SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1664 (26), Wednesday, July 6, 2011
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TITLE: Matviyenko’s Rule, Future in Spotlight
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: By her enemies, St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko is ridiculed for her unorthodox proposals to employ laser rays and homeless people to clean snow from the city’s roofs, and for her pushy campaign to erect the Gazprom skyscraper that was nicknamed “Corn on the Cob” by some sarcastic locals.
By her supporters, Matviyenko, who last week accepted — somewhat reluctantly, it appeared — President Dmitry Medvedev’s “proposal” that she resign and become the speaker of the Federation Council in Moscow, will be remembered as a forceful politician, who increased the budget of St. Petersburg by 10 times during her nearly eight-year tenure, brought wealthy corporations to the city as taxpayers and helped to create an automotive cluster in the city.
This week, Matviyenko is holding meetings with the Federation Council and in St. Petersburg in order to choose a municipal district to which she will have to get elected in order to be eligible for the post of Speaker of the Upper Chamber of the Russian Parliament.
Soon after the end of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum last month, Matviyenko was invited by Medvedev to give up her job and lead the Federation Council instead — a tricky task, as to qualify for the position Matviyenko will have to get elected, and no elections — municipal or regional — are due to be held anywhere in Russia before September. In order to realize Medvedev’s idea, members of several municipal councils in St. Petersburg have proposed the following scheme: A certain number of members of a council should resign, and then the council automatically dissolves owing to a lack of members. A new election is promptly arranged, and here Matviyenko steps in, wins the battle and get the promotion.
The scheme, which has outraged the opposition with its undisguised cynicism, caused no protest among the pro-Kremlin camp and Matviyenko herself. “The governor is still holding negotiations with the municipalities where she might hold her election campaign,” Yevgenia Altfeld, Matviyenko’s press secretary, said Tuesday.
Officially, no candidates for Matviyenko’s replacement have yet been put forward. Several political analysts, including Alexei Makarkin, vice president of the Moscow-based Center for Political Technologies, have cautiously named Alexander Beglov, deputy head of the presidential administration. Beglov’s political career began in St. Petersburg where he was head of the Kurortny district and then progressed to the position of deputy governor before moving to Moscow.
“Valentina Matviyenko is an unpopular governor; worse, her ratings now are lower than ever — this is not a situation that United Russia is comfortable with, nearing the December elections to the State Duma,” said Makarkin, commenting on Matviyenko’s removal before the end of her term as governor.
Analysts have also mentioned the names of Justice Minister Alexander Konovalov and Sergei Naryshkin, head of the presidential administration, but these candidates are only mentioned as ones who “have been discussed.”
Some of the same analysts, including some United Russia politicians — all of the latter speaking off the record — say that Beglov has already been approved for the job.
“Alexander Beglov, if appointed, is likely to adopt a tough stance toward Matviyenko’s team and prompt significant reshuffles,” said Maria Matskevich, head of the St. Petersburg association of sociologists.
Analysts say that the local political elite desperately needs not only fresh blood, but an outsider as a manager, someone who could efficiently shake up this “marshland,” as some Moscow politicians call Russia’s second capital. Beglov fits the task as he is an experienced bureaucrat and has some knowledge of the city. He does not have the reputation of someone who is renowned for their bright ideas, but rather he will do what he is told — and apparently this is what is needed.
A similar scheme was very recently used to replace Vladislav Piotrovsky, former head of the local police, with the difference being that Piotrovsky was dismissed from his post without receiving any other offers from the Kremlin.
Members of the city’s business community name Deputy Governor Mikhail Oseyevsky as their preferred future governor, while local media commentators speak with open regret about what they describe as the “modest, bleak chances” of Oseyevsky taking the reins.
Ironically, the qualities that have earned Oseyevsky respect in the city — his competence, intelligence and simply the rare ability to be a government official without becoming a bureaucrat — are not likely to be key factors when the decision is made in Moscow. Loyalty and the ability to obey and conform are the key qualities required to make a career within the Putin-Medvedev “power vertical system,” say analysts, and party membership — just as it was a few decades ago in the Soviet Union — is a top recommendation.
When asked about his preferences or ideas concerning the person who would be most fit to replace Matviyenko, Boris Gryzlov, one of the leaders of the United Russia party, was quick and decisive in his response: “I can tell you one thing — it has to be a United Russia politician,” he said.
St. Petersburg residents, however, appear to have a very different perspective on the issue. More than sixty percent of locals polled by the Moscow-based Foundation for Public Opinion Research said that the governor should be elected to the position by city residents.
“The cynicism of the whole scheme is unthinkable; unfortunately it is the direct result of the degradation of the country’s electoral system,” Matskevich said. “It has long been an open secret that the voice of the people means nothing in Russia, but this whole absurd construction with Matviyenko having to go through openly staged “elections” in order to go where the president sees fit to put her is seen by many ordinary residents of the city as an open insult, if not a sign of ridicule.”
TITLE: Central Square to Get New Development Plan
AUTHOR: By Yelena Minenko
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg’s City Planning and Architecture Committee is to announce a competition for a development project for Ploshchad Vosstaniya after hosting an international conference devoted to the subject last week.
The results of the conference were discussed this weekend by architects, city planners, sociologists and psychologists. The conference, which opened on June 26, focused on Ploshchad Vosstaniya as a central transport hub.
Formed by the intersection of two major roads — Nevsky Prospekt and Ligovsky Prospekt — Ploshchad Vosstaniya is one of the most traffic-clogged squares of the city. At any time of day, the square is busy with pedestrians, public and private transport. The Moscow Train Station located on the square is one source of people, as is the international bus station located further down Ligovsky Prospekt.
“For me, as a native citizen of St. Petersburg, Ploshchad Vosstaniya is an awful place that I always try to avoid,” said Sergei Sena, director of the city’s architecture, design and town-planning association.
The purpose of the conference was to find new ideas for the transformation of the square to ease the traffic problem. Experienced professionals as well as young architects were invited from St. Petersburg, Irkutsk, Archangelsk, Omsk, and even Estonia and Germany to offer their solutions to the problem. Following discussions on the subject during the course of last week, conference participants split into groups and each came up with their own proposals for easing the area’s problems.
The majority of the experts agreed that the priority of the project should be city residents themselves. The most popular project, devised by a group led by Alexander Karpov, director of the EKOM analysis center in St. Petersburg, was one that envisaged the introduction of separate lanes for every type of transport, including a system of bicycle lanes with bike rental and drop-off points. The project’s architects provided plans for the development of Ploshchad Vosstaniya through 2050.
Barbara Engel, an urban planner from Dresden, Germany, gave the project a positive assessment. “They looked at the problem in perspective and took into account all the different groups of society with their needs for transportation,” she said. Other experts criticized the project for its lack of specifics, however.
The other three final projects proposed quite different solutions. One was to create a transport system in which drivers would all or some of the time incur a congestion charge, which experts assessed as the most simple to realize and as the one that would also help to solve financing problems. But the project was criticized for dealing only with immediate problems and lacking overall perspective.
A suggestion to move part or all of the railway lines from the Moscow Train Station to the outskirts of the city was both criticized and supported, with some experts insisting that the train station is a historic place and part of the city’s life that cannot be taken away. Others called for the removal of the railway, naming it as the cause of all the problems on Ploshchad Vosstaniya. “The train station should be moved to the outskirts; no railways — no problem,” said Olga Lyubina, an ecologist from Tatarstan.
Another project proposed creating two more transport hubs along narrow roads leading to Ligovsky Prospekt, including 2aya Sovietskaya Ulitsa. The project was rejected as unfeasible due to the area’s architectural infrastructure being too narrow to create roads with multiple traffic lanes.
One of the conference groups suggested building underground lanes and underpasses for pedestrians. The project was criticized by Engel, who argued that underground spaces do not have the same quality as thoroughfares above ground. Only cars should be moved underground, but not pedestrians, said Engel.
“If we move the traffic underground, it wouldn’t solve the problem, because as the proverb goes, nature abhors a vacuum,” said Yelena Solovyova, professor of psychology at St. Petersburg University of Architecture and Construction. “The traffic jams won’t go away until certain social problems are solved: We have to change our way of life, moral priorities and put the common good before self-profit. Young men prefer to sit in their cars listening to music while stuck in traffic for several hours instead of spending time at home with their families [by using faster public transport such as the metro], and that’s not right,” said Solovyova.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Schoolgirl’s Body Found
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The body of a 10-year-old schoolgirl who had been missing since April was found Monday evening near the village of Izvara in the Leningrad Oblast, Interfax reported.
The girl, who lived in Volosovo, went missing on April 1. The body was discovered by local residents, and will undergo a postmortem examination to establish the cause of death.
Jet Ski Crash Injury
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A jet ski flew out of the River Neva and onto the bank on Krestovsky Island on Sunday evening, injuring a man who was sunbathing on the bank, Interfax reported this week.
The injured man, believed to be 30 years old, was taken to hospital, where he underwent an operation to remove his spleen, Interfax reported. The man also had three broken ribs, a representative of the Petrogradsky district administration was quoted as saying.
According to the police, the jet ski driver did not have any documents for the vehicle.
Snowplow Victim Case
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — St. Petersburg’s Petrograd district court sentenced the driver of a snowplow who ran over and killed the eminent cardiologist Irina Ganelina to a two-year suspended sentence, Interfax reported.
Investigators found that on Dec. 15 last year, Maxim Knyazev, a 43-year-old driver for Nevsky Potentsial company, ran over 89-year-old Ganelina while clearing snow. Ganelina, who was walking in the road because the sidewalk was blocked by snowdrifts, died at the scene of the accident.
Knyazev was charged with violating safety regulations.
Ganelina was the mother of local historian and journalist Lev Lurie.
City Hosts Bankers
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The 16th St. Petersburg International Banking Conference will take place from July 13 to 16 at the city’s Corinthia Hotel.
This year’s themes include the prospects of the post-crisis development of the banking system, global changes in the world’s financial system and their consequences for Russia, and the role of banks in the construction of an international financial center in Russia, Interfax reported.
Mikhailov to Join Party
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Former St. Petersburg ombudsman Igor Mikhailov has submitted an application to join the Right Cause political party, Interfax reported.
Mikhailov said he had shared the party’s ideas and program for a long time now. “The right-wing liberal ideology reflected in the party’s program fully corresponds to all my activities during the past 18 months,” Interfax quoted Mikhailov as saying.
Mikhailov was removed from his post as ombudsman over accusations that he had helped members of his administrative staff to get elected to municipal councils.
TITLE: Lack of Funds Fatal For Kidney Disease Patients
AUTHOR: By Yelena Minenko
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: About 200 people with kidney problems die in the city every year because they are unable to afford or get access to the drugs they need, experts estimate.
Dialysis treatment costs 50,000 rubles ($1,800) per patient per month and is covered by Compulsory Medical Insurance (OMS) provided by employers and the state, said Alexander Zemchenkov, the city’s main nephrologist, during a discussion devoted to patients suffering from kidney disease on Monday.
Kidney problems can also be eased by taking medicine that produces the hormone erythropoietin, which costs 13,000 to 15,000 rubles ($466 to $540) per patient per month and is covered by the Additional Medical Supplies program (DLO), a list of essential medicines compiled by the Ministry of Health that are supposed to be available free of charge at state pharmacies.
Unable to travel, forced to trail around the city in search of prescriptions and then stand in long lines, since only one pharmacy dispenses DLO medicines, kidney disease patients unite under the Nephro-Liga social organization that battles for their rights — and for their lives. But unlike their Moscow colleagues, the regional department in St. Petersburg is not registered as an organization by the Justice Ministry because some of its lead members died before submitting an application.
A common cause of death among people suffering from kidney disease is cardiovascular disease caused by phosphorus and calcium disorders, said Zemchenkov.
“Renal illnesses are silent; they don’t have any peculiar symptoms by which they can be recognized,” he said. “That is why when people come to hospital to get diagnosed, their illnesses have already become incurable. The only way for patients to stay alive is to substitute the functions of their kidneys, which cannot be fully achieved right now.”
One of the functions of the kidneys is to stimulate blood formation by supporting the necessary levels of phosphorus and calcium in the blood. When this balance is disturbed, calcium and phosphorus stick to the vascular walls and hamper blood circulation. This, in time, leads to thrombosis and hypertension, which can cause cardiovascular disease and then death. To prevent this, medicine that normalizes phosphorus and calcium levels needs to be taken. These drugs — Paricalcitol and Cinacalcet — cost about 13,000 to 15,000 rubles per one patient per month, but are financed neither by OMS, nor by the DLO program.
Monday’s discussion was devoted to Yelena Parkhomenko, who spent 15 years on dialysis and died of a heart attack, having been unable to walk at the end of her life due to a calcium shortage in her bones because she was unable to get access to either of those drugs.
“We have tried to get this medicine included on the DLO program list for several years, but haven’t succeeded,” said Zemchenkov. “It is a question of money, of course. The list comprises less expensive and rarely used drugs. The people who draw up the list are not stupid,” he added.
The only possible way to obtain the necessary medicine free of charge is to appeal to the local government and ask for money from the regional budget, said Anna Adanina, a representative of the city’s public health committee who was sent by City Hall to the meeting instead of Oleg Grinenko, the committee’s deputy chairman who was originally invited. “But since the budget for next year has already been agreed and City Governor Valentina Matviyenko is shortly to leave her post, it seems that nothing can be done right now.”
About 1,500 people in St. Petersburg are currently undergoing dialysis treatment for kidney disease, and a further 300 are currently recovering from kidney transplants.
