SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1667 (29), Wednesday, July 27, 2011
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TITLE: Victim: Boiko Stalling Court Case
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Twelve months after the incident, the defense team of police officer Vadim Boiko, on trial for exceeding authority has put prolonging the proceedings at the top of its priorities, victim Dmitry Semyonov said Tuesday.
In the most recent, twelfth hearing last week, Boiko’s lawyer Anna Myurrei produced a set of motions claiming that Semyonov, whom — as a video from the Strategy 31 rally in defense of the right of assembly taken on July 31, 2010 shows — Boiko hit on his head with his baton, “provoked” Boiko into hitting him.
She demanded that Semyonov’s remark be submitted for linguistic analysis.
The video of the incident made by Nevsky Express television shows Boiko verbally insulting the people who gathered for the rally near Gostiny Dvor and Semyonov asking him to stop using foul language. After the remark Boiko approaches Semyonov, seizes him by his hair and hits him with a truncheon across the left side of his head.
“Our position is that Semyonov’s remark may have been a planned provocation, but to establish whether it was, special expert analysis is needed,” Myurrei was quoted as saying.
Speaking by phone Tuesday, Semyonov said that according to the law on the police in force at the time of the incident, Boiko had no right to beat him in any case.
In March, Boiko claimed in an interview with the website of Moi Rayon newspaper that he did not beat Semyonov and that the apparently incriminating video was a montage fabrication. The defense demanded Nevsky Express provide the unedited version of the video recording last month.
But the unedited version shown at a hearing earlier this month confirmed that Boiko did hit Semyonov with his baton.
Judge Yevgeny Didyk of the Kuibyshevsky District Court rejected the defense’s other motions, in one of which Myurrei suggested that Semyonov might have been an active protester connected with The Other Russia oppositional political party, as not being relevant to the case.
“Lawyer Myurrei is working to prolong the trial as much as possible,” Semyonov said.
“She brought in a whole package of motions, where she picks on petty details.
“She found photographs from the May rally on my page in vkontakte (the Russian equivalent of Facebook) and said that I was an active participant and was aware that I could receuve a beating, so it served me right. But obviously it has nothing to do with the law on the police.”
In the other motions, the defense referred to a web photo, where Semyonov is shown with an activist of The Other Russia, and an interview with Andrei Dmitriyev, the party’s local chair, where he spoke about the Boiko case.
According to Semyonov, the defense is employing the stalling tactics in order to ride out the media interest to the case.
“Reporters come, they see these pointless activities and they have nothing to write to their Moscow offices about, it just gets boring,” he said.
Boiko is charged with “exceeding authority in the use of police tactical gear.” Although police beatings have been frequently reported during the rallies, no other officer has yet been charged with the offense, which is punishable by five to 10 years in prison.
On July 31, 2010, Boiko was also seen dragging a woman by hair, while at least two people claimed he beat them, but the investigators did not recognize them as victims.
Twelve months after the incident, Semyonov said he was still satisfied with how the trial is going, despite stops and prolongations, some caused by Boiko’s alleged health problems.
“Our prospects look good, because [Boiko’s defense] appear to have nothing left to say,” he said.
“It looks like the trial is coming to a close. The judge is handling the trial in a proper manner, to the point, I like the way he’s doing it.”
The court began hearing the case on February 9. The next hearing is due to be held on August 4.
TITLE: Georgian Court Frees ‘Spy’ Photographers
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TBILISI, Georgia — Three Georgian photographers were found guilty Friday of spying for Russia but were released from court after receiving suspended sentences in a 45-minute trial.
Irakli Gedenidze, a personal photographer of the Georgian president, Zurab Kurtsikidze of the European Pressphoto Agency, and Georgy Abdaladze, a photographer for the Georgian Foreign Ministry who has also freelanced for The Associated Press, were arrested and charged with espionage this month. Despite initial claims of innocence, all three later confessed to supplying Russian intelligence with sensitive information.
The men were greeted outside the court by fellow journalists and tearful relatives who kissed and hugged them. They had no immediate comment. The defendants’ arrests had caused outrage in Georgia and prompted calls to declassify the case files.
The case also aggravated already tense relations between Georgia and Russia, which has dismissed the spy arrests as a fabrication.
On Friday, the defendants signed a plea agreement in which the prosecutors asked for suspended sentences for them, citing the value of the information they had disclosed to the investigators. Shortly afterward, Judge Zubab Esebula convicted the three photographers of spying and released them with suspended sentences.
The judge gave a four-year sentence to Abdaladze and Gedenidze, three years to Kurtsikidze, and 18 months to Gedenidze’s wife, Natia, who was found guilty of abetting espionage.
The sentences are short for spying convictions. They also do not appear to correlate to investigators’ earlier allegations that Kurtsikidze was the ringleader.
TITLE: Fired Officials Given Softest of Landings
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Kremlin has developed a habit of announcing the dismissal of top police officers almost every week. The latest firing occurred last Friday.
But a closer look at the shakeups shows that some of those who lose privileged positions suddenly reappear in other plush jobs — just without the same fanfare.
Take for instance Nikolai Ovchinnikov, a two-star police general sacked by Medvedev from his powerful post as deputy interior minister in February 2010.
Only three months later, in May 2010, he was appointed as head of the All-Russia Institute to Raise the Qualifications of Interior Ministry Staff.
The February 2010 shakeup also cost Arkady Yedelev his job as deputy interior minister.
Yedelev, who rose in the ranks of the KGB and its successor, the Federal Security Service, in Siberia, resurfaced only two months later as a deputy to Alexander Khloponin, Medvedev’s then newly minted envoy to the North Caucasus Federal District.
But a failure to achieve a working relationship with Khloponin apparently led to Yedelev’s ouster in April of this year.
It is unclear what the 59-year-old is up to now, but he is rumored to be in Chechnya.
The rotund three-star police general with a hard-line reputation reportedly formed a far better relationship with Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov. In December 2009, Yedelev traveled to Chechnya and presented Kadyrov with the shoulder straps of a two-star police lieutenant general.
