SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1659 (21), Wednesday, June 8, 2011
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TITLE: <font color="red">UPDATE:</font> Injured Activist Claims She Was Pressured to Withdraw Complaint Against Police
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Alexandra Kachko, who is attempting to get a policeman whom she says fractured her wrist at a protest rally on May 31 identified and punished, said Thursday she was being pressured by an investigator to withdraw her complaint and testify that the fracture resulted from an “accident.”

The 25-year-old architect said the investigator told her she would “ruin the man’s life” and that she “didn’t know who it was anyway” when she was summoned for a second interview on Wednesday.

When Kachko refused to withdraw her complaint, the investigator said that he knew her boyfriend was a military officer with the Russian Space Forces, and that she had been fined for drinking champagne outdoors in 2005, she said.

“He probably wanted to intimidate me so that I would withdraw my complaint without making a fuss,” she said. “He also tried to pressure me to testify that it was an accident.”

According to Kachko, the investigator added sentences to her testimony stating that she was aware that the Strategy 31 campaign was founded by the oppositional politician Eduard Limonov and that she was committing an administrative offence by coming to the rally.

Kachko, who is a member of The Other Russia political party, said the investigator also suggested that it was the party that had made her file a complaint about the policeman’s actions.

“He does not intend to file a criminal case, and of course, it would be good for him if I drop it myself,” she said. 

Kachko was detained at the rally and says her wrist was fractured when an unidentified policeman twisted it behind her back while she was being held in a police bus.

Kachko was then taken with the other detainees to a police precinct, from where she was taken by ambulance to hospital and diagnosed with a distal radius fracture of the left wrist.

Yury Shtengel, who was detained and put on the same bus, where he witnessed the incident, said the fracture resulted from the policeman’s brutal behavior.

“I didn’t see any aimed blows or intention to cripple, nor did I see any care being taken. It was all fairly rough,” Shtengel wrote in his blog after visiting the investigator Wednesday.

“Regrettably, judging by the investigator’s mood and attitude, I suspect the case will come to nothing.”

Kachko filed a complaint with the Investigative Committee late last week. A spokesman with the Investigative Committee said that the incident would be investigated. A spokesman for the St. Petersburg Interior Department (GUVD) said Friday that a GUVD internal investigation was also underway, and that the results would be sent to the Investigative Committee, but not be made public. 

Kachko said she was not going to withdraw her complaint, despite the pressure. 
See earlier story: <a href="/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=34101">click here</a>

TITLE: Injured Protester Incident Prompts Investigation
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov

PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Investigative Committee will investigate the actions of an unidentified policeman who allegedly fractured the wrist of an activist during the Strategy 31 rally in defense of the right of assembly last week, its spokesman told Interfax on Friday.
Architect Alexandra Kachko, 25, known for her dissident street art, has filed a complaint about the actions of the policeman who she says fractured her left wrist while she was in a police bus with other detainees.
On a video published by the Grani TV web publication, Kachko, who is a member of The Other Russia oppositional party, is seen shouting “Russia Will Be Free,” one of the rally’s slogans, from the bus she had been taken to by policemen moments before.
“I was in the front seat behind the bar, and I leaned over it and started shouting,” Kachko said by telephone Tuesday.
“[The officer] started pulling me by my wrist from behind, twisted it back and broke it.”
Kachko said she was detained when the police cordoned off a group of people, including her, and put them in a police bus. 
From the site of the rally, Kachko was taken with the other detained protesters to a police precinct, from where she was taken by ambulance to hospital and diagnosed with a distal radius fracture of the left wrist.
The police spokesman last week told Interfax that Kachko had behaved “extremely aggressively” on the bus. 
“In regard to whom did I behave aggressively?” Kachko said. “In fact, I was laughing, it looked comical to me, all this police excitement around.”
Late last week, Kachko was summoned to an investigator, who took down her testimony and accepted the photo and video documents she brought to him. 
However, the investigator expressed skepticism that a criminal case against the police officer would be filed, according to Kachko.
“He was asking a lot of irrelevant things,” she said.
“Why did I go there? What did I mean? From whom would Russia be free? He noted down only a couple of sentences about the fracture.”
While Kachko was taken to hospital without being charged, more than 50 were kept in police precincts overnight and appeared in court the next day.
One of them, actor Ilya Del, 26, says he was detained by chance when passing by the site near Gostiny Dvor on Nevsky Prospekt, where the rally was held. He said he had arranged to meet a friend there.
“I was passing by and saw some detentions, some disturbances starting up, and stopped for just a second, literally,” Del said by phone on Tuesday.
“First we were surrounded by OMON [special-task police] in a circle, and then two policemen wearing helmets so that you couldn’t see their faces started to shove us into a bus.”
Del said he was wearing no protest paraphernalia and was not taking any part in the protest.
“I was driven away and held for 24 hours with no explanation given,” he said.
“They wrote in their records that I was an opposition activist and that I was shouting slogans. But it’s obvious that if I were an activist, I wouldn’t deny it.”
Del, who has been charged with taking part in an unsanctioned rally and failing to obey police orders — the latter offense punishable with up to 15 days in custody — said he was waiting for a summons to appear in his local court.
“It’s clear that the court ruling will be not in my favor, but I am going to appeal,” he said. “I will not agree that I’m guilty of anything or did anything wrong. I was detained illegally and then I was deprived of liberty illegally. I am going to file a complaint about it.”
Rights activist Maxim Gromov, 38, who runs a group called the Union of Prisoners, said he was beaten and harassed at a police precinct after being detained at the rally. 
He said his head was banged against the floor several times when police officers threw him on the floor and handcuffed him after Gromov refused to identify himself or have his fingerprints taken. 
The incident was partly recorded on a cell phone by another detainee, who made the video available on the web.
Gromov said he was taken by ambulance to hospital with a suspected concussion in the morning after spending the night in a cell.
He said he was consulting with rights organizations before taking any legal steps. 
The rest of the more than 50 people detained at the rally were charged with participating in an unsanctioned rally and failing to obey police orders, and are awaiting trial. The Other Russia’s Igor Chepkasov was released Sunday after serving five days in custody.
Strategy 31 is a civic campaign of protests in defense of the right of assembly guaranteed by Article 31 of the constitution. It is held across Russia on the 31st day of each month that has 31 days.

TITLE: City Hall to Promote Wedding Tourism
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova

PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Wedding tourism, yachts and camping are among the focal areas of a set of measures aimed at boosting tourism to St. Petersburg to eight million people a year during the next five years, up from about five million tourists last year.
The main strategies of the tourism development program for 2011-2016 that was passed Tuesday are to increase the average stay in St. Petersburg up to five days, boost the number of repeat visits to the city, develop business tourism to lessen the effects of seasonal tourism, and introduce art, religious, cultural and family tourism, the northwest division of the Russian Travel Industry Union said Tuesday.
The program envisages the introduction of a law that will allow tourists to register their marriage in St. Petersburg within two days of applying for a license.
Alexei Chichkanov, head of the city’s Investment and Strategic Projects Committee, said Tuesday that such a marriage option would add more romantic flavor to St. Petersburg and attract new tourists, Interfax reported.
City Hall also plans to develop the infrastructure of camping sites.
The city has already prepared eight plots of land for that purpose, Chichkanov said. The plots are located in different parts of the city and range from one to 10 hectares. The plan is to build camping sites that will be able to accommodate from 2,000 to 3,000 cars.
At least six companies have expressed an interest in the sites, including foreign ones. The plots will be leased out but without permission to build any permanent constructions.
The city will be ready to announce a tender for the construction of the camping sites in a month, Chichkanov said.
City Hall has also devised a law on the development of yacht tourism in St. Petersburg that would open up Russia’s domestic waters to foreigners.
The law still needs to be agreed with federal bodies, however.
“The Sports and Tourism Ministry supports it, but the Foreign Affairs Ministry requires a lot of permits for opening up domestic waters,” said Chichkanov. “However, in principle, the question is already solved.”
Yacht tourism is to be one of the priorities of the city’s new tourism program.
Sergei Korneyev, head of the Russia Travel Industry Union, said all the new ideas directed at developing tourism in St. Petersburg were interesting and could be effective.
“Marriage registration completely corresponds to the image of our city,” he said. “St. Petersburg has the romantic brand of White Nights with the raised bridges, and couples kissing and walking along the embankments of the Neva. So it seems a very logical idea,” Korneyev said in a telephone interview with The St. Petersburg Times.
Introducing wedding tourism would require the city to open new wedding palaces, because the waiting lists for civil wedding ceremonies are very long in St. Petersburg, Korneyev said.
Newly engaged couples have to wait for up to a year for an available date.
Korneyev said he fully supported the idea of opening camping sites in St. Petersburg, adding that he saw a number of reasons for doing so.
“First of all, it will be very convenient for Russian tourists, especially those from the northwestern part of the country, who prefer to travel to St. Petersburg by car. At the moment, they always have to think where to stay and where to leave the car,” Korneyev said.
“Secondly, there are many automobile campers in Scandinavia and Europe. Many of them have already explored Europe, and a chance to do the same in St. Petersburg could be very appealing to them,” he said.
Korneyev said camping sites would be a good way for the city “to enrich the price range of its accommodation.”
“It’s well known that St. Petersburg hotels are not cheap. Camping sites will obviously be far less expensive,” he said.
Korneyev said the union also supported the idea of simplifying yacht tourism.
The laws governing Russia’s domestic waters have been out of date for some time, he said. In order to enter the country’s waters, travelers have to obtain many additional permits in addition to getting a visa and going through customs.
“Of course, yacht tourists will still have to get a visa, arrive at the St. Petersburg port and go though passport control and customs. But we should save them from having to go through many other non-essential formal procedures,” Korneyev said.


TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Murder in the Metro</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A metro train operator shot his colleague dead in the St. Petersburg subway on Saturday.
Engine operator Kirill Maslov, 25, shot his colleague in the chest with a rubber pellet gun, fatally injuring him, on the platform of Volkovskaya metro station. The incident happened during a conflict at work, investigators said, Interfax reported.

<b>More Schools for City</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Ten new schools and 20 kindergartens will open in the city by the beginning of the next school year on Sept. 1.
Nineteen more schools will re-open after major renovation work by the beginning of the new term, St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko said last week, Interfax reported.

<b>New Name for Bambi</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — St. Petersburgers will be able to take part in a contest through July 7 to name a fawn that was born recently in the mini-zoo of the Central Park of Culture and Leisure on Yelagin Island.
The fawn, who was born at the end of May, is currently called Bambi.

<b>20 Years of Piter</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Two hundred professional photographers will take pictures of St. Petersburg on June 14, when the city celebrates the 20th anniversary of having its original name restored, after being known as Leningrad since 1924 (and Petrograd for ten years before that).
After the event, the organizers will select 300 of the best pictures, organize an exhibition and publish an album.

<b>Accidental Drowning</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — An investigation has found that the death of Pavel Balakiryev, a Rossiya TV channel cameraman, was an accident. No criminal case will therefore be opened regarding his death, Interfax reported.
Balakiryev fell into the Neva River while filming for Rossiya TV channel and drowned. His body has still not been found.

<b>Museum Theft Declines</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A recent inventory of museum collections will make it possible to create electronic catalogues of exhibits, Mikhail Piotrovsky, president of the Union of Russia Museums, said.
“The recent inspection showed that the losses of recent years were minimal compared to the volume of the collections,” he said. “Today, for the first time, we have a record of everything we have in the museum.
“There are 70,000 employees working in Russia’s museums,” said Piotrovsky, who is also director of the State Hermitage Museum. “Their average salary is 7,000 rubles ($250) a month,” he said.


TITLE: Awards for Petersburgers Defy Expectations
AUTHOR: By Olga Kalashnikova

PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The 12 most outstanding St. Petersburg residents were selected Sunday night on the stage of the city’s Mikhailovsky Theater. 
The official awards ceremony was preceded by two months of voting on the Internet for St. Petersburg inhabitants who have made a breakthrough in ten categories: Theater, art, literature, film, music, business, social sciences, media, sport and fashion/lifestyle. The list of 50 nominees was compiled by Sobaka.ru magazine and a panel of experts, including city officials, business, art and sport representatives. This year was the sixth time the annual awards ceremony has been held.
Voting stopped on Sunday evening, as St. Petersburg’s beau monde and celebrities arrived at the Mikhailovsky Theater. Crowds gathered nearby in the hope of seeing famous Petersburg residents arrive and walk down the red carpet. 
The welcome part of the ceremony was outdoors. After lengthy photo sessions and interviews, guests finally moved through to the theater itself to hear the results of the voting, presented by showman Mikhail Shats and 100 TV channel moderator Dasha Alexandrova, who together with her co-anchor Alexander Malich was victorious in the Media category, defeating popular showman Ivan Urgant, “a person who is loved by everyone,” as it was said at the ceremony.
“It was an award for the whole crew of journalists working in the cultural field,” said Malich.
Many of the results were surprising. Neither opera diva Anna Netrebko nor fellow opera singer Olga Borodina won an award. Instead, the status of most outstanding musician went to Igor Rasteryaev, who gained popularity via the Internet for his song about tractor drivers. The electronic age also encroached on the literature award, which was given to the poet and blogger Alina Kudryashova. 
Kristina Berezovskaya and Kira Taimanova were deemed to have made the greatest contribution in the field of social sciences, getting more votes than the mathematician Stanislav Smirnov, who was recently awarded the Fields Medal. The two young women opened the Benois House educational center, where eminent and interesting people are invited to give lectures.
“When we launched this project we were the pioneers in this area, and it is a great pleasure to observe the enthusiasm shown for our project,” said the poet Taimanova. “We are at the beginning of our path, and this award is like a loan of trust given to us that we’ll try to fulfil.”
Other awards went to film director Sergei Debizhev for his movie “Golden Ratio” and the breakdance group Top 9. Arts patron Aslan Chekhoyev, who opened the New Museum on Vasilyevsky Island last summer, won the award for the arts, while Lina Perlova, owner of the Perlov Design Center that combines architecture and business was victorious in the business category. 
Jacques von Polier, who heads the creative and design department of the Raketa watch factory, won the fashion award, while the sports award went to Vitaly Petrov, the only Russian to have competed in the Formula One World Championship.