TITLE: $1Bln in Deals at Maritime Show
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Industry and Trade Minister Viktor Khristenko estimated the total value of contracts signed during the Fifth International Maritime Defense Show (IMDS) held in St. Petersburg last week at more than $1 billion.
The IMDS ran from Wednesday through Sunday at Lenexpo.
In total, 409 expositions were presented, mainly by Russian manufacturers and developers, as well as 71 foreign companies from 29 different countries. Russia was represented at the event by large-scale manufacturing companies such as Obyedinennaya Sudostroitelnaya Korporatsiya (United Shipbuilding Corporation; OSK), Rosoboronexport and Rostekhnologii.
OSK exhibited its non-nuclear Amur submarines and Tiger corvettes, the latter of which are meant for export only. A deal was signed during the show under which OSK will build two such corvettes for the Algerian navy. OSK also signed an agreement at the event to build three Molniya corvettes for an undisclosed CIS country.
Fifty-four ships are currently under construction in OSK shipyards, said Roman Trotsenko, president of the corporation. Out of that number, 40 vessels are intended for the Russian navy, and the rest will be exported abroad.
Models of combatant ships of the future exhibited by OSK attracted a lot of attention at the Maritime Defense Show. According to the vessels’ designers, the Oryol and Strogy corvettes combine all the best traditions of domestic shipbuilding adapted to the requirements of the 21st century.
“We are making plans for their construction right now, so these corvettes will be able to join the Russian navy by 2015,” said Trotsenko.
Vladimir Vysotsky, Commander in Chief of the Russian Navy, was optimistic about the naval defense industry’s prospects.
“I think in two years we will be able to become world leaders among naval exhibitions on such a scale,” he said.
TITLE: Regular Evening Bike Ride Dispersed by Police Officers
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A regular Friday night mass bike ride from Palace Square was unexpectedly broken up by the police last week.
About 300 cyclists who gathered on St. Petersburg’s central square at 11 p.m. Friday were told to leave in groups from two to eight people and go home, according to witnesses. Two police vans were seen to be present at the incident, a video of which was later uploaded onto the Internet.
During the weekly Pin-Mix event, which is completely apolitical, cyclists gather on Palace Square for a nighttime bike ride that can take various routes. According to Pin-Mix’s web site, the rides are held at night for safety reasons, because there is less traffic at that time.
Pin-Mix events have been held for the past seven years and have had no problems with the police until last week, participants say.
The police spokesman denied Tuesday that the event had been banned, saying that participants agreed to leave “voluntarily” after a “preventive conversation.” He specified that the organizers should apply to the police to provide security measures for the ride.
“They should at least notify the police, because the movement of such a large number of people is connected to safety, including that of the participants themselves, so we need to restrict traffic in some places and provide safety of movement for this group of people, that’s all,” the police spokesman said.
Opposition politician Andrei Dmitriyev, the local chair of The Other Russia party, linked the incident to the methods of new St. Petersburg police chief Mikhail Sukhodolsky.
Dmitriyev put the blame on Sukhodolsky for the arrest of about 20 people for the alleged “use of explicit language in public” after a book presentation at the Russian National Library during the St. Petersburg Economic Forum in June.
He said the arrests happened on the first day of Sukhodolsky taking office, and that the police chief had been dubbed Literator (“author”) for it.
“It’s known who Sukhodolsky is,” Dmitriyev said.
“He’s reputed to be a zealous serviceman, a tough guy who has always stood for the dispersal of protests, and his appointment as the St. Petersburg police chief indicates that they apparently want to discipline the city ahead of the State Duma and presidential elections to prevent any mass protests. The cyclists just happened to be collateral damage.”
TITLE: Opposition Moves to Block Matviyenko’s Election
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The St. Petersburg political opposition has pledged to do its best to prevent St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko from being elected as a deputy — a procedure she must go through in order to be appointed chair of Russia’s Federation Council.
In a joint statement issued Monday, several local opposition leaders described the planned scheme as “unacceptable and insulting.”
“During the period that Matviyenko ruled the city, she brought a lot of harm to it — from the demolition and destruction of the historic center to driving municipal housing services into a disastrous state, which turned St. Petersburg into a disaster area in the wintertime,” they said.
Tamara Vedernikova of ROT Front, Andrei Dmitriyev of The Other Russia, Olga Kurnosova of the United Civil Front (OGF) and Andrei Pivovarov of the Party of People’s Freedom (Parnas) said representatives of their organizations would run in the same election as Matviyenko and called on other opposition groups to do the same.
“It’s good that she’s being taken away from the city, but it’s insulting to residents that she is getting promoted to the third position in the state, rather than being dismissed like [former Moscow Mayor Yury] Luzhkov,” Dmitriyev said by phone Tuesday.
Dmitriyev, who said he would run in the same municipality as Matviyenko, accused officials of talking about Matviyenko’s future assignment as a done deal, as if the results of an election that has not even yet been appointed were already known.
“I think that about 70 percent [of city residents] can’t stand Matviyenko; the only problem is that it is these people who don’t go to elections,” Dmitriyev said.
“If you visit every apartment in a municipality, explain the situation and persuade most of those people to vote, the results might be an unpleasant surprise for City Hall, and Matviyenko might simply lose. I’ll be doing that personally.”
According to opposition activists, because of the small size of a municipality, it is easier to prevent manipulations by installing observers at every precinct. They admit, however, that the authorities may refuse to register them as candidates.
“In this case, we’ll go to court and show that the election was not fair,” Dmitriyev said.
Kurnosova said that making Matviyenko lose the election was a feasible task.
“The last few years, in particular, of Matviyenko’s reign — starting with attempts to build the Okhta Center skyscraper on the heads of St. Petersburgers and finishing with these two hideous winters with icicles — demonstrated to what extent she is incapable of managing the city, and it’s somewhat strange to delegate such a person to the Federation Council,” Kurnosova said.
Maxim Reznik, the local chair of the Yabloko Democratic Party, said his party was yet to decide whether it would oppose Matviyenko at the upcoming election.
“As a matter of fact, we are relieved that she is leaving, and thank God for that,” he said Tuesday.
“We’ve struggled against her for all these years, since 2006,” Reznik said.
TITLE: NEW: 9 Dead, More Than 90 Missing in Volga Boat Sinking
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: Rescuers scoured the wide waters of a Volga River reservoir on Monday, searching with dimming hopes for survivors after an aged, overloaded cruise ship sank amid wind and rain. Nine people were confirmed dead, but more than 90 remained missing.
Exactly how many people were aboard the two-deck Bulgaria when it set off for a cruise on Sunday remains unclear but it was certain to be carrying more than its licensed maximum. Officials say anywhere from 185 to 196 people were aboard the ship that should have carried no more than 120.
The cause of the disaster has not been determined. Igor Panishin of the regional Emergencies Ministry was quoted by the state news agency RIA Novosti as saying survivors reported the ship was leaning to starboard as it made a turn and a wave washed over the deck. It sank within about eight minutes, he said.
The ship sank about three kilometers (two miles) from shore in about 20 meters (65 feet) of water, officials said. National Emergencies Ministry spokeswoman Yelena Smirnikh on Monday said nine people are confirmed dead and 80 have been rescued. A ministry list of the rescued shows all were Russians; it was unclear if any foreigners were aboard.
River cruise boats such as the Bulgaria are highly popular among Russian holiday-makers, conducting cruises ranging from a couple of days to two weeks.
Many children were aboard the boat, and Russian news reports cite survivors as saying about 50 children had gathered in the ship's entertainment hall shortly before it sank Sunday afternoon.
One survivor told the national news channel Vesti 24 that other ships refused to come to their aid.
"Two ships did not stop, although we waved our hands," said the man in his 40s, who stood on the shore amid weeping passengers, some of them wrapped in towels and blankets. He held another man, who was weeping desperately.
Emergency teams and divers from neighboring regions rushed to the site of the tragedy, 450 miles (750 kilometers) east of Moscow.
The Volga, Europe's longest river, is up to 30 kilometers (19 miles) wide in places. The river is a popular tourist destination, especially in summer months.
The Bulgaria was built in 1955 in Czechoslovakia and belongs to a local tourism company. It was traveling from the town of Bulgar to the regional capital, Kazan.
A tourism expert said the lack of partitions inside the Bulgaria made it vulnerable to breaches.
"In case of an accident these ships sink within minutes," Dmitri Voropayev, head of the Samara Travel company, told RIA Novosti.
Russia's Union of Tourism Industry said the ship had not been inspected or retrofitted for years, according to the Interfax news agency.
TITLE: Record Bailout for Bank of Moscow
AUTHOR: By Howard Amos
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — In the largest bailout in modern Russian history, Bank of Moscow, the country’s fifth-largest bank, will receive up to $14 billion in state-backed loans after the discovery that almost a third of the bank’s assets are “problematic,” the Central Bank said.
Financial transparency in a sector that includes more than 1,000 banks has traditionally been patchy, and analysts said similar balance-sheet black holes could be lurking in other major institutions.
“The situation closely resembles that of Lehman Brothers,” said Natalya Orlova, chief economist at Alfa Bank, noting that the failure of an institution the size of Bank of Moscow could have repercussions for international financial systems.
Revelations about the extent of the crisis at Bank of Moscow were released after a review by the Central Bank on Friday, a little more than two months after its president Andrei Borodin was ousted during a hostile takeover by state-backed lender VTB and fled to London in the face of criminal proceedings.
The outstanding allegations against Borodin center on a $415 million loan made by Bank of Moscow to a real estate project linked to Yelena Baturina, the billionaire wife of former Mayor Yury Luzhkov, who played a key role in the bank’s success.
Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin — who served as VTB chairman until he stepped down last month — acknowledged Friday that some fault for the trouble at Bank of Moscow might lie with City Hall, regulators and the Central Bank, but he laid the blame for the mess firmly at the feet of Borodin and his former co-managers.
“We hope that law enforcement agencies will take investigative and operational action against Bank of Moscow management who permitted this to happen,” he said, RIA-Novosti reported.
“We propose that there be cooperation between the law enforcement bodies of various countries … because the assets have been concentrated abroad,” he said.
The deputy head of the Deposit Insurance Agency, Valery Miroshnikov, said 60 billion rubles of Bank of Moscow loans was in offshore companies, RIA-Novosti reported. He told the news site Marker.ru that new criminal cases against Borodin would be opened “in the near future.”
Borodin, who headed Bank of Moscow for 15 years but is now sought under an international arrest warrant, said in a statement published on his personal web site that he was, “like everyone else, shocked at the size of the $14 billion bailout.”
But he raised doubts about the authenticity of the problem loans revealed Friday, describing them as “alleged and nondisclosed.” He said that like his ouster from the bank in April, he believed that the bailout loan to VTB was “political.”
Repeated calls to the cell phone of a London-based spokeswoman for Borodin went unanswered Sunday.
The Bank of Moscow bailout will involve a 10-year loan of 295 billion rubles ($10.6 billion) from the Deposit Insurance Agency — about the same sum that the agency issued in bailouts during the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 — at 0.51 percent rate of interest, significantly less than the market rate.
VTB, which together with Sberbank and Gazprombank controls more than 60 percent of the Russian banking market, will contribute 100 billion rubles to pulling Bank of Moscow out of the red. As a precondition of the process, VTB will increase its stake in Bank of Moscow to 75 percent, from 46.5 percent.
VTB shares closed up 2.1 percent in Moscow on Friday, while shares in Bank of Moscow barely wavered, inching down 0.3 percent.
Bank of Moscow, which serves some 100,000 corporate clients and 9 million private customers through 381 offices, said in a statement that the bailout money would be invested in “reliable financial instruments, including Russian state securities.”
Miroshnikov said the bad loans in Bank of Moscow’s portfolio could be easily split off from the healthy parts of its operations.
“One half is a normal retail bank. The other is Borodin’s bank,” he said, news site Finmarket.ru reported.
The Bank of Moscow run by Borodin was once controlled by Luzhkov’s City Hall, and it had close ties with the business empire established by his wife, Baturina, Russia’s richest woman.
TITLE: When Psychiatrists Assist Unscrupulous Relatives
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Galina Kozlova, then 62, was drinking tea in her Moscow apartment when psychiatrists called by her sister broke down the door, handcuffed her, dragged her to a car and took her to a psychiatric hospital.
Her 81-day treatment included copious doses of psychoactive drugs and beatings by her doctor, she said. The treatment ended when she agreed to sign away her land plot and a share of her three-room apartment to her sister.
“The doctor told me when he beat me: ‘Don’t be stubborn. Give away your property rights to your sister,’” Kozlova, now 72, said in a recent interview.
She left the hospital in 2001, only to be ruled mentally incapable by a district court. A higher court canceled the decision after an independent psychiatric examination confirmed her mentally sound, but by then the damage had been done. She has spent the last decade suing for the reinstatement of her property rights, but to no avail.
The story is far from unique.
Relatives, authorities, neighbors and even psychiatrists who want to grab an elderly person’s apartment often ask courts to declare the person mentally incapable in order to be appointed their guardians, said Tatyana Malchikova, head of the Civil Commission for Human Rights in Moscow, which has tracked abuse in psychiatry for the past 11 years.
She was echoed by independent psychiatrist Emmanuil Gushansky, whose professional experience spans more than half a century. “It is convenient to declare people mentally incapable to deprive them of … their property,” Gushansky said in an interview.
A 1992 law grants psychiatrists the right to hospitalize people involuntarily if they pose a danger to themselves or others, or if their physical health faces “significant damage” without urgent intervention.
Anyone can complain to police or psychiatrists about anyone whom they think needs hospitalization, Malchikova said.