The ousters of Yedelev and Ovchinnikov can be explained by Medvedev’s desire to fill the Interior Ministry with people loyal to him. (They were replaced by two senior members of the Kremlin administration: Sergei Gerasimov and Sergei Bulavin.)
But the shakeup also raises questions about whether the Kremlin’s current efforts to clean house in the country’s notoriously corrupt police force will succeed.
“It all depends on an official’s position in a clan. As long as he has broken no clan rules, he will be protected,” said Vladimir Pribylovsky, an analyst with the Panorama think tank.
The February 2010 shakeup also included a top police official who was already behind bars when Medvedev signed the decree.
Buryatia’s top police official, Viktor Syusyura, was arrested in October 2009, implying that he had led the East Siberian region for months from prison.
He stands accused of contraband charges along with his deputy Andrei Shurupov, who has claimed he was tortured in detention.
Syusyura’s legal troubles stem back to 2006, when he headed the Interior Ministry’s Azov-Black Sea transportation department. Investigators say he helped a group import goods from the Middle East without paying customs.
Syusyura has started fighting back — even though he is now in a Krasnodar region detention center.
Last week, Novaya Gazeta published an open letter from Syusyura in which he denied the charges as fabricated and accused two Lebanese businessmen living in Russia of running the scheme.
Syusyura also implicated Nikolai Simakov, his former deputy in the Krasnodar transportation police who is a deputy police chief for the North Caucasus Federal District, in the affair.
Syusyura claims that Simakov was fired from the post of deputy head of the Krasnodar transportation police in 2006 after an inspection initiated by him revealed that he had failed to respond for three years to the smugglers’ activities at the Adler airport, which serves Sochi.
Syusyura is vague about the fact that he was Simakov’s direct boss between 2003 and 2006, according to his biography published on his web site, syusyura.ru, and Simakov’s official biography.
Indeed, both officers were removed from Krasnodar in 2006, with Syusyura becoming Buryatia’s police chief and Simakov becoming Chechnya’s first deputy interior minister and head of the republic’s criminal police.
In December 2008, Medvedev relieved Simakov from the Chechen Interior Ministry, but he soon resurfaced as head of the federal Interior Troops in Chechnya, a function that includes the position of deputy police chief for the North Caucasus Federal District.
Both the Interior Ministry and the North Caucasus Federal District police did not answer repeated calls for comment Monday.
Critics have long assailed the police reform as cosmetic — like the name change from “militsia” to “politsia” — and argued that corruption will remain endemic as long as the top echelons aren’t radically cleansed and wrongdoers prosecuted.
Medvedev has promised to reduce the number of Interior Ministry personnel from 1.2 million to 1 million while boosting salaries. Last week, he signed a bill that more than triples salaries from the current average of 10,000 rubles ($360) per month.
The recent sackings of deputy ministers, especially First Deputy Minister Mikhail Sukhodolsky, who became St. Petersburg’s police chief, have resulted in Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev being encircled by Medvedev loyalists, but Nurgaliyev himself remains firmly in place.
Some observers believe that Medvedev won’t touch Nurgaliyev because he is Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s man. A career FSB officer, Nurgaliyev was appointed by then-President Putin in 2004.
But Alexei Mukhin, an analyst with the Center for Political Information, said Medvedev would not like to see Nurgaliyev weakened or even removed because he has proven the most loyal of ministers. “He has carried out every one of the president’s orders. Why fire him?” he said.
TITLE: Polluted City Tries To Trick Google
AUTHOR: By Oxana Andrienko
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A city widely reputed as Russia’s dirtiest wants to prevent search queries in Yandex and Google from displaying negative reports about its ecology — and is willing to spend taxpayer money to do so.
Chelyabinsk authorities launched last week a state tender worth 300,000 rubles ($10,700) to “optimize” Yandex and Google queries using 15 search phrases, including “radiation in Chelyabinsk,” “dirtiest city in Russia” and “ecology of the Urals.”
The first 150 search results in each of the queries must display predominantly “positive or neutral opinions of the ecology of Chelyabinsk and the Chelyabinsk region,” according to the tender’s description, available on Zakupki.gov.ru. Only 20 percent of the queries may contain negative reports about the region’s environment. The count does not include search hits for Russian Wikipedia, of which no “optimization” is requested.
Chelyabinsk is not Russia’s dirtiest city — the spot has been occupied by Norilsk since 1992 — but it ranked in the top 10 last year, the State Statistics Service said in June. The city, which has a population of 1.1 million, hosts many industrial facilities, including a metallurgical plant and a ferroalloys factory.
In 1957, nuclear waste exploded at a facility in the closed town of Ozyorsk in the region, leading to radioactive emissions estimated at one-twentieth of the Chernobyl disaster. The story was hushed up until 1989. Search queries related to the incident are also to be modified, according to the tender’s description.
Whistleblower Alexei Navalny, who reported the story on his blog Thursday, called the tender “disgusting and immoral” and dubbed Chelyabinsk Governor Mikhail Yurevich a “proactive idiot.” The governor announced a campaign to change the region’s public image last September.
But a spokeswoman for the regional government, Svetlana Doronina, called reports about the region’s pollution “horror stories” spread by “radical environmental activists” in the pay of foreign competitors of the local industry, Chelyabinsk.ru reported. She did not name any names.
Yandex and Google are not amused by the tender.
“Yandex has a negative attitude toward any attempt to mislead users and the search engine,” company spokesman Ochir Mandzhikov said by e-mail on Friday.
Google Russia spokeswoman Alla Zabrovskaya said by telephone that impartiality is the main principle of the search engine and the content’s relevancy is defined solely by Google users.
TITLE: Small Printer Defies Deripaska Over a Lease
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Mikhail Senatorov has printed catalogs for carmaker Audi and advertising agency BBDO and campaign posters for United Russia. The Office of Presidential Affairs gave his company its Printer of the Year award.
But these days Senatorov produces a steady flow of letters to law enforcement officials and executives at Basic Element, a company controlled by billionaire Oleg Deripaska.
His company, Offset Print House 21, is mired in a dispute with Basic Element, which owns the Tryokhgornaya textile factory where he leases his premises, and he fears that he’s going to get kicked out.
