SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1653 (15), Wednesday, April 27, 2011
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TITLE: Architects Display Plans for New City Zoo
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: French landscape designers and architects who won an international competition to build a new zoo for St. Petersburg last December shared more details and pictures of their project last week.
The design for the new zoo, created by the French designers Bruno and Jean Christophe Nani from TN Plus and architects Aldric Beckmann and Francoise N’Thepe from Beckmann company, looks back to the early history of the Earth, “when its surface was just one single super continent, known as Pangea,” the authors of the design said in a press release.
“The project offers a symbolic sample of every continent in an attempt to recreate the illusion of a reunited Pangea within the zoological park of St. Petersburg,” it said. “The archipelago created will be made of islands, representing Southeast Asia, Africa, Australia, South America, North America and Eurasia, the latter two being linked to each other by the solid ice of the Arctic Pole,” the company wrote.
“The chosen site enjoys an abundant supply of water, and is therefore particularly well suited for such an organization of various environments,” it said.
The cost of the French plan is estimated at $395 million and is particularly attractive due to plans for it to be constructed in stages, City Hall’s press service said earlier.
Governor Valentina Matviyenko said earlier that the city would finance the engineering infrastructure for the new zoo. It also plans to attract major private companies to construct the pavilions and open-air cages.
Founded in 1865, the city’s Leningrad Zoo is the oldest zoo in Russia. Like most other zoos across Russia, it suffers from a dire lack of space, being located in the heart of the historic city center.
The idea of moving the Leningrad Zoo to the Yuntolovo district first arose in 1992, having been proposed by the zoo’s then-director Ivan Korneyev. 
It was decided to create a new zoo that will be situated on 300 hectares on the city’s outskirts in the Yuntolovo area. 


TITLE: City Gets Nuclear Safety Info Center
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A high-tech nuclear safety information center opened in St. Petersburg last week, equipped with a 3-D cinema and computer room that will plunge residents into what the project’s organizers call “the world of nuclear energy.” The center is funded exclusively by the Russian Atomic Energy Agency, a state organization that manages the country’s nuclear industry.
The center, the 11th of its kind in Russia, joining those in Moscow, Tomsk, Voronezh, Murmansk, Krasnoyarsk, Chelyabinsk, Kaliningrad, Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk and Rostov-on-Don, will provide information as well as lectures, including free-of-charge lessons for schoolchildren. Located at the St. Petersburg Technological University, the center offers all its materials in Russian and English.
According to organizers, since the first center was founded in 2009, more than 160,000 people have visited its branches across Russia. More than 80 percent of the visitors are schoolchildren. 
In theory, such a center should be of particular use in St. Petersburg. The Leningrad Nuclear Power Station still uses Chernobyl-type reactors, and the plant is situated just 80 kilometers away from the city, in the neighboring town of Sosnovy Bor. Environmentalists say the locals need information about nuclear security, if only for safety awareness.
However, although the state seems to be willing to educate St. Petersburgers about nuclear energy, the information about nuclear safety that comes from official sources usually differs drastically from that presented by independent environmental organizations and pressure groups such as Greenpeace, Ecodefense or Bellona. 
Andrei Ozharovsky, a leading expert with the Moscow-based environmental organization Ecodefense, said the general syllabus in Russian high schools gives lightweight, superficial coverage of the world’s largest-ever nuclear catastrophe and hardly any insight at all into the nuclear industry in general. 
“The teachers, if they touch on the topic at all, tend to present the Chernobyl disaster as some kind of technical malfunction, without putting the accident in context with the risks that the nuclear industry presents in itself,” Ozharovsky said. 
According to the environmental organization Bellona, more than 600,000 people were exposed to large doses of radiation resulting from the deadly blast at Chernobyl that took place 25 years ago on Tuesday. These figures contrast with statistics available from the International Atomic Energy Agency that claims that, to date, “fewer than 50 deaths have been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster.” The IAEA study was limited to those sent in to liquidate the effects of the explosion and did not include those who suffered from the Chernobyl fallout. 
Rosatom, the founder of the new center, routinely accuses environmentalists of exaggerating the damage caused by Chernobyl and the risks posed by the nuclear industry. Ecologists, in turn, suggest the agency deliberately understates and downplays the risks as it lobbies the interests of the powerful industry. 
“Whatever information comes out from the state agency is a deliberate attempt to play down the risks of nuclear power in order to free the way for new reactor construction,” Ozharovsky said. 
Collecting statistics for research connected to deaths and illnesses related to nuclear accidents is difficult. Greenpeace volunteers, for example, have encountered numerous cases of state experts refusing or being extremely reluctant to connect illnesses of those who work in the nuclear industry or those living in close proximity to nuclear waste burial sites with the exposure factor. 


TITLE: Opposition Slams City Hall’s Stance on Mayday March
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Opposition figures are criticizing City Hall’s refusal to authorize traditional Mayday marches on Nevsky Prospekt, St. Petersburg’s main street, for several political and social groups. Critics have condemned the move, deeming it an attempt on the part of the authorities to further restrict civic freedoms in Russia.
On May 1 — formerly known as “International Worker’s Solidarity Day” and marked with official demonstrations under the Soviets — Nevsky is usually closed to traffic for the morning and part of the afternoon to allow diverse political groups, from pro-Kremlin to opposition parties, to march to a number of sites and hold meetings there.
An opposition group that is planning to have a “dissenters’ Mayday march” and an LGBT group that planned to join the May 1 demo for the first time have not been allowed to march on Nevsky at this year’s event. 
The “democratic Mayday” group was also refused authorization for a march last week, with the authorities proposing that it hold a rally in the remote Polyustrovo Park instead. But after some negotiations the group was finally allowed on Monday to walk along a section of Nevsky between Ploshchad Vosstaniya and Ulitsa Marata before heading in the direction of Pionerskaya Ploshchad to hold a rally there.
City Hall issued a similar response to each of the three groups, saying that the number of applications was too high and “the simultaneous holding of public events […] may cause conflict between the participants in the events and threaten the safety of citizens’ lives and health.”
Organizers say that high numbers of applications did not prevent their May 1 rallies from being authorized in the past, while preventing conflicts between participants is the obligation of the authorities who regularly deploy massive police presence at such events.
The organizers of the Dissenters’ group — former Legitimate Assembly deputy Sergei Gulyayev, the United Civil Front’s (OGF) Olga Kurnosova, TIGR’s Alexander Rastorguyev and Nashe Pravo (Our Right) trade union’s Sergei Vesnov — described City Hall’s refusal as “unmotivated, ungrounded and illegal” and filed a complaint with the Primorsky District Court. The complaint will be heard on Thursday.
Unlike the “democratic Mayday” group — represented by the Yabloko democratic party, the Russian People’s Democratic Union (RNDS), Oborona and Solidarity democratic movement — the dissenters claimed that they would not be satisfied with a meeting on Pionerskaya Ploshchad. Instead, they plan to march almost the entire length of Nevsky Prospekt to the Mariinsky Palace, the seat of the city’s parliament, despite not having received authorization, and demand the dismissal of St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko there.
Last year, the group of democrats, whose participation in the demos had been authorized by City Hall, was stopped by the police at the gathering point on Ligovsky Prospekt and ordered to disperse when they unveiled a large banner reading “Dismiss Matviyenko.” City Hall claimed the slogan “did not conform” to the goals of the demo that the organizers listed in their application.
Speaking at the meeting point immediately after the ban, Yabloko’s local chair Maxim Reznik announced a “perpetual campaign for the dismissal of Matviyenko,” but since December he has been seen at meetings with Matviyenko and City Hall officials discussing the city’s planning issues.
However, Yabloko claimed that there would be slogans for the dismissal of Matviyenko at the upcoming Mayday rally as well.
City Hall also refused to authorize a demo by gay group Ravnopraviye (Equality), suggesting that it should change the place and time of the event and move it to 3 p.m. and to the remote Yuzhno-Primorsky Park in the south-west. 
In an unexpected move, the Other Russia, twelve local members of which are now under criminal investigation for allegedly organizing activities or participating in a banned organization, was authorized to march — in the same group as the left-wing party ROT Front (Russian United Labor Front) and independent trade unions. Both parties were founded last year but so far have not been permitted to register.
The Other Russia will be protesting the criminal prosecution of its members, making “You Can’t Put Everybody in Jail!” the rally’s main slogan, the party said in a statement on Monday.
Nationalist groups including members of DPNI (the Movement Against Illegal Immigration) — an organization that was banned by the Moscow City Court as “extremist” early last week — have had no problems being authorized to march on Nevsky on Mayday.

TITLE: City Hall Signs Off on Top Charges for New Toll Roads
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: City Hall has approved maximum rates for the city’s toll roads. The price chart will be used by a private investor who will manage the city’s only toll road: The as-yet uncompleted Western High-Speed Diameter Road (WHSD), Fontanka reported.
On roads with a so-called open payment system, in which the only payment points are road entrances and exits, the fixed fees will be 82 rubles ($2.94) for regular cars, 143 rubles ($5.13) for small trucks, 229 rubles ($8.22) for buses and 372 rubles ($13.35) for heavy trucks. 
On roads on which drivers pay a variable fee depending on how far they have driven along it, calculated by returning a token received when joining the road, the charges will be nine rubles ($0.32) per kilometer for regular cars, 16 rubles ($0.57) per kilometer for small trucks, 25 rubles ($0.89) per kilometer for buses, and 41 rubles ($1.47) per kilometer for heavy trucks..
At the moment, the first part of the WHSD is the only toll road in St. Petersburg. Charges for using the road will apply from late April or early May.
The charges will also vary according to the time of day, the day of the week and traffic volumes. 
The figures may change when the road is completed, and the concessioner of the road — to be chosen in a tender on July 29 this year — will also be able to set prices. The concessioner will be able to set any price that does not exceed the maximum rates set by the city administration.
The length of the city’s first toll road will be 46.6 kilometers. Investment in the project amounts to 212 billion rubles ($7.6 billion), approximately 4.5 billion rubles ($161.6 million) for each kilometer of the road.
The road will connect the city’s southern districts with the sea port, and will go continue to the western part of Vasilyevsky Island, ending in the Primorsky district.

TITLE: Gazprom Skyscraper in Lakhta Gets New Web Site
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The subsidiary of Gazprom responsible for planning the ill-fated, controversial Okhta Center skyscraper has set up a new web site for its latest project in the city’s Lakhta district, Interfax reported Monday.
The web site, www.proektvlahte.ru offers information about the new construction site, the new design for a business center with public facilities, related tenders and other project news.
The site also has a section on which visitors can ask questions or express opinions.
“The design of the site reflects the concept of a public business center to be built in the city’s Primorsky district on the coast of the Gulf of Finland. The concept’s major components include modernity, accessibility, and an ecological approach,” the web site says.
Okhta Public and Business Center company bought a plot of land in the area for the construction of its business center, which will serve as the headquarters of Gazprom Neft. The plot covers an area of 140,000 square meters and is located between Primorskoye Shosse and the coast of the Gulf of Finland in the northwestern part of St. Petersburg.
The company stated that the design for the new center will be based on the previous Okhta Center project. That project was canceled due to public protests against the construction of a 400-meter skyscraper near the center of the city. 


TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Waterbuses Launched</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Waterbuses will begin operating along the Neva River from May 29 through October 31, Fontanka reported.
Due to demands for waterbuses last year among both local residents and visitors to the city, this year the city will launch two new waterbus routes.
The Nevskaya (Neva) line — route 55 — will run from Ploshchad Lenina to Rybatsky Prospekt, connecting the city’s Nevsky district with the city center.
The new Kurortnaya line will run from Ploshchad Lenina to the town of Zelenogorsk through the Palace Square area and the suburb of Kronstadt. This line will replace the Kronstadt line that operated last year, connecting the city center with Kronstadt and St. Petersburg’s Kurortny district. Four more routes are planned for 2012-13.

<b>Car Fuel Running Low</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — St. Petersburg motorists may encounter restricted gas supplies if the current situation does not change, Oleg Ashikhmin, president of the St. Petersburg Petroleum Club that unites independent gas sellers, was quoted by Interfax as saying Tuesday.
“Right now there are no restrictions, but we [independent sellers] can’t get more gas, so if the situation doesn’t change, then in St. Petersburg there may be restrictions on sales and work at gas stations may be suspended,” Ashikhmin told the Petroleum Information Agency.
According to him, the retail price of fuel has not grown, but its wholesale price has already increased.
The St. Petersburg branch of the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service said Tuesday that gas sellers on the St. Petersburg market do not currently have problems delivering gasoline. 
“According to information presented at the FAS’s St. Petersburg office by Russia’s leading regional operators on the fuel market, a gasoline shortage is not being experienced at the present time,” it said in a statement.

<b>Nissan Production Hit</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The city’s Nissan plant will temporarily stop work for five days from May 30 through June 3 due to the situation at its plants in Japan.
“Due to the temporary halt in production in Japan, at the end of March and beginning of April... the company has made the decision to temporarily change the work schedule of its plant in St. Petersburg,” Nissan’s press service in Russia said, Interfax reported.
Nissan’s plants in Japan have resumed work, but there is a delay in the delivery of engines from the plant in Ivaka that suffered most during the tsunami and earthquake that devastated the country last month, the press service said.
The temporary halt in work at the St. Petersburg plant will allow the company to synchronize the production process with the delivery schedule, Nissan said.

<b>Giant Kulich Baked</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — One of the world’s biggest kulich (Russian Easter cakes) was baked in St. Petersburg’s Frunzensky district on Easter Sunday.
The kulich weighed three tons and was 20 meters long and 10 meters wide, Interfax reported.

TITLE: Dispute Ignites Talk of Cabinet Shuffle
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A bizarre conflict between a renowned pediatrician and the Health and Social Development Ministry has stirred talk about an imminent Cabinet reshuffle and even evoked memories of Stalin’s infamous Doctors’ Plot.
Analysts said Friday that the dispute with pediatrician Leonid Roshal could signal that Health and Social Development Minister Tatyana Golikova might be on her way out.
The conflict started on April 13 when Roshal lambasted conditions in the country’s health sector at a medical conference attended by both Golikova and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
In his speech, which only became public when it was published by Novaya Gazeta last week, he argued that the widespread underpayment of medical staff contributes to rampant corruption in the sector.
Roshal, who has received numerous awards for his disaster relief work around the world, draws attention when he speaks. By far the country’s best-known pediatrician, he acted as a mediator during hostage-takings at Moscow’s Dubrovka Theater in 2002 and the Beslan school in 2004 and heads a children’s hospital in Moscow. He even has a star named after him in the Taurus constellation.
But all the recognition did not save Roshal, who will turn 78 on Wednesday, from being denounced in an open letter by health ministry staff who accused him of having a “negative professional past” and of sabotaging the ministry’s work.
The letter, signed by “the ministry team,” was posted on the ministry’s web site on April 18, the same day that Novaya Gazeta published Roshal’s speech.
It was also posted as an addendum to the conference’s transcript on Putin’s web site. That transcript, however, does not contain Roshal’s speech. Rather, it ends with a scathing attack against Roshal signed by a certain Andrei Petrovich, who describes himself as a “simple gastroenterologist.”
But Putin’s site does contain a post-speech discussion between the prime minister and Roshal in which Putin says he prefers Roshal’s criticism to those people who “calmly and phlegmatically keep picking away at problems.”
It also seems that Roshal has the support of an overwhelming majority of doctors online, as evidenced by the hundreds of comments in his defense published underneath the ministry’s complaint letter on its own web site.
Thickening the plot was a mysterious incident last Thursday when a group of young people delivered a seemingly ill friend to Roshal’s hospital, saying the young woman had probably suffered a stroke.
But after emergency preparations were completed, the would-be patient told baffled hospital staff that she was all right. “She said the whole thing had been an ‘inspection’ and that she was an actor,” said Razmik Keshishyan, a doctor at the clinic, according to the RBC.ru news web site.
Roshal said in interviews Friday that he was unsure about the incident’s meaning. “If it was a joke, we’re not offended. If it was a provocation, it’s bad,” he told Vesti FM radio.
The incident also recalled the murky death of Maxim Goloviznin, a regional leader of the Just Russia party who died outside a Moscow hospital on April 15 after staff refused to admit him.
The uproar left experts scratching their heads, with some speculating that Roshal was being used in a government intrigue against Golikova. “I think he unwillingly became an instrument in a political game,” said Kirill Danishevsky, a health expert who heads the Society for Evidence-Based Medicine.
Danishevsky said the invitation for Roshal to speak at the congress had made the conflict inevitable because nothing else could have been expected from him. “He just said what he has been saying for four years,” he said.
In another twist, political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky published an article in Moskovsky Komsomolets on Friday that defended Roshal and called for the arrest of Golikova and her husband, Industry and Trade Minister Viktor Khristenko, on charges of corruption. He also accused the health ministry of pilfering funds for tomographic scanners and recalled that Golikova had promoted a drug called Arbidol that is produced by Pharmstandard, a company believed to have close links to her family.
Similar accusations were voiced earlier this month by St. Petersburg Times columnist Yulia Latynina. They also appear on opposition activist Maria Litvinovich’s new web site, Election2012.ru.
“If an investigation confirms the worst fears, [Golikova] would get 10 to 15 years,” Belkovsky wrote.
He also alleged that Khristenko controls shares worth some $3 billion in two factories in the Chelyabinsk region.
Spokespeople for both ministries denied the accusations Friday. A spokesman for Golikova said by telephone that he would not comment on “slanderous allegations.” He refused to give his name.
Alexei Mukhin, head of the Center for Political Information, a think tank, suggested that Putin had asked Roshal to speak to lay the basis for a Cabinet shakeup in the run-up to the December State Duma elections.
Mukhin recalled that before the 2007 Duma elections, then-President Putin fired health minister Mikhail Zurabov, widely regarded at the time as the least popular Cabinet member.
“This could be positive for United Russia,” Mukhin said.
Not all analysts agreed, however. Vladimir Pribylovsky, head of the Panorama think tank, argued that Golikova would remain in her post while Putin and Roshal were probably not part of any intrigue against her. “She has many enemies,” he said.
That notwithstanding, United Russia acknowledged the debate’s salience Friday by dubbing it the “Doctors’ Plot” in a feature on its web site. That name refers to an anti-Semitic witch hunt toward the end of Stalin’s life when the Soviet dictator accused a group of mainly Jewish doctors of conspiring against his leadership.

TITLE: 5 Arrested as Kaspersky Kidnapping Plot Foiled
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Moscow City Court authorized on Monday the arrest of five people, including an elderly ex-convict, on suspicion of kidnapping the son of software tycoon Yevgeny Kaspersky to pay off their debts. 
Ivan Kaspersky, 20, was freed by police during the weekend from the banya where he was held outside Moscow without a single gunshot fired, news reports said. 
Rosbalt.ru identified the suspected ringleader as Nikolai Savelyev, 61, a man with a criminal record on unspecified charges, who was allegedly aided by his wife, Lyudmila Savelyeva, 64, his son, also Nikolai, 29, and two of the son’s friends. 
The Savelyevs decided to kidnap the son of Yevgeny Kaspersky — whose wealth is put at $800 million by Forbes Russia — to pay off a bank loan, Rosbalt.ru added, citing an unidentified law enforcement source. Earlier reports put the ransom at 3 million euros ($4.3 million). 
Ivan Kaspersky was kidnapped on his way to work in northwestern Moscow last Tuesday. The captors put him in a banya on the premises of their house in the Moscow region under the guard of one of the younger gang members and proceeded to contact Yevgeny Kaspersky by cell phone to demand the ransom, Interfax said. 
Investigators managed to determine the location of the banya by tracing the phone call, Interfax said. After that, they lured four suspects from the premises, asking them to collect a down payment on the ransom, but stopped them on the pretext of a routine document check and detained all four, including the younger Savelyev, who attempted to resist arrest, the report said. At the same time, police stormed the banya and freed Ivan Kaspersky unharmed. 
Police also spread false information about the kidnapping to the media as part of the operation, which accounts for last week’s conflicting reports, some of which claimed Yevgeny Kaspersky had refused to seek help from the police and had paid the ransom. 
“Police officers working on the case were astonished with how stupid and audacious the kidnapping was,” a police official told Interfax. 
Monday’s court ruling means that the five suspects will be held in custody while investigators decide whether to press kidnapping charges, which carry up to 15 years in prison.

TITLE: Kazakh Diplomat in Hijacking
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A Kazakh diplomat tried to hijack an Alitalia flight from Paris to Rome, demanding it be flown to Libya, but was quickly overpowered and arrested when the plane landed.
Witnesses said Valery Tolmachev, 48, put a small knife to the throat of a flight attendant and held her for a few minutes during the Sunday night flight.
“The man grabbed the stewardess from behind her back and pointed the knife. She was in difficulty and tried to turn around,” a passenger named Sofia told reporters in Rome.
Stefanie, a French woman who lives in Italy, said the man laughed when the stewardess asked him to go the front of the plane with her.
“He held her for just a few minutes and then the other flight attendants intervened and passengers helped hold the man to the floor,” she said.
Italian news agency ANSA said Tolmachev had brandished a nailclipper against the flight attendant.
Tolmachev lives in Paris with his mother and has worked as an aide in Kazakhstan’s permanent mission to UNESCO since 2002, Interfax reported.
A childhood friend in Kazakhstan said he was dumbfounded by the attempted hijacking.
“Valery has never done this kind of thing before,” the friend, Rustem Tursunbayev, told Interfax in Astana. “He is quiet by nature, a nondrinker, no drugs.”
He said Tolmachev graduated from Moscow State University with top marks and once accompanied Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev to the United States as an interpreter.
Rome airport police took Tolmachev into custody for questioning.
A statement from Alitalia said Tolmachev had “assaulted a flight attendant and asked that the plane be taken to Tripoli.”
Other flight attendants on flight AZ329 then overpowered Tolmachev, the statement said.
MOSCOW — A Kazakh diplomat tried to hijack an Alitalia flight from Paris to Rome, demanding it be flown to Libya, but was quickly overpowered and arrested when the plane landed.
Witnesses said Valery Tolmachev, 48, put a small knife to the throat of a flight attendant and held her for a few minutes during the Sunday night flight.
“The man grabbed the stewardess from behind her back and pointed the knife. She was in difficulty and tried to turn around,” a passenger named Sofia told reporters in Rome.
Stefanie, a French woman who lives in Italy, said the man laughed when the stewardess asked him to go the front of the plane with her.
“He held her for just a few minutes and then the other flight attendants intervened and passengers helped hold the man to the floor,” she said.
Italian news agency ANSA said Tolmachev had brandished a nailclipper against the flight attendant.
Tolmachev lives in Paris with his mother and has worked as an aide in Kazakhstan’s permanent mission to UNESCO since 2002, Interfax reported.
A childhood friend in Kazakhstan said he was dumbfounded by the attempted hijacking.
“Valery has never done this kind of thing before,” the friend, Rustem Tursunbayev, told Interfax in Astana. “He is quiet by nature, a nondrinker, no drugs.”
He said Tolmachev graduated from Moscow State University with top marks and once accompanied Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev to the United States as an interpreter.
Rome airport police took Tolmachev into custody for questioning.
A statement from Alitalia said Tolmachev had “assaulted a flight attendant and asked that the plane be taken to Tripoli.”
Other flight attendants on flight AZ329 then overpowered Tolmachev, the statement said.