Paramedics can deliver people to mental health facilities before checking whether they need hospitalization if the patient is deemed to be dangerous, said lawyer Yury Yershov, who defends victims of psychiatric abuse.
Psychiatrists have to justify their actions before a judge within two days, but that gives them more than enough time to drug a patient, making him or her look psychologically unstable when brought to the courtroom, Malchikova said.
The patients get free, state-provided lawyers, but the lawyers are notoriously prone to side with the psychiatrists, Yershov said.
As for the judges themselves, they nearly always rule against the patients, Malchikova said.
Even more often, the hospitalized patient is never brought to the court hearing at all and does not know that it was held, Malchikova said.
Kozlova said she learned about the trial that ordered her hospitalization only several years after it took place.
The Kremlin addressed the problem in April, after years of pressure from the UN Human Rights Committee to uphold the rights of psychologically unfit people. President Dmitry Medvedev signed into law a bill that banned courts from declaring people unfit based only on a psychiatric examination, obliging judges to listen to the patient or his or her lawyer and hand a written court order for hospitalization to the patient in person. Moreover, patients ruled mentally unfit now have the right to appeal the diagnosis.
But that does little to help cases that date back to earlier times. Kozlova, for one, lives with relatives because her sister — who could not be reached to comment for the article despite repeated attempts — refuses to let her back into the apartment, ignoring a court order, Kozlova said.
The sister has actually convinced court marshals that she isn’t blocking Kozlova’s entry into the apartment, leading them to close the case, she said.
“I am tired,” Kozlova said, unable to hold back tears. “There is such an evident and insolent crime out there, and no one wants to deal with it.”
Boris Stremyakov, head of the Izmailovo district branch of the Federal Court Marshals Service, refused to comment on the affair, which he said pre-dates his appointment.
A Moscow Times reporter also studied documents and interviewed three other elderly Moscow residents and one Moscow region resident who were forcefully hospitalized, declared mentally incapable by courts at the request of relatives, and then lost the rights to their apartments to the relatives.
Kozlova and two other women, Tatyana Truntayeva and Lyubov Andreyeva, have been offered legal assistance by the For Human Rights group, while the other two, Lidia Balakireva and Viktor Goryachyev, have received support from The Civil Commission for Human Rights.
In a typical example, 58-year-old Lidia Balakireva was declared mentally incapable and hospitalized in 2007 at the request of her daughter after she refused to sell her share in their apartment for a price far below market value.
District police appeared to have had a hand in the affair, because an officer invited Balakireva to go with him to the police station to “write an explanation,” she said. When she arrived, she was put in a holding cell and handed over to psychiatric ambulance, purportedly for a check at a hospital. But then she was kept at the hospital for treatment.
A court later ruled the hospitalization illegal and confirmed her psychological health as normal. But Balakireva has since been living in an apartment where she works as a caregiver, saying she fears that her daughter will have her hospitalized again if she returns home.
Tatyana Truntayeva, 70, was officially registered as suffering from a psychoneurological disorder in 2007 at the request of her son-in-law after she refused to sign away her apartment and dacha to him in her will.
The designation, registered at a neighborhood clinic, means Truntayeva can’t sell or give away her property and her will is considered invalid in the eyes of the law. As things stand, her daughter will inherit her property, and if the daughter, who is gravely ill, dies, the property automatically goes to her son-in-law.
TITLE: Beyrle: Visas Bigger Deal Than Arms Pact
AUTHOR: By Andrew McChesney
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — U.S. Ambassador John Beyrle said Monday that the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty was important but the real highlight of a “reset” in U.S.-Russian ties would come next week with the signing of agreements on liberalized visa rules and child adoptions.
The two countries’ top diplomats, Hillary Clinton and Sergei Lavrov, are to sign a deal granting three-year multiple-entry visas and eliminating the need to secure visa invitations during July 12-14 talks in Washington.
They will also sign a long-awaited accord aimed at restarting child adoptions, which stalled in April 2010 when a U.S. mother sent her 7-year-old adopted son back to Russia unaccompanied on a plane.
Beyrle, speaking at a U.S. Independence Day celebration attended by about 2,000 guests at his Spaso House residence in Moscow, said the agreements illustrate that the United States’ relationship with Russia has changed dramatically since he arrived in Moscow on July 3, 2008 — just in time to address a similar July 4 gathering at Spaso House, the U.S. ambassador’s residence.
“We can talk about a lot that we have got done together over the last three years, especially this past year, over the past 12 months,” Beyrle said, making his remarks first in Russian and then in English.
Among the achievements, he mentioned New START, which entered force in February and is seen by President Barack Obama as a hallmark of his foreign policy, and Russia’s pending accession into the World Trade Organization, which Beyrle said would happen this year.
“But for me, the best is really still yet to come next week when I go to Washington for the signing by Secretary of State Clinton and Minister of Foreign Affairs Lavrov of the agreements on adoptions and a more liberal visa regime for our two countries,” Beyrle said.
Beyrle broke the news about the visa agreement last month at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
TITLE: Chemical Castration Sought For Molesters
AUTHOR: By Alex Chachkevitch
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Two months after President Dmitry Medvedev called for the voluntary chemical castration of child molesters, a Just Russia deputy introduced a bill demanding mandatory chemical castration to the State Duma on Monday.
The government, however, has criticized the bill as too expensive. But the draft may be just an attempt to clear the way for the Kremlin, which is working on a similar bill, said children rights defender Boris Altshuler.
The bill’s author, Anton Belyakov, said by telephone that most convicted child abusers resume the abuse after their release from prison, so medical treatment offers a safe alternative.
“The situation is just plain stupid,” Belyakov said. “It’s the same child molesters committing crimes over and over again. They sit out their time and then do it again.”
The bill says people convicted of child molestation — which carries a sentence of eight to 20 years in prison — must start medical treatment to inhibit their sexual drive six months before their release.
They are to continue the treatment, which blocks the male sex hormone testosterone, every few months upon release, Belyakov said. He added that the process can be reversed anytime by simply stopping taking medication.
He said 97 percent of convicts return to child molestation after serving their prison time, but only 3 percent commit new crimes in countries where chemical castration is used. He did not say where he got his data from.
“Why are we trying to invent something ourselves when it’s already being successfully done in other countries?” Belyakov said.
Countries that implement chemical castration include Britain, France and the United States, where nine states, among them Florida and California, employ the procedure as punishment for serious sex offenses.
The practice was developed in the 1940s, and its use was initially not limited to child molesters but included, among others, homosexuals. Among the more famous victims of such treatment was computer scientist Alan Turing, who agreed to chemical castration in 1952 to avoid being jailed for being gay. He committed suicide two years later.
The procedure has side effects, including breast enlargement and reduced bone density, which increases risk of cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis. This has prompted several human rights organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, to oppose it as cruel and unconstitutional.
TITLE: Police in Belarus Use Tear Gas on Protesters
AUTHOR: By Yuras Karmanau
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MINSK, Belarus — Police used tear gas to break up an anti-government protest in Belarus and forcefully detained dozens of demonstrators in the capital Sunday.
The authoritarian government had tried to thwart the protest by blocking access to Facebook, Twitter and a major Russian social networking site used by the organizers. The government also deployed thousands of police and secret service agents in central Minsk as an additional deterrent.
But about 700 or 800 people gathered anyway on a central square. Using a new tactic introduced by young activists this summer, they did not hold signs or chant, but instead clapped their hands in unison to show their opposition to President Alexander Lukashenko.
Public discontent is swelling as Belarus experiences its worst financial crisis since the fall of the Soviet Union.
“The U.S.S.R has come back,” said Tatyana Segalskaya, a 30-year-old demonstrator. “It is dictatorship in the middle of Europe. People are detained for nothing. The worse the economic concerns are, the tougher repressions become.”
Rights group Vesna said more than 200 demonstrators were detained in Minsk, while similar protests were held in at least six other cities.
Lukashenko, appearing earlier Sunday in full military dress, warned that “an escalation of information intervention is under way” in Belarus as part of plans drawn up in “the capitals of separate countries” to bring about a popular revolution.
“We understand that the goal of these attacks is to sow uncertainty and alarm, to destroy social harmony, and in the end to bring us to our knees and bring to naught the achievements of our independence,” Lukashenko said in opening a military parade on Independence Day, the anniversary of the end of Nazi occupation in 1944. He wore a military uniform, as did his 6-year-old son.
Belarus is under pressure from Russia and the West. Moscow has been pushing for greater control over the Belarusian economy in exchange for loans to help Lukashenko’s government weather the financial turmoil, while the European Union has threatened to expand sanctions imposed on Lukashenko as punishment for his crackdown on the opposition.
For the first time, Russian troops took part in the annual military parade. Russian state television, which broadcasts in Belarus, has supported the Belarusian protesters by showing their rough treatment at the hands of police.
A new opposition group called “Revolution by Social Networks” has held a series of Internet-organized rallies on Wednesday evenings for the past month. The rallies have been held in about 30 cities and have drawn thousands of protesters.
Eager to avoid protests on the national holiday, the government on Saturday began blocking access to the social media sites, including VKontakte, the Russian version of Facebook.
The opposition group appealed to Russian authorities on Sunday to respond to the Belarusian government’s interference, activist Vyacheslav Dianov said.
TITLE: Dutch Lawmakers Vote for Sanctions In Magnitsky Case
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Netherlands has joined the fray over the death of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, with the country’s legislature voting to support an entry ban and freeze on assets of Russian officials implicated in the case.
The vote, which passed 150-0, does not introduce the ban or freeze but calls on the Dutch government to support a push for such sanctions, which are being considered separately by U.S. and EU authorities, Hermitage said in a statement Monday.
It was not immediately clear whether any of the Russian officials affected by the ban had assets in the Netherlands. Hermitage did not name the blacklisted officials or say how many there were.
The Dutch government has not commented on the issue. If it moves to impose the ban, the officials essentially could be banned from all member states of the European Union, rights champion Svetlana Gannushkina said, Interfax reported.
A Foreign Ministry source called the Dutch initiative “unacceptable,” Radio Liberty reported.
In May, U.S. Senator Ben Cardin introduced a bill into Congress proposing visa sanctions and the freezing of U.S. assets of 60 Russian officials implicated in Magnitsky’s death. The European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee unanimously approved a similar sanctions proposal in November. But neither legislature has voted on the bills so far.
TITLE: Putin Slams His Front’s Membership Tactics
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin condemned the involuntary enlistment of people to his All-Russia People’s Front on Thursday after the group embarked on a chaotic membership drive that has swept musicians, architects, HIV and cancer patients and even an entire neighborhood into its fold.
Putin’s remarks to a United Russia conference came after two more people from a professional union publicly denounced the group.
Putin said he opposed recruiting members “on assignment” or “on bureaucratic command” and would not tolerate the “artificial increase of large-scale participation,” Interfax reported.
“This can only discredit the very idea” of the group, Putin said.
A day earlier, two members of the Russian Union of Composers, Lyudmila Korabelnikova and Mikhail Arkadyev, published open letters that warned the All-Russia People’s Front would ruin Russia and asked union leaders to exclude them from it.
“All in all, the mode of recruiting to its ranks (rather, attaching or ascribing) surpasses all we survived in Soviet times in regard to manipulation,” Korabelnikova said in her letter published by Openspace.ru.
Arkadyev said he believed the group was started “exclusively” to profane the democratic process in Russia.
Boris Yurgenson, executive secretary of the Russian Union of Composers, defended the union’s right to enroll Wednesday, saying that by law the members of a nongovernmental organization were not responsible for the NGO’s actions and vice versa.
Yurgenson said, however, that the union might reconsider its decision because some union leaders and a number of its regional branches were “not very happy” with the activities of Putin’s group.
Repeated calls to Yurgenson went unanswered Thursday.
Hundreds of public groups and associations have been swept into the front, with some of their members learning about it after the fact.
On Monday, the Russian Union of Architects became the first public group to snub Putin’s movement, several days after one of its members published an open letter that said he had found the union listed on the group’s web site and that he would quit the union if it remained a part of the group.
More than 100 union members joined his protest.
A blogger noted Wednesday that nationwide associations for disabled, deaf, blind and sclerotic people, as well as unions of HIV and cancer patients, have been listed on the group’s web site as members.
Another blogger this week published a letter by a local administration in the Volgograd region informing its subordinates that the All-Russia Union of Local Government had joined Putin’s group.
In Vladimir, residents of a whole street enrolled in Putin’s movement, the regional United Russia’s web site reported.
In Bashkortostan, directors of several grade schools have voiced support for Putin’s group, the regional United Russia’s web site reported Wednesday.
Under Putin’s initiative, the group was created to consolidate public groups around United Russia and mobilize the public around United Russia ahead of State Duma elections in December.
TITLE: Former Cop Gets 14 Years for Raping 27 Women
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A Moscow court on Friday sentenced a former traffic police officer to 14 years in prison for raping 27 women.
The Nagatinsky District Court also convicted Artur Kositsyn, 34, who worked as a lieutenant for the Podolsk traffic police force in the Moscow region until May 2009, of attempted rape and sexual harassment, RIA-Novosti reported, citing a court spokeswoman.
An investigation found that Kositsyn went on a rape spree in southern Moscow for a few months in 2009, usually following his victims into elevators or their house entrances and then raping them under threat of violence with a knife, the report said.
The court was able to prove 27 rape cases out of the 39 that Kositsyn was initially charged with, Vzglyad newspaper reported.
Prosecutors initially asked for 15 years imprisonment, but the sentence was reduced by one year under a deal with Kositsyn in which he agreed to be incarcerated in a maximum-security prison, RIA-Novosti said.
Kositsyn, who was arrested in December 2009, admitted his guilt and apologized to the court in his closing statement, it said.