“We live like we’re in a fortress under siege,” said Senatorov, general director of Offset Print House 21, which he opened with business partner Nikolai Yelagin in 2001, a year before the textile factory was purchased by Basic Element Group.
Disputes between business owners and landlords are nothing new. But what makes this unique is that few small business owners have dared to challenge a billionaire as powerful as Deripaska.
Basic Element said its plans for the factory, portions of which were built in the 18th century, are to facilitate textile manufacturing. But some observers suspect that it wants to develop a luxury office center in the factory on 15 Rochdelskaya Ulitsa, near the White House.
“The redevelopment of the place would be quite lucrative because many companies are interested in having a prestigious address near Kutuzovsky Prospekt,” said Anastasia Uspenskaya, a consultant with the Jones Lang LaSalle real estate agency.
Senatorov’s printing plant, which he built from scratch inside the old brick factory, is in jeopardy. The factory management, he said, wants to remove his business, with an annual turnover of $3 million to $4 million and 85 employees, from its premises.
The reason? The Deripaska-owned company is not satisfied with the rent Senatorov pays: $45 per square meter per year for a space of 1,400 square meters. Jones Lang LaSalle estimates that the market value for a lease for renovated premises on the site ranges from $8,000 to $16,000 per square meter.
While the lease amount might sound laughable for premises located near the White House and World Trade Center, the price in the contract, which runs through 2016, is not subject to renegotiation.
Senatorov acknowledged that the price might be low, but he noted that in addition to the printing plant, he has signed contracts to rent three areas of the factory for $220 to $360 per square meter annually. “That makes it a medium rental price on the market,” Senatorov said.
The factory has terminated the agreements for the three areas, with the last being severed in June, and the printer’s main building is now the only facility left.
Senatorov and his business partner said they were willing to move to another location but they want $2 million in compensation for the money they spent renovating and equipping what was an abandoned factory building when they moved in.
Senatorov said the building had been used for dying fabric, and nothing more than walls and the roof were in place when he arrived. Even the floor had to be replaced because of damage from the acid dyes.
“They told me they have no premises within the factory, and that was all,” he said.
However, Tryokhgornaya spokeswoman Tatyana Yamshchikova said the factory offered Senatorov a chance to relocate after city officials gave a special historical status to the building he occupies.
“But the company management tried to take advantage of the situation by demanding compensation that is 3 1/2 times greater than the sum received from the print house over the 10 years of the lease,” Yamshchikova said.
Senatorov said the factory met his demands with a declaration of war. In February, the factory prohibited the printer’s trucks and clients’ cars from entering its territory, demanding that he pay 150 rubles ($5) every time a car enters and 6,000 rubles ($200) for a monthly pass for one car. “It was done without any explanation. They have chosen to terrorize us,” Senatorov said.
He said he has paid almost 94,000 rubles ($3,000) for single-car passes for visitors over four months.
In May, Senatorov said, the factory cut his phone and Internet cables, forcing him to use his cell phone for business communications and to switch to more expensive wireless Internet. He said he believes that phone operator West Call cut the lines under pressure from the factory and that no one else’s cables were cut on the premises.
West Call representatives had no immediate comment on the claim.
Senatorov said he has filed complaints about the factory with the prosecutor’s office and Federal Anti-Monopoly Service and even wrote a letter to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, whose United Russia party was among his clients.
Senatorov in January was named Printer of the Year by the Office of Presidential Affairs for his work with government agencies.
This month, the Presnensky District Prosecutor’s Office sent him a letter saying that an additional investigation would be made in the case, Senatorov said.
Incidentally, Tryokhgornaya textile workers also tried to attract the attention of Putin and his All-Russia People’s Front in late May, rallying against management plans to slash the work force and relocate the factory to Gavrilov-Yam, a depressed town in the Yaroslavl region that is also home to another textile factory owned by Basic Element.
The protesters were supported by the Russian Textile Union, which sent a letter to the Prosecutor General’s Office asking it to look into the situation.
This is not the first time that Deripaska, whose fortune is estimated at more than $16 billion by Forbes magazine, has been embroiled in a labor dispute. In 2009, Putin personally intervened after workers at a Basic Element-owned cement plant in the Leningrad region town of Pikalyovo blocked a major road demanding payment after the plant ceased operations due to high prices charged by local raw-material suppliers.
A spokesman for Deripaska’s Basic Element referred all questions to Tryokhgornaya.
Tryokhgornaya spokeswoman Yamshchikova said her company is “engaged in a continuing dialogue with the printer to reconsider the lease agreement.” She called the 2001 lease agreement “enslavement” and said the factory doesn’t rule out the possibility of going to court.
“We are amazed that the printer is making a business conflict public. That is called pressure,” Yamshchikova said.
Senatorov said he doubts that the factory will go to court. “This situation did not start yesterday,” he said. “They could have filed a lawsuit against us many times if they had a legal basis.”
TITLE: Russia Offers Norway Help Following Tragedy
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Pointing to its own struggle with extremism, the government has offered condolences and assistance to Norway in its investigation into a suspected ultranationalist who has admitted to going on a bombing and shooting rampage that killed at least 93 people.
One official also insisted that a similar attack could not happen in Russia, even as ultranationalists warned that an ongoing state crackdown could backfire by encouraging one of their own to take matters into his own hands.
A bombing shook government offices in downtown Oslo on Friday, killing at least seven people. Shortly afterward, a man dressed in a police uniform went on a shooting rampage at a summer camp run by the ruling Labor Party on a small island near the capital, killing 86.
Anders Behring Breivik, 32, told police that he had acted alone and had planned the “gruesome but necessary” attacks for years to promote his ideals of “cultural conservatism.” He earlier published a 1,500-page manifesto online that denounced multiculturalism, “cultural Marxists” and “economical Marxism,” which, he wrote, had destroyed Russia.
Breivik faces 21 years in prison — the strictest punishment the Norwegian legal system has for convicts.
Breivik, although linked in years past to right-wing extremists, appears to have no current ties to organized groups, legal or illegal. Nevertheless, President Dmitry Medvedev offered Russia’s help.