TITLE: ‘Elevator Man’ Held in Sex Assault Case
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Moscow region investigators have detained a 45-year-old convicted serial rapist nicknamed “The Elevator Man” on suspicion of targeting teenage girls by pretending to be blind and poisoning at least one victim.
The suspect, Moscow resident Oleg Kosarev, was detained late Thursday at an apartment in Serpukhov, 100 kilometers south of Moscow, the Investigative Committee said in a statement Friday.
Serpukhov investigators, baffled by an attack on two teen girls in an elevator on April 7, got their break after contacting the Moscow investigator who sent Kosarev to jail for attacking underage girls in Moscow elevators in 1995, the statement said. The investigators learned that Kosarev had been freed from prison late last year after serving a 15-year sentence.
Kosarev, who earned the nickname “The Elevator Man” for cornering his victims in elevators, caused a minor panic in Moscow in the mid-1990s after going on a spree in which he attacked two to three girls aged 12 to 13 every day, Lifenews.ru reported. He took pictures of the victims after the attacks, the report said.
After his arrest in 1995, Kosarev admitted to sexually abusing 137 minors but was convicted of only 40, it reported.
He is suspected in at least two separate attacks in Serpukhov, news reports said.
In the April 7 attack, a man 40 to 50 years old wearing dark glasses threatened two high school students with a knife in the elevator of an apartment building in Serpukhov, robbing them of 4,000 rubles, jewelry and their cell phones, and sexually assaulting one of them, the local newspaper Okainfo reported.
On Feb. 25, a man wearing dark glasses and carrying three red carnations sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl in the hall of a local apartment building, Lifenews.ru reported. 

TITLE: Failed Reality Show Contestant Chief Suspect in Explosion at Dom-2 Set
AUTHOR: By Herbert Mosmuller
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The main suspect in a weekend explosion that maimed a guard on the set of the “Dom-2” reality television show is a wannabe contestant who claimed that he was roughed up by the guards, media reports said Monday.
But the Moscow region’s branch of the Investigative Committee said a probe was ongoing and no charges have been filed, Interfax reported.
A bomb went off when private security guards removed for inspection a backpack lodged in a fence surrounding the site of the show in the Moscow region, the report said. The blast tore off the arm of one of the guards, Sergei Tere, who remained in intensive care Monday. A second guard escaped with minor injuries.
The explosion was loud enough to wake up show contestants, former “Dom-2” star Viktoria Bonya told The St. Petersburg Times by telephone, adding that they were “shocked” when they learned about the bomb.
The show was suspended for several hours following the blast but then resumed with beefed-up security, “Dom-2” broadcaster TNT said in e-mailed comments. During the delay, police found and disarmed a second, much more powerful homemade bomb on the premises, Gazeta.ru said.
News web site Lifenews.ru said police suspected Sergei Lyapin, a 39-year-old resident of the Siberian city of Novokuznetsk, of planting the bombs.
Lyapin, who has a criminal record, applied twice to participate in “Dom-2,” which has aired since 2004 and has made “The Guinness Book of Records” as the world’s longest-running reality show, a Novokuznetsk police source told Interfax. He failed the casting call both times.


TITLE: Amusement Park Chain Opens in City 
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A new children’s amusement park belonging to the Happylon international chain of 10 modern theme parks opened in St. Petersburg’s Galeria shopping mall last weekend.
Investment in the park totaled 12 million rubles  ($430,000), and the company expects the pay-back period to be from four to seven years.
The prices for the attractions range from about 200 rubles ($7.20) for large rides to 50 rubles ($1.80) for a video game. Rustam Ageyev, founder of the Happylon chain, said the average cost of a visit to the entertainment park for a child could range from 500 to 1,000 rubles ($18 to $35). The park is aimed at children from three to 12 years old. 
Each of the chain’s nine Happylon parks is constructed in a different style. St. Petersburg’s Happylon is designed as a Pirate Treasure Island. Inside the park’s 4,500 square-meter-area, visitors can choose from 10 rides, play on more than 100 video games and video simulators, play mini-bowling and view a 5D cruise cinema attraction with special effects, sounds and stereo pictures.
Younger children who visit the theme park can play on roundabouts, bumper cars and other attractions.
Among the center’s most prominent attractions are the Lasertag “Star Wars” game in which teams with light sabers can compete, “Jack’s Tower,” in which visitors can experience free fall, “Tsunami,” in which free fall is combined with rotation, giving a realistic feeling of being caught inside a storm, “Caribbean Race,” a motordrome for car lovers, and “Pirate Town,” in which children can travel along ladders and labyrinths in a multi-level area.
Ageyev said the park’s mission would be “to create a territory of childhood in which parents and children will have a chance to be together and share joy.”
Safety has been one of the entertainment park’s major priorities, according to its founders. The company equipped the center with well-tested and high-quality attractions, Ageyev said at a press conference. All the games and rides came from the U.S., Europe or Japan, he said.
The first Happylon Park was opened in 2006 in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Ageyev’s hometown. There are also two Happylon theme parks in Moscow.
Ageyev said the company wants to open Happylon theme parks in at least 15 of Russia’s biggest cities.
Happylon is located on the fifth floor of the Galeria shopping center on Ligovsky Prospekt. The park is open daily from 10 a.m. through 11 p.m. 


TITLE: Finland Gears Up For Joint Forum
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Innovation in management, energy efficiency, information technologies and healthcare are some of the key topics of the forthcoming EU-Russia Innovation Forum, which will be held in the Finnish town of Lappeenranta on May 25 to 26.
The small town on the Russian-Finnish border is getting ready to receive representatives of more than 300 Russian and 200 European companies, representing some of the most important businesses on the continent as well as leading politicians from across the European Union. 
Finnish President Tarja Halonen, who has confirmed her presence at the event, is still waiting for a response from the Kremlin concerning President Dmitry Medvedev’s attendance. Some confirmed speakers include Anatoly Chubais, head of Rosnano; Aho Esko, executive vice president of Nokia; and Enrico Castanini, general manager of Datasiel holding.
The forum’s ideologists are facing the daunting task of reconciling two conflicting approaches to innovations that exist in Russia and the EU. Russia’s domestic companies have shown a very low appetite for innovations, and invest in new technologies reluctantly. According to a recent sociological poll that was held simultaneously in Russia and Finland, more than 50 percent of Finnish companies are willing to spend money on modernization, while only 10 percent of Russian enterprises wish to do so.
“The level of academic research in Russia is very high but, in contrast to EU countries, the findings of Russian scientists are rarely related to the demands of the market,” said Katja Keinanen, the forum’s secretary general. 
In EU countries, research in universities and scientific centers is often sponsored not by the state but by large holdings that are directly interested in the outcome.
“Most of the largest Russian companies depend on lucrative state tenders; it is an open secret that to win one of those tenders you need good connections rather than innovations,” said Mikhail Khitrov, general director of the Center for Speech Technologies, a company that became one of the main newsmakers of the first forum, held last year, as a Russian company that successfully entered the EU market at the event. 
“Our companies lack motivation to invest in technologies as the market situation here does not provide a strong enough impulse for that. Thankfully, that depressing trend has begun to decline.”
May 24 and 25 will see a series of business meetings between Russian and EU companies organized with an eye to facilitating professional connections. Keinanen also said it is expected that several high-profile business deals, including at least one on a federal level, will be inked at the forum, although she declined to elaborate on details, as negotiations are still in process. 
She also added that all the businesspeople attending the meetings will be able to visit the main forum sessions too.


TITLE: More Passengers for Lufthansa  
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Lufthansa saw a 10-percent increase in passenger volumes from St. Petersburg last year, prompting Germany’s national carrier to introduce bigger airplanes for its six daily flights from the city to Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Munich beginning this summer.
“The year 2010 was very positive for Lufthansa’s business in St. Petersburg, so we decided to introduce higher capacity planes for our flights from the city,” Ronald Schultz, regional director of Lufthansa for Russia and CIS countries, said at a press conference in St. Petersburg last week.
Last year, Lufthansa served 380,000 passengers at Pulkovo airport, setting a new record for the airline in the city. 
“Such figures put St. Petersburg at the top positions of Lufthansa’s presence in Russian cities,” Schultz said.
“In fact, if such a successful trend continues, we may consider either introducing more flights from St. Petersburg or adding a new route from the city to Germany next year,” he said.
Schultz said Lufthansa hopes to attract from two million to 2.5 million passengers in St. Petersburg this year.
The company said it also registered high demand for online services in St. Petersburg last year. Compared to 2009, sales through the company’s web site doubled, Schultz said.
Lufthansa also presented its Russian-language iPhone application last week. The service allows passengers to check-in, book flights, check schedules and collect air miles.
“The owners of iPhones and smart phones can now use Internet on board our planes, though they can’t use them as phones — we have disabled that function,” Schultz said.
Aage Dunhaupt, director of International Communications for Lufthansa, said the company invests a lot of money in new airplanes, which can be both economically and ecologically more efficient, since they use less fuel.


TITLE: Mail.ru Group Denies Rumor 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Mail.ru Group denied reports in the media about the company’s proposal to unite the country’s two most popular social networks, Odnoklassniki and Vkontakte, Mail.ru Group’s press service told RIA-Novosti on Thursday.
At the Russian Internet Forum and Internet and Business Conference (RIF+KIB 2011) conference Wednesday, head of Mail.ru Group Dmitry Grishin suggested that increasing the group’s share in Vkontakte might be a good idea. This did not mean, however, that the group was suggesting uniting the two social networks, the group’s press service said.
“We are an independent company and are not planning to fall under Mail.ru Group’s control. There are no negotiations underway,” Vkontakte spokesman Vladislav Tsyplukhin also said.