He still has the option of appealing the sentence within 10 days of the ruling. It was unclear whether he would appeal.
TITLE: Spar Supermarket Chain Agrees Franchise Deal
AUTHOR: By Yelena Dombrova
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: St. Petersburg’s retailer Intertorg is to open a chain of Spar supermarkets in the northwest region.
Dutch retailer Spar International has signed a licensing agreement with the Intertorg trading company (which manages the Narodnaya Semya and Ideya supermarkets). This agreement guarantees Intertorg an exclusive right to use the Spar brand in the northwest, said Spar representatives. Intertorg is a key player on the local market, said Alexei Pavlov, general director of Spar Russia BV.
“We plan on opening 20 new stores, including two Spar supermarkets with retail areas of 700 to 900 square meters by the end of the summer,” said Anton Belovetsky, Intertorgs’s coordinator for the Spar project. Spar’s future development will be dependent on the results achieved by the first St. Petersburg supermarkets to be opened. It is possible that 10 to 12 Spar stores will be opened within the first year, said Pavlov.
The opening of a single supermarket could cost between $400,000 and $500,000, estimates Dmitry Potapenko, managing partner of Management Development Group.
The partners are not revealing the terms of the deal, although Pavlov said the agreement doesn’t provide Spar with a percentage of turnover. Spar will provide consultation services to its partner on the supermarket’s construction, marketing and logistics, participation in federal contracts and development of the Spar brand and trademarks on the local market.
The contract allows for the sub-franchising of the brand, though that is not planned for the near future, Belovetsky said. He added that the development of Spar’s brand and trademarks is one of the strategic spheres of operation.
Primarily, local retailers require logistics schemes, rather than consultative support, and that is why franchising projects in this sector are rare, said Potapenko.
Mikhail Burmistrov, the general director of Infoline-Analitika, doubts that Intertorg will replace its own widely recognized brands with the Spar brand. In his opinion, Spar supermarkets are a good opportunity for entry in new regions and for developing the effectiveness of disputed trade outlets.
Spar has received the largest franchisee in Russia and an opportunity to develop in the northwest, Burmistrov said. He estimated Intertorg’s turnover in 2010 at 15 billion rubles ($538 million).
TITLE: City to Get New 5-Star Hotel
AUTHOR: By Alla Tokareva and
Anatoly Tyomkin
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: The South Korean hotel firm Lotte plans to build a first-class hotel on the Fontanka River embankment.
Lotte Hotels & Resorts, part of South Korea’s Lotte Group, will open a hotel at 23 Naberezhnaya Reki Fontanki, a real estate consultant close to City Hall said.
Jendok Son, the company’s representative in Russia and the general director of its subsidiary Lotte Rus, confirmed that negotiations on the construction of the business-hotel on the site are underway.
City Hall is negotiating with Lotte Group on the construction of a new hotel, Governor Valentina Matviyenko confirmed in a meeting with Lee Ensu, South Korea’s consul general in St. Petersburg last week.
At the end of 2007, City Hall terminated an agreement with Tyazhpromexport, the former owner of the building slated for reconstruction, awarding it to the Fontanka-Hotel corporation, which was to reconstruct the building by the beginning of 2011 and then transfer 79.4 million rubles ($2.85 million) to the city budget.
Fontanka-Hotel planned to create a 206-room, three-star hotel complex with a total area of 11,150 square meters. City Hall is to discuss extending the construction period to February 2013 in the near future, a representative of the city’s Investment Committee said.
Lotte plans on buying the Fontanka-Hotel corporation in order to build a five-star hotel independently, a source close to Fontanka-Hotel said.
According to SPARK-Interfax, Alexei Parshin is Fontaka-Hotel’s general director, as well as the director of FOR-Peterburg, which is owned by Nikolai Ulyanov (66.68 percent) and Dmitry Kozharsky (33.32 percent). FOR-Peterburg owns 50 percent of the Kaliningrad fishing company Rybflot-FOR.
Representatives of Fontanka-Hotel and Colliers International St. Petersburg, the broker for the deal, refused to comment.
Investment in such a project by a hotel operator is something of an exception, but Lotte is not only a hotel operator, said Nikolai Pashkov, general director of Knight Frank St. Petersburg. Lotte opened its first hotel outside South Korea in Moscow in 2010, investing about $300 million in the project. The company has also built a shopping center in Moscow, Lotte Plaza, valued at $400 million.
Investment in the hotel’s construction could amount to $10 million, whilst acquiring the necessary investment rights could cost $5-7 million, making it cheaper than the purchase of a new site, estimated Sergei Fyodorov, general director of Praktis CB.
According to Pashkov, $30 million to $40 million will be needed for the construction of a four-star hotel.
Lotte is a brand that is not widely recognized, making it difficult for the firm to compete with other first-class operators in the city, Fyodorov said. The operator’s hotel in Moscow will provide a circle of potential guests, said Dmitry Vorobyov, developer of the W St. Petersburg hotel.
TITLE: Skolkovo ‘Population’ Increases by 21
AUTHOR: By Olga Razumovskaya
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The expansion of Moscow’s borders and creation of the Moscow Federal District will not affect Skolkovo, the innovation hub near Moscow, Skolkovo Foundation president Viktor Vekselberg told reporters Monday after presenting participation certificates to 21 new resident companies.
“As far as I know, changes to the project’s configuration are being considered. [The expansion] has nothing to do with the Skolkovo project,” he said.
Skolkovo is among the areas being considered for inclusion in the new federal district, Vedomosti reported. President Dmitry Medvedev gave instructions to the heads of Moscow and the Moscow region on Friday to come up with suggestions by July 10 for how Moscow can be expanded.
Vekselberg said residents should be able to start moving to Skolkovo in 2014. The first building should be ready by the end of this year and be able to host residents in the first quarter of 2012.
Among the residents hoping to move into the newly constructed buildings are the 21 companies that received their residency certificates Monday.
Most of the new companies are in the energy-efficiency cluster, while others will join the biomedical research and IT clusters.
The companies include RusAl and Optogan, a St. Petersburg firm that develops and produces high-brightness light-emitting diodes and was backed by both Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Biosfera TNK and Technologies of Inverse Problems are among the energy-efficiency companies that have joined the project. Among IT companies that have joined are Hamster Soft and Speaktoit, working on natural language interfaces and talking online products.
TITLE: VTB Hits Road to Reassure Investors
AUTHOR: By Howard Amos
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — VTB, Russia’s second-largest lender, will hold roadshows for investors in London and New York to allay concerns about the black hole in the balance sheet of its new acquisition, Bank of Moscow, which received a $14 billion state-backed bailout last week.
As a part of the bailout, to which the government will contribute $10.6 billion, VTB will increase its stake in Bank of Moscow to 75 percent. Investors, however, are likely to be seeking answers as to why the initial hostile takeover of Bank of Moscow in April was trumpeted as such a success.
Sergei Dubinin, a member of the board of VTB, told radio station Ekho Moskvy on Saturday that VTB president Andrei Kostin and other members of management would be sent abroad to meet with investors to explain “how all of this will work and try to calm them down.”
A VTB spokeswoman confirmed to The St. Petersburg Times on Monday that such a roadshow is being planned for the last week of July, but stressed that it had not yet been confirmed.
“It’s standard practice for banks to organize meetings with investors,” she said.
Analysts, however, said VTB needed face-to-face meetings with investors to explain exactly how and why the takeover of Bank of Moscow, Russia’s fifth-largest bank, unfolded as it did.
“VTB’s top managers probably feel that in order to save face they have to explain to investors in person why they went into the Bank of Moscow transaction without due diligence in a situation that showed red flags, particularly after they probably presented a more positive outlook on the deal during their secondary public offering marketing,” said Jason Hurwitz, a financial analyst at Alfa Bank.
Despite the privatization of a 10 percent stake in VTB in February, the bank is 75-percent owned by the government.
Hurwitz added that there was still a lot of uncertainty about the value of the VTB stock “not only due to a lack of clarity over the quality of Bank of Moscow’s loan book, but also because it remains unclear how VTB will add 100 billion rubles of capital to Bank of Moscow, and whether the state might provide any subsidized funding to VTB directly.”
Andrei Kostin, son of VTB’s chief executive, also named Andrei Kostin, was killed Saturday in a quad-biking accident in the Yaroslavl region, RIA-Novosti reported.
Kostin, 32, was a managing director at Deutsche Bank in Moscow and oversaw the company’s investment banking division. He had worked for Deutsche Bank for 11 years, joining the company’s London offices in 2000.
Kostin lost control of the vehicle he was driving near Pereslavl-Zalessky, veered off the road and crashed into a tree. He died at the scene of the accident. A criminal investigation into the incident has been opened.
TITLE: Medvedev Acts on Petersburg Forum Vows
AUTHOR: By Irina Filatova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — In a flurry of activity aimed at attracting foreign investors, President Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree Friday that will lift restrictions on domestic companies wanting to list securities abroad and ordered the creation of a central securities depositary by Sept. 1.
Medvedev also appointed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to oversee privatization of state-owned companies through 2015 and set a deadline for City Hall and the Moscow region government to draft a plan to expand the boundaries of Moscow.
The orders followed Medvedev’s speech during the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum last month, which revealed details of the Kremlin’s plans for the country’s modernization.
Russian companies making initial public offerings on foreign stock exchanges will be able to list as much of their equity as they want — compared with the current limit of 5 percent to 25 percent of their capitalization, according to a statement on the Kremlin web site.
The measure is expected to increase the attractiveness of domestic companies, some of which have successfully listed abroad.
Internet company Mail.ru raised $1 billion in an IPO in London late last year followed by search engine Yandex, which raised a record $1.4 billion in its IPO on NASDAQ in May.
In another sign of the trend, Sberbank announced Friday that its American Depositary Receipts had been admitted for trading on the London Stock Exchange.
However, eliminating the restriction on the amount of shares listed abroad is unlikely to affect local companies substantially because the rule in fact existed only on paper, analysts said.
Domestic companies attempting to attract foreign investors were listing shares through offshore companies, which allowed them to get around the restrictions, Finam analyst Alexander Osin said.
In another measure to attract foreign investors Medvedev also ordered the creation of a central securities depositary, which has so far failed to gain final approval because of disagreements between the relevant government agencies. He also decreed that foreign companies can open depositary accounts locally.
The central depositary, which will facilitate equity transactions, is supposed to replace the two depositaries serving the clients of the MICEX Stock Exchange and the RTS — which finalized the details of their merger last week.
MICEX clients are currently served by the National Settlement Depositary, while the Depositary-Clearing Company serves clients of the RTS.
A law on the central depositary, which the State Duma passed in its first reading in 2007, stalled after the Finance Ministry, the Economic Development Ministry and the Federal Service for Financial Markets engaged in a struggle over which institution would function as the central depositary.
Creating a central depositary will ease the work of the stock market because all clients will be served in one place, said Pavel Dorodnikov, head of the trading department at Rye, Man & Gor Securities.
It currently takes one to seven days to transfer securities from one depositary to the other if the companies closing the deal have their shares traded on different stock exchanges, Dorodnikov said.
The measure will also eliminate costs related to transferring the securities, he said by telephone.
TITLE: Schneider Opens Third Local Plant
AUTHOR: By Roland Oliphant
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: KOMMUNAR, Leningrad Oblast — French electric services firm Schneider Electric has opened a third Russian factory in a bid to keep up with increasing demand for “smart-grid” technologies in Russia and the CIS.
“We reached a critical point where we had to be in-country to keep up with orders and the demands of customers,” country president Jean-Louis Stasi said at the opening ceremony.
The 10 million euro ($14.5 million) plant near the small town of Kommunar in the Leningrad Oblast will turn out RM6 ring main units for Russian utility companies and property developers.
TITLE: Our Answer to Magnitsky
AUTHOR: By Michael Bohm
TEXT: “Our answer to Chamberlain.”
This Soviet slogan originated in the late 1920s as a government protest against British Foreign Minister Austen Chamberlain, who was outspoken in his criticism of the Soviet policy toward China. But instead of addressing the arguments raised by Chamberlain, the Kremlin responded with the only weapon they had: a massive propaganda campaign that included military threats aimed at Britain. The expression later took on the broader meaning of basically “Go fly a kite!” when the Kremlin had nothing else to say in response to criticism from the West.
“Our answer to Chamberlain” is the best way to describe the bill introduced by the Foreign Ministry and United Russia (and supported by the other three parties in the State Duma) that would blacklist foreign bureaucrats and public officials who have allegedly violated the rights of Russian citizens located abroad. Foreigners who end up on the list would be barred from entering Russia and prevented from conducting business deals, and whatever assets they hold in Russian banks would be frozen.
“The situation around the Magnitsky list was the starting point for this bill,” Igor Lebedev, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party’s faction in the Duma, told Kommersant last week.
Lebedev was referring to the Magnitsky bill being considered in the U.S. Congress that, if passed, would impose visa restrictions and freeze the U.S. assets of 60 Russian officials linked to the prosecution and death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in a Moscow pretrial detention center. Magnitsky was arrested on charges of organizing a $230 million tax fraud scheme for Hermitage Capital after he accused officials from the Interior Ministry of organizing the $230 million tax fraud themselves.
Backers of the Russian blacklist bill point to the U.S. arrest of businessman Viktor Bout in an arms smuggling investigation as a prime example of why “abusive foreign officials” — presumably from the U.S. State Department, Justice Department and even the White House — need to be blacklisted.