“The president has offered any kind of help that Russia could offer Norway in overcoming this tragedy,” Medvedev’s spokeswomen Natalya Timakova said in televised comments Saturday.
Mikhail Margelov, chairman of the Federation Council’s International Affairs Committee, said the help could include investigative assistance, seeing Russia’s vast experience with extremism. “Unfortunately, we have built up a sad experience in dealing with this,” said Margelov, RIA-Novosti reported.
Norwegian police have not commented on the offers.
Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin have both expressed condolences, and dozens of people have laid flowers at Norway’s embassy in Moscow and consulate in St. Petersburg.
The director of a summer camp closely linked to the ruling United Russia party at the Tver region’s Lake Seliger said a similar attack could not happen there. Seliger has a security staff of more than 100 people and a three-tier access system that cannot be traversed without a valid identification and a luggage check, the director, Alexei Volokhov said Sunday, RIA-Novosti reported.
A remotely similar incident — with a vastly different ideological background — took place in Moscow in 2003, when two female Islamist suicide bombers blew themselves up at the Krylya rock festival, killing 20. The bombers failed to pass entry checkpoints, which officials said helped avoid a much higher death toll.
Although Islamists, not ultranationalists, have been blamed for most attacks in Russia, representatives of the country’s far-right groups said the Norwegian events might be used by the authorities as a pretext to further suppress them.
“Reaction from authorities around the world indicates this,” Dmitry Bakharyov, a representative of Slavic Force, a successor to the banned Slavic Union, said by telephone Sunday.
Slavic Force declared Breivik as “the white hero” on its web site and accompanied a report of the Norwegian attacks with a quote from the Norwegian online newspaper Nettavisen: “It was expected, it was only a question of when it would happen.”
Bakharyov blamed Norway’s liberal immigration policies for the tragedy. “Norway is one of those countries that shelters Chechen radicals,” he said, referring to dozens of Chechens who have moved to Scandinavia since the end of the second Chechen war in the mid-2000s.
Breivik “was not connected to any radical group, he just didn’t like the existing situation where his country invites all kinds of immigrants from anywhere,” said Bakharyov, whose day job is a lawyer.
Curiously, the Norwegian far right was closely involved with a Slavic Union member, Vyacheslav Datsik, last year. Datsik, a former mixed martial arts champion and convicted robber, fled a psychiatric facility near St. Petersburg and was detained in Norway carrying a gun whose origin he never managed to adequately explain. Aided by local ultranationalists, he unsuccessfully sought asylum and was deported to Russia in March.
Alexei Baranovsky, a leader for Russian Verdict, a public group that provides legal support to rightwing radicals, said he did not expect the government to take a tougher stance on Russian ultranationalists after Norway.
“The screws are wound to the max and being tightened still more, so you don’t need an external pretext,” said Baranovsky, whose group helped ultranationalists Nikita Tikhonov and Yevgenia Khasis during their trial, which ended with lengthy sentences for both in April. The couple was found guilty of killing human rights lawyer Mikhail Markelov and reporter Anastasia Baburova in 2009.
But, Baranovsky added, the Norwegian massacre is an illustration of how state policies might backfire and urged the authorities to take note. “Maybe some politicians should consider the turn that the nationalist opposition might take if it’s not allowed into the parliamentary race,” he said. State Duma elections will take place in December.
In the 2000s, the Kremlin regularly faced accusations of “flirting” with ultranationalism, including by creating the nationalist Rodina party just two months before Duma elections in 2003. But the Kremlin later purged Rodina from politics, merging it into the pro-Kremlin Just Russia party in 2006.
Ultranationalists accused in the killings of dark-skinned migrants have also gone on trial in recent months, including a trial that ended last month with the jailing of most members of the paramilitary National Socialist Society.
There are no nationalist parties in the Norwegian parliament, unlike in Finland, where the rightwing True Finns party won 39 seats earlier this year, Baranovsky said. The election victory gives nationalists a voice in the political process that keeps growing dissatisfaction in check, he said. He did not comment on deadly Finnish school shootings in 2007 and 2009, the first of which was also carried out by a man with extremist views. The second has been called a copycat crime.
Law enforcement officials will step up surveillance of rightwing groups following the Norwegian attacks to maintain calm ahead of the Duma elections and the presidential vote in March, said Alexei Mukhin, an analyst with the Center for Political Information. He said Russia’s ultranationalists are unlikely to follow Breivik’s example for fear of retaliation, but a copycat attack from “a crazy person” could not be ruled out.
“You can’t protect yourself from crazy people,” he said.
TITLE: Federal Minister Slams City Managers
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Regional Development Minister Viktor Basargin has denounced a growing practice of replacing elected mayors with hired city managers as “ineffective.”
“We’re not done analyzing their work, but from the results we have we cannot recommend expanding the institution of city managers to towns and small localities,” Basargin said Friday, RIA-Novosti reported.
City managers are ineffective largely because they bear no responsibility for their performance, he said. He did not say whether he advocated the rollback or the revision of the reform.
No official statistics are kept on the issue, but direct mayoral elections have been abolished in half of the country’s cities with populations of more than 200,000, according to research conducted by Alexei Sidorenko at Moscow State University.
City managers, an institution established in the United States and gradually introduced in Russia since 2003, are appointed by local legislatures to handle economic- and finance-related tasks, limiting the scope of responsibilities of elected mayors to ceremonial duties and interaction with the federal government.
The institution is seen as a Kremlin attempt to strip city authorities of their independence, making them a part of the “power vertical.” Russia’s international obligations explicitly prohibit the cancellation of mayoral elections, and the Council of Europe criticized the implementation of city managers in 2006.
Prominent cities with managers include Chelyabinsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Murmansk, Perm, Tyumen, Volgograd and Yekaterinburg. Several of the cities saw public protests when the post was introduced.
Many cities that introduced the institution did so on the advice of regional governors, who themselves have not been elected since 2004 and often are embroiled in fights with mayors.
“The mayoral elections are the last stand of democracy,” said Mark Feigin, a member of the Solidarity opposition group who served as Samara’s deputy mayor during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency in the 1990s.