TITLE: Local Hyundai Plant Increases Prices
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Hyundai Motor Company, which started producing cars at its St. Petersburg plant in January this year, increased prices for its Russian-made vehicles starting Monday.
The price of the Hyundai Solaris, which used to be 379,000 rubles ($13,615), is now 399,000 rubles ($14,333) — a price hike of 5.2 percent, Interfax reported.
The company is also planning to raise its current production capacity up to 10,000 cars a month.
Customers currently have to wait for ordered cars for two to six months on average.
The plant launched its second production shift at the beginning of this month. 
In 2012, the plant plans to increase capacity up to 200,000 cars a year as compared with 105,000 cars expected to be produced this year.


TITLE: HSBC Quits After Two Years on the Russian Market
AUTHOR: By Howard Amos
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Despite a lavish opening party in 2009 and a commitment to “aggressive” growth, HSBC’s dreams for the Russian retail banking market ended Monday with a tacit acknowledgement by the bank that it could not compete against state-owned heavyweights like VTB and Sberbank.
HSBC — which promotes itself as “the world’s local bank” — said all retail banking operations would be closed immediately for new business and that existing accounts would be shut down according to contractual obligations.
“It’s clear that the strongest opportunity for HSBC in Russia lies in servicing corporate and institutional clients,” Huseyin Ozkaya, HSBC Russia’s chief executive, said in a statement. “That’s why we’ve made the decision to exit our retail business and reduce our private banking presence to a representative office.”
The announcement confirmed months of speculation that the international financial giant was on its way out. It is the second foreign bank to take the step in three months. Barclays, with about 400,000 clients in Russia, announced that it was selling its Russian retail and commercial arm in February.
HSBC’s pullout comes amid increasing assertiveness from VTB and Sberbank, which, boosted by almost unlimited capital reserves, have a competitive edge over private competitors.
State-controlled banking institutions occupy about 60 percent of the Russian market.
Sberbank CEO German Gref boasted about the bank’s position as the country’s largest lender in an announcement Monday that he would lead a team of bank executives to the United States this week to court investors ahead of the expected privatization of a 7.6 percent stake later this year or in 2012. “We can make a profit. We are exceeding analysts’ expectations,” Gref said in a statement.
Unlike many other foreign banks entering the Russian market, HSBC elected to follow a path of organic growth, rather than acquisition.
The only major bank that has made a success of this strategy is Citibank, which entered the retail market in 2002.
Without acquisitions, HSBC struggled to carve out a space for itself in the Russian retail banking business.
“When the tempo of growth is not fast, it’s much more complicated for new players to find themselves a niche,” said Svetlana Kovalskaya, a financial analyst at Renaissance Capital.
“The market is complicated now for both Russian and foreign banks in terms of competition,” she added.
JPMorgan Russia’s chief executive, Jeffrey Costello, told The St. Petersburg Times last week that “compression” was to be expected in the retail banking sector and was likely to spread to investment banking as well.
HSBC currently has four branches in Moscow and one in St. Petersburg. In the first quarter of 2011, individual clients placed 6.4 billion rubles ($230 million) in the bank — by which measure HSBC ranks 127th nationally.
HSBC is not among the top 20 foreign banks operating in Russia — the list of which is topped by UniCredit Bank (seventh overall in Russia with $21.8 billion in assets) and includes Austria’s Raiffeisenbank and France’s Societe Generale. Barclays occupied 20th place.
HSBC opened its personal financial services in Russia in June 2009 and targeted the high-end market through its HSBC Premier and HSBC Plus facilities. HSBC Premier was a global banking service requiring an average monthly balance of at least 1.5 million rubles ($53,800), while HSBC Plus required a deposit of at least 75,000 rubles ($2,700).
“Some people have asked whether we’re too late [entering the Russian market],” said then-HSBC chief executive Stuart Lawson in 2009. “I don’t think we are.”
Nevertheless, commentators on Monday questioned whether HSBC had ever had a sufficient appreciation of the demanding Russian business environment.
“Doing business in Russia is immensely difficult,” said Timothy Stubbs, head of law firm Salans’ banking and finance practice. “HSBC may have underestimated the amount of energy that they had to put into growing operations.”
But the timing of HSBC’s decision, based purely on an analysis of the Russian market, is strange — the company opened its first branches during the financial crisis and is now closing them during a period of high oil prices and ongoing growth in the financial sector.
The answer may lie in HSBC’s global strategy. HSBC’s new international head, Stuart Gulliver, who took up the post in January, has told associates that he will initiate radical restructuring within the company, including a potential multibillion-dollar cost-cutting scheme, the Financial Times reported last week. Downsizing could include some of the 87 markets worldwide where the bank operates.
The decision to cap expansion at five branches in Moscow and St. Petersburg may have contributed to Russian HSBC’s candidature for closure, a top banker close to the matter told The St. Petersburg Times.
“It’s their own dynamics rather than the market dynamics,” he said. “Russia just happens to be caught up in this.”


TITLE: Putin’s Cabinet Plans Raise In State Spending Budget
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Cabinet agreed on April 21 to boost spending by 4 percent this year as soaring oil prices push revenues up.
Federal expenditures would grow by 420 billion rubles, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said, bringing the total to about 11.1 trillion rubles.
The measure has to pass the parliament and gain President Dmitry Medvedev’s approval — a mere formality — to take effect.
A significant part of the additional spending, Putin said, would go toward raising retirement pensions later this year — a decision the government will make depending on the inflation rate in the year’s first half. Some of the money will pay for higher salaries for schoolteachers, renovation of museums and libraries and provision of technical aids to the handicapped, he said.
Putin said 180 billion rubles would be used to support the economy’s industrial sector, with another 13 billion rubles going to the agricultural sector. He didn’t elaborate.
Another 62 billion rubles will serve as the government’s contribution to the international equity fund Medvedev ordered to be created jointly with foreign capital to foster foreign investment in non-energy businesses. VEB, which has been designated to manage the government’s involvement in the fund, and Putin, as its chairman, will discuss the issue Friday.
The Cabinet also started working on next year’s budget Thursday by approving anticipated scenarios for economic development for the period — assumptions the Economic Development Ministry often rewrites several times a year, given the country’s dependence on the volatile oil price.
The basic scenario backed Thursday assumes that Russian oil will sell for an average of $93 a barrel, down from the latest official estimate of $105 for this year, which gained the Cabinet’s endorsement at the same session, Deputy Economic Development Minister Andrei Klepach said after the meeting.
The economy will expand by 3.5 percent, down from the 4.2 percent expected this year, he said.
One of the reasons for the slower growth will be swelling imports, he said. This year alone, imports are projected to increase 20 percent, while demand will only be 10 percent higher, Klepach said.
“Our products are not competitive so far,” he said.
Before the Cabinet session, Putin met with senior members of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, a big business lobby group, to discuss — among other things — the ruble exchange rate, which could harm exporters if it stays at the current level or strengthens further on the back of expensive oil. 

TITLE: President Hopes to Teach at Skolkovo
AUTHOR: By Olga Razumovskaya
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev reiterated on Monday his desire to see Skolkovo become a new global brand name — possibly in part because he hopes to work there after retiring from the Kremlin.
Medvedev, a former university law professor, told the Internet-based Dozhd television channel that he would like to teach at the innovation hub one day.
“As for Skolkovo, no doubt, if everything there is working well, I would certainly like to teach there,” he said, speaking in the channel’s studio after a session of the presidential modernization commission.
“I would like to do that not only at Skolkovo but in other places as well because it seems to me that any politician who has headed the state simply must speak about his experience, negative and positive,” he said.
But Medvedev gave no indication of when he would like to start teaching. He said earlier this month said he would make a decision “fairly soon” on whether to run for a second term in the March 2012 election.
At the commission meeting, Medvedev lamented the lack of domestic and international awareness of Skolkovo and encouraged officials to try to get on the same page with technology and innovation partners.
Medvedev struck a familiar chord following last week’s annual report to the State Duma by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who talked economy and populist measures, largely ignoring innovation in his speech.
He scolded Skolkovo Foundation management and the Education and Science Ministry for failing to adequately educate both the Russian and foreign communities about the importance and potential of the innovation hub to be built near Moscow.
Today less than 40 percent of Russians know what Skolkovo is, the president said, calling this number “unacceptable.”
A recent poll by state polling agency VTsIOM indicated that 32 percent of Russians have a clear understanding of what Skolkovo is and only 2.6 percent consider it competitive to Silicon Valley.
“Skolkovo is not just some kind of get-together,” Medvedev told the commission meeting, which took place at Digital October, a private technology and entrepreneurship center on the territory of the former Krasny Oktyabr candy factory, Interfax reported.
“It is a public project, the kind of project all modernization should develop around, which is why citizens should have full knowledge of how these products are being financed. This information should be absolutely open and public,” he said.
“It is of critical importance to promote Skolkovo abroad, where awareness of its existence is lower,” Medvedev said, adding that he is making sure to mention the high-tech research facility during all of his international trips, and it is often met with great interest and enthusiasm.
The president’s criticism came in response to a presentation by Skolkovo Foundation co-chairman and former Intel board chairman Craig Barrett, who said Skolkovo’s recognition could be much higher if appropriate funds were allocated to promote it.
“We have, in fact, done it for free. We haven’t spent any money on it yet,” the president agreed.
Medvedev also cited lack of communication among research facilities, the government and academia as one of the main hindrances to promoting of the Skolkovo brand.
“I think the [Education and Science] Ministry should work and not sleep,” the president said.
“You should work in earnest, [Education and Science Minister] Andrei Alexandrovich [Fursenko]. … Maybe take some kind of stimulants,” Medvedev said.
The comment was in stark contrast to Putin’s address to the Duma, in which he spoke about the government’s achievements in education, as well as its goals.
The Skolkovo innovation center will have 15,000 residents and will be housed in the Odintsovo district near the Moscow Ring Road between the Minskoye and Skolkovskoye highways. It will occupy 400 hectares of land.
Its construction will cost an estimated 100 billion rubles to 120 billion rubles ($3.6 billion to $4.3 billion) — enough to build two metro lines in Moscow — and is projected to be finished in 2015, with the first buildings coming online at the end of this year. According to Skolkovo Foundation projections, it should serve as a potential model for other small and medium-sized Russian cities.