The Bout case is a peculiar casus belli — and an even more peculiar Russian answer to the Magnitsky bill. The Foreign Ministry and Duma’s logic would make sense if, for example, U.S. investigators and prosecutors in the Bout case had sent masked SWAT units to raid one of Bout’s subsidiaries in the United States, seized the company’s seals and, in collaboration with U.S. tax authorities, fraudulently claimed $230 million in tax rebates.
The analogy would also work if U.S. investigators and prosecutors who profited from the raid on Bout’s company had organized a campaign to pressure Bout to keep silent by holding him in inhumane, squalid conditions in pretrial detention and denying him medical treatment for a critical illness, from which he later died in prison. Then, because of pressure from senior officials in the U.S. government, no criminal charges were filed against the perpetrators — who had become remarkably wealthy since the raid on Bout’s company, despite their modest government salaries. What’s more, they were given promotions and awards for outstanding public service.
Since the 1920s, the Kremlin has been fond of these “answers to Chamberlain” in a clumsy, infantile attempt to divert attention away from its own abuse of power. For example, recall the U.S. campaign to free Soviet dissidents in the early 1970s. The Soviet Union’s answer was a massive propaganda campaign to free the United States’ own “most-persecuted dissident” — U.S. Communist and social activist Angela Davis.
Soviets, poking fun at this ridiculous habit, used to joke that in response to every criticism voiced by a U.S. government official, the Kremlin would repeat the stock answer: “Look who’s talking! You still lynch blacks in the United States!”
These “answers to Chamberlain” didn’t stop after the Soviet collapse. In 2005, for example, then-President Vladimir Putin, in response to a French journalist’s question about the Yukos affair, answered that Russia’s criminal case against Yukos doesn’t differ from the U.S. case against Enron.
Another example was when Putin was asked during his call-in show in December about the fairness of the long prison sentence handed to former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Putin, who answered only half-jokingly that Russia’s judicial system is the “most humane in the world,” compared Khodorkovsky’s “liberal sentence” to the 150-year sentence that Bernard Madoff, the U.S. mastermind of the largest Ponzi scheme in history, received for what Putin called “similar crimes.”
But far worse than these absurd attempts to turn the tables on the West is the false patriotism and simulated deep concern for “abused Russians” that cut to the core of the blacklist bill. There is one disturbing irony in this distasteful attempt to gain political points in an election year. The bill, which officially claims to protect Russians who end up in “difficult situations abroad,” is supposed to be a “symmetrical answer” to the Magnitsky bill. But it ignores the fact that it was precisely Magnitsky who ended up in a far more “difficult situation” — not abroad, mind you, but in Moscow’s own notorious Butyrskaya pretrial prison.
While Russia has developed its latest “answer to Chamberlain” in the form of a blacklist for foreigners, clearly a better answer would be to blacklist and prosecute its own criminals. If Russia’s lawmakers showed as much concern for all of the Sergei Magnitskys languishing in Russia’s own prisons today as they did for Viktor Bout, there wouldn’t have been a need for U.S. lawmakers to propose the Magnitsky bill in the first place.
Michael Bohm is opinion page editor of The Moscow Times.
TITLE: Matviyenko, Don’t Pack Your Bags Just Yet
AUTHOR: By Nikolai Petrov
TEXT: In the run-up to the elections, we are seeing the beginning of a shakeup in top political positions. The Kremlin started with Valentina Matviyenko. She will be moved out of St. Petersburg, where she is governor, and sent to Moscow, where she will serve as speaker of the Federation Council.
It is difficult to say to what extent this is a Matviyenko phenomenon or whether it reflects the people’s irritation with the authorities in general. In any event, the Kremlin wanted to get rid of a large political dead weight who was not liked among residents of St. Petersburg.
This reminds me of how Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev reacted to regional elections in 1989. He interpreted the losses to the Communist Party during elections for regional heads — particularly in the Leningrad region — as a sign of how poorly they regarded specific officials, while he failed to understand that voters were expressing their negative attitude toward government as a whole. As a result, the Soviet Union simply changed faces in top regional positions, but the overall decrepit political and economic state of the country remained largely unchanged.
On June 24, President Dmitry Medvedev, during a meeting with governors, surprised many when he supported the idea of nominating Matviyenko as the new Federation Council speaker. There were plenty of regional heavyweights at the meeting. The main agenda item of the meeting was to discuss Medvedev’s idea to decentralize federal authority. Suddenly, Rustem Khamitov, the leader of Bashkortostan, voiced the idea of nominating Matviyenko as speaker. He was warmly supported by Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov.
Although Matviyenko’s ouster was likely prepared ahead of time, Medvedev staged the event to make it look like her appointment was an initiative of the governors.
Meanwhile, several days before Medvedev’s meeting, Kremlin first deputy chief of staff Vladislav Surkov, who was visiting St. Petersburg to discuss election prospects, met with Matviyenko. Surkov reportedly told Matviyenko that she has hurt United Russia’s ratings and should not wait until the beginning of the campaign to leave St. Petersburg.
Matviyenko, after some deliberation and consultation, wisely chose to accept what had already been officially announced on June 28. But according to changes in the law last year, a deputy mandate is a prerequisite for nomination to the Federation Council. This means that before Matviyenko could become a senator and then speaker, she would have to be elected as deputy — either on a municipal, regional or federal level.
Choosing the easiest option, she took the municipal route. She will run for a councilwoman’s post in one of the city’s 111 district councils. But this would require calling an early special election, which is pegged for September.
Matviyenko hasn’t faced the voters in a direct election since 2003, when she won the governor’s seat in an election that many considered unfair because of heavy support from the Kremlin. Since then, Matviyenko’s popularity has dropped markedly. Moreover, Communist and Yabloko parties are considering an invitation to join forces with A Just Russia under the slogan “Petersburg Against Matviyenko.”
Thus, before Matviyenko packs her bags to relocate to Moscow, she will still have to pass a very difficult test in the St. Petersburg special election. This will also be a big test for United Russia, which is more significant for the Kremlin than the Matviyenko appointment.
Nikolai Petrov is a scholar in residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center.
TITLE: CHERNOV’S CHOICE
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Seliger, a summer camp held for the Kremlin-backed movement Nashi, sent out a news release on Friday claiming that a concert by Mumiy Troll is “scheduled to be held” there.
The ill-famed Nashi was created when the Kremlin became scared by Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004, and the movement’s initial goal was to confront protesters in the street (and on social networks). This is what they are primarily taught at Seliger.
Commenting on the information, the band’s manager Alex Kedrov slammed journalists, rather than the camp’s organizers. Speaking to web site Slon.ru on Friday, he said the band was “in negotiations.”
“The decision has not been taken yet; it will be taken only at the end of the week,” Kedrov was quoted as saying.
“Currently, we’re only weighing up all the pros and cons. But if they’ve already written we are set to perform, I don’t know, it might be some unscrupulous journalists, who can’t even call and ask the band.”
Singer Zemfira performed at the first Seliger camp in July 2005, but later described it as a “mistake.”
Speaking to Kommersant in May 2007, she admitted that her fee for performing at Nashi’s Seliger camp was much higher than her usual concert fee. She also admitted that the pubic reaction to her performing for Nashi was “invariably negative.”
“That was my mistake,” she was quoted as saying. “If you are offered an overtly excessive fee, it means that something is not quite right; you have to take a closer look at things. I should have been more careful, it was a lesson for me.”
The situation surrounding Mumiy Troll is stranger, because the band famously refused to perform at an outdoor concert in Moscow in June 2008 when its members discovered that the show was set to promote Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party.
Kedrov, the band’s manager, said Tuesday that the band had declined the offer, adding that it has “different plans.”
This week’s good news is that Sting declined to perform in Kazakhstan over the bad treatment of oil workers there, after he was harshly criticized by the British press for performing in Uzbekistan at an event promoted by the Uzbek dictator’s daughter in 2009. He was allegedly paid as much as $2 million.
Sting was, however, perfectly happy to perform at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum last month.
The people who run the forum have effectively disassembled the newly-born democracy in Russia by cancelling constitutional freedoms, turning elections into farce through manipulations and reintroducing censorship on television.
On the day Sting performed, more than 20 people were preventively arrested in the city to ensure they did not interfere with the forum and charged with ridiculous offenses, such as “using explicit language in public.” One can only hope that the fee Sting received was good enough to make him turn a blind eye to the lawlessness.
TITLE: Steppenwolf’s new home
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Steppenwolf Awards, co-founded by the beleaguered Moscow-based music critic and producer Artyom Troitsky with the aim of promoting talented, innovative and independent music, move to St. Petersburg this week.
The ceremony, featuring nominees that include some of the finest Russian indie rock and electronic music artists, will be held Thursday at the local venue Kosmonavt.
About 15 bands and artists, such as Yury Shevchuk of the local rock band DDT, Moscow-based rapper Noize MC and Sergei Mikhalok of the Minsk, Belarus-based band Lyapis Trubetskoy — and American guitarist, vocalist and composer of Latin music Omar Torrez as a special guest — will perform between one and four songs each throughout the show, which will be presented by Troitsky himself.
The Steppenwolf Awards were established in Moscow in 2008, originally as part of the Moscow Book Fair, and for the past three years have been held at Moscow’s Central House of Artists.
“There are a number of music awards in the country, but all of them are corporate ones; on the one hand, they are organized by music television channels or radio stations,” Troitsky says.
“On the other hand, everybody knows only too well how much these awards are manipulated or, to put it simply, are corrupt.
“My friends and I wanted there to be one award that is not corporate or biased, and not given for popularity or exposure — not for the number of copies sold or radio plays, but for real achievements in music or spheres connected to music.”
For the Steppenwolf Awards, nominees are put forward by a team of about 20 journalists and music industry professionals, while the winners are voted for by a jury. Awards are given for 16 categories, ranging from Best Song to Something Remarkable.
Troitsky claims that the awards do not reflect his personal music taste, but are simply the choice of music experts.
“There will be alternative rock, electronic music and some rap at the event,” he said.
“This year, I would say the awards are even less mainstream than usual. The main figures will be people like Mujuice, Zhenya Lyubich, Zorge, YestYestYest and Kira Lao.
“Out of mainstream artists, there will be Lyapis Trubetskoy, Vasya Oblomov and Noize MC, if he can be considered mainstream. I even heard that they were planning to ban Noize MC in St. Petersburg, because some commission has found references to drugs in his songs.”
According to Troitsky, Russian music has made dramatic progress since the awards were established.
“I think the music scene has improved greatly during the past two or three years,” he says.
“On my part, it would be too brash and immodest to say that the Steppenwolf Awards have had any considerable influence on it, although I can’t rule out that to a certain extent they have. At least, I know that these awards are respected by worthwhile musicians.
“But the main thing is that everything has become more interesting here than it was at least a couple of years ago. If you recall, in 2007, for example, there was no Noize MC, no Barto, no extreme rap, there was no huge number of English-language groups like Momoney, Scofferlane, and so on.
“Nor were there any interesting provincial groups like Kira Lao, 4 Positions of Bruno, Ptitsu Yem, bands from Novgorod, Kaluga, and so on. All this has emerged in the last few years. Or take St. Petersburg’s hippest girls like Nina Karlsson, Zhenya Lyubich, Galya Chikiss and others — they’ve all emerged in the last few years.”
“I would say that there has been a total revolution in quality Russian music as a whole during the few past years.”
Troitsky is wary of estimating the extent to which the Russian audience for indie music has expanded during the same period.
“I’m afraid there are no statistics, but the quantity of music and the number of artists performing it have become much higher,” he says.
“Secondly, the quality and diversity of this music have also increased very noticeably.
“I don’t even want to compare this music to what is shown on all sorts of television channels. It’s simply a different universe. There is [pop singer] Nikolai Baskov there, and there is 4 Positions of Bruno here. The abyss between these two poles is wider than that between Putin and Limonov.”
Ignored for the most part by the Russian media, the music with which the Steppenwolf Awards deal exists mostly in underground clubs, small festivals and on the Internet.
“This music mostly lives in three dimensions,” Troitsky says.
“The main dimension and core is the Internet, the second is live concerts, and the third is discs, because this music comes out on discs; plus there’s a small number of niche television stations such as A-One.”
According to Troitsky, these outlets are more up-to-date than the traditional Russian mass media.
“All that Russian pop crap exists in the media, which is slowly — like federal television channels — or quickly — like FM radio — sinking to the bottom.”
Troitsky promotes Russian music he finds interesting on his Voskhod label, a subsidiary of Soyuz recording company.
Although some of the bands released on his label are also nominated for Steppenwolf Awards, that is not intentional, according to Troitsky.
“To a certain extent, some things overlap, but I swear it’s only by accident,” he says.
“It happens that I have released albums by Mujuice and Kira Lao, and both Mujuice and Kira Lao are nominated in many categories, but it has nothing to do with the activities of my label. I simply liked Kira Lao when I heard her in concert and offered to release her album, while Roma Litvinov, a.k.a. Mujuice, is the son of my friend.
“Mujuice is now artist #1 in Russia, and Kira Lao is also quite a successful girl, and I don’t think that my work as a producer played any substantial role in their success.”
Many of the nominees and participants of the upcoming awards show are known for their dissident stance, but the recent controversy is that rock group Mumiy Troll — nominated for Best Concert but not due to participate in the awards ceremony — has just been scheduled to perform at the Seliger summer camp for the Kremlin-backed youth movement Nashi.
“I always feel hurt when talented people walk smack into talentless, demagogical projects like the concerts on Red Square, or at Seliger, etc. But it’s their business, after all,” said Troitsky.
Earlier this year, several criminal and civil cases, seemingly orchestrated by the Kremlin, were launched against Troitsky for his role in political and civic campaigns.