TITLE: National Bestseller Won By Bykov
AUTHOR: By Olga Sharapova

PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The 2011 National Bestseller (NatsBest) Award was given to author Dmitry Bykov on Sunday for his novel “Ostromov, or the Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” set in Leningrad, as Petersburg was formerly known.  
Bykov will receive $10,000 for his novel, which is the final book in a trilogy, following “Justification” and “Orthography.” 
The writer also won the NatsBest in 2006 for his book “Boris Pasternak.” 
“The main idea of the prize is to find a book that has the potential to become an intellectual bestseller,” said Vadim Levental, chairman of the National Bestseller foundation. “Representativeness is the strongest feature of the NatsBest. I think this year’s short list was splendid. It showed the key tendencies not only of modern Russian literature, but of Russian culture and even Russian society.” 
    In this context, the plot of Bykov’s “Ostromov” is initially unexpected. The novel is based on an old, forgotten story involving masons in the 1920s in Leningrad, but revolves around fundamental questions of life and death. 
This year, the National Bestseller Award celebrated its 10th anniversary. On May 29, Zakhar Prilepin won the SuperNatsBest — a special version of the National Bestseller prize worth $100,000 — for his novel in short stories “Sin.” The SuperNatsBest shortlist consisted of NatsBest winners from the past 10 years. Prilepin won that award in 2008.
     Of the five state book prizes and about 17 private ones in Russia, the National Bestseller Award is one of the oldest. 
The nominations are originally selected by the organizing committee of the prize, which is mostly made up of writers, publishers, agents and critics from eminent literary journals. The long list can be expansive: This year, the long list contained around 60 nominations. Then a jury of about 20 people, which is also formed by the organizing committee, awards points to every book. The jury does not meet to discuss the books, and the works that receive the most points make up the short list of the Natsbest prize. At the third stage of the voting, another, smaller jury made up of famous people choose the winning book from the short list. 
The awards ceremony itself is usually presented by the leading music critic Artemy Troitsky, but this year, the chairwoman of the small jury was the TV presenter and “It-girl” Kseniya Sobchak.  
It is difficult to say yet whether winning the prize has caused Bykov to “wake up famous” — the slogan of the NatsBest — as he already has an established reputation as a journalist, writer and poet, but the prize certainly adds some interest to the country’s literary scene and offers an incentive to contemporary writers.  

TITLE: Dutch Pediatricians Bring Know-How To St. Petersburg
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A group of Dutch pediatricians visited the city this week to share knowledge and techniques with their Russian counterparts.
Five pediatricians from St. Petersburg and four from Murmansk met with a group of four specialists from the Dutch city of Groningen headed by Professor Pieter Sauer for a conference held Monday and Tuesday. 
“The conference is part of a long-standing tradition of knowledge transfer between our countries,” Dr. Bart Rottier, a member of the Dutch delegation, told The St. Petersburg Times by telephone Tuesday. 
“In Murmansk, which is twinned with Groningen, Dutch organizations have been sponsoring the renovation of wards at the city’s children’s hospital for several years now,” he said.
The topics covered at this year’s conference included interactive teaching methods, how to diagnose congenital heart defects using ultrasound, and how to organize pediatric intensive care units, Rottier said. 
“What makes the conference special is that it is very interactive,” he said, adding that he had just been watching his colleagues practice putting in bone needles, using artificial bones.
This year’s conference was the second time the doctors have met in St. Petersburg. In previous years, several smaller conferences had been held in Murmansk, and several years ago, pediatricians from Murmansk also visited the Groningen Hospital for a few weeks, said Rottier.
Professor Sauer hopes to get sponsorship to organize more sessions in the future to improve pediatric care in Murmansk, he said. 

TITLE: 77,500 Tons of Shells Explode in Fire
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova

PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A fire, possibly sparked by a discarded cigarette, engulfed a Urals arms depot over the weekend, injuring at least 95 people and prompting 2,000 others to seek psychological help, officials said.
The military said no one was killed in the blaze, which started late Thursday and was extinguished late Saturday. But the top health official in the Udmurtia republic, Vladimir Muzlov, said two elderly people died of heart attacks, apparently from fright over the blasts.
Conscript Timur Miniakhmetov, who was involved in fighting the fire, was missing Sunday, Interfax reported. Thirty-seven people remained hospitalized with shrapnel and other injuries.
Firefighting robots, tanks, planes and helicopters were deployed to fight the blaze, and some 28,000 people were evacuated from villages bombarded by exploding shells, though most had returned home by Sunday.
The first explosion went off minutes before midnight Thursday at the facility located on the premises of a military unit near the village of Pugachyovo, 20 kilometers southwest of the regional capital, Izhevsk, the Emergency Situations Ministry said.
The facility, used for the controlled destruction of old ammunition, housed some 150,000 tons of artillery shells, Interfax said. At least half of the shells were destroyed in the blaze, Udmurtia Governor Alexander Volkov said.
Rocket-propelled missiles also stored at the site were not affected, Deputy Defense Minister Dmitry Bulgakov told Itar-Tass. The missile could have inflicted damage at a greater range.
Flying shrapnel inflicted minor damage to houses in nearby villages, while trains were redirected to other routes and part of a federal highway was closed until Saturday. A stretch of the Transneft pipeline stopped receiving oil from producers, with losses amounting to 161,000 barrels per day, the company said Friday. It was not immediately clear Sunday whether supplies had resumed.
The authorities did not specify what had caused the fire, but an unidentified law enforcement official blamed it on a carelessly discarded cigarette stub, Interfax said. Governor Volkov faulted the “human factor” for the fire, but did not elaborate.
More than 1,200 people fought the fire, receiving welcome assistance in the form of heavy rainfall Saturday, a local Emergency Situations Ministry spokesman said.
Sales of alcohol in the vicinity of the depot were temporarily banned Sunday following reports of looters searching for booze in the abandoned area, Interfax reported.
Eight local residents were detained on suspicion of looting, seven of them accused of stealing alcohol from a shop and the eighth with carrying away household appliances from an abandoned house. Police said no large-scale looting took place.
Several evacuees tried earlier to get past cordons around the area to check on their homes, with the police having to shoot the tires of the car of one drunken resident Saturday, Interfax said.
Investigators were conducting a preliminary check into the explosions, the Investigative Committee said in a statement.
Although the damage to neighboring villages was minor, the cleanup of scattered artillery shells will take up to a year, Emergency Situations Ministry official Mikhail Vdovin said Sunday. He did not mention any compensation to villagers.
This is the second arms depot fire in as many weeks. Twelve people were injured in a blaze at an arms depot in Bashkortostan in late May. The fire, which destroyed 40 buildings, including 14 residential ones, was blamed on a soldier mishandling old ammunition.
President Dmitry Medvedev ordered Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov to identify officials responsible for the two incidents and threatened to dismiss or demote anyone found negligent of safety rules.
“We’ll be stripping epaulets,” Medvedev said.
Poor safety standards may be the result of serious staff cutbacks under an ongoing military reform, as well as insufficient financing, Sergei Melkov, a researcher with the Association of Military Political Analysts, said by telephone.
But arson should not be ruled out either, as similar incidents have taken place, said Igor Barinov, a former special operations officer who is now a State Duma deputy with United Russia. Ammo “destroyed” in such blazes in the 1990s and early 2000s sometimes popped up later in the hands of North Caucasus militants, he told the Nr2.ru news web site.


TITLE: 2 Parties Challenge Putin’s New Front
AUTHOR: By Alexandra Odynova

PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Communist and Just Russia parties are creating organizations to counter Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s All-Russia People’s Front ahead of State Duma elections.
The Communist Party’s People’s Militia will unite interest groups around the party ahead of the December vote, party leader Gennady Zyuganov said. Putin’s organization, established last month, aims to do the same for the ruling United Russia.
The People’s Militia will protect “labor, peace, justice and brotherhood of all peoples in the state,” Zyuganov said Saturday, according to a transcript on his party’s web site. He did not elaborate on the group’s leadership or tactics.
The idea for the militia was introduced by two party branches in Altai and Nizhny Novgorod, Zyuganov said. In the Altai city of Rubtsovsk, a brigade of 50 members has been established, and more brigades will follow nationwide, the party said in a separate statement.
A Just Russia followed suit Saturday, declaring plans to form A Just Russia’s Union of Supporters. Senior party official Gennady Gudkov also said Friday that his old groups, the People’s Front Against Corruption and unregistered Go, Russia, would oppose Putin’s All-Russia People’s Front, Interfax reported.
Senior United Russia official Andrei Isayev said Monday that the rush of competitors implied that “Putin is right.”
“Copycat products are always worse than the originals,” Isayev said in a statement published on United Russia’s web site.
Meanwhile, the All-Russia People’s Front made an attempt to attract more supporters Monday, calling on individual supporters to join a group previously only open to organizations.
The front will now accept everyone who “shares [its] aims and landmarks,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in a statement on the government’s web site.
The online application form for the group has only two fields, one for the applicant’s name and the other to explain the reasons for joining. Up to 5,000 words are allowed for the latter. It is also possible to apply through United Russia offices.
The first prominent individual to join the group was world-renowned chess master Anatoly Karpov, Gazeta.ru reported Monday.
Curiously, the opposition New Times magazine published a report shortly before Peskov’s announcement about how its reporter had unsuccessfully tried to join the front as an individual.
United Russia will allot up to 150 of the 600 places on its party ticket for the Duma vote to nominees from the All-Russia People’s Front, Boris Gryzlov, who heads the ruling party’s Duma faction, said Saturday, RIA-Novosti reported.
Peskov said Monday that more than 400 public groups and organizations have joined the front since its inception.

TITLE: Russia Trailing Behind BRIC Countries in Competitiveness
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia is falling behind other BRIC economies in global competitiveness and growth, according to The Russia Competitiveness Report 2011, released Monday by the World Economic Forum.
The country ranked 63rd out of 139 countries based on the report’s 12 pillars of competitiveness.
The report noted that Russia can improve its poor ranking by reforming its institutions, improving the quality of education, stabilizing financial markets and moving away from a focus on natural resources.
“It is becoming increasingly evident that the current growth model, which is centered on high oil prices and leveraged facilities, is no longer effective,” Sberbank chief executive German Gref wrote in the report. “New drivers of growth are needed for Russia to achieve sustainable development.”
The report’s authors recommended taking a “three-plus-five” approach to increase Russia’s competitiveness. This approach involves capitalizing on Russia’s three key economic advantages and addressing its five key challenges.
Natural resources, the size of the domestic and foreign markets, and a highly educated population are listed as Russia’s key strengths in the report. Challenges include inefficient and corrupt institutions, quality of education, low market competition, unstable financial markets and unsophisticated business practices.
Russia received a similarly poor scorecard last year and its performance in the Global Competitiveness Index has stagnated over the past five years.
The 2011 rankings were calculated based on publicly available data and an annual survey conducted by the World Economic Forum with its network of partner institutions.

TITLE: Memorial Activist Beaten Outside Home
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A human rights worker was hospitalized after being beaten up in his apartment building, an attack his employer said was linked to his work, Reuters reported.
Bakhrom Khamroyev, a member of leading human rights group Memorial, was walking into the building in southeast Moscow on Monday when a group of strangers attacked him, spraying gas in his face and beating him on the head and legs.
Memorial chief Oleg Orlov said Tuesday that the attack was aimed at disrupting Khamroyev’s upcoming trip to Murmansk, where he had arranged a meeting with an Uzbek citizen threatened with extradition for purportedly taking part in Islamist militant activities, RIA-Novosti reported.
“Memorial believes the attack on Bakhrom Khamroyev was planned in advance and prepared as a trap,” Memorial said in a statement. 

TITLE: Big Cuts Loom in Izvestia Revamp
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky

PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The publisher of Izvestia, once known as Russia’s New York Times, signaled Monday that two-thirds of the newspaper’s journalists might face dismissal as he seeks to turn the publication into something “cooler” than Kommersant and Vedomosti.
Some Izvestia journalists said they understood that Izvestia would adopt a conservative, pro-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin stance ahead of the State Duma elections in December and the presidential vote next spring.
Izvestia has maintained a reliable pro-Putin policy since it underwent a major ownership shakeup linked to its critical coverage of the 2004 Beslan school crisis. Whether it can survive another revamp and find a niche remains unclear. But publisher Aram Gabrelyanov made clear Monday that the current editorial policy was unsatisfactory and hinted that few of the current team were worth keeping.
“The newspaper is completely ineffective as a business,” he told Slon.ru. “Is it normal that of the 130 reporters, only 30 contribute while the rest do nothing?
Gabrelyanov, who modeled his most successful newspaper, Zhizn, on the British tabloid The Sun, said that making Izvestia profitable was his main goal.
“We will be much cooler than Kommersant and Vedomosti,” he said.
Gabrelyanov has ordered the transfer of 38 Izvestia employees to the offices of his National Media Group, leaving the jobs of the remaining 200 staffers, including 100 reporters, up in the air, Izvestia staff said in an open letter published in Novaya Gazeta on Monday.
Gabrelyanov has also removed “a globe and the digitized photo archive” from the old newsroom on Pushkin Square, the letter said.
Portraits of the past 23 editors of Izvestia are to be transferred later this week.
Gabrelyanov said no one has been fired and negotiations were ongoing. “People are just pressuring the shareholders and the management to get bigger bonuses and compensation, that’s all,” he said in comments carried by RIA-Novosti.
Alexander Malyutin, the recently appointed editor of Izvestia, confirmed that big staff cuts are in the offing, saying Friday that 60 percent of the staff would lose their jobs with the newspaper’s move to 5th Ulitsa Yamskogo Polya, which also houses Zhizn.
“Some of them don’t want to move. Others we don’t want to take with us,” said Malyutin, a former deputy editor for Russian Forbes magazine, RIA-Novosti reported.
Malyutin said shortly after his appointment in April that under his leadership Izvestia would have a stronger focus on business coverage and online content, but not at the cost of political reporting.
But deputy editor Yelena Yampolskaya has said in private conversations that Izvestia will actually become a “pro-Putin, pro-empire and pro-Orthodox Christianity publication,” said another deputy editor, Sergei Mostovshchikov.
Reports said earlier that Yampolskaya, known for her conservative views, would keep her job at Izvestia, as would deputy editor Yelena Ovcherenko, a strong critic of the United States.
Mostovshchikov, who was named in the open letter published Monday as the spokesman for Izvestia’s staff, made his comments to the news site Openspace.ru.
Gabrelyanov’s press service refused to comment Monday.
But a former editor told The St. Petersburg Times that Izvestia’s relocation from the building on Pushkin Square, which still bears its logo in gigantic stone letters, will mark “the end of an era.”
“It’s sad symbolism because it will become a completely new paper with no connection to its past. However, looking at today’s Izvestia, you could say that this building has already served as its grave stone,” the editor said by telephone. He asked not to be identified to protect his relationship with journalists still at the newspaper.
Established in the year of the Revolution, 1917, Izvestia rose to prominence as the country’s second-most important daily, behind party mouthpiece Pravda. It has counted Vladimir Lenin’s ally Nikolai Bukharin and poet Vladimir Mayakovsky among contributors.
Izvestia editor-in-chief Alexei Adzhubei, Nikita Khrushchev’s son-in-law, was the only Soviet journalist to interview U.S. President John F. Kennedy in the White House, speaking to him in 1961, a year before the Cuban missile crisis.
At its peak, Izvestia had a print run of 8 million copies. It further boosted its reputation in the late 1980s when it became a flagship for perestroika. Although circulation fell from 1 million to 300,000 following perestroika, the paper, then owned by billionaire Vladimir Potanin, survived as a respectable broadsheet in the 1990s and early 2000s.
But following the Beslan crisis, Izvestia all but turned into a Kremlin mouthpiece after it was sold to Gazprom in 2005.
In a signal of the paper’s stance at the time, then-editor-in-chief Vladimir Mamontov decorated his office with a portrait of revolutionary Che Guevara — which he said in the presence of a Moscow Times reporter was a gift from Kremlin deputy chief of staff Vladislav Surkov.
In 2008, Izvestia was purchased by National Media Group, owed by Putin’s close ally Yury Kovalchuk. The media holding also owns Zhizn, known online as Lifenews.ru, a thriving sensationalist tabloid founded by Gabrelyanov.
Alexei Pankin, a media analyst and former Izvestia editor, said Izvestia was edged out by Kommersant as the national broadsheet after perestroika, and its core audience, older people who remained loyal to the Soviet-era brandname, could not make it profitable.
The paper has changed editors several times over the years, “but all have failed to create a product that would be popular with a quality audience,” he said.
Leonid Bershidsky, editor of Slon.ru and founding editor of Vedomosti, said he doubted that Gabrelyanov could save Izvestia.
“He is the perfect tabloid editor and publisher. But Izvestia — as it’s supposed to be — is not the kind of newspaper he knows how to make,” Bershidsky told the Perm-based online newspaper Sol.


TITLE: Race On to End Spat Over Banning of Vegetable Imports
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — EU and Russian officials expressed hope Monday that a dispute over Russia’s decision to ban European vegetables amid an E. coli outbreak in Germany would be resolved before a EU-Russia summit at the end of the week.
Asked at a Brussels news conference whether the ban was on the agenda for the two-day summit, which opens Thursday in Nizhny Novgorod, European Commission spokeswoman Pia Hansen replied: “We hope not. We hope to find a solution to this problem and to convince our Russian partners that such measures are not needed and will not affect the topic at the summit. We hope to find a solution before the summit,” Interfax reported.
Separately, Russia’s EU envoy, Vladimir Chirov, said via video link from Brussels that he hoped “the issue will be clarified” before the summit, Interfax reported.
Russia banned all EU vegetables on Thursday over fears about a new strain of the E. coli bacterial infection that by Monday had killed at least 22 people and sickened more than 2,200 others, mostly in northern Germany.
German scientists on Monday failed to confirm that the source of the outbreak was bean sprouts grown at a vegetable farm in northern Germany. Initial suspicion had fallen on cucumbers, tomatoes or lettuce, possibly from Spain.
The EU has lambasted the Russian ban as unfair. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin acknowledged on Friday that the ban might violate the rules of the World Trade Organization, which Russia hopes to join this year. But he defended the ban, saying, “Cucumbers that people die from after eating really stink.”


TITLE: Diplomat: 5-Year Visas Planned for Professionals
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel

PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A new visa agreement between Russia and Europe’s Schengen zone could significantly reduce red tape and travel restrictions by next year — but only for professionals, not tourists, a European diplomat said Thursday.
The deal could cover lawmakers, businessmen, journalists, members of central and regional governments — along with their families — and representatives of nongovernmental organizations, said Denis Daniilidis, spokesman for the EU delegation to Moscow.
Athletes, students and scientists may also be included, on the condition that they had received one-year visas twice before, he added.
All of them could be entitled to five-year multiple entry visas, Daniilidis told The St. Petersburg Times. He stressed that the new rules only cover short-term stays, usually defined by up to 90 days.
The agreement, which would be strictly based on reciprocity, granting equal visa opportunities to Russians and citizens of Schengen member states, could be signed by the end of the year, Daniilidis said by telephone.
A signing would mark a rare and much-needed success in the long and cumbersome negotiations between Moscow and the 27-member block.
It would also follow a similar EU-Russia agreement that came into force in 2007 and limited the times and fees for visa processing.
The latest round of talks started after Spain pushed for the abolition of visa requirements in January 2010.
The Spanish initiative was quickly and warmly embraced in Moscow, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov repeatedly saying visas could be abolished right away. But it was soon stalled as other EU members made it clear that they did not want to grant Russia visa-free travel, quoting both technical requirements and overtly political arguments.
The result has been a deepening rift between members of the Schengen agreement, an open-border zone of 25 European states, including non-EU countries Switzerland, Norway and Iceland, but not union members Britain, Ireland, Romania, Bulgaria and Cyprus.
The five-year visa deal was negotiated parallel to ongoing talks about total visa abolishment. Russia and the EU plan to approve soon a set of so-called common steps toward scrapping visas, though the deal, expected to be signed at next week’s EU-Russia summit in Nizhny Novgorod, was postponed.
Daniilidis said the holdup was merely technical.
“It’s not an issue of substance, it’s an issue of procedure,” he said, adding that the signing was “only a matter of some weeks.”
The common steps document is a list of commitments both sides have to fulfill, with no binding time frame.
Requirements include forgery-proof passports, tighter border controls and free movement throughout the host country.
The last point reflects Europeans’ frustration with Russia’s cumbersome registration requirements for foreigners.
Those rules were eased this spring by introducing a seven-day waiver period for registration of foreigners traveling in Russia, but EU officials have made it clear that they want the rules totally scrapped.
The Federal Migration Service also recently announced the introduction of new biometric passports that contain a microchip with fingerprint data.
Service head Konstantin Romodanovsky told Kommersant last week that the new generation of passport would soon be issued in St. Petersburg. Nationwide distribution is planned to begin in 2013, he said.
But visa requirements are not expected to be eliminated any time soon, especially since the political popularity of open borders has recently dropped in some member states of the Schengen agreement, the rules of which can only be changed by unanimous approval of all participating states.
Denmark said last month that it would reintroduce border controls by the end of the year, arguing that cross-border crime has increased.
Notably, the country’s Justice Minister Lars Barfoed said the move was aimed at shutting out “Eastern European criminals.”
Alexander Rahr, an analyst with the German Council of Foreign Relations, warned that the clash over visa rules would fuel accusations that Europe is being divided again.
It would take years to overcome political opposition to abolishing visas in Europe, he added.
“My feeling is that visas won’t be scrapped before the 2018 Football World Cup,” which will be held in Russia, Rahr said by telephone.
Meanwhile, countries like France, Italy and Finland have followed Spain’s example of employing the most liberal policies possible under the Schengen agreement when issuing visas to Russian tourists.
Those policies already include routinely giving five-year multiple entry visas to applicants who have held two Schengen visas before.
But other countries, notably Germany, are far more restrictive and demand more documents and personal interviews from applicants.
These discrepancies give Russian travelers an extra incentive to get their Schengen visas from those countries that offer the easiest point of entry — in violation of the spirit of the agreement.
“They travel to Finland by train, have a coffee in Helsinki, before flying to Germany,” one senior European diplomat said upon condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the matter.
But European officials also point out that such unilateral steps by European states are not matched by Moscow.


TITLE: IN BRIEF
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — State-controlled NTV television has aired a lengthy report on the luxury lifestyles of officials implicated in the case of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky — two months after the story was first broken by Magnitsky’s supporters.
The 14-minute documentary, whose title roughly translates as “Fat Cats,” voices charges by Magnitsky’s supporters that Moscow police and tax service officials were involved in a 2007 scheme to embezzle $230 million in tax refunds originally intended for Hermitage.
“Fat Cats,” which aired late Monday, is based on series of exposes by Hermitage that claimed officials implicated in the case own assets worth millions of dollars that they could not afford on their salaries.
Magnitsky was jailed in 2008 after accusing officials in the $230 million fraud and died in pretrial detention of health problems 11 months later. His supporters say the case was fabricated as punishment for whistleblowing and that he was denied medical help.
While the allegations are not new, their appearance on national TV is.


TITLE: Vereschagin Painting Sold for $3.75M
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: LONDON — Vasily Vereshchagin’s painting “The Taj Mahal, Evening” set a new record for the painter at Sotheby’s auction house on Sunday night when it was sold for $3,749,919.
The picture was sold to an anonymous buyer on the telephone, far surpassing its pre-sale estimate of $410,000 to $739,000.
In total, Sotheby’s Evening Sale of Important Russian Paintings raised $23,170 million, in line with pre-sale expectations of $20.5 million to $29.9 million.
Jo Vickery, senior director and head of the Russian art department at Sotheby’s, said the auction house was “extremely pleased” with the results.
“We are also thrilled to have set a new record for Vereshchagin… in addition to a further four artists records at auction for Bogaevsky, Kamenev, Maliavin and Sala. It has been a huge privilege to bring to the market such a number of highly desirable and quality works by this renowned Russian master Vereshchagin, and the international competition for these pieces tonight is enduring testament to this artist’s output and the quality of the works on offer, which saw huge interest pre-sale,” Vickery said via the company’s press service.
Vereschagin was born in 1842. He traveled much during his lifetime, living in India for two years, and many of his paintings were based on eastern themes. The artist served in the army and was killed in a battle at Port Arthur during the Russian-Japanese war in 1904.

TITLE: Local Takes Top Job
AUTHOR: By Derek Andersen

PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — St. Petersburg realtor Alex Romanenko has been elected president of the International Real Estate Federation, which unites 100 national real estate associations worldwide.
The federation, also known as FIABCI, held its world congress in Cyprus last month and will hold its 2012 congress in Romanenko’s hometown, where he is president of the Advecs real estate agency.
The FIABCI meeting will bring 1,000 real estate professionals from 70 countries to Russia, Romanenko told The St. Petersburg Times on Monday at the annual Russian National Real Estate Congress.
Brokers, appraisers and property managers will attend the congress, but Romanenko said it is also an opportunity to attract investor attention to Russia. 
Romanenko emphasized the importance of attracting smaller investors, linking their absence to Russia’s falling place among countries attracting foreign investment in real estate.
Brazil, China and India occupy the first through third places for international real estate investment, but Russia has lost its pre-crisis fourth position and is now in 10th place, Romanenko said.
Western investment in the Russian real estate market was only 14 percent of its pre-crisis level, Romanenko said, and 96 percent of those funds were directed at Moscow.
“Large corporations will always be here no matter what,” he said, “because they are interested in the enormous market.”
But Romanenko cited a well-known laundry list of impediments that discourage investment on a smaller scale, such as lengthy bureaucratic procedures, risks related to the lack of transparency and secure property rights and a lack of trained managers.
“Enough talk about the special Russian way. It’s time for us to meet international standards,” he said.
“We really need deep structural reforms,” he said. “Brazil, Poland, Turkey — they receive more investment because they are more understandable.”
But while we are criticizing we also need to acknowledge the potential, Romanenko said. The role of professional associations can be significant. After a crisis new opportunities arise, he said.
“The associations need to work with the government and the Duma,” he said. “Nobody will do it for us. We need to promote it and to pay for it. It is in the interests of all the citizens of Russia.”
Romanenko is the former president of the Russian Guild of Realtors, which hosted the event in Moscow. The guild also provides voluntary certification to realtors. There is no government licensing procedure for realtors.


TITLE: Okhta Center Seeks Permission
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Gazprom Neft is seeking approval to build a skyscraper on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, Bloomberg reported.
The move comes after the original plan to build the skyscraper in the city center was blocked by protests.
The project may be 15 percent to 25 percent higher or lower than the original design, Gazprom’s Okhta Center project said in a statement late last week. The site is almost 10 kilometers away from the historic center, which doesn’t violate laws on cultural preservation, according to the statement.
The contract to build the initially planned 400-meter skyscraper was estimated at 2.3 billion euros ($3.3 billion). Adapting the project will be 50 percent cheaper and take two years less time to build than drafting a new design, Okhta Center said.
St. Petersburg and Gazprom at the end of last year agreed to move the project. Historical preservation groups including UNESCO opposed building what was designed to be Europe’s tallest tower near the city center, which is listed as a World Heritage Site.The original complex was designed to serve as Gazprom Neft’s headquarters and include a concert hall, art museum, hotel and business center. 