TITLE: The Meaning of Chernobyl
AUTHOR: By Yulia Tymoshenko
TEXT: It began as a gray and muddy spring day, like so many others in my homeland. It ended in dread and mourning.
Of course, none of us knew the precise moment when catastrophe struck at Chernobyl 25 years ago. Back then, we lived under a system that denied ordinary people any right whatsoever to know about even essential facts and events. So we were kept in the dark about the radiation leaking from the shattered reactor at Chernobyl — and blowing in the winds over northern Europe.
But the more bizarre fact about the Chernobyl disaster, we now know, is that Mikhail Gorbachev, then-general secretary of the Communist Party, was also kept in the dark about the magnitude of the disaster. Indeed, it may be this very fact that finally condemned the old system to the dustbin of history a mere five years later. No regime built on limitless self-delusion is capable of retaining a shred of legitimacy once the scale of its self-deception is exposed.
Because only fragments of reliable information reached ordinary Ukrainians at the time, my memories of Chernobyl are sketchy. I recall now only the first hushed, frightened whispers of disaster from a family friend. I remember the abject fear I felt for my young daughter. A virtual torrent of near-hysterical hearsay and trickle-down stories about the disaster soon followed.
All these memories, of course, remain indelible. But even 25 years later, I find it difficult to connect what I really know of the disaster with when I came to know it.
Today, the Chernobyl meltdown is judged severely in both moral and metaphysical terms. It cast a dark shadow over humanity, one unseen since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
But, unlike Japan’s Fukushima nuclear crisis, Chernobyl’s real lesson is not about nuclear-plant safety. It is about official arrogance and indifference to suffering — and a cult of secrecy that allows information to be shared only among a narrow elite obsessed with stability. Ukrainians are being reminded of the consequences of this mind-set right now by a government that has slashed health benefits for the men who heroically fought to contain the Chernobyl disaster.
So, what was the source of the carelessness with which the Chernobyl crisis was handled? What caused such arrogant unconcern for the health of those who lived near the plant, for those heroic men and women who tried to limit the damage and for the millions who lived beneath the radioactive cloud as it spread?
Government indifference is a strange and unnatural state of mind in which the lines between crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion and good and evil are blurred. Having grown up in the Soviet Union, I know that the country’s leaders practically made contempt for suffering and moral concerns a foundation of their philosophy of rule. Unaccountable governments are almost inevitably unconcerned about their citizens’ fate.
Can indifference ever be a virtue? Of course, in times of horror such as the Holocaust and Ukraine’s Holodomor, isolated and powerless individuals may swaddle themselves in indifference simply to retain some shred of sanity. But, even then, it can never be justified fully, and the nameless, nagging guilt of which Primo Levi wrote so movingly invariably follows.
It is official indifference, however, that is truly unpardonable, perhaps because indifferent officials never feel the guilt of which Levi wrote. Indeed, for some political leaders, indifference is seductive. It is so much easier to avert your eyes from citizens than to grapple with their plight. It is so much easier — and often less costly — to avoid individuals’ tragic circumstances than it is to adjust your policies to their needs.
For the state official who turns his back on suffering, his country’s citizens lack consequence. Their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is worthless, a cipher’s despair.
Such indifference is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can actually be artistically and politically creative. Pushkin wrote some of his greatest poems as a result of anger. Beethoven’s great symphonies were written in the grip of overpowering emotions. Nelson Mandela, Vaclav Havel and Aung San Suu Kyi all endured imprisonment because they were angry at the injustice they had witnessed.
Indifference, by contrast, is never creative. It means that no response to injustice and no help for the suffering will ever come. It is the tool of governments that are, in fact, the enemy of their people, for it benefits only the ruler — never the victim, whose pain is magnified by neglect. To dismiss the plight of political prisoners, hungry children, the homeless Chernobyl refugees or the irradiated workers in need of a lifetime of medical help is to exile them to a netherworld of helplessness. Government officials who deny human solidarity in this way deny their own humanity.
From his prison cell awaiting his execution by Hitler’s Gestapo, Dietrich Bonhoeffer declared that we must all “share in God’s suffering.” Indifference for Bonhoeffer was not only a sin, but also a type of punishment. This is perhaps the central lesson of Chernobyl: Governments that systematically turn a blind eye to their citizens’ fate ultimately condemn themselves.

Yulia Tymoshenko was twice prime minister of Ukraine. © Project Syndicate


TITLE: The Price of Fresh Air and Boiled Water

AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Everything in life comes at a price. In March, many of Moscow’s sick and elderly were reminded of that sad truism in the form of a huge monthly bill from the city’s social services for bathing them, taking them for a walk, or helping them to dress, cook, or clean.
These services used to be free, but the authorities have opted to tackle the budget deficit by a cunning trick: They created a short list of free services accompanied by a much longer and detailed list of paid ones, some of which nullify the free services.
For example, the short list says that “assistance with cooking” is a free service, but the list of paid services later makes it clear that preparation of any hot dish has to be paid for; that slicing vegetables is not included in the free service, and so forth. Whether this was done under the assumption that a vindictive Russian pensioner would one day seek revenge against the state by making a social worker spend hours in the kitchen cooking time-consuming dishes is anyone’s guess. The fact is that even “boiling of water” is now listed in brackets on the paid services list.
In April, some pensioners in Moscow received bills totaling around 15,000 rubles ($535), exceeding the average pension in the city. A Moscow television crew last week followed a frustrated recipient of one such bill, 77-year-old Raisa Sorokina. It takes Sorokina a good 20 minutes to walk down from her apartment to the street, and even longer to climb the stairs back. Her bill lists a charge of 193 rubles per hour for “accompaniment on a walk.” With a round trip to the doorway taking an hour, if she wanted to have the luxury of spending an hour outdoors every day, that service alone would cost her more than 11,000 rubles per month. 
Asked to comment on the controversy, a senior social services official said, “Going for a walk is not a life essential,” and therefore not covered on the list of free services.
In May, Russia will celebrate yet another anniversary of the end of World War II, known as Victory Day in the country.
One phrase has survived in the Victory Day speeches of Russian leaders since the Soviet years: “All of us, your descendants, owe an irredeemable debt to you, the war veterans.”
The moral underpinning of that debt has obviously crumbled. This “irredeemable debt” is one the state has no intention of paying. Making the war veterans themselves face “irredeemable debts” to the state is an ultra-cynical gesture that serves to bring up the younger generation in the spirit of hypocrisy and double standards.
Indeed, many of the Russian pensioners who depend on social services do have younger relatives. In most cases, these relatives live separately, often in other cities, and earn salaries comparable in size to the social services bills.
Besides, for some people in Russia, deciding to have children means cutting financial support to their elderly parents.
Tatyana, a radio presenter in her mid-30s, has a mother who is nearing 80 and lives in a village near the town of Ufa. She requires constant care. The elderly woman moves around with difficulty and needs help with shopping and cleaning, not to mention paying for prescriptions not covered by state insurance. Tatyana made the tough decision to cut down on support to her mother after she gave birth to her own child. The joy of having a child came with a heavy sense of guilt, as Tatyana knows that the money that she sends no longer covers all of her mother’s pressing needs.
Tatyana’s is a situation unthinkable for any senior Russian official. Children of the country’s top bureaucrats enjoy plum jobs as top managers at the leading banks and large corporations. But even considering the enormous wealth gap, what sort of humane value system considers fresh air for a disabled person as a paid extra? Even prison inmates get a daily walk outside. The new order has essentially sentenced some of Russia’s most feeble pensioners to the life of a prisoner — with the exception that some freedom of movement can be officially purchased, at 193 rubles per hour.

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

TITLE: Good vibrations
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Seraphin Selenge Makangila, the St. Petersburg-based musician who originally hails from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has been invigorating the Russian music scene with African beats for nearly 20 years, ever since he first formed a band with a group of African students in 1991. 
He came to underground fame as a singer with Markscheider Kunst, and for the past six years has been fronting his own band, Simba Vibration.
Simba Vibration made its debut — simply as Simba (which means “lion” in Swahili, Makangila’s native language) — at Kochegarka club in Vyborg on February 27, 2005. Makangila describes his music, which blends various traditional and contemporary styles, as “Afro positive music.”
“I am pleased when my songs feature African speech and then rock guitar gets in and plays in such harmony that you can’t separate them at all; you accept it simply as an overall piece,” the 42-year-old musician says.
“That’s why when I’m asked what kind of music I play, I say Simba Vibration plays Afro positive music. It includes reggae, ska, Congo rumba and Soukous music, but all at the same time.
“It’s crucial in Russia, where I often encounter a wrong attitude toward music. People tend to close their ears and eyes because they’ve chosen one specific way, even if there’s an abyss ahead. I can afford to play music depending on my mood — diverse music, anything that puts me in a good mood.”
Makangila came to the city back in 1991, when it was still known as Leningrad, to study at the Mining Institute. His first band was M’Bond Art,  formed by students from Congo (Brazzaville), Benin and Guinea in September that year.
“As a carrier of this culture, I felt I was obliged to show it to Russians,” Makangila said.
“The people here had no chance to see real African culture, except for on television, but what they show on television is not always true.”
Makangila’s influence on the current Afro-Cuban style of Markscheider Kunst cannot be overestimated. When the band’s members, who also studied at the Mining Institute and spent a lot of time at St. Petersburg’s pioneering alternative music club TaMtAm, met and became friends with Makangila, they were more into blues and rock than world music.
Makangila recalls an exchange from that early era, when Markscheider Kunst’s current guitarist and singer Sergei Yefremenko asked him how M’Bond Art managed without guitar solos. Makangila replied, “But we dance.”
“You could say I was a provocateur, who pushed them toward this attitude of music-making. Through my persistence, they realized I was right and started to look in that direction,” he says.
“With Markscheider Kunst, I tried to accentuate black music, black rhythm and even African language, so that people could not simply play notes, but feel it at a profound level and speak for themselves.”
“My approach to music deals more with what’s inside me, where I grew up, the sounds that I heard, what I saw then, and I shared it with them. We practiced and tried new things, and songs emerged as a result. It’s the same today.”
Now Makangila, who graduated with a degree in economic management of mining enterprises,  says that the early years with Markscheider Kunst were his way of having fun in a friendly crowd of students from the Mining Institute.
“There was nothing serious to me in it, but when I was on stage, I did everything from pure soul. When I watch old videos now, they are funny, but when I look into my eyes and the eyes of those around me, I see that we believed in what we were doing.
“That is most important to me. A person should live without deceiving themselves. When the last day comes, he or she shouldn’t feel regret: ‘I haven’t had time to change myself, I lived in a false way until now, just showing off.’”
Makangila, who parted ways with Markscheider Kunst in 2003, still performs two of the band’s songs — “Bazelyaka” and “No No No” — and employed Markscheider Kunst’s brass section on Simba Vibration’s first and as yet only album “Bolingo” (2009), although he admits he went through a difficult period when he left the band. 
In 2004, Makangila experimented with performing dub and jungle with Samosad Band as Seraphin and Samosad Band, but most of the time he was left to his own devices. 
The idea of forming his own band was suggested to Makangila by friends at a 2005 New Year party. 
A mix of different cultures, Simba Vibration features the St. Petersburg-based Finnish guitarist Antti Juntunen, half-Ethiopian bassist Anton Mewa, half-Roma seven-string guitarist Vasily Zhandarov, percussionist Andrei Panin and drummer Dmitry Gaitnutdinov.
“It’s based on friendship; there were no auditions or castings — what’s important is that they are sincere,” Makangila says.
“I treat them as an older brother and I respect them for choosing to play with me, which is an adventure, because we are not the kind of band that gets sponsorship and is given a lot of money.”
“Bolingo” (Lingala for “love”), which comprises 13 songs in Swahili, Lingala, English, French and Russian, was recorded using money borrowed from a friend. 
“Simba Vibration is not just a band for me, but a spiritual being, through which I can communicate with both people and God,” Makangila says.
“That’s why I decided that all the songs should be about love, and also maybe about empathy, but not about causing pain or any negative feelings.”
Makangila was born on August 31, 1968 in Kasongo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, into the family of a Muslim mother and Catholic father who had 12 children. But he sees himself as a true Petersburger, having seen Leningrad renamed back into St. Petersburg in September 1991.
“St. Petersburg has made me a creative person, and from here I learned more about my native Africa than when I was there,” he says.
“From here, I learned about what happens in Asia musically, about what happens in Europe and America.”
Makangila said he is grateful to the St. Petersburg rock scene, specifying TaMtAm’s coordinator Seva Gakkel for accepting him and not seeing him as “something exotic.” 
He also speaks fondly of Akvarium’s Boris Grebenshchikov and DDT frontman Yury Shevchuk.
“Shevchuk announced me at a rock festival in 1996, when for the rock public, a black man was something outlandish. Most [rock fans] identified themselves as fascists, but in five years they had changed. I meet them in the streets now, and they are completely different.”