Troitsky is being sued by former traffic policeman Nikolai Khovansky, whom Troitsky called a “policeman of the foulest kind” for his role in putting the blame for a traffic accident involving a high-positioned oil industry official on two women who were killed in the accident. He is also being sued by pro-Kremlin musician Vadim Samoilov, described by Troitsky as “Surkov’s performing poodle” (in a reference to the Kremlin’s ‘gray cardinal’ Vladislav Surkov).
The latest plaintiff is the Federation charity’s chair Vladimir Kiselyov, who was offended by Troitsky’s comment on the ill-famed, Putin-headlined charity show after which funds for the stated causes initially failed to materialize.
“I’ve been to quite a lot of hearings lately, and the day after Steppenwolf there will be another regarding the ‘poodle’ with Samoilov,” Troitsky said.
“Things aren’t going too badly so far. The court didn’t agree to change the charge of ‘insult’ into ‘extremism’ and did not forbid me from leaving the city.
“It looks like both the Khovansky and Samoilov cases will go to expert analysis and my great hope is that the analysis will be objective. Even if, in my view, everything is crystal clear even without any expert analysis.
“But if the judges want to refer to some academic authorities, I hope that the academics will live up to their proud titles of philologist.”
The Steppenwolf Awards Show, featuring Omar Torrez, Mujuice, Noize MC, Sergei Mikhalok of Lyapis Trubetskoy, Kira Lao, Zorge, Barto, Vasily Shumov, Yury Shevchuk, Zhenya Lyubich and PTVP, takes place at 7 p.m. on Thursday, July 7 at Kosmonavt, 24 Bronnitskaya Ulitsa. M: Tekhnologichesky Institut. Tel. 922 1300.
TITLE: Scandal at the Tchaikovsky
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Controversial decisions abounded at the 14th International Tchaikovsky competition that concluded in Moscow and St. Petersburg last weekend as the event struggles to regain its international reputation and influence under the leadership of its new head, the Mariinsky Theater’s artistic director, Valery Gergiev.
Held once every four years, the event comprises competitions in piano, violin, cello and voice.
The competition’s Grand Prix went to Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov, who also won the first prize in his discipline. Both first prizes in the vocal contest went to South Korean singers soprano Sun Young Seo and bass Jong Min Park, while in the violin category, the jury decided not to award a first prize. The first prize in the cello category went to Armenia’s Narek Hakhnazaryan.
Although Gergiev described the event as a great international success, not all aspects of the competition, which was held in two cities for the first time since it was created in 1958, went smoothly.
Following a rehearsal with Hakhnazaryan, cello conductor Mark Gorenstein was heard, via the Internet, making a derogatory remark about the 22-year-old cellist, including a crude reference to his ethnic origin. Gorenstein subsequently withdrew from the competition “due to illness” and was replaced by a pair of conductors from the Mariinsky Theater.
Music critics watching the vocal competition were left speechless when the jury decided to eliminate Mariinsky soprano Olga Pudova, one of Russia’s most outstanding participants in the competition, before the third round.
“Soprano Angelina Nikitchenko was so bleak and colorless that I wondered how the singer made it to the second round, let alone the final,” said Vladimir Dudin, a music reviewer who wrote a blog on the Tchaikovsky Competition’s web site. “By contrast, Pudova was sensational, her every performance resulting in an ovation. Her singing was a triumph of a brilliant coloratura with stunning fiorituras and fantastic range.”
Regrettably, the international element of the vocal competition was scarce. The only European singer to make it through the selection process was French mezzo-soprano Aude Extremo, who was eliminated after the first round.
Canadian soprano Yannick Muriel Noah — again, the only vocalist representing the whole of North America — also failed to make it past the first round.
On the other hand, while 22 of the forty singers competing in the vocal contest were Russian, they failed to impress. Only three Russians made it to the final round, and only one — Moscow soprano Yelena Guseva — went away with an award, winning the third prize.
Those following the pianists’ competition in Moscow were amazed to see Alexander Lubyantsev be eliminated from the contest after the second round. The crowd and critics alike had adored the pianist, who received a spontaneous engagement from the Mariinsky Theater to perform Mozart’s piano concerto alongside the Mariinsky symphony orchestra at the Mariinsky Concert Hall on July 4.
The question of why international participation in the competition was more than modest — in all disciplines, Russian musicians accounted for the lion’s share of the participants — has two possible answers. Either the European and North American participants were considerably weaker than their Russian counterparts, or they simply ignored the Tchaikovsky competition altogether. The latter theory appears far more likely, considering the contest’s deteriorating reputation over recent years, complete with speculation that the jurors tend to distribute the prizes between their favorites.
It is believed that foreign singers decide against taking part in the Tchaikovsky Competition because it entails singing pieces from the Russian repertoire — in Russian. Another consideration that places a role is the country’s visa regulations.
Gergiev has succeeded in attracting some of the leading names in the world of classical music to sit on the competition’s jury. The names of the jurors for the prestigious event were impressive: The vocalists’ performances were judged by Renata Scotto, Ileana Cotrubas, Olga Borodina, Yelena Obraztsova and Vladimir Atlantov, while the jury for the violinists’ competition included Anne-Sophie Mutter, Leonidas Kavakos and Maxim Vengerov.
One of the world’s most acclaimed violinists, it was Mutter’s debut as a jury member at any music competition. Although Mutter admits she does not believe in competitions, as she feels they have more to do with sports rather than the arts, and in her opinion talent and stage charisma do not always go hand in hand, which puts contestants on an unequal footing, the star violinist this time made an exception.
“I have been following the Tchaikovsky Competition since the age of seven,” said Mutter. “Some of its winners became my idols, such as the violinist Gidon Kremer. And I really admire what Gergiev has been doing to restore the reputation of this competition, so I wanted to help him.”
Many of the jury members themselves received a kick-start to their careers at the Tchaikovsky Competition. The jury’s honorary president is the world-renowned American pianist Van Cliburn, the sensational winner of the first Tchaikovsky competition in 1958.
Another innovation by Gergiev was the organization of Internet broadcasts, not only of the competition’s rounds but also of the rehearsals — a great step toward increasing the event’s transparency and attracting younger audiences.
Clearly, however, more efforts are needed to repair the reputation of the Tchaikovsky Competition, as it is evident that potential participants have lost faith in its objectivity. The reputation of any music competition is created not only by the prominent names of the people sitting on the jury: It is the ability of a contest to discover and highlight new talent that makes it high profile and desirable for musicians to attend.
TITLE: The word’s worth: The Really Cool People Say ‘Dot’
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: What do soap, a hamster, a doggie and a little mouse all have in common?
In English, not much. In Russian, they are all slang terms connected with your computer and the Internet.
They are also wonderful illustrations of the clever and diverse ways in which the Russian language claims, transforms and reinvents words from English.
Take ìûëî (soap). When e-mail appeared, Russians decided to use this similar-sounding native word to describe it. E-mail and ìûëî can be the message that is sent (also called ñîîáùåíèå, ìåññåäæ or ìåñàãà), or the way it’s sent (also called ýëåêòðîííàÿ ïî÷òà — electronic mail).
When sending e-mail in Russian, slangy speakers use either ïî and the dative (ïî ìûëó) or íà and the accusative (íà ìûëî). Îòïðàâü ìíå åãî òåëåôîí ïî ìûëó (Send me his telephone number by e-mail). Ïîëüçîâàòåëü ìîæåò ðàññûëàòü íà ìûëî îïðîñû, ïðèãëàøåíèÿ è ïðàéñ-ëèñòû (The user can send surveys, invitations and price lists by e-mail).
Sadly, it seems that whimsical ìûëî is being pushed out by the loan word èìåéë, aka e-mail, ýìåëÿ, å-ìåéë, åìåéë or åìàéë.
Russians apparently didn’t like saying õîì (home — a web site’s home page), so they wittily transformed õîì into a similar and familiar Russian word: õîìÿê (hamster). This is not to be confused with English computer slang, in which the hamster is a wireless (tailless) mouse.
And speaking of mice, here Russians use a calque — that is, they translated the slang word “mouse” into the Russian equivalent ìûøü or ìûøêà. If you want a wireless one, ask for áåñïðîâîäíàÿ ìûøü. And remember that the mouse may sit on a pad in Des Moines, but in Tula the ìûøêà runs along a êîâðèê (a small rug).
The most interesting of the computer creatures is ñîáà÷êà (sometimes ñîáàêà). In standard Russian, ñîáà÷êà is a little dog. In the world of modern communications, ñîáà÷êà denotes @ — the “at sign.”
If you’re curious, in standard Russian, @ is called êîììåð÷åñêîå at or ýò (the commercial “at”). When giving your e-mail address, you say or spell out your þçåðíåéì (user name), sometimes called íèê, and then say: “ñîáà÷êà ìåéë òî÷êà ðó” (at mail dot ru). The really cool people say äîò instead of òî÷êà.
No one knows why @ is called ñîáà÷êà. Some speculate that the sign looks like a little dog with a curled tail to Russians, probably because other languages have taken to calling it a snail, pig’s tail, elephant’s trunk or monkey’s tail. But in other languages it’s a pretzel, roll-mop herring, strudel or a cinnamon roll. And if we’re going for analogies with foreign tongues, Russians could have called it anything from óëèòêà (snail) to áàðàíêà (wheel).
I have another theory, which is probably absolutely wrong. But since it can’t be proven either way, here it is: Ñîáà÷êà has several meanings other than a small dog. It’s the pull-tab on a zipper, the trigger of a rifle, the locking device that prevents a gear from moving backward and any sort of small wedge. In other words, ñîáà÷êà is a bit of a thingamajig.
The word has also generated the nice slangy verb ïðèñîáà÷èòü, which means to attach or stick something onto something. The not-very-handy do-it-yourselfer might ask: Êàê ïðèñîáà÷èòü ìîëäèíã? (How do you stick molding on?)
In my theory, through various linguistic associations in Russian, that thingamajig odd sign that gets wedged or stuck between your user name and your server became ñîáà÷êà.
Or not. In any case, at least you know how to say your email address in Russian.
Michele A. Berdy, a Moscow-based translator and interpreter, is author of “The Russian Word’s Worth” (Glas), a collection of her columns.
TITLE: Identifying Norway’s Soviet graves
AUTHOR: By Nick Dowson
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: There are six Ivanovs listed on the web site: Grigory, Semyon, Pavel, Vasily, Pyotr and Alexei.
Ivanov is one of Russia’s most common surnames, so it is unlikely that the six were relatives. What they do have in common though, is that all of them died on Norwegian soil between 1942 and 1945, where they remain to this day.
The Ivanovs are listed on the Krigsgraver web site — launched earlier this year — which lists basic information about close to half of the roughly 13,000 Soviet citizens who died in prison camps in Norway during World War II.
The database is part of a project called “Krigsgraver Soker Navn,” or “War Graves Seek Names.”
“We started the project about one year ago, compiling the data about prisoners and where they were held, from Norwegian, German and Russian archives,” said Marianne Neerland Soleim, project manager for the team that has created the database. “So far we’ve added 3,500 new names to what we had before, but it’s been difficult work, particularly as the Germans and Russians often have place names spelled wrongly — they wrote them down just as they heard them.”
About 100,000 Soviet prisoners of war were held captive in Norway from 1940 to 1945, while it was occupied by Germany.
The prisoners were used as captive labor to build railroads, roads, fortresses and aerodromes for the Nazi war effort, Soleim said. “The conditions in the camps were very hard, especially in northern Norway. Sometimes the death rates were as high as 90 percent, though some of the commandants treated the prisoners a little better.”
Prisoners of war were taken to Norway after being captured in fronts across Europe, many during fighting in Ukraine, Belarus or in Yugoslavia. The vast majority were Soviet citizens, and the database, which has been created with funding from the Norwegian government, can be searched in Russian, Norwegian or English.
POWs received mixed treatment from locals. “Some Norwegians treated them well,” Soleim said. “But some told the Germans if they found escaped prisoners.”
At the end of the war, the Norwegian government deported the 84,000 surviving Soviet prisoners back to the Soviet Union. About 30 managed to avoid being sent back and remained in Norway.
One of those who never returned is Alexei Perminov, who attended the launch of the database in Oslo earlier this year.
“This database is important for relatives of the prisoners, so they can find out what happened,” he said. “It has importance for those who are living. If you were a son of someone who died in the camps you’d want to know more.”
Perminov, 88, is currently writing memoirs about his life in the camps and how he avoided the forced return to the Soviet Union.
Vasily Vasilyevich Tolochka, deputy general director of the organization War Memorials, welcomed the site, although he said Russian site www.obd-memorial.ru, an attempt to collate all those dead or missing in action during the war, sometimes has more information.
“However, the Norwegian database gives extra information as it even contains information about where POWs died,” he said. “It’s good that there is this database.”
“War Graves Seek Names” is online at Krigsgraver.no.
TITLE: In the spotlight: The Death of Russian Cinema
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
TEXT: Last week, Channel One controller Konstantin Ernst took a dig at the luxuriant breasts of retired ice dancer Anna Semenovich, saying they were doubly responsible for the death of Russian cinema. And a little bit of a fairy tale died, as Russian-born model Natalia Vodianova revealed that she has separated from her husband, British aristocrat Justin Portman, whom she had married in a perfect market stall-to-mansion story.
Lank-haired Ernst was the man behind “Irony of Fate 2,” a remake of the Soviet New Year’s comedy with added product placement so blatant that one character even worked for Beeline. So he had plenty of chutzpah when he gave a lecture at the Moscow International Film Festival on why young people do not want to see Russian films any more.