TITLE: St. Petersburg University Scores High in League Table
AUTHOR: By Yelena Vinogradova

PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW — The best university in the country remains Moscow State University, or MGU, but it’s not necessary to come to the capital to get one of the country’s best classical educations: Universities in Tomsk and Novosibirsk ranked in the top five of the latest published rating.
The national university rating project was conducted jointly by Interfax and radio station Ekho Moskvy, and grew out of a 2009 order from the Federal Education Agency to create an independent evaluation system for the country’s institutions of higher education.
Every year, 90 percent of high school graduates go on to college or university — meaning that about 2 million families a year wonder how best to select a place for higher education, said Alexei Venediktov, chief editor of Ekho Moskvy.
The strongest university in the country is unquestionably MGU, so its rating result is listed as 100, and the other 107 universities that are largely focused on classical education — though 28 have the status of “national research university” — were ranked in terms of a percentage of MGU’s result.
The “brand” value of universities was ignored until recently. But now employers look more frequently not just for a specialist with a diploma, but one who has finished a particular institution. Companies that understand the different “brands” and are willing to pay more for graduates of the better schools have increased from 15 percent in 2005 to 35 percent now. According to City Hall, only 5 percent of graduates from Moscow’s lesser known institutes find jobs related to their chosen field of education.
The main driver to getting a degree is better salary options. Those with a higher degree can count on 60 percent better pay than those without. With 1.5 million graduates entering the job market every year and competing for work, the significance of the university brand is growing.
Regional educational institutions are much better at generating and managing intellectual property than federal ones. For example, Siberian Federal University in Krasnoyarsk registered 95 patents in 2010, while MGU registered only four for the same period. The regions are also much more active in creating small innovation enterprises, or MIPs, where students and professors work to create and commercialize innovative ideas. Tomsk State University has nine MIPs whose charter capital includes patents valued from 35,000 to 408,000 rubles ($1,250 to $14,600).
The commercialization wave is expected to continue as federal and regional authorities encourage educational institutions to engage in entrepreneurial activities.
The methodology used for the rating system is based on the one used by the magazine Times Higher Education — which last year put MGU as the highest-ranked Russian participant on its list, coming in at 237 in the World University Ranking. 

TITLE: Few Ideas For Fall In Social Tax
AUTHOR: By Howard Amos

PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Viable legislation for lowering the social tax burden on companies, a key part of President Medvedev’s modernization agenda, has not been put forward by the government, prompting suggestions of a schism between the White House and the Kremlin.
The June 1 deadline for an official suggestion on how to lower the 34 percent tax on payroll for companies — imposed by Medvedev during a landmark March speech in Magnitogorsk — has passed without a constructive proposal from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s government.
In an effort to resolve the impasse, presidential economic aide Arkady Dvorkovich suggested that the corporate income tax rate be raised to its pre-crisis level of 24 percent, Vedomosti reported Monday, offsetting the budget losses that would be entailed by dropping the tax on payroll, covering insurance and pensions, eight percentage points to its 2010 level of 26 percent.
But this compromise solution has been met with hostility from business groups and experts who contend that any rise in corporate income tax would run counter to Medvedev’s goals of modernization and an improving business climate.
“It [would be] a contradictory approach,” Alexander Osipov, vice president of Delovaya Rossia, an organization that represents small and medium-sized businesses, told The St. Petersburg Times. “There are [other] taxes that would not affect economic development, modernization or the abilities of companies to raise their effectiveness.”
He cited levies on alcohol, tobacco and the oil and gas extraction industry as well as dividends paid by state companies as sources that could be mined for the budget without damaging the economy.
“If the government’s strategy is to stimulate investment, modernize the economy and increase its efficiency, then a higher corporate income tax is a no-go,” VTB Capital said in a research note Monday. “The current proposal would be a wrong signal to business.”
Medvedev described the 34 percent tax rate, introduced by Putin’s government, as “unbearable” on March 30 in Magnitogorsk.
Though Putin has also said the rate must be changed, he has been less clear on the time frame. In a May 26 speech he refused to give any “final parameters” for potential alterations.
It is not the first policy statement outlined by Medvedev in Magnitogorsk that appears to be stalling. First Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov was listed by Gazprom as a candidate for its board of directors — despite a deadline set by Medvedev for all government ministers to vacate their seats on the boards of state companies before Oct. 1.
The rise in the social tax burden that came into force on Jan. 1, 2011, prompted many companies to revert to practices whereby they paid employees part of their salaries in cash-filled envelopes.
The chief executive of a midsized Moscow manufacturing company who requested anonymity said the measure had forced companies to “disappear further into the shadows” and pay “black wages.”


TITLE: No Cherries, Just Challenges for Yakunin
AUTHOR: By Roland Oliphant

PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: SOCHI — Vladimir Yakunin seemed irked.
“No cherries, no tea?” he said. “Honestly, I can’t work like this.”
But Yakunin, president of Russian Railways, wasn’t really upset. It had just been a long day, he said, sending an aide off to find the tea at the start of an interview with the sister newspaper of The St. Petersburg Times, The Moscow Times.
It would be hard for Yakunin to be genuinely distressed about such a minor inconvenience. The former diplomat is widely believed to have worked for the KGB in foreign intelligence — a profession that promotes restraint, even in the absence of cherries.
His possible spy links are believable in conversation, when it becomes apparent that his portly figure and bear-like demeanor mask a sharp mind and a disarming ability to slip effortlessly between Russian and English during discussions with foreign colleagues.
The weather in Sochi, where he presided over an annual international rail business conference last week, was perfect. The scenery was stunning, and the event, however much it purported to be a working summit, carried the feel of a vacation.
Although the atmosphere was relaxing, there was a reason to bring luminaries of the international rail business, potential investors and government officials from Moscow to the Black Sea resort: the not-so-subtle need to promote the massive work and challenges facing the rail monopoly.
Sochi is the site of several of Russian Railways’ most high-profile — and controversial — construction projects ahead of the 2014 Winter Olympics.
The company is building three new rail lines, including a contentious road and rail link to the Alpika mountain resort in Krasnaya Polyana, a new freight yard, and four new rail terminals in Sochi and surrounding towns.
“I can say that all the Olympic projects we’re responsible for are on schedule and going to plan. We’ve had no upsets,” Yakunin said with evident satisfaction.
It’s an opportunity to show fellow railway men, potential investors and, more important, those who control the purse strings in Moscow what can be done.
“All in all, there’s a lot of events coming up that would be impossible without the railways,” he said. “First there’s the Universiade [in Kazan in 2013], then the Olympics in 2014, then the World Cup in 2018. Oh, and don’t forget the hockey.” Russia won its bid to host the 2016 Ice Hockey World Championships last month.
Those looming deadlines serve as an incentive to the company to get things done as quickly as possible, he said.
“But most important I hope it’s a stimulus for our government,” Yakunin said. “Because it’s one thing to say, ‘Here’s the concept on the table: We need to develop transport links.’ But it’s another thing to give us the money.”
And the upcoming sporting events are just the beginning. The company also plans to spend 13 trillion rubles ($400 billion) on new rolling stock and lay more than 20,000 kilometers of track by 2030.
‘Heated’ Tariff Talks
Talking to Yakunin about funding these projects gives an insight into the extent the economy remains heavily centralized. Russian Railways is still a purely state-owned company, and its primary sources of income are freight tariffs and state subsidies, meaning “heated discussions” with the Finance Ministry, as Yakunin described them, are a fact of life.
But its activities have such significance for the economy that even its own main source of income — freight tariffs — is subject to government control. Freight tariffs accounted for about 85 percent of nearly 1.1 trillion rubles of revenues in 2010, according to company figures.
The railway monopoly would like to increase tariffs to raise funds to invest in infrastructure projects and modern rolling stock. But the government, nervous about inflation and the impact on the industries that rely on rail freight, has kept tariffs on a tight lease.
“It is a question that lies beyond the competence of the company. These are questions of macroeconomics,” Yakunin said. “There’s a non-antagonistic conflict — by which I mean there’s no clash — between keeping a grip on inflation and limiting state debt.
“But the government sets the objectives, and the government sets the tariffs. So we can assume that they will find the best decision,” he added diplomatically.
Surprise Putin Visit
Shortly after the interview, Yakunin got an unexpected chance to put his arguments to the man who matters. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who had visited Abkhazia for the funeral of its leader, Sergei Bagapsh, dropped in unexpectedly at the end of the Rail Business Forum on Friday — causing organizers to extend events for an extra day and hurriedly put together a reception committee.
Yakunin is considered part of the prime minister’s inner circle, with a friendship stretching back to at least the early 1990s. But it didn’t look like Yakunin got much out of Putin, who restated his position on tariffs before Yakunin had a chance to open his mouth.
“We understand the industry needs resources for buying things. But we cannot raise tariffs too high — it’s very dangerous for the economy as a whole and the customers,” Putin said in a speech to a hastily assembled audience of rail executives, bankers and government officials.
Putin barely reacted when Yakunin called for liberalized tariffs on international transit on the grounds that the market was sufficiently “advanced.”
But Yakunin got an immediate and sharp response when he asked for “market mechanisms” to address the “painful and sensitive” issue of providing services to small and medium-sized businesses left out by a system geared toward large customers like coal producers.
“You expect subsidies from us?” Putin interrupted.
“Manufacturers may need just one or 10 cars, and frankly they feel offended that the current system… “ Yakunin replied.
“What do you want from the government? Money?” the prime minister said, cutting to the heart of the matter.
The honest answer would probably be “yes.” Last June, the government extended a 50 billion ruble subsidy to compensate for the tariff controls, and the company is likely to seek further support in the future.
If the external influence on the company irritates Yakunin, he doesn’t let it show. And it might, because Yakunin effectively runs a state within a state.
He presides over one of the world’s largest transport systems, with a charter capital estimated at 36.5 billion euros ($53 billion) in 2010. He employs more than 1 million people. Last year’s estimated turnover of $38.7 billion equals the gross domestic product of Serbia.
It’s a sprawling corporation that the government has put on its list to participate in a $33 billion state privatization program.
The company creates 1.9 percent of the country’s GDP, possesses 7.3 percent of all state assets, and carries out 3.4 percent of infrastructure investment, Yakunin told Putin on Friday.
“Last year the government invested 176 billion rubles in our authorized capital, but received 245 billion back in taxes alone,” he said.
“That’s our macroeconomic impact. Without the railways, we cannot implement goals set by the government like a double-digit increase in GDP,” he said.
So the least you could do, he seemed to be saying, is provide a bit of money for tea and cherries.

TITLE: Turkey Pressures Turkmenistan Over Building Debts
AUTHOR: The Associated Press

TEXT: ASHGABAT, Turkmenistan — Turkish President Abdullah Gul met with his counterpart in Turkmenistan last week for urgent talks thought to be related to $1 billion in outstanding bills owed to Turkish construction companies that have revamped the capital city.
Turkish companies have played a leading role in transforming this old sleepy post-Soviet backwater into a city of soaring marble-clad government offices and apartment blocks. But a report last month by risk analyst D&B said 25 Turkish firms are preparing to take legal action against Turkmenistan over the hitherto unexplained nonpayment.
Turkish media reported that Gul’s visit is aimed at recovering the debt and heading off complaints to the International Center for Settlement of Investments Disputes, or ICSID. Several Turkish businessmen said they believed it to be the central issue of Gul’s visit, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of imperiling their investments in the tightly controlled Central Asian nation.
Gul himself was coy on the nature of the visit, but warned what was at stake before setting out. “With my visit, we will be reviewing all aspects of our cooperation in the fields of economy, trade, energy, investments and education,” Gul said. “Turkmenistan is the country where Turkish businessmen have undertaken the largest number of projects in Central Asia,” he said, adding that Turkish companies have developed projects worth $21 billion since Turkmenistan gained independence in 1991.
Turkey’s daily newspaper Hurriyet reported in April that the Turkmen government was refusing to pay Turkish companies $1 billion owed for building work. It also said Gul, who is known to take a close interest in Turkish investors abroad, had scheduled a trip to discuss the issue with Turkmen officials.
Foreign companies based in Turkmenistan, run as an opaque and authoritarian fiefdom since independence, are normally highly reluctant to publicize problems with the government. Turkish builder Ickale Insaat broke ranks late last year, however, when it filed a complaint against the country with the ICSID.
“More are to follow,” said Ozan Ickale, of the Ankara-based builder. “The Turkish companies are slowly all seeking their rights through arbitration.” He said a number of Turkish contractors have been jailed in Turkmenistan or are barred from leaving the country “for simply seeking their rights.” Ickale itself is owed over $50 million, he said. “Not only have we stopped our activities, but we were lucky to have come out of there,” he said.