Basargin’s criticism of city managers echoes a recent exchange on local self-government between President Dmitry Medvedev and Right Cause leader Mikhail Prokhorov.
Prokhorov said at a June congress for Right Cause that elected him as party leader that he was “strongly against” the institution of city managers. He also urged Medvedev during a subsequent meeting in the Kremlin to change the tax system to allow local authorities to keep a bigger share of revenues for local needs.
Medvedev voiced cautious support of Prokhorov’s ideas, saying the “centralization of power, even in such a complicated federation like Russia, could not last forever,” according to the Kremlin’s web site. Medvedev said he has asked governors to create task forces to create proposals on possible reforms to the electoral system and the distribution of power in the country.
TITLE: Cops Idle, Vigilantes Seek to Stop Child Abuse
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — It took just two days for the online profile of a fictitious 12-year-old girl to attract the attention of an older man.
When the man asked to meet the girl, whose profile was created by child rights activists and Moscow police, undercover police officers stood by to capture him on video camera.
But that was all they could do.
Russian legislation, unlike in the United States and other Western countries, does not allow the arrest of a suspected offender unless a child has actually been abused.
But at least the police showed up. Many police officers do not, ignoring a flood of reports from volunteers struggling to stem child abuse, activists say. Officers seem to prefer to crack down on suspected extremism, often involving anti-Kremlin political groups, and unsanctioned street rallies.
Some disillusioned activists have turned vigilante, tracking down and even beating up suspected offenders who are, after all, unlikely to complain. But grassroots violence is no replacement for government action, which so far, has been limited to a draft bill envisioning chemical castration for convicted sex offenders and reams of bureaucratic babble.
While President Dmitry Medvedev launched an overhaul of the corruption-ridden national police force in March after public confidence in law enforcement sank to new lows, activists fear that children will still receive scant attention.
The sting operation that ended in the videotaping occurred in Moscow this spring and was announced by child rights activist Denis Davydov at a roundtable organized by the ruling United Russia party this month.
“Maybe we should criminalize the cyber-contacts of pedophiles with children,” Davydov said at the roundtable, which was devoted to child sex abuse.
None of the high-ranking attendees, who included federal legislators, a senior prosecutor and a police chief, voiced support for the proposal.
But U.S. law allows the arrest of people entrapped by police officers pretending to be underage, Davydov said in an interview. The problem, he said, is that Russian law bans entrapment of suspected child sex offenders.
The law also appears to be unable to curb abuse. Children’s ombudsman Pavel Astakhov said on his web site this month that reported instances of suspected abuse soared by 147 percent to 623 percent last year, depending on the type of abuse. More than 9,500 children were victimized last year, he said.
At the same time, about 7,500 people were convicted on child sex charges, including 2,500 repeat offenders, according to statistics on the Kremlin’s web site.
But the figures tell little about the real story, say activists, who complain that police have ignored their attempts to expose cases of abuse.
Among the most prominent activists is Anna Levchenko, a Moscow-based member of the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi, who details her campaigning on her LiveJournal blog, Agatacrysty.
It’s a depressing read. For example, she wrote in February that she had handed information to the Tula region police about a man who posted child pornography online and admitted to regularly abusing eight boys under 14 on an Internet forum.
The law requires police to reply to complaints within 30 days, but all Levchenko got was a private conversation with a local police officer two months later, she said by telephone. The officer told her that the region’s Investigative Committee had refused to open a criminal case for lack of proof that the man had acted intentionally when he posted the pornography online.
But Tula region police said in an e-mailed statement Wednesday that they did take action on Levchenko’s complaint and informed her of that by telephone. They declined further comment on the case, citing an ongoing investigation.
The statement also accused Levchenko of frightening the suspect into fleeing Russia by continuing to report about him on her blog despite being asked not to do so. The man left Russia in June, the statement said, without specifying why he was not detained before that.
Levchenko said the police should have “at least sent a piece of paper” to prove that they were working on the case. “How can I know that they are really looking into my complaint?” she said.
Levchenko, who works with some 200 activists, said her group has alerted law enforcement agencies about 80 suspected offenders over the last six months and received by e-mail about 2,500 complaints since March.
The group’s efforts have led to four cases being opened.
A more aggressive group of activists operates under the name Head Hunters and posts personal information about suspected offenders on a blog, Goodwin-hunters. According to the blog, the Moscow-based group also alerts the friends and relatives of suspected offenders about their alleged activities, and its members sometimes pretend to be children and arrange meetings with adults online. When the adult shows up for a “date,” several activists beat him up.
“We believe that even though we are hunting them, their numbers are only growing,” said the group’s leader, whose online name is Goodwin and who only agreed to a telephone interview on condition of anonymity for fear of his personal safety.
The group says it has been active since 2007 but only went public in May 2010 when it launched its blog on Mail.ru.
Despite its tactics, the group never faced criticism from the authorities. Goodwin said the group comprises about a dozen regular activists and hundreds of occasional or one-off supporters. He claims that it has tracked down 700 to 1,000 suspected offenders.
But the group’s efforts have failed to impress law enforcement officials. In 2009, it sent information about several suspected offenders to the Prosecutor General’s Office, but the agency forwarded it to the Interior Ministry’s cybercrime department, which “flat-out refused to accept information about pedophiles,” saying its job was limited to child pornography, Goodwin said.
When the group passed a list of 150,000 web pages containing child pornography, many of them on the Vkontakte social networking site, to the cybercrime department last year, police blocked access to most of these web pages and sent a note of thanks to the group but no pedophile was prosecuted, Goodwin said.
Nashi activist Levchenko, who has monitored the Internet for sexual content involving children for three years, said that “so much child pornography appears daily that we are constantly late in tracking it down.”
Yana Lantratova, a senior member of Childhood Territory, an initiative of United Russia’s youth wing, Young Guard, also said her group was getting the “runaround” from law enforcement agencies.
In March, Lantratova said, she complained to the Interior Ministry’s cybercrime department, the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Investigative Committee about a gynecologist who was suspected of posting online pictures of his underage patients. She received no reply.