Simba Vibration will perform at 11 p.m. on Sunday, May 1 at Mod, 7 Naberezhnaya Kanala Griboyedova. Metro Nevsky Prospekt. Tel. 712 0734.

TITLE: CHERNOV’S CHOICE
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Having tried to intimidate artists (Voina) and musicians (Noize MC and Barto), the authorities launched an offensive against music journalists last week, when Artyom Troitsky found himself under criminal investigation for allegedly insulting a traffic policeman.
Last week, the court found Troitsky guilty of insulting police officer Nikolai Khovansky and ordered him to pay 130,000 rubles ($4,666) in damages, but it turned out that a criminal case over the same incident was filed, and Troitsky now faces up to two years in prison.
Khovansky felt he was insulted at a mock police awards ceremony held by Troitsky during a DDT concert in Moscow on Russia’s national Police Day in November. 
The “anti-awards” — a moneybox in the shape of a Russian policeman with wide open pockets — were reportedly sent by mail to the year’s most notorious police officers, including Vadim Boiko, who assaulted members of the public at the July 31 rally in defense of freedom of assembly in St. Petersburg.
One prize went to Khovansky for his handling of the Feb. 25, 2010 car accident involving Anatoly Barkov, vice president of the state-owned energy company Lukoil. Barkov’s Mercedes smashed into a Citroen carrying two women, who were both killed.
Although witnesses said it was Barkov’s Mercedes, equipped with a flashing light, that crossed over into oncoming traffic to overtake a traffic jam, Khovansky, who was reportedly the first traffic policeman to arrive at the scene, was quick to put the blame on the other driver — a doctor — in an apparent attempt to clear the oil official.
According to Khovansky’s lawsuits, the policeman was upset that Troitsky used the word “piggy bank” next to the word “cop” and that Troitsky allegedly called him a “filthy cop” (a phrase he did not use at the ceremony.) Khovansky also claimed that his religious beliefs were offended by Troitsky, because the nomination was called “Give Way to the Chariot,” the second title of Noize MC’s song “Mercedes S666” about the car accident (Khovansky said he was offended by the number.)
Speaking on Ekho Moskvy radio on Saturday, Troitsky said he was surprised not so much by the verdict, but by the fact that such a lawsuit even made it into the courtroom.
As Troitsky faced Khovansky’s accusations, more lawsuits came from Vadim Samoilov, a curly-haired pro-Kremlin rock musician who felt insulted when Troitsky described him as “Surkov’s performing poodle” (referring to the Kremlin’s “gray cardinal” Vladislav Surkov.)
In his lawsuits, Samoilov cites dictionaries to explain that a “poodle is a dog,” and “dog when applied to a person is an insult.” Samoilov also mentions that the dog insult was directed not only to him personally, but to the entire Public Chamber of which he is a member.
It seems impossible to come up with more ridiculous accusations, but no doubt there will be more.

— By Sergey Chernov


TITLE: The man who shot the stars
AUTHOR: By Olga Khrustaleva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Frank Sinatra, the Beatles, Brigitte Bardot, Nelson Mandela, Queen Elizabeth II. Other than being famous across the globe, it might seem that they have little in common. But at various times, they have all been in the camera lens of Terry O’Neill. 
While his subjects are popular among the general public, O’Neill is famous in celebrity circles, which may be twice as precious. “I’m pleased,” he says. “It means they are happy with my work. They are hard people to work with. You have to be the best to work with them, or you won’t be there.”
The son of Irish immigrants raised in the London’s East End, O’Neill left school when he was 14 to become a jazz drummer. “I was trying to get to America to be an air steward, so I joined British airways,” he said. But the only job available was at the photography unit. “That’s how I started photography, and then it was slowly over for the jazz drumming. Rock and roll came in and nobody was really listening to jazz. So I decided to become a photographer.”
Fortune, luck and opportunity have been O’Neill’s companions throughout life. He was the first to shoot the Beatles and Rolling Stones just before they got famous, being only a couple of years older than them. But it all started with “a picture I took accidentally of the British Foreign secretary, Rab Butler, sitting at a London airport with a load of African chiefs on their way back to Africa,” recounts the photographer. “And he was falling asleep. He was in a pin-stripe suit. And I just thought it was an interesting picture. I had no idea who he was.” The Daily Sketch bought the photograph and offered O’Neill the job of covering the airport. “And that’s the picture that started my whole career, so I guess that was my lucky break.”
The cover of David Bowie’s “Diamond Dogs” album was also taken by chance. During the shoot, the dog was lying quietly at Bowie’s feet, but right after O’Neill said the photo shoot was over, the dog leapt up. Everybody started with surprise, except Bowie, who didn’t move a muscle. Fortunately O’Neill still had his camera in his hands and captured the dog on film just as it jumped. That was the picture that later become the album cover of “Diamond Dogs.”
Terry O’Neill is like a man from another epoch. He distrusts digital photography and thinks that there are no contemporary stars. Nor will there be, he says, until one thing happens: “When the PR people stop controlling everything,” he said. “It might take 10 to 20 years for a new star to appear.” 
He is skeptical about the capabilities of today’s celebrities: “I don’t think they’ve got the talent. All the time I was working, all those people really had talent. Sinatra was going from top to bottom, top to bottom. He made a comeback three times. And if they can’t make it today they’re gone, they never come back. Sinatra was the king of them all.”
According to O’Neill, photographers also have their ups and downs, but what makes a really good professional is the ability to move forward. “I keep working, I keep taking pictures. I always realize I’ve got to beat the last picture I’ve taken,” he says. “Always try to do the best you can, no matter what conditions or anything [you’re faced with]. There are going to be bad periods when you won’t get good pictures, but you’ve just got to go on taking pictures. And one day it’ll be all right.”
O’Neill told The St. Petersburg Times that the most exciting part of his job was “meeting all those great people all the time. At the very first job I had at the newspaper, I photographed the Beatles, and I’ve never looked back. Everyone I’ve photographed has been someone famous. So it’s been a really exciting life for me.”
Despite being among stars all his life, O’Neill doesn’t consider himself a celebrity, but pays respect to the people he has photographed, who were not just pop stars, but diamonds of the celebrity world. 
“I see them as big stars,” he says. “That’s the way I shoot them. I try not to take ordinary pictures of them. They deserve something to match their talent. I try to shoot them with the respect they deserve.”

“Terry O’Neill and His Shining Stars” runs through May 29 at Rosphoto center, 35 Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa, with the aid of Renaissance credit bank. The exhibits are available for purchase. For additional information, see www.rosphoto.org/en. Tel: 314 1214.

TITLE: The Dancing President
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
TEXT: Last week, everyone was transfixed by President Dmitry Medvedev’s moves on the dance floor after some rat leaked a video from his university reunion to YouTube. On a stage in broad daylight, he flails away valiantly to some of the worst music of the 1980s.
The video had been watched more than 1.4 million times on YouTube last Thursday, and for true aficionados, Lifenews.ru had a longer eight-minute cut for the full awkward experience.
“It has to be a fake, tell me it’s a fake,” the spokeswoman for the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi, Kristina Potupchik, wrote on Twitter, her faith in the Kremlin apparently shot to the core, after herding thousands of the faithful in white aprons on the weekend.
My sympathies went out to Medvedev for having to attend what looked like the worst party ever, although I was less sympathetic when I read on Life News that he had organized it. Certainly it is no ordinary reunion. Instead of 1980s pop on the turntables, it has the actual singers performing on stage. The group Kombinatsia belts out its hit “American Boy,” a classic about a Russian girl who wants to be whisked away to the States and ride in a Mercedes.
There are conspiracy theories out there about the video’s release having something to do with Russia’s position on Libya because the name of the YouTube account is KremlinLivia, or Libya in Russian. I wonder if it is meant to be a play on the word “live,” though. But my goodness, if that is the worst dirt they can find, Medvedev has nothing to worry about. He’s no dancer and should ditch the shiny jacket, but he looks better than many of his matronly or portly contemporaries. What intrigued me was his apparent lack of interaction with the other dancers, almost as if he paid for the party but still can’t be the popular kid.
The awkward men of the world probably took heart from the spy Anna Chapman’s interview with the Sun, in which she confessed that she fell in love with her British husband because he had long hair like Oasis star Liam Gallagher and wore clumpy Clarks shoes — the sensible brand loved by parents.
“Whenever he rolled his tobacco and wore his loose-hanging jeans, with his Clarks shoes and Liam Gallagher-style hair, it took my breath away,” she gushed, praising his “aristocratic beauty.”
In a far-from-gentlemanly fashion, her now ex-husband, Alex Chapman, sold or gave photographs of Chapman topless to The Daily Telegraph, sealing her reputation as the “hot” spy. Later some unpleasantly private photographs of her lying in the bath, taken by another British ex, were published in Playboy.
Chapman said she cried when she saw the Playboy photographs, calling them the “final blow.”
And she delicately skewered her ex-husband, suggesting that he is a complete loser. He is “an incredible, talented person who still hasn’t yet found himself in this life,” she commiserated sweetly. Meanwhile she is shooting up the ranks of United Russia’s youth wing and working as a mysterious bank “consultant,” not to mention shots at modeling and hosting a creaky television show.
Perhaps Mr. Chapman should turn to the power of prayer, like ballerina Anastasia Volochkova, who told Komsomolskaya Pravda that her latest toy, a two-tone Maybach car, appeared through divine intervention.
After posting photos of the blue-and-white car on her blog, she told the tabloid: “I prayed to God. He heard my prayers. I walked out into the street, and it was parked there.” Although oddly for a gift from God, she knew the exact price tag: 3 million rubles ($100,000).