TITLE: A Case of False Missile Defense Panic
AUTHOR: By Michael Bohm

TEXT: Pseudocyesis, or false pregnancy, is the psychological syndrome when a woman is convinced she is pregnant after experiencing similar symptoms that are associated with pregnancy.
Russia’s military hawks, who constantly warn that U.S. missile defense will undermine Russia’s strategic nuclear deterrence, are experiencing a similar hallucination.
We have been hearing these overblown, alarmist cries ever since President George W. Bush announced the U.S. withdrawal  from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in December 2001.
Strangely enough, these cries continued unabated even after U.S. President Barack Obama drastically scaled back Bush’s missile defense program in September 2009 — a move that was intended, above all, to be more effective against a missile threat by a Middle Eastern rogue state, such as Iran or Syria, but also to help appease Russia’s concerns and boost the reset in relations between the two countries.
We heard the latest round of Russian military bluster on May 20, when General Staff deputy chief Andrei Tretyak claimed that by 2015, the third phase of Obama’s planned European missile defense system — which would be only able to intercept intermediate-range missiles that Russia doesn’t even possess — would somehow pose a threat to Russia’s intercontinental missiles and even its submarine-based nuclear missiles.
“This is a real threat to our nuclear deterrent forces,” Tretyak said with the kind of straight face that only a Cold War-era general could muster.
For his part, President Dmitry Medvedev — albeit with a much softer face — has warned that if Russia feels threatened by a U.S. or European missile defense system, the Kremlin would be forced to beef up its strategic nuclear arsenal despite New START limits, possibly leading to an arms race.
Medvedev also pressed for a written, binding U.S. guarantee that no missile defense system could ever be targeted against Russia.
But a quick look at the globe will show that this proposal is a nonstarter at best and nonsensical at worst. Since Russia covers one-seventh of the world’s landmass, even the most modest missile defense installment intended to defend against a rogue state and placed forward of Russia’s northern borders — for example, the current 30 intercepters in Alaska and California — could be considered by the Kremlin as being “targeted against Russia.” How far does Moscow really expect Washington to go to cater to its whims?
There have been numerous commentaries on these pages explaining the objective reasons why U.S. missile defense poses no threat to Russia. A quick look at the globe shows that the current Aegis-based SM-3 missiles — which are short- and medium-range intercepters — cannot reach Russia’s strategic land-based nuclear missiles, much less its submarine-based ones.
If the United States were really intent on weakening Russia’s strategic forces, it wouldn’t deploy Aegis-based SM-3 intercepters, but a much more powerful missile defense system that is intended to intercept ICBMs. Moreover, these intercepters would have to be deployed along the Russia-U.S. trajectory in a forward position — for example, in Norway, Greenland and northern Canada —  and certainly not in the Black Sea region or Central Europe. In addition, the United States would have to install 15,000 intercepters to come even close to weakening Russia’s nuclear forces, even at its reduced New START level of 1,550 warheads.
The U.S. strategic nuclear deterrent has always been an important component of Washington’s military strategy, but far from a dominating one for the simple reason that strategic nuclear weapons are, by definition, not intended to be used in combat. They are intended only as a deterrent against a nuclear first strike. But for Russia, as military analyst Ruslan Pukhov wrote in a May 27 column on these pages, its nuclear forces play a hypertrophied role in its military strategy for two reasons — first, as a superpower status symbol; and, second, as a surrogate military tool that it brandishes in a vain attempt to compensate for its lagging conventional forces. Just as Russia exaggerates the importance of its nuclear weapons, it also exaggerates the threat that U.S. military missile defense poses to its nuclear forces.
Since Russia’s military hawks view its nuclear weapons as the holy of holies — or, to put it more bluntly, the only military component that still makes it a superpower — even the slightest hint of a theoretical devaluation of Russia’s strategic forces from U.S. missile defense gets blown out of proportion and is viewed as a matter of life and death for the country’s national security, however irrational this may appear to outsiders.
In most cases, false pregnancy is treated by a psychotherapist. The most successful treatment is to simply show the patient ultrasound images that objectively and conclusively refute pregnancy. In Russia’s case, which can be diagnosed as “acute false missile defense panic,” a quick look at the globe would be a good way to start treatment.
Michael Bohm is the opinion page editor of The Moscow Times.


TITLE: United Russia Presents Local Cultural Icons
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova

TEXT: There is nothing very new about recruiting prominent cultural figures to take part in political advertising. It’s a tactic that was adopted long ago by United Russia, the powerful pro-Kremlin party.
 But there always seemed to be a problem: among the celebrities it co-opted, it was hard to find anyone of great artistic or intellectual stature, still less of genius. Those used in the party’s advertising campaigns have been more the showbiz crowd, people who are well-known but may be forgotten in 20 or 50 years.
 That approach changed dramatically at the end of last month, when United Russia published a series of posters, stamped with the party logo, featuring some of the towering figures of Russian arts and literature from the past. The images were released as part of a campaign to celebrate the 308th birthday of the city of St. Petersburg on 27 May.
 Suddenly the streets of St. Petersburg were festooned with images of titanic figures such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Alexander Pushkin.
 Also apparently queuing up to congratulate the city on behalf of United Russia were the physiologist Ivan Pavlov, the composer Dmitry Shostakovich, the poets Anna Akhmatova and Joseph Brodsky, and the chemist Dmitry Mendeleev. 
 The unmistakable party logo at the bottom-left corner of each poster immediately exposed the project as a case of cynical political and moral looting. None of the writers, artists, composers, singers, or scientists who appeared on the posters had any connection with United Russia, a party that was set up in the wake of communism but has come to be seen by modern-day dissidents as embracing some of the Kremlin’s past totalitarian tactics.
 Brodsky’s dissident poetry was published secretly, attracting as much attention from the KGB as it did in literary circles. He was detained in a psychiatric hospital for political reasons in 1965 and was later held on a collective farm in the Archangelsk oblast. The charge against him was that he was a social parasite — a Soviet term for not having a regular job.
 He was eventually forced out of the Soviet Union in 1972 and lived in exile in the United States. 
 And now we see him being portrayed on the posters of United Russia – a party loathed by Brodsky’s successors, the dissidents of today, and a party not even vaguely identified with support for human rights or any challenge to the Kremlin or the political status quo. 
 And what about the Silver Age poet Anna Akhmatova? Her former husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilyev, was shot by the Bolsheviks in 1921 on false charges of conspiracy to commit counter-revolutionary activities. Their son, historian Lev Gumilyev, spent time in the gulags on political charges.
 Today the dead are unable to rise from their graves to protest against the smear on their memory. But some of their furious descendants are speaking out.
 Anastasia Shostakovich, great-granddaughter of the composer, said the stunt amounts to the imposition of “posthumous party membership.”
 Alexei Tanner, deputy head of United Russia’s regional branch and the official responsible for its ideology and propaganda, said the project “made perfect sense.”
 “The party congratulates the city on its birthday. All we wanted is for local residents to meditate on the unfortunate fate of these most talented people,” Tanner told reporters in St. Petersburg.
 The United Russia spokesman said the party is ready to offer its apologies to those descendants who felt offended by the campaign, but he stressed that the party’s actions were legal. 
 The Soviet regime first made it impossible for dissidents to get work and then branded them social parasites. Today it is Russia’s biggest political party that is the parasite, attempting to promote its political ambitions by feeding off the fame of some of Russia’s greatest artistic heroes — and failing to realize that by doing so it has essentially declared itself a political corpse.

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: Shaking up the swamp
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov

PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Avant Fest, the music festival showcasing Russian and international indie rock held in Moscow since 2004, returns to St. Petersburg this year for one night only — called Avant Piter and headlined by British Sea Power — at Kosmonavt on Saturday, June 11.
Launched by the Moscow-based promoter Maxim Silva-Vega in 2004, the festival featured St. Petersburg events in 2004 and 2005 at the now-defunct Red Club and the Sergei Kuryokhin Modern Art Center, respectively. In 2005, Avant Piter was headlined by the British post-rock band Hood.
Held for the eighth year running, this year’s event will bring the Brighton-based indie rock band British Sea Power, which released its fourth studio album, “Valhalla Dancehall,” earlier this year.
Also performing will be Chinawoman, a Russian singer/songwriter from Toronto, whose work was influenced by Nico, Leonard Cohen and Marc Almond, as well as a vinyl record collection of Soviet pop that belonged to her emigre parents, a ballerina from the Mariinsky Theater and an engineer from Leningrad (the Soviet name for St. Petersburg).
The St. Petersburg event will also feature the Frozen Orchestra, an acoustic trip-hop band formed by St. Petersburg-based Swiss singer/songwriter Tamara Lee and Richard Deutsch, an Austrian guitarist of Metamorphosis fame.
“When we started organizing the festival in the mid-2000s, the idea was to expand the musical mentality of young people and develop a new music scene,” Silva-Vega says.
“There was no Russian indie music scene, no such phenomenon at all at that time. There were only some bands and some artists. Many things have changed since then, and now they say we have an independent scene in Russia. What it is actually like, though, is quite another question.”
But according to Silva-Vega, Russia still lacks what he calls a “festival spirit,” something that Avant was also founded with the intention of developing.
“The festival spirit, in our view, lies in a diversity of music, in the creation of an audience interested in diverse types of music,” he says.
“I think we haven’t got there yet. Not just us — nobody in Russia. People here only go to what they’re accustomed to. Our goal was to get people interested not in something well-known, something old, something they already know, but to make them go to something new and interesting. Strictly speaking, the festival is intended to help people to discover new things.”
The Avant project is more than a music festival, encompassing concert promotion, a record label and a club in Moscow specializing in indie music.
“It’s very important to comprehend all these activities as a whole,” Silva-Vega says.
“The festival is a culmination, a celebration, when people who don’t know each other meet, listen to each other’s music, mix and learn something, but our goal was to cultivate this atmosphere of openness, interest and tolerance throughout the entire year.”
Silva-Vega, whose Spanish communist grandfather fled to Moscow when General Francisco Franco won the Spanish civil war in the late 1930s, began his music activities by promoting the Barcelona-based band Refree’s concerts in Moscow and St. Petersburg in February 2004. 
In May that year, he promoted the first, one-night Avant Fest, and two months later, launched the Avant club project, then based at the 35 MM film theater in Moscow.
According to Silva-Vega, he financed his first efforts from his salary as a journalist with a Spanish news agency in Moscow.
“To be honest, I came across this music purely by accident,” he says.
“But it was interesting for me to learn new things, and the new encounters and impressions thrilled me so much that I realized I wanted to share this experience with other people,” he says.
“It’s no secret that Russia divides itself from Europe or the West on the whole; this idea of bi-polarity, about us being different, it doesn’t die; it exists through the centuries,” Silva-Vega says.
“The uniqueness of our destiny notwithstanding, I think that insularity is sometimes harmful. It was by being in touch with other cultures and mentalities that great Russian culture was born. Take Pushkin.
“To develop and regain your own identity and peculiarity, you should not be in a closed world, but just the opposite — by correlating your world with other cultures and taking something from them. These are things that are obvious enough, but we often forget about them.”
Avant Fest and the concerts set up by Avant help to open up Russia a little, Silva-Vega believes.
“It’s absolutely crucial for this country to ‘open a window on Europe’ all the time,” he says.
“To shake up our swamp, so that people see something new and start thinking in new, diverse ways, to overcome uniformity. So that people get an interest in others, and if not love them, then at least try to understand and get to know them. There is a dire lack of that here. So we have this sort of socio-political aspect.”
The music featured at the Avant Fest cannot usually be heard on Russian television or radio. 
“It’s important for us to have young people get in touch with art, rather than with the cheap mass culture that is promoted by the media,” says Silva-Vega.
“[Officials] preach from their bully pulpits that it is necessary to develop culture, but nothing is done to develop this culture, while television is given over to making money from the basest human instincts. It’s enough to turn on NTV television channel, or even MTV.”
But despite the lack of media attention shown to the genre, audiences of indie rock and more artistically creative kinds of music are growing, with fans and interesting bands appearing even in small towns.
“This audience can’t be compared to the audience of the MuzTV Awards, because we lack this kind of media and financial resources, and we don’t appeal to the masses,” said Silva-Vega. 
“But on the other hand, [the fan base] isn’t that small, if we consider not only those who come to the event in person, but also those who are with us from a distance.
Russia’s main television channels are state-controlled and have been repeatedly criticized for being used as propaganda tools to influence public opinion.
“We are exactly the opposite: We want everybody to think for themselves and rely on their own thoughts rather than on what they are told on television,” Silva-Vega says. 
“That’s why our audience is largely an Internet audience. They’re active people, people for whom what they have nearby is not enough, who need something more.
“I think there’s a lot that can be done, especially in the regions where people need this cultural product far more.”
During its existence, Avant has brought acts including  Devendra Banhart, Mudhoney, Explosions in the Sky, Xiu Xiu, Trail of Dead, The Horrors, Spiritualized, Patrick Wolf, The Rakes, Shitdisco, Young Knives, We Have Band, Arab Strap and I Am Kloot to Russia.
“Because we’re independent, there are only two factors that we take into consideration: Our preferences and our financial possibilities,” Silva-Vega says.
“But even with our financial resources, it’s a great pleasure and privilege to organize such a festival and to invite artists whom you find worthy and interesting, and who represent truly outstanding examples of contemporary music. It’s very gratifying to follow your own, even subjective preferences, and to not be dependent on the market.”
In Moscow, the Avant Fest will be held from Friday to Sunday at Avant Club, which moved into the former factory-turned-art center called Art Play earlier this year.

Avant Piter, featuring British Sea Power, Chinawoman and the Frozen Orchestra, will take place at 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 11 at Kosmonavt, 24 Bronnitskaya Ulitsa. M: Tekhnologichesky Institut. Tel. 922 1300.


TITLE: CHERNOV’S CHOICE
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov

PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A concert in support of Moscow music journalist and promoter Artyom Troitsky, now on trial for critical remarks made about a musician, had to switch venues from the Moscow House of Artists, where it had been scheduled to be held on Friday, June 10.
Eventually, another venue, a music club called Hleb, was found and, if it does not face similar problems, the concert will be held there.
The planned show has been organized by Vasily Shumov, frontman of the Moscow band Center, and its ever-growing lineup features such artists as DDT’s Yury Shevchuk, Center, Barto and Nik Rok-n-roll.
The director of the House of Artists, who suddenly canceled the concert on May 31, appears to have found himself under pressure from the authorities because of the concert, and, very typically, is reluctant to speak about it and even to tell the organizers the origin of any phone calls on the matter.
Shumov suggests that the call came from the presidential administration, specifically from the offices of the Kremlin’s “grey cardinal” Vladislav Surkov, but admits that all attempts by the organizers to discover if this is true have failed.
Speaking to web publication Slon.ru, the House of Artists director Vasily Bychkov said that the cancelation was caused by the fact that “various institutions and organizations interpret [the concert] as a rally.”
“We hold public events all the time, and they are under the control of various organizations; I’ve had calls from the FSB (Federal Security Service) and almost even from the drugs department, who ask what will be happening here,” Bychkov said.
“This time they started to call from various organizations and ask what we were planning.”
When asked if he could name the organizations, Bychkov confronted the journalist by asking him, “Are you investigators? It’s our internal affair.”
Troitsky faces hefty fines and even a prison sentence if found guilty of slander after former traffic policeman Nikolai Khovansky and pro-Kremlin rock musician Vadim Samoilov filed lawsuits against him almost simultaneously, in what looks like a coordinated action.
Last year, Troitsky presented Khovansky with a “worst cop” anti-award in absentia during a ceremony at a DDT concert in Moscow, where the year’s best and worst policemen were named. He described Samoilov as “Surkov’s trained poodle” during a television program in January.
The callers, described by Shumov as “grey cardinals and behind-the-scenes puppet masters,” want to remain in the shadows because their actions are illegal even in Russia, where censorship is technically forbidden.
But by pressuring the House of Artists, they have effectively proved that the lawsuits against Troitsky are the result of his oppositional political stance, rather than due to the fact that the former traffic policeman and the musician truly felt insulted by his remarks.