Inquiries submitted Monday to the Interior Ministry’s cybercrime department, the Investigative Committee and the Prosecutor General’s Office went unanswered.
Child pornography is “a business sheltered by certain people,” said State Duma Deputy Grigory Ivliyev. Although he named no names, he spoke of “a system of corrupt law enforcement agencies” at the recent roundtable. He also said he and fellow legislators have asked police and Internet service providers to remove child pornography from the Internet but have been told that both groups lacked the power to act.
Ivliyev, a United Russia member and chairman of the Duma’s Culture Committee, also co-authored a 2009 bill introducing definitions for erotica and pornography, still absent from Russian legislation. The bill was dropped because the government did not approve of its wording.
Some organizations have had more luck in their efforts. The Friendly Runet Foundation, for example, has managed to have some 10,000 web resources with pornographic content involving children — both whole web sites and individual pages — taken down in 2010 alone, its head, Yevgeny Bespalov, told the roundtable.
Another group, League for a Safe Internet, was created in February under the auspices of the Communications and Press Ministry and four telecom giants to combat illegal online content, including child pornography. It is headed by Davydov, who helped create the fake profile of a 12-year-old girl in the spring.
But Bespalov said the task is getting harder because child pornography is circulating mostly through social networking sites and file-sharing systems, not easily identifiable web sites.
Participants of the roundtable had no problem agreeing on the general outlines of what needs to be done: tightening Internet regulations, introducing hotlines to report suspected offenders, and spreading awareness about the issue among both children and parents.
But when activist Lantratova proposed to introduce “direct” communication between activists and law enforcement officers, the then-acting chief of the Interior Ministry’s cybercrime department, Konstantin Machabeli, questioned the very notion of activists hunting suspected offenders.
He said exposing suspects online would only make them “hide their activities better,” and fighting them face to face would be dangerous because their “reaction might be unpredictable and daft.” He did not comment on complaints of his agency’s nonfeasance.
Machabeli declined to comment to a Moscow Times reporter on the sidelines of the roundtable. Admittedly, he may have had other things on his mind — he was fired by the Kremlin days later. The presidential order cited no reason for the dismissal, but former Yevroset owner Yevgeny Chichvarkin earlier accused Machabeli of ordering police raids that bankrupted several companies.
After taking office last year, children’s ombudsman Astakhov spoke about a “pedophile lobby” in the Duma blocking legislation on the issue. But he voiced a more reserved stance in an interview with The St. Petersburg Times last Tuesday, saying the police simply lack specialists and courts underestimate the danger that offenders pose to children.
TITLE: Business Forum Links Innovators With Investors
AUTHOR: By Khristina Narizhnaya
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Displair, an Astrakhan-based company that develops interactive players that show videos in free air instead of a screen, will be meeting with several investors soon.
About a year ago, the Displair team began visiting innovation-related conferences to market their product, PR director Mikhail Bezruk said.
The team met Marchmont Capital Partners general director Kendrick White at the Seliger 2010 forum. White liked the project so much that he invited them for free to the Marchmont annual Innovations for Business forum, which took place on Wednesday and Thursday. There the Displair team met with potential investors.
President Dmitry Medvedev has continuously pushed for modernization, but Russia remains largely a country where entrepreneurs must fend for themselves. They are banding together and finding ways to continue their work with the help of group support of domestic and international entrepreneurs.
“We need to support entrepreneurs,” White said. “Real innovation comes from the bottom up.”
Russia’s business innovation sector has seen major changes in the last few years, White said. Among the major changes is the growth of educational forums and conferences and the rise of angel investors, or investors that provide capital for startups in early stages.
Venture capital company Sberinvest has agreed to finance 23 of 7,600 proposals that it has received over three years, board member Oleg Dyachenko said.
The reason for such a low ratio of proposals to financed projects is not the money — there is no problem with financing, Dyachenko said — it’s the poor quality of the proposals. Projects were either not well thought out, “idiotic” or total shams, Dyachenko said.
Poor innovation infrastructure and education is to blame for the lack of good ideas, experts said at the Innovations for Business forum in Moscow on Wednesday.
Many entrepreneurs see the lack of an organized innovation business network as the biggest hindrance to innovation.
Everything is on a regional level and unorganized, Bezruk said. It is difficult for entrepreneurs to understand where to turn for help.
“Every entrepreneur is on his own,” Bezruk said.
It is pointless to wait for any real support from the government on this issue, at least until after the election, Skolkovo program director Alexei Germanovich said. Entrepreneurs must share their experiences and help one another in order to grow.
Since early 2011, RUS, a small and medium-sized business organization, has been working to organize a nationwide network of professionals to offer support to one another and a new generation of entrepreneurs. The members currently include more than 60,000 graduates of the presidential higher management training program.
RUS’s main objectives include fostering communication among business innovators throughout Russia to offer advice and support. Plans for the network include a web site, currently under construction, and local chapters in Russia’s regions.
Although the number of innovative projects in Russia remains relatively small, business incubators and technoparks have popped up around the country. A third of Russia’s technoparks are “very successful,” Sarov technopark director Andrei Shpilenko said.
Despite rampant brain drain, successful innovations are taking place in Russia’s regions.
Andrei Khusid, general director of I&I Group, a business innovation consulting company, also runs the Higher School of Economics business incubator in Perm. The year-old program already has six startups.
“Innovators want to live in Tomsk and Astrakhan,” White of Marchmont Capital said.
Indeed, Displair had offers from foreign companies including Cisco and Siemens, but turned them down, despite the lucrative fees and the difficult entrepreneurial environment in Russia.
“I was raised that way, I guess — to build Russian business in Russia,” said Bezruk of Displair. “Call it patriotism.”
TITLE: Novatek Head Mikhelson Recalls Family Ties
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW — Billionaire Leonid Mikhelson, the main owner of Novatek, sold his Zhiguli car in 1991 to take part in the first round of privatizations. He told Vedomosti that only 40 percent of a businessperson’s success is “labor, intellect and goal-orientedness, whereas 60 percent is luck and the ability to take advantage of it.”
Q: Have you been lucky often in your life?