He blamed “The Balls of Fate,” a movie-length adaptation of a television sketch about hapless migrant workers in Moscow. Oh, and Semenovich, whose famous bosom stole the scene in “Hitler Kaput,” a parody of Soviet war movies. Oddly enough, both were huge hits. I rather enjoyed “The Balls of Fate,” which had a slightly subversive message about the orange-clad gastarbeiters rising up at the end, with nothing to lose but their orange jackets and brooms. Although I have to admit giving “Hitler Kaput” a miss.
“The guys with ‘The Balls of Fate’ and the mammary glands of Anna Semenovich have so turned off the most active youth audience from Russian cinema that they won’t go to see a Russian film any more, not even a good one that is worth watching,” Ernst intoned in a lecture quoted in Komsomolskaya Pravda.
What audiences can’t stand is being deceived, he bewailed, although that has never stopped Channel One from airing promotion for its films as items on its nightly news show.
The story was lavishly illustrated with a large photograph of the said breasts. Oh, and a still from the film, showing Semenovich vamping with a pistol and very tight dress, like an earlier version of Anna Chapman.
Semenovich, who used to be an ice dancer, has had a brilliantly varied career, moving on to be a member of girl group Blestyashchiye to sitcom actress and television host, even if she is condemned to be remembered primarily for her breasts, which have grown noticeably larger since her skating days and prompted snide speculation about silicon. But maybe she just needs an inspired film director to make her frolic in the fountain with the horses on Moscow’s Manezh Square, “Dolce Vita” style.
Meanwhile, Vodianova announced in the ES magazine — the glossy published by the London newspaper Evening Standard — that she had separated from her husband of nine years and was in love with someone else, after rumors had swirled around for more than a year. Vodianova grew up in grimy Nizhny Novgorod, a city always described in Dickensian terms in magazine profiles — and sounds to have been really poor, even working at a market stall at one point. But with those legs and sparkly eyes, she was obviously not going to stay weighing out fruit, and she got her big break as a model, moved abroad and the rest is Hello! magazine. She married Portman, an aristocrat and half-brother of a super-wealthy property tycoon, whose own profession is sometimes described vaguely as an artist, and they had three children in quick succession, while she was still in her 20s.
Rumors of a separation surfaced last year, when Russian media named a possible new man in Vodianova’s life as a Channel One director, Andrei Boltenko.
Recently “Russia’s Cinderella,” as Komsomolskaya Pravda gushingly calls her, has been seen with a prominent Russian divorce lawyer, it said Thursday.
TITLE: The Dish: Flora and Fauna
AUTHOR: By Ciara Bartlam
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Located directly above its own cake shop on a stretch of the Petrograd Side packed with restaurants and cafes, Truffle is a delightful chateau in the heart of St Petersburg.
Designed with French Provence in mind, walking into Truffle is a little like walking into your own home. British visitors may even feel like they are dining in a Laura Ashley furnishings store, of which the restaurant’s clean, light interior and occasional floral decoration are reminiscent. While a chintzy home decor store might not be everyone’s idea of cool, the warm smiles upon arrival and sofas you can sink into are impossible to resist.
The color scheme is nautical with soft, beige tones and light blue hues on the ceiling and napkins. If you ignore the air vents strung from the ceiling, which only slightly mar the classically-French country interior, and the dull-toned music, which is uninspired but on the whole unobtrusive, then you might actually imagine yourself away from the big city, just for an hour or two.
Truffle has something for every member of the family, with a brightly decorated kids’ room right beside the dining area, so children can be seen and heard — but only when necessary. There is also a childminder at weekends.
Alongside the modest, welcoming atmosphere and pleasantly kitsch interior, Truffle boasts a menu prepared by Pavel Bulgakov (formerly of Ginza Project) with dishes ranging from sea bass steak (570 rubles, $20.50) to a rack of New Zealand lamb (890 rubles, $32). For younger taste buds, there is also an array of pizza and pasta dishes ranging from a reasonable 220 to 480 rubles ($8 to $17) in price.
For starters, the goat cheese and beetroot salad (320 rubles, $11.50) and the scallops with mango sauce (590 rubles, $21) were a treat. The goat cheese was smooth and satisfying, and the combination of it with the beetroot, pine nuts and pesto thrown in was worth the 40-minute wait.
The scallops — notoriously difficult to cook — had a subtle taste and supple texture, beautifully contrasted by the crunch of the asparagus and the sweetness of the sauce. Colorful, light and thoroughly enjoyable, the dish was spot on for summer.
For the main course, the duck with bilberry sauce (720 rubles, $26) was divine. With the one obvious omission on the menu being side dishes and not a lot of carbs otherwise, the chef certainly makes up for it with meat — and indeed, what meat! Cooked to perfection and served with cabbage, oranges and bilberry sauce, it was a dreamy dish, and in the end, the lack of carbohydrates did not diminish the dish’s success: Instead, it was refreshing, filling and seriously moreish all at once.
Beef Stroganoff (390 rubles, $14) was homely and substantial: A simple, traditional take on the national favorite with no frills.
Last but certainly not least, in a restaurant that prides itself on its downstairs confectioners, it would be rude not to sample something from the dessert menu, and with prices ranging from 60 to 310 rubles ($2 to $11), it is tempting to try everything. The menu includes classics such as tiramisu (260 rubles, $9) and French pancakes (250 rubles, $9), but Truffle’s piece de resistance is, unsurprisingly, its speciality truffle (120 rubles, $4). This is a must even for those who do not have a taste for chocolate. The chocolate was creamy and not too sweet, but laced with a hint of chilli that set the mouth alight with a myriad of taste sensations.
With a business lunch available from noon to 4 p.m. on weekdays, Truffle is a fantastic place for lunch and also for families — and, of course, for those with a sweet tooth.
TITLE: And Quiet Flows the Don
AUTHOR: By Irina Filatova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: ROSTOV-ON-DON — If you walk around the city center in Rostov-on-Don, one of the most likely things to catch your eye would be groups of Cossacks dressed in traditional dark-blue uniforms and pants with red stripes.
The Cossacks, riding chestnut horses, seem to have leaped off the pages of Soviet writer Mikhail Sholokhov’s novel “And Quiet Flows the Don,” which won him a Nobel prize for literature in 1965.
The vast Don River, which divides Rostov-on-Don in two, is largely associated with Sholokhov’s name, and statues of his most well-known characters are scattered throughout the city.
One of the statues, depicting a boy fleeing from geese, is located near the city’s main street, Bolshaya Sadovaya, with its mansions dating from the late 18th century that now house the local administration and the offices of Russian and foreign banks.
City residents take particular pride in the mansions, mostly white or pale yellow and decorated with stucco, which give the street the atmosphere of a bygone era of nobles’ receptions and balls.
“My great-grandmother worked as a maid for a banker’s wife before the 1917 Revolution, and when we came to one of the mansions, a former Noble Assembly building, several years ago, she suddenly said: ‘I remember this place. I used to accompany my lady to balls here,’” said Tina Shaposhnikova, a senior public relations executive with a local company.
Rostov-on-Don has changed significantly since those days, with the Soviets turning it into a huge industrial city and one of just 12 Russian cities that has a population of more than 1 million.
Rostov is also a key transportation hub, providing a water route to five seas, including the Black, Azov and Caspian seas. The country’s two most important land routes — the North Caucasus Railroad and the Don highway — also go through the city.
The local administration is developing transportation infrastructure and getting ready to start construction of a stadium after Rostov-on-Don was named a host city for the World Cup in 2018.
Locals, however, seem to like a homegrown sport even more than football: tractor racing. Every summer, tractor drivers from all over the Rostov region turn into Michael Schumachers at the Bizon Track Show, the only rally of its kind in Russia.
The roaring tractors, tearing through mud and dust at the race just outside Rostov-on-Don, return to their normal farm work immediately after the contest. Agriculture and the production of agricultural equipment are among the most rapidly developing sectors in Rostov-on-Don and the region. In fact, Rostov-on-Don is headquarters for one of the world’s biggest combine makers, Rostselmash Group, which has plants in the United States, Canada, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
Another sector associated with Rostov-on-Don for decades is the production of helicopters. The city is home to Rostvertol, a unit of Russian Helicopters, one of the world’s biggest helicopter producers that has supplied India and Venezuela, among others.
Rostov-on-Don, which was founded in 1749 as a customs point, has traditionally been a merchants’ city. Today, company offices, administrative buildings and residential districts are located on the right bank of the Don, while the left bank is occupied with numerous restaurants and bars.
The river’s banks are connected by two bridges — a new one opened in late 2010 and the Voroshilovsky bridge built in 1965. Driving over the bridge from one bank to the other takes about 20 minutes — which is just enough time to notice how quietly the Don flows.
What to do
if you have two hours
The most popular place in the city is the Don Embankment, which is always packed with city residents and tourists, sitting on carved benches and enjoying red and purple carpets of flowerbeds.
Walk in the shadows of towering trees and along black cast-iron fences on the river bank. Pause to listen to street musicians perform classic music and Russian folk songs. Don’t forget to stop by one of the numerous cafes for a snack of freshly caught fish.
Check out the statue of Rostovchanka — the young girl of Rostov with her hair fluttering in the wind. She symbolizes the beauty of all the Rostov women.
Finally, take a short trip on the river aboard one of the snow-white steamboats tied up along the Don Embankment. The river ride offers the best view of the right bank, with the golden domes of the Orthodox Cathedral of the Nativity of the Holy Virgin peeking out from behind brand-new hotels and apartment buildings. You might catch a glimpse of the massive railroad bridge being raised to let ships through to the port, a twice-a-day event. River trips can be arranged through DonTur (23a Beregovaya Ulitsa; +7 863-279-7360; dontour.ru). Steamboats depart from the Don Embankment from 9 a.m. to 3 a.m., and the price for an hourlong trip ranges from 130 rubles to 210 rubles, depending on the time of the day. Ticket offices are located near Quays 21, 22 and 23.
If you want to stay downtown, walk along the most beautiful street in the city, Pushkinskaya, which runs parallel to Bolshaya Sadovaya Ulitsa. A variety of colors makes the street especially beautiful, with the white and purple splashes of flowerbeds stretching between wide walking paths decorated with red and yellow paving stones.
Stop by the statue of poet Alexander Pushkin, after whom the street got its name, and look at black wrought-iron globes depicting Pushkin and scenes from his works.
Pushkinskaya Ulitsa leads to one of the city parks — Maxim Gorky Park, a popular place where locals while away the evening hours. Check out a sign at the entrance marking the city center and showing the distance from the city to Paris and New York.
What to do
if you have two days
You are in Cossack country, so you must visit a Cossack village — called a stanitsa — to enjoy views of the quietly flowing Don and perhaps learn a couple of traditional Cossack songs.
Get a feeling for everyday Cossack life at a traditional Cossack kuren — a stone hut covered with clay — in Stanitsa Razdorskaya or Stanitsa Starocherkasskaya.
Further away is Stanitsa Vyoshenskaya, located 360 kilometers northeast of Rostov-on-Don, but a must-see village because this is where Sholokhov wrote his “And Quiet Flows the Don” and where the main action of the novel takes place.
Visit the State Sholokhov Museum-Reserve (60 Ulitsa Sholokhova, Vyoshenskaya; +7 863-532-1377) and its highlight, the writer’s two-story pale-yellow mansion in the center of the village. Walk along a narrow path through the garden behind the house and down to the bank of the Don. Check out white kurens surrounded by low wattles described by Sholokhov in his book.
Stop at the observation point, which provides a breathtaking view of the Don flowing between slightly sloping banks. The place can easily be found thanks to a huge statue depicting a scene from Sholokhov’s novel: main characters Cossack Grigory Melekhov riding a horse and Aksinya carrying buckets full of water on a balance beam.
Two other popular destinations in the region are the ancient city of Azov, a former fortress owned by Turks and conquered by Peter the Great during his Azov campaign of 1696, and Taganrog, the hometown of writer Anton Chekhov.
Bus trips to these sites can be organized through Reina Tour NTV (126 Bolshaya Sadovaya Ulitsa; +7 863-295-0914; +7 863-272-6732; reina-tour.ru) or Rostov Tour (56 Voroshilovsky Prospekt; +7 863-232-9315; rostov-tour.ru).
What to do with kids
The Rostov Circus (45 Budyonnovsky Prospekt, +7 863-240-7093), located in a huge mansion with columns and an ancient chariot decorating the roof, bears a striking resemblance to Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater. The action inside, however, is quite different, with tigers, acrobats and clowns.
The local zoo (3 Zoologicheskaya Ulitsa; +7 863-232-8291) is one of the largest in Russia and boasts rare species like tapirs, white rhinoceroses and white-tailed eagles.
Nightlife
The left bank of the Don is crowded with bars and nightclubs, so a visitor can simply drop into any establishment that looks inviting.
Several popular bars and nightclubs are also located on the right bank. Go to Chesterpub (1g Budyonnovsky Prospekt; +7 863-262-5272; chesterpub.com) to listen to live rock concerts by local and visiting musicians like Chizh & Co, Nogu Svelo and Serga, as well as the Ukrainian rock band Okean Elzy.
Alternatively, drop in to Cork, an Irish bar, for a glad of Irish whiskey and Irish folk songs performed by local musicians (224 Ulitsa Tekucheva; +7 863-230-8383; barcork.ru).
Where to eat
Given the city’s location on the river, fish and seafood dishes are a must-try, and many restaurants on both banks of the Don offer them.
A popular spot with visiting Kremlin and government officials is Petrovsky Prichal (45 Levoberezhnaya Ulitsa; +7 863-240-1358; petrovsky-prichal.ru), located on the left bank of the river and about 20 minutes by car from the city center. Try a platter of various sorts of fried local fish like zander, carp and mullet — served with crawfish, boiled potatoes and vegetables. A meal for one without alcohol costs 1,000 rubles to 1,200 rubles.