— By Sergey Chernov


TITLE: Connecting cultures
AUTHOR: By Olga Khrustaleva

PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: With only 20 percent of Russians ever traveling abroad, notions of other cultures and peoples are often limited to impressions gained from television, books and magazines. The Magic Table project that opened Monday at the Pro Arte center in the Peter and Paul Fortress aims to kill three birds with one stone: Improve visitors’ knowledge of geography, reveal interesting aspects of American life, and broaden spectators’ horizons. 
The Magic Table is an art installation that features an interactive world map on its tabletop. By rotating it and shifting the angle, visitors can choose a location on the map and play with the scale. The invention is already popular in the U.S., and is often purchased by children’s museums. 
This time, however, the artists JD Beltran and Scott Minneman have gone even further, and made the journey more exciting by adding extra details. 
“Scott invented this table, the map,” said Beltran. “And then I had the idea of adding stories to the places where they happened”. 
Beltran and Minneman began by visiting San Francisco and Cleveland and asking high-school students to describe the most memorable moments of their lives. Some of those moments had occurred outside the U.S., when the young Americans had been visiting relatives or traveling abroad.
Sometimes the artists used different tactics to get the stories. 
“We went out one day with a video camera and just stopped people in the street and got them to tell us what they really liked about Cleveland,” said Minneman. One woman they asked turned out to be a witness of the Kent State Massacre, in which the National Guard charged anti-Vietnam war protesters at Kent State University in 1970. 
“She was living in the dormitory that overlooked the place where the students got shot,” said Minneman. “She came in the day after we had done the videotaping and she told us the story. She’d never told that story publicly before. Sometimes the table becomes very cathartic, with people telling stories they wouldn’t otherwise tell.”
In St. Petersburg, the stories “aren’t so dramatic sometimes” according to the artists, but are still remarkable for “showing what kind of life they use to live, and the war.”
“It was quite difficult, because most of the stories have no links to the city itself, but rather to the people, ” said Polina Dubchinskaya, one of the Pro Arte students who participated in the project. “The stories turned out to be rather abstract, as emotions are usually what matter.”
The Magic Story Table project aims to establish new links between people living on different continents and help them to understand each other better. 
“I think that the importance of certain events for Russians and Americans is different,” Dubchinskaya told The St. Petersburg Times. “It seems to me that we have different values in our perception of life. These values reflect the country and its mentality, and are better than any guide book. When you are interested in a certain country, first of all, you wonder what kind of people live there. This project has come closer than any other to portraying the objective perception of people living in a certain country.”
The St. Petersburg stories revolve around various locations, moods and emotions. But what unites all of them is the people, despite their different attitudes to the city, their various favorite places and ways of life. And it is this that makes the project so interesting — the diversity even within just one town. A portrait of the city painted by its citizens, Magic Story Table is reminiscent of scenes from the films “Paris, je t’aime” and “New York, I Love You.” 
The stories are written in both Russian and English, and are accompanied by the author reading it aloud. 
One of the featured stories is by Minneman himself. The artist describes his arrival in St. Petersburg with the Magic Table project. 
“Unlike a lot of other international airports, where you could be anywhere, St. Petersburg is an older airport. It feels different, you really realize that you are somewhere else,” he said. 
The artists are currently accepting contributions from St. Petersburg residents. Stories should be sent to magicstorytable@gmail.com.  
Stories should be one or two paragraphs long and be no longer than 150 words. The project’s organizers ask that contributors specify the location of the story, and send a photo (less than 1 MB in size) of themselves by email. 

The Magic Story Table runs through June 11 at the Pro Arte center in the left side of the Nevskaya Kurtina at the Peter and Paul Fortress. Tel. 233 0040, 233 0553.


TITLE: The Zeus of Russian Insults
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: Russian insults, îòìîðîçîê is Zeus — the king of the bad guys. Like Zeus, îòìîðîçîê is brutish and inhuman. But sometimes îòìîðîçîê is like Zeus on drugs — weird, wacky and out of it.
Confused? Don’t feel bad. Oòìîðîçîê is a confusing word with lots of slangy meanings.
Îòìîðîçîê, the adjective îòìîðîæåí­­íûé and verb îòìîðîçèòüñÿ are all derived from ìîðîç (chill, frost) and ìîðîçèòüñÿ (to become frozen). The prefix îò adds the sense of an action done through and through. One armchair etymologist suggested that îòìîðîçîê and îòìîðîçèòüñÿ were originally used figuratively to mean someone whose humanity had been frozen solid, as in this example: Ïîëèòè÷åñêèå ëèäåðû ïîñåäåëè è ìîðàëüíî îòìîðîçèëèñü, þáêè ñòàëè êîðî÷å, íàñèëèå — áåñïîùàäíåé, íåíàâèñòü — ñìåðòåëüíåé. (Political leaders went gray and became morally inert, skirts got shorter, violence became more merciless and hatred — more deadly.)
Today, the most common meaning of îòìîðîçîê and its derivatives is a bullying monster — a thug who has no morals and whose brutality knows no bounds. This is worse than your average thug and close to the notion of a sociopath, as one fellow clarified on a blog:  ß ÷åñòíûé áàíäèò, íå îòìîðîçîê. Äåòåé, æåíùèí è èíâàëèäîâ íå òðîãàþ. (I’m an honest gangster, not a goon. I don’t touch children, women or disabled people.)
You might hear the adjective or verb used in this sense, too: Èâàí ñîâñåì îòìîðîçèëñÿ, óáèë çà áóòûëêó âîäêè. (Ivan went berserk and killed someone over a bottle of vodka.) Èâàí áóéñòâóåò, â íàòóðå îòìîðîæåííûé. (Ivan is raising all hell. He’s totally lost it.)
Îòìîðîçîê and îòìîðîæåííûé can also be used to describe a drug addict who has lost his humanity and morality and would do anything for a fix. Îí íàñòîëüêî îòìîðîæåííûé, ÷òî ïðîäàë êâàðòèðó çà íàðêîòèêè è òåïåðü áîìæóåò. (He’s so wacked out on drugs that he sold his apartment to support his habit and is now homeless.) Âîåííûé, çàùèùàþùèé ðîäèíó, è îòìîðîçîê, êîòîðîìó íå õâàòàåò íà äîçó, îáà ñîâåðøàþò óáèéñòâî, íî îíè óáèâàþò ïî-ðàçíîìó. (A soldier defending his homeland and a druggie who doesn’t have enough money for a fix both commit murder, but they kill in different ways.)
The third meaning is someone who is dimwitted, weird or wacko. This kind of îòìîðîçîê crosses boundaries of normality but is not necessarily violent. For example, an article about a university student who called in false reports to the police every day for a week because, as she said, ìíå áûëî ñêó÷íî (I was bored) was titled: Îòìîðîæåííàÿ ñòóäåíòêà ñêó÷àåò (A Weird Student Gets Bored).
Îòìîðîçèòüñÿ is also used by the under-20 crowd to mean turning a deaf ear or pretending that you don’t know you are being talked about. In my experience — and as I recall — this is a teenage specialty: Îí ãîâîðèò ìíå, “Äåâóøêà! Òóò íå êóðÿò!” À ÿ îòìîðîçèëàñü è ïðîäîëæàëà êóðèòü. (He says to me, “Young lady! You can’t smoke here!” But I made like I didn’t hear him and kept on smoking.)
Finally, îòìîðîçèòüñÿ can mean to break off relations. When a guy complained on a blog that a girl wouldn’t even talk to him, a sympathetic soul wrote: Îíà õîòÿ áû ñ òîáîé ïîîáùàëàñü, íó à ïîòîì ïðîñòî îòìîðîçèëàñü. (She might have at least talked to you for a while and then let you down.)
You know, compared with these îòìîðîçêè, Zeus is a prince of a guy.

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

TITLE: Art in the public eye
AUTHOR: By Chris Gordon
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Love it or hate it, public art has been a ubiquitous part of the urban landscape in cites around the world for decades. And despite a period in the 1980s and ’90s when it came to be seen as overly decorative, or as a de facto stamp of approval for corporate culture, respected contemporary artists have used it to humanize often alienating spaces, addressing important cultural issues along the way. 
Not so, St. Petersburg. For all its expansive public parks and gardens, spanking new business centers and pedestrian zones, contemporary art seldom rates a place at the table. Whereas most city governments and corporations actively place works of public art around town — think of Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture affixed to the side of the John Lewis store in London’s Oxford Street, the kinetic fountain created by Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle in the center of Paris, or Anish Kapoor’s enormous chrome spaceship that recently touched down in Chicago — Russia just doesn’t seem interested. 
Part of the reason is, of course, historical: The Soviet state was concerned with art as a means of consolidating power. But it is also the result of apathy on the part of the general public, and ignorance of its virtues on the part of government officials. A new exhibition that opened last week and that runs through the end of the month, however, is trying to change all that. 
Years in the making, “Critical Mass” is nothing if not ambitious. It began with a fact-finding trip to the city in 2009 by a group of Nordic artists, whose remit was to assess the ills that plague the city — an excess of traffic, land control issues, corruption, the disconnect between local government and city residents, and a general neglect of public spaces — and create work that specifically spoke to these matters. The resulting artworks have allowed the organizers to present important emerging art in a public context, to begin to assess the public’s reaction to that work, and open new channels of communication between artists, audiences and local government. All of which is certainly easier said than done.
In a city center where every square inch is classified as being of historical significance (except where the chance to make a quick buck exists), erecting even a temporary structure is fraught with difficulties and brought the organizers up against the first of the problems the project was formulated to address. In the end, the only outdoor spaces made available to them were far from the historic heart of the city. Curator Anna Bitkina, however, remains hopeful. 
“While getting permission from the different committees, we have established contact with them and in the future are planning to continue conducting ‘Critical Mass’ projects in those parks that are neglected and need to be revitalized,” she said.
Probably the most successful in this context is a sculpture by Finnish Artist Kalle Purhohen installed on the dusty square in front of the Troitsky Center for Culture on Prospekt Obukhovskoi Oborony, near the Proletarskaya metro station. An impressively scaled dinosaur egg constructed of hubcaps, the sculpture sits on a plinth that formerly supported a statue of Lenin. It astutely brings together associations about the automobile as an endangered, soon to be extinct, species and references Faberge’s St. Petersburg workshops, discredited ideologies, and popular myths about fossil fuels being formed from the remains of dinosaurs.
Meanwhile, over at the Kirov Cultural Center toward the western end of Vasilyevsky Island, Norway’s Lars Ramberg advocates public debate by offering a pile of wooden crates meant to inspire and then, quite literally, support the undertaking. Titled “Last Dying Speech (Speakers Corner),” the interactive installation is constructed of numerous wooden boxes bearing various slogans that can be taken down and stood upon. The artwork stresses the importance of freedom of speech, both locally and globally. But whether the boxes will be used by residents to air their grievances, to showcase the talents of young Hard Bass dancers or, as seems most likely, disappear one by one remains to be seen. 
Other works in the exhibition include Latvian artist Laura Feldberga’s mirrored disco ball snowman in the Kurikina Dacha garden (two parts of which were stolen overnight following the opening), and work by Finland’s Kaarina Kaikkonen and Iceland’s Hrafnkell Sigurdsson, both on Yelagin Island.
One thing that is certain is that during the next few weeks, local residents out for a Sunday stroll will come across some surprising structures that will hopefully prompt a collective experience as accessible as the movies or popular music, demonstrating art’s ability to reach larger audiences. With any luck, the conversations that are begun — between the artists and the location, the audience and the works of art, and between the local government and the city’s residents — will have a beneficial effect. Dialogue, after all, is what it’s all about.
 
Critical Mass runs through June 26 at various locations around the city. 
For further information, visit 
www.tok-spb.org

TITLE: Gay Pride Marchers Vs. Border Guards
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas

TEXT: Last weekend’s attempt to hold a gay pride event in Moscow was the usual truncated affair with protesters running the gauntlet of riot police, icon-brandishing fundamentalists and the fists of some very unpleasant bullet-headed types.
Before the event, organizer Nikolai Alexeyev gave a combative performance on Rossia One’s “Duel” debate show, finally walking out in the middle, leaving oily host Vladimir Solovyov nonplussed.
The show is a virtual remake of Solovyov’s former show “To the Barrier” on NTV, with debaters contesting a viewpoint and viewers voting by telephone but, in fact, watching a show recorded earlier.
Bizarrely, Alexeyev ended up arguing with a sexologist in a hat, Dilya Yenikeyeva, who is ubiquitous on talk shows. In a strident voice, she said she had written a book called “Gays and Lesbians” that prompted threats from gay men to rape her daughter, without specifying the content of the book. She asked Alexeyev whether gays were discriminating against the rights of the straight majority, or more specifically her and her daughter.
It was here that Alexeyev lost his rag, saying: “You sit there in your hat telling lies from show to show… You put on a wig and sit there telling lies in your wig… You scarecrow in a hat.” He then got up, pulled off his microphone and walked out, crashing into something offscreen.
No one had ever behaved like this on the show, insulting a woman and then walking off, breaking props, Solovyov intoned solemnly, not even nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky. “This is all very touching, of course, but more than strange,” he said wryly.
“I took revenge on that homophobic scum Solovyov,” Alexeyev wrote on his blog. Rather bathetically, he added that he hurt his foot when he walked out and was considering legal action.
Alexeyev unexpectedly did not turn up to the parade but wrote in his blog that this was because he did not want to be jailed as his father has just been diagnosed with cancer and he wants to be there for his mother — a pretty good reason.
Some bloggers spoke out to support the parade, condemning the homophobes who even attacked women. Internet pioneer Anton Nosik wrote that he would like to hear an explanation from “the Orthodox — forgive me God — activist, who beat up a female activist… What was he aiming for when he hit a woman on the head, and is he happy with the result?”
The day of the parade was also the professional holiday of the Border Guards, when officers past and present walk around in uniform and get dead drunk, adding an extra layer of risk.
Channel One’s mock news show “Yesterday Live” imagined what might have happened if City Hall had permitted the march and the two sides had gotten together to celebrate, in a surprisingly tolerant comedy sketch.
A news reader in a satin jacket reads from a pink page against a gay rights flag. “It would be curious to see gays and border guards marking their holiday on the same day,” he says.
The sketch shows stereotypically mincing gay activists in Village People outfits and boas fraternizing with the swaggering border guards in stripy vests. “We’ve waited 17 years for Luzhkov to leave,” one says, referring to the openly homophobic mayor, sacked in September.
The two sides join for a “West Side Story”-style dance routine to the tune of the song “America” with a joke about the sexual orientation of the pop singers at the traditional concert for the border guards.
At the end, the two groups separate, but one border guard confusedly stays with the gay group, before running back to his brothers in arms with a scream of alarm.