TITLE: Life after the Chernobyl blast
AUTHOR: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK — Families walk their children to school. Teenage girls smile backstage before a concert. Couples work out at a gym not far from villages where subsistence farmers draw well water and raise crops.
Welcome to the present-day Chernobyl region.
A quarter-century before a tsunami triggered a nuclear crisis in Japan, the world’s attention was riveted by the Chernobyl nuclear power plant as it spewed radioactive material across much of the Northern Hemisphere. A generation later, thousands of people live in the region — and even still work at the disabled plant.
Freelance photojournalist Michael Forster Rothbart wanted to understand why anyone would choose to stay in the radioactive area, so he went to Ukraine on a Fulbright Scholarship in 2007 and for two years lived 16 kilometers south of the Chernobyl “exclusion zone.” He got to know the people whose lives changed on April 26, 1986, when the No. 4 reactor blew up 100 kilometers from Kiev, Ukraine’s capital.
His “Inside Chornobyl” exhibit, a photographic collage that focuses on five families who work in the Chernobyl zone, opened last Sunday at the Ukrainian Museum in New York. A parallel exhibition of his work, “After Chornobyl,” is also open at the Ukrainian Institute of America.
Both run until May 8.
“People told me ‘I’d rather die here than live anywhere else,’” he said of the 3,800 people who work at the plant, many of whom live in Slavutych, 50 kilometers to the east.
“In this country we’re so mobile that it’s hard for us to conceive that people have such deep ties to the land and community that they would stay in the face of such adversity,” he said. Some stay for lack of alternative or a sense of duty, others because they have decent jobs or simply because it’s home, Forster Rothbart said.
Chernobyl workers make about $500 a month, about twice the country’s average monthly wage.
Many of Forster Rothbart’s images belie the enormity of the 25-year-old catastrophe. The explosion released about 400 times more radiation than the U.S. atomic bomb dropped over Hiroshima. Thousands of children developed thyroid cancer, and other possible health problems are still being documented. But how many people died is still debated. Several international agencies say 50, and others predict that radiation-related deaths will eventually climb into the thousands.
The plant stopped making electricity in 2000, but nuclear fuel remains on site. The Chernobyl plant lies within the exclusion zone, where workers live for two weeks at a time because of high contamination.
The zone also is home to some 400 elderly people who returned to their ancestral homes despite the government’s warnings to stay out.
For “Inside Chornobyl,” which uses the Ukrainian spelling, Forster Rothbart focused mainly on those who commute daily by train from Slavutych. It’s a city of 25,000 people built after the accident for displaced workers from Pripyat, which was abandoned after the explosion and is now an eerie ghost town about two kilometers from the plant.
Some are involved in a project to build an enormous cover for the reactor building intended to block fallout from escaping when the reactor is disassembled sometime in the future.
Forster Rothbart said his goal was to go beyond the “sensationalist approach” that showed the suffering but obscured the complexity of how displaced communities adapt and survive.
“I sought to create more nuanced portraits of these communities. Their suffering, of course, but also their joy, beauty, endurance and hope,” he said.
People expect the Chernobyl zone “to look like a bombed out crater,” he said, but a walk along the Pripyat River is like any scenic area of Ukraine.
The difference is that the radiation — invisible to the eye — “is all around you,” he said.
His photo montage is combined with text mounted on large vinyl banners. Among the most chilling images is that of two dolls lying on a shattered kindergarten windowsill in Pripyat. A caption quotes the school’s former director: “I only went back once. I couldn’t stop crying.”
Another is that of the plant’s burned out fourth-block control room, where a combination of design flaws and human error triggered the accident. Another photo shows three workers checking their hands and feet for radioactive contamination before heading home.
The exhibition juxtaposes images of people’s working and private lives. It shows Oxana Rozmarisa operating machines that measure radiation levels in the plant and her husband, Leonid, as a shift supervisor there. The photos also portray the couple’s passion for bodybuilding. In one image, Leonid holds up his wife in one arm and his son in the other.
In other photos, engineer Tanya Bokova poses at the plant’s decommissioning office and at home with her husband. Their smiling faces make clear that the Chernobyl disaster does not overshadow their lives.
“I feel happy because I have a family, a beloved husband, parents together. I have a good job, which I go to with delight,” she is quoted as saying in a photo caption.
As for Forster Rothbart, he said, “The story seemed important enough that I was willing to undertake some risk.”
“In this country, every day people die in car crashes. We’re used to it, and so we don’t even think about it. The same is true in Chernobyl.
“Radiation is just part of living there,” he said. “Everyone in Slavutych knows someone who has cancer or who died of cancer. It’s sort of a veil of normality over this very troubling background.”
He said it was impossible not to draw parallels between the Chernobyl accident and Japan’s crippled nuclear plant.
“They’ll be forming a similar exclusion zone 25 years from now; they’ll still be dealing with the consequences just like the people in Chernobyl are today,” he said.
The exhibit is presented jointly by the museum and the Children of Chornobyl Relief and Development Fund.

Forster Rothbart, 39, lives in Oneonta, New York. He has done freelance work for The Associated Press and other media outlets. Among his other projects is “Fracking Pennsylvania,” which explores the effects of natural gas drilling on rural communities.

TITLE: An Easter Lesson
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: This year as both Western and Eastern Christian churches prepare to celebrate Easter (Ïàñõà), it seems like a good time to seek answers to some of the cultural and linguistic puzzles of the season.
The first mystery is why the dates of Easter usually don’t coincide, but sometimes do (like this year). All the churches figure the date the same way. Easter is the first Sunday after the full moon following the vernal equinox.
But it all gets complicated by which solar and lunar calendars are used. Western churches use the Gregorian calendar and set the equinox on March 21. The Orthodox church uses the older Julian calendar, which is now 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar (and therefore the equinox is April 3). So if there happens to be a full moon between March 21 and April 3 — that is, before the “Orthodox equinox” — it won’t count for the Eastern church, which will wait for the next full moon. Hence, the sometimes large gap between the two holidays.
The calculation of the date is further complicated by the way the lunar calendar is figured, which gives me a headache just to think about. (If you have strong nerves and a scientific turn of mind, type “ecclesiastical moon” or “paschal full moon” in your search engine.) In any case, this is the last time the Christian churches will celebrate Easter on the same day until 2034.
Another mystery for the more linguistically minded is the declension of the word Õðèñòîñ (Christ). You hear the expression Õðèñòà ðàäè (for the love of Christ, for Christ’s sake) and wonder what happened to the -îñ in Õðèñòîñ. I’ve found several different explanations — like the calculations for the date of Easter, everything depends on classification systems and starting points — but the most likely seems to be that the word was borrowed from Greek and declined by analogy with that language (in which the -os ending is dropped). If your ancient Greek is a bit rusty, it may be easier to think of the word as Õðèñò for purposes of declension and regard the nominative Õðèñòîñ as an exception.
In Russian culture, Õðèñòîñ and Áîã (God) are not words to be used lightly. But today you might hear ðàäè Áîãà (for God’s sake) used very casually. If you ask a co-worker if you can use his stapler, he might answer: Äà, ðàäè Áîãà (Sure, of course.)
To my ear, the phrase Õðèñòà ðàäè is a much stronger. It is used when asking for alms, when beseeching someone or asking them to speak truthfully, as if swearing an oath: Ñêàæè ìíå ÷åñòíî, Õðèñòà ðàäè, òû ìåíÿ ëþáèøü? (Tell me honestly, in the name of Christ, do you love me?)
There is one common expression with the word Õðèñòîñ that I’m very fond of: æèòü êàê ó Õðèñòà çà ïàçóõîé (to live without a care in the world). The word ïàçóõà is from the noun ïàç (groove, slot) and refers to the space between a person’s chest and his or her clothing.
There isn’t an equivalent of this in English, except the figurative and old-fashioned word “bosom.” Ïàçóõà is the place where you hide your money or valuables, the space where you might tuck a small child or mewling kitten — close to your heart but protected from the elements. Ëîæèñü ñïàòü. Çäåñü òû áóäåøü êàê ó Õðèñòà çà ïàçóõîé. (Go to bed. Here you’ll be as safe and cozy as in God’s pocket.)
What a lovely place to be.

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

TITLE: Den of Dionysus
AUTHOR: By Shura Collinson
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Russia’s wine-drinking culture is not, to put it mildly, the country’s strongest alcoholic tradition. For centuries, vodka was the national tipple, though several years ago, sales of beer overtook those of vodka. Wine traditions in Russia and the Soviet Union were generally limited to Soviet champagne, and in the absence of a national viniculture, sweet wines from Moldova and Georgia were the favorites in Russia, until they were banned in 2006 amid a series of diplomatic spats between the countries, allegedly for failing to conform to health and safety standards. 
Drinking foreign wine in Russian restaurants is not really the norm, which is unsurprising, considering that a bottle of plonk that the average Frenchman would buy only to cook with for three euros is guaranteed to set you back at least 1,000 rubles ($36) here.
The disadvantaged wine culture is nevertheless slowly growing, as evidenced by the local phenomenon of the enoteca — a type of wine store originating in Italy that allows visitors or tourists to taste wines at a reasonable fee and possibly to buy them, and that sometimes serves food. Following the fledgling local tradition set by Gusto and Grand Cru wine bar now comes Anima Enoteka. 
The latest addition to the enoteca scene has a slightly unlikely location just off Suvorovsky Prospekt. Anima has set up shop in the former premises of a fur shop, and where once the eerily empty eyes of stuffed foxes stared out from the windows, bottles of wine are now arranged.
Inside the compact premises, the entrance is given over to the store part, which houses a broad selection of wines from all over the world, comprising a collection the size of which is rarely seen in Russia. The attraction of the enoteca concept is that guests can select a wine and enjoy it over a meal for an additional 20 percent of its price — as opposed to 200 or 300 percent of the shop price as in most restaurants, Anima’s wait staff are quick to point out. 
In another continental twist, Anima is that rare thing in Russia — a non-smoking restaurant.
The interior, which looks somewhat cold and unappealing from the outside, is in fact far more agreeable from the inside itself. Oak shelves housing wines line the walls from floor to ceiling, while the deceptively comfortable black plastic armchairs, lime-green newspaper bins and stools in the shape of giant corks ooze Italian design. (The waiter confirmed that all of the furniture was custom-made in Italy.)
From the restaurant’s pride — its wine menu — a bottle of Chablis La Pierrelee 2008, priced at 1,500 rubles ($54) was everything it ought to be, and was complemented beautifully by a bowl of devilishly tangy marinated artichokes in olive oil — a compliment from the chef — and some truly superb warm ciabatta that the restaurant buys half-baked and finishes baking on site.
Of the appetizers, the tomato soup (190 rubles, $6.80) was so fresh that it didn’t seem to consist of anything other than blended tomatoes and copious amounts of basil, which those who like a bit of zest or garlic in their soup may find a little disappointing. 
In the salad of warm rabbit liver (250 rubles, $9), tender pieces of liver lay atop a bed of fresh spinach leaves and parsley, dotted with fine slices of chilli pepper, creating an original and very successful combination.
The mushroom risotto (350 rubles, $12.60) had a rich, creamy sauce and the ceps were firm, giving the dish just the right consistency.
The beef steak (890 rubles, $32) resembled black pudding when it was served, due to the fact it had been stewed in Barolo wine. It was served on what appeared to be mashed potato, but in fact transpired to be celery puree. The latter would certainly not be to everybody’s taste, but deserves recognition for innovation, at least, and did not detract from the meat itself, which was cooked to perfection. 
Anima offers only two choices of dessert — tiramisu and panna cotta — and as elsewhere in the menu, limited selection seems to correspond directly to quality. The tiramisu — a bargain at 150 rubles ($5.40) — was light and not at all sickly, despite the enormous portion, with the creamy part delightfully offset by crunchy, bitter chips of fresh coffee beans. 
Despite having been praised widely by local critics since opening at the very end of last year, Anima appears to stand empty a lot of the time, perhaps due to its location outside the city’s hubs of social activity. This is a shame, in view of how much the restaurant has to commend it, though it may well find itself busier as word spreads of this winning wine bar.