In the city center, the Pirs (16a Beregovaya Ulitsa; +7 863-259-8167) offers European and Asian cuisine, including a choice of grilled local fish. Mezonin (Astor Plaza trade center, 49 Budyonnovsky Prospekt; +7 863-297-5981) specializes in original cuisine like seafood pasta and melon gazpacho with blackberry and mint. A meal at either restaurant without alcohol costs 800 rubles.
Where to stay
Rostov offers a choice of more than 30 hotels throughout the city, including a number of business-class options.
Don-Plaza (115 Bolshaya Sadovaya Ulitsa; +7 863-263-9052, don-plaza.ru/en.html) is an enormous congress hotel with 233 rooms and prices starting at 4,950 rubles per night for a single to 21,600 rubles per night for the presidential suite. The hotel, which opened in 1973 as Intourist and was reconstructed in 2004, was initially built for visiting foreigners after Rostov became one of the most popular tourist destinations in the Soviet Union. The hotel, which hosted the Russian-EU summit in 2010, is still popular among foreigners, and its guests have included German rock band Scorpions and British rockers Deep Purple. Don-Plaza is located in the city center, minutes away from the major places of interest, and a drive of 15 minutes to an hour from the airport, depending on traffic.
Take a trip back in time at the Villa de Ville (55 Prospekt Mikhaila Nagibina; +7 863-231-0041, villadeville.com/en/), a two-story boutique hotel built in the style of an 18th-century villa and boasting an ivory-white and gold interior. Each of its 12 rooms has a name that reflects its individual decor. The Mon Amour room, for one, is decorated with small statues of angels hanging from the ceiling, while La Cite has a big panel depicting Venice hanging on the wall. Prices range from 7,000 rubles to 18,000 rubles per night. The hotel is located about 15 minutes by car from the city center and a 30-minute drive from the airport.
Cultural tips
Rostov-on-Don, with its numerous theaters, has long been a cultural center of southern Russia. Visit the Rostov Academic Drama Theater (1 Teatralnaya Ploshchad; +7 863-263-7173; rostovteatr.ru), built in 1935, to enjoy performances of classic and modern plays.
Even if you don’t catch an opera, ballet show or operetta in the Rostov State Opera and Ballet Theater (134 Bolshaya Sadovaya Ulitsa; +7 863-264-0707; rostovopera.ru), make a visit to the building anyway to inspect its unique construction. The building is constructed in the shape of an open white piano.
Conversation starters
Aviation is a sure bet for starting a conversation, because many city residents work or have worked at the Rostvertol helicopter plant and devoted their lives to the industry.
“I love aviation,” said Nikolai Belusyak, a former pilot who has worked as an electric engineer at Rostvertol for 25 years.
“Each helicopter is like a child. It behaves a different way,” said Belusyak, a robust man with tanned hands and a large cross hanging from a thick golden chain around his neck.
Another topic is local markets, which have lots of fish from the Don. Locals will gladly explain which fish to buy and how to choose it.
You also can’t go wrong with author Mikhail Sholokhov.
Other helpful hints
Rostov-on-Don could easily compete with St. Petersburg in traffic jams, so driving between the airport and the city center can take at least an hour at midday.
How to get there
Regular scheduled daily flights to Rostov-on-Don from St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport take 110 minutes. Tickets start at 13,000 rubles ($467).
The Rostov-on-Don International Airport (aeroport-rostov.ru) is one of the biggest civilian airports in Russia. It is located directly in the city and is surrounded by apartment buildings. The two-story airport building has a currency exchange office, a duty-free shop and a VIP area.
Rostov offers direct flights to a number of European cities, including Dusseldorf, Frankfurt-am-Main, Prague, Vienna and Rome. The airport has offices for international airlines like Lufthansa, Austrian Airlines and Turkish Airlines.
Daily trains heading from St. Petersburg to cities such as Kislovodsk, Adler, Anapa, Makhachkala, Novorossiisk, Sochi and Vladikavkaz stop in Rostov-on-Don. The trains depart from the Moskovsky and Ladozhsky railway stations. The 1,540-kilometer trip takes 30 to 40 hours. Prices start at 4,400 rubles ($158) for a round-trip.
Rostov-on-Don
Population: 1.089 million
Main industries: helicopter manufacturing, agricultural equipment production, textile industry, food production.
Mayor: Mikhail Chernyshyov
Interesting fact: The city was initially called Rostov and got the “on-Don” suffix only in 1928 in order not to be confused with Rostov Veliky in the Yaroslavl region.
Founded in 1749 at the order of Empress Elizabeth Romanova as the Temernitskaya customs point and later named after the fortress of Metropolitan Dmitry Rostovsky, founded on the customs point in 1761.
Helpful contacts: • Mayor Mikhail Chernyshyov (47 Bolshaya Sadovaya; +7 863-244-1414, City Hall; +7 863-244-1323, Mayor’s Office; rostov-gorod.ru/eng/); • Nikolai Prisyazhnyuk, head of the Rostov regional branch of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry (40a Kirovsky Prospekt; +7 863-268-7600; eng.tppro.ru).
Sister cities: Pleven, Bulgaria; Kajaani, Finland; Le Mans, France; the German cities of Dortmund and Gera; Volos, Greece; Glasgow, Scotland; Cheongju-si, South Korea; Antalya, Turkey; Mobile, Alabama, U.S.
Galina Demchuk,
Director of Mart-Rostov, a medium-sized firm that produces magnets and other souvenirs with images of Rostov and other cities.
Q: Why did you choose manufacturing souvenirs?
A: I received a salary of 4,800 rubles ($172) as a mathematics teacher at State Don Technical University and had to pay 4,500 rubles in utilities fees. So I quit to start my own business. Souvenirs with city images appeared to be in high demand. Images of small towns are especially popular, not Moscow or St. Petersburg, which are full of souvenirs.
Q: Who are your main customers?
A: When I started the business five years ago, we focused only on Rostov-on-Don. Now we supply our products to 154 Russian cities, from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok, with big souvenir companies being the main clients. We have many customers. My workday starts at 3 a.m. and finishes at 9 p.m. — and that’s great!
Q: What makes your business successful?
A: A large assortment, low prices and small output. My magnets sell for 10 rubles to 15 rubles ($0.36 to $0.54) each, which is possible because of low production costs. It costs me 4 rubles 30 kopeks to make a magnet: The plastic cover costs 4 rubles, and it costs 30 kopeks to print a city photo on the color printer. Also, our small output makes it possible to order just 10 items, which is convenient.
Q: What problems do you face?
A: Exporting products across the border. Customs fees are very high. Many companies want to collaborate with me because I have low prices. I’d like to work with China and Germany, and the Czech Republic is also very interested.
Q: What sights are worth seeing in Rostov?
A: The Rostov Academic Drama Theater and the Rostov State Opera and Ballet Theater are worth visiting. There are also a huge number of things in the Rostov region, including Stanitsa Vyoshenskaya and Stanitsa Starocherkasskaya and Taganrog. The view of the Orthodox cathedral in Novocherkassk is breathtaking: a huge cathedral on a huge square. You’ll never see anything like this in Paris or London.
Mikhail
Chernyshyov,
Rostov-on-Don mayor
Q: What makes Rostov-on-Don attractive for foreign investors?
A: It has a good location and is a big transportation hub connecting Europe and Asia. The city provides good logistical opportunities, because it has railway, air and sea connections, as well as many roads. Also, Rostov is home to many universities and therefore has good personnel potential. In addition, Rostov has sincere and hospitable people who also have business acumen.
Q: Which foreign companies have a presence in Rostov-on-Don?
A: We have Coca-Cola, Pepsico, Turkish carpet manufacturer Merinos, brewer Efes Russia and a number of retailers — Metro, IKEA, Leroy Merlin, Auchan and Media Markt.
Q: What does City Hall do to attract foreign investors?
A: We provide tax breaks and other benefits for investors. We also lead big investment projects in order to reduce administrative barriers and help investors get connected to power lines. There are a number of investment projects overseen by me and the governor personally.
Q: Which sectors are developing most rapidly?
A: Agriculture equipment manufacturing, with Rostov-based company Rostelmash — one of the world’s biggest combine producers — accounting for 17 percent of the world market and 65 percent of the domestic market. We also are developing food production. Yug Rusi is one of the biggest producers of sunflower oil and exports 25 percent of its products. We also have the textile industry, as Rostov is home to clothes maker Gloria Jeans. And, of course, we have helicopter production.
Q: What will the city look like in 10 years?
A: The city will continue to be the center of scientific, financial and cultural life in southern Russia. We’re implementing a new development strategy now that focuses on developing innovations, transportation and education and increasing the quality of people’s life. This will increase Rostov’s competitiveness in Russia.
Q: What do you recommend seeing in the city?
A: Well, we say that you haven’t seen Rostov if you haven’t been to the left bank of the Don. The Don Embankment and Pushkinskaya Ulitsa are also must-sees, because you can feel the pace of Rostov life there.
TITLE: In Czech Republic, Russians Are Back and Thriving
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PRAGUE — The Russians are back.
Twenty years after Soviet troops left to the delight of a liberated nation, Russian schools, businesses, newspapers and communities are thriving in and around Prague.
But while many Czechs seem to be leaving decades of bad blood behind them, there’s alarm in Russia at the economic impact of a new wave of middle-class immigration to Eastern Europe, where life seems far simpler and where EU membership brings dynamism.
“Private property rights are questioned every day. It’s an awful business environment here [in Russia]. There is even a danger to people’s freedom,” opposition leader Mikhail Kasyanov said in an interview.
Statistics reveal a deep loss of confidence in Russia among foreigners and Russians alike. In the first five months of this year, net capital outflow from Russia hit a staggering $35 billion, which even the government admits is due to a highly unfavorable investment climate.
Some of that money is finding a new home in countries like the Czech Republic, and many newcomers plan on staying for the foreseeable future. Kasyanov — a former prime minister — said Slovakia, Bulgaria and the Baltic states Latvia and Estonia are also proving popular as Russians seek destinations cheaper than London or New York.
“Don’t return!” was the advice given to 20-year-old Valeria Tarhanova by her parents. She left the city of Krasnoyarsk in central Siberia to study at a hotel business school in Prague.
“I’ll stay here and hope to work possibly in a hotel,” she said in solid Czech. “I don’t know what to do in Russia. There are no jobs and life’s much worse.”
But Boris Pankin, a foreign minister under Mikhail Gorbachev, considers the Russian exodus a source of pride.
“It’s exactly what we were fighting for during perestroika,” Pankin said in an interview this week in Prague, where he was attending a conference looking back at the fall of communism. “It is a very important achievement — a right for people to leave whenever they would like to leave. I welcome it.”
The armies of five Warsaw Pact countries — the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and East Germany — invaded then-Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush the Prague Spring, the extraordinary flourishing of personal and artistic freedoms ushered in by leader Alexander Dubcek’s reforms.
Almost overnight, the brutal crackdown turned Czechoslovakia into one of the most hard-line regimes behind the Iron Curtain, killing the dreams of an entire generation, poisoning life with fear and sending dissidents to prison. At least 108 people were killed by Soviet troops in 1968, dozens of others in following years.
The Velvet Revolution led by Vaclav Havel brought communism to an end in 1989. Two years later the last of 75,000 troops departed.
Many Czechs — especially the younger generations — have moved on.
“I don’t consider it a problem. To be honest, I just don’t think much about it,” said Katerina Heilmann, a 32-year-old Prague translator. “But I read about the Russian mafia operating here, and that’s a cause for concern.”
Czech officials say more than 30,000 Russians have residency permits, although the real number is considered much higher. There are almost four times as many Ukrainians. Like Russia, Ukraine also suffers from systemic corruption and a stifling bureaucracy, and the nation was devastated by the global financial crisis.
A survey conducted in June by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center showed that 39 percent of Russians aged 18 to 24 would like to leave the country. The polling agency surveyed 1,600 people in 138 cities and towns across Russia on June 4-5. The margin of error was 3.4 percent.
Russian immigration to the Czech Republic dates back to the 1917 Revolution when some 30,000 people fled.
“They all settled here well,” said Milan Pospisil, of the Czech Government Council for National Minorities. “It’s not a serious problem for them to understand the language.”
For years, Russia’s mega-rich have been setting up residence in Britain and sending their children to British schools. The new wave to Eastern Europe, though, has a very different feel.
“You wouldn’t find any billionaires like in Britain here,” said Anna Chlebina, editor-in-chief of the Russian Word, a monthly magazine released in Prague. She has settled with her husband and five-year-old daughter in what she calls a “more predictable country where trams go on schedule.”
She said many families with boys simply leave to avoid conscription: “For an ordinary person, it’s a huge problem to do military service in Russia.”
Alexander Barabanov, a 30-year-old businessman and chairman of the Association of Russian-speaking Youth in the Czech Republic, revels in his personal freedom.
“It’s quiet here,” said Barabanov, who came to Prague in 1999 to study medicine before switching to business. “You don’t have to worry that one day your offices could be raided by policemen with Kalashnikovs.”
Roman Avanessian, the Armenian co-owner of the Arbat store, which sells Russian products including caviar, vodka and DVDs, said he was attracted to the country by the peaceful way in which then-Czechoslovakia separated peacefully into two nations in 1993.
“The Czech Republic and Slovakia are probably the only two nations in the world that were able to split in such a way,” he said, reflecting on his last home in the North Caucasus.
“I know very well what it means when nations start to fight each other.”