TITLE: Italy Lite
AUTHOR: By Piper Wheele
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The light-filled dining room of Italy, on the fourth floor of an upscale shopping center, provides an object lesson in the possibilities of mall cuisine. Restaurants in Petersburg’s older buildings can be cozy and atmospheric, but for high ceilings, open floor plans, and an expansive view, head to one of the Putin era’s glass-fronted behemoths.
It doesn’t hurt that such pristine digs house some of the city’s best kitchens. Italy serves a light, lively version of a cuisine whose Petersburg renderings can be bland and over-sauced.
At around eight on a Friday night, a friendly hostess seated our party of three immediately. Our lack of reservations stuck us in the smoking section, but great ventilation saved us from any odor.
Italy is rightfully proud of its bar, which gives pride of place to wine and cocktails. The former is on the pricey side, with bottles upwards of 1,200 rubles ($42.80). The basil julep (290 rubles, $10.35) was a truly spectacular mixed drink: Heaps of fresh herbs muddled with gin and citrus made a mild and refreshing cocktail.
A glass of house Pinot Grigio (295 rubles; $10.50) was a fine companion to our shared appetizers — bruschetta with tomato and mushroom (160 rubles; $5.70) and a beef tartar from the antipasti list (490 rubles; $17.50). The bruschetta’s sturdy crust held up beautifully beneath juicy tomatoes dressed in olive oil. A cup of mayonnaise-heavy egg salad was an odd if inoffensive garnish.
The tartar was a standout. The beef, piled to a generous stature, was exceedingly fresh, light on the tongue, and complimented by raw diced cucumbers, carrots and Dijon mustard.
From the salad list, our Caprese (a half-portion at 450 rubles; $16) was unremarkable, particularly in view of the hefty price. The buffalo mozzarella lacked body and failed to stand up to the soggy tomato and lettuce. A Margherita pizza was considerably better value for money — half a pie for 170 rubles, or $6 — and was competently done, with a thin, chewy crust and light, sweet sauce.
Italy offers a page of meat-based entrees, priced at 380 to 950 rubles ($13.60 to $34). None of these steak or fish dishes caught our attention, though, and we stuck to the pasta. Here, oddly, Italy’s kitchen disappoints. Our waitress recommended the baked gnocchi with mozzarella and tomato (320 rubles, $11.40), but this dish turned out dull and mushy. The Pesto alla Siciliana (350 rubles; $12.50) wasn’t pesto at all: Hearty tagliatelle was dressed in a watery cream of tomato sauce, topped with scant shreds of basil.
Happily, our waitress persuaded us to sample not one but three desserts. The signature tiramisu (260 rubles, $9.30), airy pear mousse (165 rubles; $5.90) and Chantilly cream (290 rubles; $10.35) were outstanding. Succulent pear and strawberry, complex chocolate accents, the lightest of frothed cream and buttery wafers baked onsite made dessert highly memorable.
While the espresso at Italia (90 rubles; $3.20) is of good quality, the Moroccan mint tea (160 rubles; $5.70) is simply a must-have: Fresh mint is steeped with star-anise and lemon for an enlivening finale. We rode the very mall-like escalator back down to earth, satisfied on the whole with our trip to Italy.

Given that Teplichnye Usloviya is located just off Nevsky Prospekt in the heart of St. Petersburg’s historic center, is open daily until the last customer and features an extensive cocktail menu, one might expect to find a late-night party atmosphere upon entering. It turns out, though, that the restaurant’s name — a Russian phrase denoting conditions of exceptional (perhaps even excessive) comfort and tranquility — is meant to be taken at face value. The dining space attempts to create the feel of a cozy country cottage. The floors are wooden, the windowsills are strewn with baskets and plants, and the general color scheme is white and light green. It feels more suited to a quiet lunch after work than a party with friends.
The restaurant doesn’t quite manage to bring off the homey feel it strives for. Several unattractive touches — ceiling lamps with what appear to be cloth stockings for shades, plastic flowers and butterflies that dangle alongside them — as well as the space’s general brightness give it the feel of a nursery school playroom. The background music is almost all Beatles melodies, and while this is a step up from the gruesome techno so often inflicted on St. Petersburg diners, it does add to the retro atmosphere. Ultimately, the dining room is more tacky than cozy.
However, thanks to its unusually friendly wait staff, one could never say the restaurant isn’t welcoming. And the food, if not quite as inspired as the best St. Petersburg has to offer, is generally excellent and well worth its modest asking price. The menu consists mainly of simple French dishes; the secret to their success lies not in any “innovative” tinkering, but in solid craftsmanship and the use of fresh ingredients.
We began with the cream of pumpkin soup (150 rubles, $5) and the ceviche in a cheese basket (180 rubles, $6). The mild pumpkin flavor of the soup was well complemented by fresh basil, though it could have used a bit more creaminess. The ceviche, one of the more imaginative items on the menu, was perfect in every way: The shrimp, onions and tomatoes merged into a tangy blend while at the same time preserving their distinctive flavors, and the surrounding cheese basket provided a superbly crunchy finish.
The main courses were on a similarly high level. The baked salmon fillet with hollandaise sauce (370 rubles, $13) was rich and flavorful, if a little on the dry side. The duck breast (310 rubles, $11) was cooked to just the right degree — not too tough, not too flabby — and the fat left on the meat added flavor without overwhelming it. What made the dish really pleasurable, though, was the rich cheese sauce served alongside the duck meat. Both of our side dishes — the grilled vegetables (150 rubles, $5) and the vegetable ratatouille (230 rubles, $8) — were superbly seasoned, generously sized and featured gratifyingly fresh veggies.
With the exception of the ceviche, all of these dishes were potentially ordinary staples made excellent by skill and good taste. If anything, the restaurant displayed even more care when it came to dessert, which proved to be the highlight of the meal. The plum crumble (100 rubles, $4) was airy yet moist, sweet but not at all saccharine. The homemade ice cream (170 rubles, $6) — which, our waitress proudly emphasized, the restaurant really does prepare itself — may be the best reason to pay this place a visit. Anyone who has tried homemade ice cream knows that it has far more freshness and flavor than even the best store-bought brands. This particular example, which was graced with fresh raspberries, was no exception. Both desserts were very generously sized given their low prices.
Feeling highly satisfied by our meal, we couldn’t resist sampling the large cocktail menu, and weren’t disappointed. The strawberry margarita (280 rubles, $10) was especially notable for its use of real strawberries — even those who do not normally take to fruit cocktails may be won over by this touch.
Ultimately, Teplichnye Usloviya offers affordable, fresh, carefully prepared food and friendly service at a convenient location, all of which more than compensates for its misconceived decor.

<div class="divider">&nbsp;</div>
<h1>THE GUIDE</h1>

<B>Prandial Petrograd</B>
The second city center that is the stately Petrograd Side is home to a wealth of cafes and restaurants, many of which are tucked away down crumbling side streets.

<B>Capuletti</B>

This Italian restaurant located in a former cinema on the Petrograd Side manages to combine a truly excellent interior, good food and very reasonable prices.
<i>74 Bolshoi Prospekt
Tel: 232 2282</i>

<b>Zhelaniya</b>

The homey ambience at Zhelaniya, which means “wishes,” can be felt straight away: Zhelaniya is a very warm place in every sense of the word and serves commendable European cuisine.
<i>23a Prospekt Dobrolyubova
Tel: 232 9883</i>

<b>Tbiliso</b>

This upscale Georgian eatery behind the Sytny market is elaborately decorated, with waiters in Georgian national dress and occasional folk performances. It remains on the tasteful side of kitsch, and the food is good, though perhaps not as impressive as could be expected for the prices.
<i>10 Sytninskaya Ulitsa.
Tel: 232 9391</i>

TITLE: ‘Corteo’  Director Creates ‘Aida’ Fueled by Gasoline
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova

PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Guiseppe Verdi’s “Aida” that premieres at the Mariinsky Theater Concert Hall on June 11 and 14, Swiss-born director Daniele Finzi Pasca aims to do far more than offer a striking stage experiment. He wants his production to be a new word in human anatomy. 
“The main component of a human body is not water; it is gasoline,” says Finzi Pasca, the man behind “Corteo,” the hugely popular show he created for Cirque du Soleil. “And my production of ‘Aida’ is going to prove it.”
“There is enough proof of my theory in real life: Look at the many burnouts, the many people exploding with emotions,” he explains. “But ‘Aida’ gives a most compelling illustration of how easily a human being can combust, destroying themselves, their loved ones — and even damage a whole nation as a consequence.”
“Aida” is a very personal opera, in which the characters fall victim to their own passions, says Finzi Pasca.
The eponymous character of Verdi’s 1871 opera is an Ethiopian princess who is taken prisoner and enslaved in Egypt. Radames, an Egyptian military commander, falls in love with her but is torn between his feelings for Aida and his loyalty to the Pharaoh. Radames is in turn loved by the Pharaoh’s daughter Amneris.
“Jealousy destroys Amneris, as it forces her to protect herself in a savage way, while Aida fights for the very same love in a noble manner,” Finzi Pasca said. “Radames acts in a most immature way: All he wants is to feel like an important person, a commander. If only any of them had been able to stop and think, if only the Pharaoh and Amonasro [Aida’s father, the King of Ethiopia] could have sat down and talked, if only there had been no slaves and generals, if only we weren’t all boxes of gunpowder ready to go off, if only we weren’t all such cannibals, such destroyers committing a betrayal in order to protect and to survive, like the characters in Aida.
“For me, it is important to depict human craziness, and what drives people into devastating wars,” the director said. “Our explosive capacities are genuinely enormous.”
Professionally, Finzi Pasca compares himself to a masseur. “The only difference is that I provide massage for the soul; but just like a masseur I am very sensitive to the response,” the director said. “I do not need big crowds, and would just as happily stage a show for one spectator. What is important is that my message gets heard.”
While with Cirque du Soleil’s “Corteo,” Finzi Pasca created a mystical show exploring issues of life and death, in “Aida,” the key topic for the director is what he calls “the madness of war.”
Finzi Pasca became a pacifist early on in life. After spending a year working as a volunteer with street children, and seeing the devastating consequences of children left orphaned or deprived by military conflict, he made the life-changing decision to boycott military service. It was a brave decision, considering that at that time — some 25 years ago — conscientious objectors in Switzerland were inevitably sent to prison for several months.
“The military culture — I mean, being trained to kill other human beings — was something I could not accept and be part of,” Finzi Pasca said. “And I was prepared to pay the price.”
Symbolically, it was in prison where Daniele’s own artistic philosophy began to shape up. “It was in jail where I experienced the most emotionally overwhelming moments: It was when I first met an innocent person who was serving his term owing to a judicial mistake,” he remembers. “Later I met several more such people — I don’t think that actually we all realize how much flawed justice there is that destroys people’s lives like this — but that first shock of listening to a tragic human story of an innocent victim, I will never forget.”
The philosophy of Finzi Pasca as a stage director, regardless of the genre he works in, is that of a peacemaker. What he seeks to do with any show is to encourage reconciliation, agreement and inner harmony among his audience. 
“When there are barriers between people, you have to look for a solution,” the director said. “I would like the final words of ‘Aida’ — the whisper “peace, peace, peace” — to reach out to every heart. You can even take it as a direct call for a peacemaking initiative, whatever war or conflict is going on in your life.”