<b>In Vino Veritas</b>
Wine may not have such a prominent position in the history of Russian alcohol traditions, but this is changing, giving rise to a new kind of restaurant where the emphasis is as much on the wine as the food, which tends to be upscale European/Mediterranean fare.

<b>Grand Cru Wine Bar</b>
 
Grand Cru boasts molecular gastronomy such as shrimp carpaccio and bouillabaisse-cappucino, as well as a wine store with vintages from all over the world. The portion sizes may disappoint some, but the food and wine will not.
<i>52 Nab. Reki Fontanki
Tel: 363 2511</i>

<b>Gusto</b>
 
Gusto’s selling point is its enoteca system that allows guests to sample by the glass fine wines that are usually only available by the bottle, and its wine list, which is one of the largest in the city. Vintages can be soaked up with a selection of Italian dishes.
<i>1a Ulitsa Degtyarnaya
Tel: 941 1744</i>

<b>Probka</b> 
  
This upscale wine bar and Italian restaurant has been a favorite with the city’s glamour-pusses since it opened seven years ago. Its popularity exceeds its size, so booking ahead is recommended. 
<i>5 Ulitsa Belinskogo
Tel: 273 4904</i>

TITLE: Jeweler Takes Inspiration From Orthodox Church
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The spiritual journey began with a young man, who was yet to serve in the army, cutting grass in a village just outside Veliky Novgorod, almost 30 years ago at the end of the Soviet era. Little by little, Vladimir Mikhailov, who was studying to be a lapidary, worked his way to the edge of the field where he stumbled across an old, crumbling wooden house next to a derelict church. Curious to see inside the hut, he was bemused and mesmerized by what he saw: A secret Orthodox prayer house, something of an improvised sanctuary arranged by the religious residents of the nearby village.
Three decades on, Mikhailov, now 50, occupies the unique position of a jeweler crafting collections inspired by Orthodox symbols, saints and values in a centuries-old technique developed in the 12th and 13th centuries in northern Russia — and all with the blessing of the Russian Orthodox Church. 
“The sight of the tiny hut dotted with old icons, manuscripts and other things that the secret believers from the village had brought there was absolutely mesmerizing,” Mikhailov recalls. “It was my first real exposure to the Orthodox faith, and I really felt it at a close and personal level. 
“From that moment, I never really stopped thinking about it, but it took a few years for me to decide to make it my life’s work to create Orthodox-inspired jewelry.”
A native and resident of the town of Borovichi near Novgorod, Mikhailov seeks inspiration from ancient relics in the Orthodox monasteries of northern Russia, making pilgrimages to meditate on centuries-old icons and create objects of art devoted to the most revered saints and martyrs in the Russian Orthodox religion, including St. Nicholas, St. Panteleimon, St. George and St. Andrew the First-Called.
Carved in silver or gold in an ascetic style using a highly intricate technique, Mikhailov’s rings, pendants and crosses have proved equally appealing to both the clergy — originally the artist’s main clientele — and secular, even non-religious customers. His clients include Queen Sophia of Spain and Hollywood stars such as Mickey Rourke, both of whom bought items of jewelry spontaneously while shopping in St. Petersburg.
“When I started out, I made most of my items to order, and mainly for priests,” Mikhailov remembers. “Now I just work on the designs, and then they go to production.”
The jeweler, who presented his art abroad for the first time this spring at the Festival International d’Art Monaco – Cote d’Azur, is ready to go international. In the near future, Mikhailov is opening branches of his stores in London, Berlin and Nice following the success of his display at the festival.
Some of the collections, such as the Easter Collection that has just been released, take up to a year to design. After Mikhailov creates a design, it is then sent to the Baltic Jewellery Company, which in turn produces a certain number of pieces.
Mikhailov had a number of teachers. “I never had what one would call ‘the teacher’ or ‘the master;’ I had to look out for different artists who knew the art and learn from them whatever I could,” Mikhailov recalls. “It was not easy, and it took time to find the right people.”
Studying the art brought with it a deeper perception of Orthodox values, Mikhailov said. “It was a parallel process that involved a lot of thinking,” the artist said.
Mikhailov’s meeting with the late Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, Alexy II, back in 1983 during Alexy’s tenure as the Metropolitan of Leningrad was a life-changing experience for the artist.
“His recognition and blessing meant the world to me,” the artist said. 
“When the Metropolitan listened to me and told me that he appreciated what I was doing and gave me his blessing, it gave me a very special sense of security, inner peace and also confidence.” 
Although Mikhailov received a blessing for his work, the items of jewelry on sale at the stores are not blessed, which is a conscious decision. The jeweler believes in giving freedom to the customer to choose whether to wear the piece as a religious object or talisman, or simply as a work of art. In no way, says Mikhailov, does he want his art to be regarded as religious propaganda. 
“Naturally, every piece that we create shows that we share the spiritual values of the Russian Orthodox church, but we do not actually campaign among our customers to join us in our beliefs,” Mikhailov said. “I know that some of my clients choose to make this step and go to church and get their items blessed, and, more importantly, I have even seen examples of art inspiring a spiritual change in people. But I would hate to be seen as preaching.”
The artist says that when he talks to a client, he can tell whether they are attracted by the harmony and finesse of the design, or whether they came to the store specifically to choose a ring for a baptizing ceremony, for example, or a pendant with an image of a patron saint for their saint’s day. Mikhailov says he never attempts to convert shoppers. “It is not for me to judge anyone; and it is indeed a temptation to be in a potential position to influence people’s mentality, but this is what I do not allow myself to fall for,” he said. 
“What I do allow myself is to appeal to people’s emotions and soul. I try to create items with a festive spirit — like, for example, Easter angels. In Russia, many people go to church in times of sorrow but far less to say thank you when they are happy.”
Has the artist ever felt that the religious theme somewhat hampers his creativity, by forcing him to follow a number of canons? 
“No, it is quite the opposite,” Mikhailov said. “It is not the urge for self-expression that motivates me most. Of course, every design that I create bears my personal touch — but this touch is more emotional than visual, and can be sensed rather than seen.”


TITLE: How the Soviet Paradise of Pripyat Froze in Time
AUTHOR: By Alexandra Odynova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: PRIPYAT, Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone — Once built as the model of a perfect Soviet town, Pripyat is now the perfect model of undisturbed silence.
“We thought we were living in the best city,” said Natalya Oleinichenko, 50, a former Pripyat resident.
“I came here when I was 21, directed by the Komsomol after graduation,” she said with a slight laugh of irony standing in the deserted center of Pripyat, two kilometers from the Chernobyl nuclear power station.
A contractor by training, Oleinichenko ultimately ended up commanding two construction crews working in the area, including at Power Unit No. 4 where the ill-fated reactor was located. Her other crew raised buildings in the town, she said, pointing at nearby blocks of flats — now staring with black, square holes.
Twenty-five years later, she can recall in detail how she was walking outside with a baby carriage on April 26, 1986, when the first anxiety started to drift through the air, already ionized with radioactive vapor estimated by scientists to have been 10 times greater than the Hiroshima explosion.
“I remember helicopters buzzing back and forth in the sky,” said Oleinichenko, who was 25 at the time.
The reactor had blown up a day earlier, at 1:23 a.m. Friday, during a planned experiment as a result of what is still a subject of debate among scientists. But the unequivocal fact remains that the some 50,000 residents of Pripyat, whose average age was 26, continued living their weekend lives, awaiting the upcoming May holiday celebrations.
“Only after lunch we were told to stay inside with the windows closed, while pills of potassium iodide were distributed around the flats,” Oleinichenko said. “Late in the evening of April 26, Saturday, it was announced that a bus would stop by the apartment building on April 27 at 2 p.m. to move us away for three days.”
No statement was made about what really had happened and that every minute spent in the town within view of the exploded reactor was harming people’s health.
Only later did a monotone “Attention! Attention!” announcement start reverberating through the town’s loudspeakers, a record of which can be still found in online archives. A woman said in a calm voice that residents needed to evacuate because “in connection with an accident, an … unfavorable radioactive atmosphere is settling on the town of Pripyat.”
Offering assurances that the military and other authorities were doing their best to stabilize the situation, officials recommended that residents only take their documents, a few necessities and — “just in case” — some food.
“We left behind everything, taking with us only cloth diapers,” Oleinichenko said. She never came back for the rest.
But other people, including looters, returned to collect things, and many apartments have bare walls. In some cases even radiators have been yanked off the walls.
Twenty-five years ago, residents were living in a Soviet paradise with stores stuffed with food, a direct connection to Kiev by water and to Moscow by railway. The population was expected to grow to 75,000.
Today, the town resembles a classic picture of a ghost town from a Hollywood doomsday movie. Glassless apartment buildings line straight streets, while concrete buildings that once housed a massive concert hall, a large hotel and a restaurant are crumbling.
While concrete and glass are deteriorating, nature is taking over. Birds can be heard chirping, but not a pigeon or sparrow can be seen.
A rusting amusement park with a frozen yellow Ferris wheel delivered to Pripyat especially for the 1986 May holidays has instead become a symbol of the town’s tragedy.
Now and then, graffiti of smiling, playing children can be spotted on abandoned walls, painted by unknown visitors.
“They appeared about five to six years ago,” Oleinichenko said. “Maybe there were ghosts.”
People are not allowed into the town without special permission, just like in the rest of the 30-kilometer exclusion zone around Chernobyl. But once every year, on April 26, the town opens to former residents who want to visit their former homes and relive old memories.
Oleinichenko, whose husband worked at the station, said she didn’t choose to come to Chernobyl and she didn’t choose to leave it. But she had to choose to return.
“We were offered to leave the work at the station and move to Kiev or keep it and stay,” she said with regret.
They chose to stay. Oleinichenko’s husband continues to work at the station, and she holds a position in its information department. A beaming, friendly woman with dyed strawberry-blond hair, Oleinichenko shows no ill effects from the radiation.
They are among only 3,000 people still employed by the station, down from 12,000 in 2000. The number of staff is expected to drop to 1,000 over the next two years as the Ukrainian government further boards up the station as it secures its long-term safety with the help of foreign aid.
Now Oleinichenko and her husband live in the town of Slavutich, established in 1986 to house up to 30,000 evacuated workers and their families and located about 50 kilometers outside the exclusion zone. But many of the people who moved to Slavutich have since left, looking for work and better futures.
“We made the most foolish mistake of our lives,” Oleinichenko said. “Slavutich has no future as a town. I don’t know what will happen to us here.”