A: More than anything, I was lucky to have had my parents. My mom and dad both gave me a lot as a person; my dad also helped me professionally.
Q: Your father was also well known in your sector — he built pipelines?
A: He was well known in the Soviet Oil and Gas Industry Ministry. From childhood he took me to construction sites, but I didn’t want to become a builder. I dreamed of becoming a pilot, but I wasn’t accepted due to my poor eyesight. Then I wanted to become a professional athlete. I got into volleyball and almost left for Tashkent to play. But my parents asked that I first get an education, and I was accepted at a construction institute. I suffered a severe injury to my shoulder and had to forget about a sports career. I worried then, but now I understand that it happened for the better.
Q: Where did you start your career?
A: I had to go to Kharkiv on assignment, but I wanted to go up north. So I asked my dad for help and ended up working in Chelyabinsk as a foreman on the construction of the Urengoi pipeline. There I realized that building was my thing, and the north really captivated me. Everything there was done to the limit of possibility.
Q: What else did the north give you?
A: Huge experience and the ability to find a common language and work with any crew. People there were really varied; management often sent me ex-convicts.
Q: How were you able to succeed your father as director of the Kuibyshev pipemaking trust?
A: In 1987 my dad fell severely ill. I quit [my job] and for several months was unemployed, helping my dad as best I could. At the same time, I attempted to enter the Kuibyshev pipemaking trust. But party officials dragged out the decision. In the end, though, they called me into the regional committee and approved my request.
Q: Then you converted the Kuibyshev pipemaking trust into a joint stock company?
A: I was a man of the Soviet system. I respected it. I felt totally comfortable and could not imagine things any other way. So what went on in 1989-91 seemed to me like something savage. Chaos, no one leading in any way, total rearrangement of responsibilities. In the early 1990s, my company found itself with practically no orders. There were 4,500 employees, everyone with a family. At that time I thought only about how the enterprise, the work force, could survive — I wasn’t undertaking any global challenges. We basically worked under a barter system, building regional gas lines. A textile factory paid us with coat materials, a metallurgical plant with metal, and so forth. In such conditions, you can only lead effectively if you are the owner and control the entire process. So, when the chance came to convert the trust into a joint stock company, I requested that the Oil and Gas Industry Ministry permit it. As a result, I received approval but with some conditions: Local authorities would participate in the privatization, and the company’s director would not be able to buy up more than 15 percent. So in 1991, the Kuibyshev pipemaking trust became joint stock company Nova. I sold my Zhiguli and bought a 15 percent stake in Nova. The rest of the shares were bought by employees.
Q: So, Novatek grew out of Nova?
A: Novatek grow out of Novafininvest, a management company that we founded in 1994.
TITLE: Avianova Faces Legal Suit For Defaming Expat Staff
AUTHOR: By Roland Oliphant
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Expat managers kicked out of airline Avianova in an apparent shareholder dispute will sue the company over allegations of wrongdoing, they said Friday.
Avianova chief executive Andrew Pyne told The Moscow Times that he and his colleagues have already begun consulting with lawyers over claims made by Avianova that they had been fired for improper and legally dubious behavior.
“We reject unreservedly any suggestion of impropriety or illegal behavior by any member of the senior management team and will be taking legal action against comments made in this regard by LLC Avianova,” the managers said in a statement.
The rebuttal follows a statement by Avianova on July 14 in which the company’s general director Vladimir Gorbunov said Pyne had “demonstrated his unwillingness to work in compliance with Russian laws and emphasized his intention to work solely in accordance with his own rules.”
Gorbunov said he was obliged to remove Pyne and other Russian and expatriate executives from their positions after regulatory agencies brought repeated legislative violations to his attention.
The company also alleged that chief commercial officer Michael Hayden was responsible for the company’s loss of 4.5 million rubles ($160,000).
But the managers said the accusations were being “manufactured, primarily to justify retrospectively improper and arguably illegal actions taken by one set of shareholders on 24 June 2011,” the managers wrote.
“We are not the ones in noncompliance with Russian law: on the morning of 24 June, A1, working through its agents, unilaterally abrogated all existing agreements and understandings and effectively hijacked LLC Avianova for its own ends, without regard to the rights of the other shareholders, management or due legal process,” the statement continued.
In the strongly worded statement released late Friday, the expat managers, who remain in Moscow, said they believed relations between the shareholders had broken down so badly that only a “speedy” change in the “shareholder mix,” could resolve the matter.
“We no longer believe that the current shareholders will be able to resolve their differences in a manner which provides a stable platform for further growth,” the managers said.
Neither the managers nor the current administration of Avianova could be reached for comment Friday.
Pyne, Hayden and several other expat managers and Russian staff were barred from the Avianova offices on June 24.
Pyne has said he and his colleagues are “collateral damage” in a shareholder dispute.
Avianova is 51 percent owned by A1, the investment branch of Mikhail Fridman’s Alfa Group. Arizona-based investment firm Indigo Partners holds the other 49 percent.
The shareholders had been due to meet last week, but the meeting was postponed.
Neither A1 nor Indigo Partners could be reached for comment Friday evening.
TITLE: Four Myths of Russia’s Party System
AUTHOR: By Henry Hale
TEXT: Russia’s party system developed in a decidedly lopsided way during the 2000s. As with all things lopsided, it runs a serious risk of instability, which could occur over the next decade. Understanding how this is the case requires clearing up four common myths about political parties in Russia.
Myth No. 1. United Russia is an empty shell, constituting nothing more than a collection of ambitious elites with no genuine ties to the population. Public opinion surveys show this to be false. Take, for example, the Russian Election Studies surveys, which I co-organized. Not only can one fairly count over a quarter of the country’s electorate as party loyalists as of 2008, but the party also connects clearly in public minds with important issues, such as a generally market-oriented approach to the economy.
While United Russia’s support is also closely linked with its leader, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, this is far from the whole story. Indeed, part of Putin’s appeal is linked to issues — many of them the same ones identified with United Russia — as well as with a general “Putinist” style of leadership that in principle can be practiced by others. This strongly suggests that were Russia to open up its political system now, United Russia could not only survive but potentially thrive with good leadership. Comparative analysis shows that even highly personalistic parties can survive their initial leaders — for example, the Peronists in Argentina.