“Aida” premieres on June 11 and 14 at the Mariinsky Theater, 1 Teatralnaya Ploshchad. M: Sadovaya/Sennaya Ploshchad. Tel: 326 4141.
 www.mariinsky.ru

TITLE: MBA Program in Austrian Capital Looks East
AUTHOR: By Shura Collinson

PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Located in the very center of Europe, the city of Vienna is attracting more and more Russian students of business education programs every year.
As an additional incentive to prospective business students, the WU Executive Academy at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) is offering scholarships to citizens of Central and Eastern Europe for its Professional MBA program. 
The scholarships, which are being offered for the fourth year running, are merit-based and are exclusively available for citizens of CEE countries who already have a bachelor’s university degree and at least three years of management experience. Recipients of the scholarship can see reductions of up to 50 percent on their tuition fees, which average a total of 28,000 to 30,000 euros. In the three years that the program has existed, between five and 10 Russians have already been awarded such scholarships, said Paul Kospach, head of public relations at the WU Executive Academy.
Among the programs offered by the WU Executive Academy, which has a total of 700 students each year, some have attracted particularly strong interest from Russian students.
Professor Bodo Schlegelmilch, dean of the WU Executive Academy, said that one program that is proving popular with Russians is the energy management program, a relatively new program on the Professional MBA course that costs 45,000 euros.
“We have OPEC here, as well as the second largest office of the UN and the Atomic Energy Agency: Vienna has a lot of expertise in energy, and a number of Russians are showing interest in this program,” said Schlegelmilch. 
Energy is not the only area of expertise to attract Russian students, however.
Dmitry Osokin, brand manager for Tassimo AT, part of Kraft Foods, graduated in 2009 from the first Professional MBA class in marketing and sales.
Osokin, who moved to Poland from his native St. Petersburg as a teenager and is currently based in Vienna, said he had always wanted to do an MBA, and that he paid for the course himself. “It’s not an expense, but an investment,” he said.  
“My company supported me fully; they gave me time off and understood what I was doing it for,” he said. “An MBA is not essential at my company, because it has strong internal training programs. But they see it as an example of motivation and a way of obtaining an external view on how to solve problems.”
Osokin said he had wanted to do an MBA program that would allow him to keep working. 
 “After considering other European programs, I came to the conclusion that the sales and marketing program was most suitable for me,” he said. “Most MBAs are executive. The [Professional MBA] Program was oriented on marketing and sales, which was also what I wanted to do. Marketing and sales was a point of professional interest that I wanted to expand for myself, so I chose that area. I had an economic education with some knowledge of sales and marketing that I wanted to deepen.”
Osokin, who was 26 when he completed the program, said he was the youngest student on the course. “I got new perspectives, both on my firm and on my job,” he said. He also cited the contacts made as a benefit of the program. “It’s a club in the good sense of the word; people on the course have similar ideas and motivation in life, so it’s really interesting to interact with them,” he said.  
The WU Executive Academy’s Executive MBA program, which includes a trip to St. Petersburg, also attracts several Russian students every year. This year’s Executive MBA students include Yekaterina Nikitina, a Muscovite currently working as a project director at an aluminium plant in Montenegro. Nikitina said she had wanted to do an MBA for a long time, and had chosen Vienna due to its central position and the fact that it combines an American education with a European approach (the WU Executive Academy has a partnership with the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota). 
“It’s a good chance to interact with representatives of different spheres of business in Europe,” she said. “The program is very full, short but intensive, but you can combine it with work.” The Executive MBA course comprises 40 days in Vienna during a period of 14 months. All the periods in Vienna include weekends (normally from Thursday to Sunday) to allow participants to take minimum time off from their job.
Nikitina said she had gained greater knowledge of making business decisions and career decisions. “I am already using what I have learnt,” she added. 
Her husband and fellow student, Maxim, who is the director of legal affairs at the same factory in Montenegro, said he had looked at several European and American schools. “I took several factors into account, and Vienna offered a combination of price and rating,” he said. “The rating is the most important factor, but Vienna is also convenient to get to from both Moscow and Montenegro.”
“Top managers definitely need an MBA,” he said. “As a lawyer, it’s essential to understand all the company’s operations. An MBA provides knowledge and understanding. There are people from all over the world here, all sharing their experience,” he said. 
The Executive MBA program has included a component with the St. Petersburg Graduate School of Management for four years, in which students attend lectures at the university and visit companies such as Nokian Tyres, Baltika Breweries and Khlebny Dom. The program also features trips to China, India and the U.S. 
Nikitina said that the program in St. Petersburg has been the one aspect of the program that left her disappointed. “It would be better to go to Moscow,” she said. “The St. Petersburg Graduate School of Management is worse than the Moscow School of Management. I learnt little from that part of the program,” she said. She also complained that the students had only been given the opportunity to talk to mid-level managers instead of the top managers with whom they wanted to speak.
The WU Executive Academy has no plans to expand exchange programs to other cities in Russia, however. “We are focusing on St. Petersburg; we’re very happy with that,” said Schlegelmilch. “We’re going where the demand is. The philosophy we are pursuing is to bring Russian students to Vienna, because we want to provide an international learning environment.”
That learning environment will, together with the rest of the WU, move in fall 2013 to a 100,000-square-meter new campus that is being built from scratch in a former imperial hunting ground at a total cost of 492 million euros.

The application deadline for CEE-Partial Scholarships is June 30, 2011. Applications can be requested at scholarship@wu.ac.at.


TITLE: The Ancient City of Pskov: ‘Russia Starts Here!’
AUTHOR: By Howard Amos

PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: PSKOV —Perched on Russia’s western fringes, yet one of the country’s most ancient cities, Pskov may lack industry but it combines a unique concentration of crumbling Orthodox churches with echoes of its proximity to Europe.
On the outskirts of the city, an unremarkable, modern white building embodies one of those echoes. Built in 1991 with German financial support, the Center for Curative Pedagogics has for 20 years championed a pioneering educational approach to the upbringing of children with physical and mental disabilities, offering an alternative to warehousing them in state institutions.
But, on a first glance, such subtleties are not what strike the visitor. Rather it is the town’s UNESCO world heritage center: The massive kremlin and its Trinity Cathedral towering over all approaching roads and the clusters of — usually dilapidated — onion domes that emerge around every other street corner.
Pskov’s long history and its proximity to Europe are fodder for the town’s tourism agencies: “Russia Starts Here!” is the slogan plastered, somewhat forlornly, across city buses.
The broad Velikaya River that eventually drains into the Gulf of Finland joins the Pskov River under the kremlin’s walls. In the winter ice fishermen sit and skiers glide up and down — and in the summer riverside cafes open up.
On the opposite bank to downtown Pskov is the Mirozhsky Monastery whose 12th-century Greek frescoes, undergoing gradual restoration, are a beautiful illustration of Russia’s cultural debt to Constantinople — and the town’s hidden gem.
But while the relics of past glories abound, they also serve to highlight contemporary problems — including acute demographic decline.
Though the city’s population has remained static, the population of the region as a whole fell 11.5 percent — more than 700,000 people — between 2002 and 2010, putting it third, behind Magadan and Ingushetia, in a list of Russia’s regions ranked according to demographic loss.
Heavy industry and big business have never had a significant presence in Pskov — they are more in evidence in Velikiye Luki, the region’s second city — and this is made more true by closures after the fall of the Soviet Union, particularly in the defense industry. Nor, despite the city’s proximity to the European Union, is there much international investment.
The surrounding countryside used to be famed for its flax production — but, in line with worldwide trends, the fields of blue flowers are now a rarity and the associated urban industries have disappeared. Traditional peasant clothes of flax and other intricate handmade pieces are a staple of Pskov museums.
Though Internet penetration runs at a relatively high level in the city and the region, business circles are traditionally difficult for outsiders to penetrate.
“The conditions for business in Pskov are exclusive and somewhat closed,” said a source close to the region’s governor. “The mentality is: ‘It’s our own swamp — we will deal with things ourselves.’”
But, he added, Governor Andrei Turchak —a former judo sparring partner of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin who retains close ties to Moscow — has been trying to break down these barriers since his appointment in 2009. The city hosted delegations from Singaporean, Chinese and European companies in the first half of 2011, a “business incubator” for nurturing small and medium-sized businesses was set up in 2010 with an investment of 5.4 million rubles ($190,000) by the local government, and a development agency has been established.
The editor of the Pskovskaya Pravda newspaper, Alexander Mashkarin, said Turchak was more serious about implementing real change than previous governors. “Local society is spoiled by the fact that the government is not to be found ‘above’ but works in parallel,” he said.
One of the major government-backed drives in the city is the development of a tourism industry, amid a widespread belief that Pskov’s historical legacy, which has accumulated over more than 1,000 years, could be a big earner.
Pskov’s heraldic symbol — a snow leopard on a blue background beneath a cloud from which a hand is protruding — hints at another aspect of the town’s history through big cat associations with ferocity: its military traditions.
As Russia’s major defensive outpost on its Western border, the city was involved in 123 wars between 1116 and 1709 — and has only been occupied twice, in 1918 and the 1940s. Its system of fortifications includes nine-kilometer walls, 37 towers and 14 gates.
Today, Pskov is famous for its 76th Airborne Division, which suffered heavy casualties during the wars in Chechnya, in particular when positions at Ulus-Kert were overrun by Chechen fighters in thick fog at the cost of 84 Pskov lives. A film glorifying their exploits, “Breakthrough,” was made in 2006. The unit also saw action in South Ossetia and Georgia in 2008.
On a May 2011 trip to Pskov, his first in 11 years, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin laid flowers at the city’s monument to those killed at Ulus-Kert. “I am sure,” Putin said, “that Pskov will show itself again.”  

What to see if you have two hours
The kremlin is the inevitable first stop for anyone visiting the city. Towering over the central square and home to the enormous Trinity Cathedral that rises 72 meters from foundation to cupolas — it is an impressive reminder that Pskov was a frontier city, built for defense. Today’s Trinity Cathedral, with its famous iconostasis, was completed in 1699 and is the fourth church to be built on the site — the first was of wood and, according to tradition, commissioned by Princess Olga of Kiev Rus, one of the first “early Russians” to be baptized into Orthodox Christianity.
After visiting the kremlin, wander along the banks of the Velikaya and over the bridge (or, in the winter, across the ice) to the UNESCO world heritage site Mirozhsky Monastery (2 Mirozhskaya Naberezhnaya; +7 8112-44-64-06; Mirozhsky-monastery.ru). Modest from the outside, inside the monastery’s compound you are likely to encounter monks going about their daily business: chopping wood or tending to the orchard. The diminutive black-domed church, however, hides beautiful 12th-century Byzantine frescoes — an attendant will open up the church for you once you have bought your ticket.

What to do if you have two days
If you have a free morning or afternoon in Pskov, you could do worse than walking through the park that winds along by the Pskov River, and then explore the quiet area sandwiched between the river and Oktyabarsky Prospekt, containing the city’s greatest concentration of medieval churches.
The Pskov State Historical, Architectural and Artistic Museum (7 Ulitsa Nekrasova; +7 8112-66-25-17; Museum.pskov.ru) is based in an old merchant’s house — Pogankin Palata — and is well worth a visit as it provides a historical and cultural context for the city and the region.
Many visitors to Pskov use the city as a base for visiting some of the famous sites in its vicinity. The most renowned of these are: Mikhailovskoye (21 Novorzhevskaya, Puskinskiye Gory; +7 8114-62-23-21), the country estate of Alexander Pushkin and where he is buried; the Orthodox Lavra in the town of Pechory (close to the Estonian border) with its clusters of gold onion domes and holy caves; and Old Izborsk (30 kilometers west of Pskov; Museum-izborsk.ru) where there is a 14th-century fortress on one side of a beautiful valley, ancient churches, holy springs and a large lake.

Where to eat
Though no culinary paradise, Pskov offers a few places for a pleasant meal. The Aristocrat restaurant attached to the Heliopark Old Estate Hotel (see Where to stay) gives you the opportunity to rub shoulders with the elite as well as a good dinner at Moscow prices.
Another reliable spot frequented by local businessmen is the Old Tallinn (54 Rizhsky Prospekt, +7 8112-72-41-58, Caferp.ru), which serves Estonian and Latvian food alongside traditional Russian dishes with occasional live music in the evening. Chocolate Cafe (17 Fabricius Ulitsa; +7 8112-72-73-83; Caferp.ru) is a good place for a break from sightseeing, with breakfasts and lunches on offer and a mixed European-Russian menu.
If you are looking for somewhere a bit further afield, the Pleskov Hotel (Pyochky village, Pechorsky district; 8921-506-0358, Otelpleskov.ru), located 25 kilometers outside town, occupies an idyllic location by the edge of the large Pskov Lake and has a well-regarded restaurant that could make for a tranquil — or romantic — evening meal.

Where to stay
Given the city’s tourist ambitions, accommodation options in Pskov are likely to become more varied over the coming months and years. Meanwhile, the huge hotel being built in a concrete mockery of a medieval style, overlooking the Velikaya and opposite the kremlin, is somewhat typical. Construction began in Soviet times — and the completion date has been continually pushed back. The authorities are currently promising that it will finally open in 2012.
The top of the range option in Pskov is the Heliopark Old Estate Hotel (4 Verkhny-Begovaya Ulitsa; +7 8112-79-45-45; Heliopark.ru) — giving you easy access to the city’s most elite bar (see Nightlife). Prices for a double start at 4,550 rubles ($160) and go up to 13,300 rubles ($470) for the presidential suite. The hotel includes a spa and can arrange excursions to sites outside the town. Other more soulless but cheaper and still reliable spots include the large Rizhskaya (25 Rizhsky Prospekt; +7 8112-56-22-23; Rijskaya.ru) and Olginskaya (4 Ulitsa Paromenskaya; +7 8112-57-08-88; Sotstour.ru), which looks across the Velikaya River toward the kremlin. More intimate is the Golden Bank Hotel (2 Sovetskaya Naberezhnaya Ulitsa; +7 8112-62-78-77) by the Pskov River and — often literally — in the kremlin’s shadow.
Listings of private apartments available for anything from one night to a week can be found in local papers, but beware of the “real estate mafia”: There may be lots of different telephone numbers, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be passed back to the same one or two people who control all the properties.

Conversation starters
Any praise of their architectural heritage will go down well with Pskov residents. You could throw in for good measure your awareness that Sergei Eisenstein’s historical epic, “Alexander Nevsky,” opens in Pskov. If you want to display knowledge of current affairs, you can mention the devastating fire that all but destroyed two towers of the kremlin and made national news in 2010, how the new governor is getting on two years into his term — or that Putin made a rare visit in May 2011. Otherwise, perennial conversation topics in any small Russian provincial city include the terrible state of the roads and the causes and consequences of people leaving for bigger cities.

How to get there
There are daily trains and buses to Pskov from St. Petersburg. Buses leave from the city bus station (36 Naberezhnaya Obvodnogo Kanala, tel: 766 5777), and there is also a Eurolines bus service from Baltiisky Railway Station (120 Naberezhnaya Obvodnogo Kanala, tel: 457 2859). There are two trains a day to Pskov, which leave from Vitebsky Railway Station (52 Zagorodny Prospekt, tel: 
457 5939).