Myth No. 2. There is no viable opposition in Russia. Many claim that the Kremlin-sanctioned Communist Party is allowed only because it is unelectable, which means it can never inject real competition into the system. True, in its current form and under its current leadership, it is hard to imagine it ever winning the presidency or a parliamentary majority. It is too closely associated with a past that is too widely discredited. But parties can reform. Who would have thought in 1989 that former Communist parties could return to power in Eastern Europe? But they soon did even in Poland, birthplace of the Solidarity movement, and in Lithuania, a country that led the charge to bring down the Soviet Union.
The Communist parties were able to rebound because they reformed. They became something like classic European social democratic or labor parties. Some say that Russia’s Communist Party could not pull off such a feat, but a determined effort to reform the party, to shed discredited symbols and join the ranks of social democratic parties has the potential to succeed over the next decade should the right leader emerge. This could place it in position to reap the gains should the Kremlin and United Russia make major missteps by 2020.
Many believe that Yabloko, arguably the only other Kremlin-sanctioned opposition party after the Communist Party, has no chance of winning. Surely this is true for 2011-12. Marginalized parties do have the chance to rise to power once the ruling regime weakens, and this can happen suddenly. Take Mexico in 2000. The PRI party, which had ruled seemingly unchallenged for decades, fell victim to economic problems and before it knew what happened, the formerly minor PAN party rose to capture the presidency under a renewed leadership that seemed fresher than the incumbents. Neither Grigory Yavlinsky nor Sergei Mitrokhin are likely the figures to lead Yabloko to the promised land. But if it can survive over the next 10 years, its relatively clean reputation make it the most likely potential winner should United Russia and its patrons lose their footing and should the Communist Party fail to reform.
Myth No. 3. All the other parties are “virtual parties” that have no prospects whatsoever except as tools for the Kremlin. This is a myth with a grain of truth behind it. But history shows that political puppets can take on lives of their own when the puppeteer himself loses control. Virtual parties typically contain many ambitious figures who are trying to use the Kremlin as much as the Kremlin is using them.
Should the Kremlin falter, with United Russia and its patrons dropping in popularity and the springs of the political machine flying off, these ambitious figures are unlikely to sacrifice their own ambitions. Instead, they are likely to try to use the resources they have at their disposal to take the puppeteer’s place. Recall the battle for Stavropol region in 2007, when pro-Kremlin parties were given the green light to battle each other relatively freely for local authority: Quite a struggle emerged between United Russia and A Just Russia, one prompting the Kremlin to quickly switch the light back to red. What happens when the Kremlin is no longer in such a strong position?
Myth No. 4. The liberal opposition that is not sanctioned by the Kremlin, such as Parnas, has no hope of coming to power in Russia in the next 10 years. The current authorities will most likely continue to keep the Garry Kasparovs, Mikhail Kasyanovs, Boris Nemtsovs and Vladimir Ryzhkovs out of power. But by continuing to restrict competition as tightly as it now does, the Kremlin over the next decade or two risks its own “Arab Spring,” which means a transition over which it has much less influence. Recall that Hosni Mubarak’s ruling National Democratic Party seemed to be even stronger than United Russia in 2010, but it completely vanished by mid-2011.
In politics as in sports, champions are often better off going out while on top, while they can still shape their own graceful exit. But they rarely do.
Henry Hale is associate professor of political science and international affairs at The George Washington University. This comment appeared in Vedomosti.
TITLE: from a safe distance: Putin’s Quadriga Problem
AUTHOR: By Alexei Bayer
TEXT: Germans rarely treat us to a good laugh, so the decision to award this year’s Quadriga prize to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was a precious moment. Although given by a private foundation, the prize is a semi-official undertaking couched in the somewhat clumsy do-goodnik cheerfulness that the Federal Republic of Germany has affected since the end of World War II.
The horses atop Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, for which the prize is named, symbolize “friendship, harmony, state wisdom and bravery,” says the Quadriga web site, as well as “flourishing state, economy, art and sciences” that stem from these virtues. Most amusingly, “the Quadriga honors personalities and projects whose thoughts and acts are built on values.” Since Russia during Putin’s rule has become one of the world’s worst kleptocracies, those values are likely to be strictly monetary.
But the Quadriga is a kind of worldwide Jubilee award given to friendly politicians, artists and projects to mark the Oct. 3 anniversary of German reunification. The list of political honorees includes former Czech President Vaclav Havel and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, but it also includes some fairly questionable figures such as Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Giorgos Papandreou, the Greek prime minister and probably not the most popular man in Germany, given the Greek debt crisis.
In this lineup, Putin seems to stand out. Those who decided to honor him miscalculated badly. Both the Conservatives, who are in power in Germany, and the Greens came out sharply against the decision. Some prominent Quadriga board members announced that they were resigning and several past recipients, apparently including Havel, threatened to send back their awards.
Fearing a major scandal, the Quadriga found a face-saving solution: It canceled this year’s award completely. Palestinian National Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who was to be honored with Putin, also had his prize taken away, marking yet another instance when a Palestinian fell victim to Great Power politics.
As an outside observer, I greatly enjoyed the outcry and cheered the outcome. But I also felt that the entire messy affair was a tragedy for Russia.
Looking at Putin’s reputation today, we forget how many people in the early 2000s saw him as somebody who could restore Russia to greatness in the new century — particularly people on the right who thought that a former KGB officer could rebuild a strong state and introduce order and discipline into the free-for-all that replaced the Soviet Union. On the left, too, many remembered that the KGB had been the most reform-minded organization in the Soviet Union. They hoped that a Putin government could solidify the democratic gains of the previous decade and turn Russia into an orderly, prosperous and law-based modern nation.
Putin’s rule began under extremely favorable economic auspices. The 1998 default and ruble devaluation revived Russia’s industry, whereas rising oil prices filled government coffers. The decade to 2008 marked a period of rare prosperity. But just as many times in the past, Russia has been let down by its leaders. The expectations on the left and on the right were frustrated as Putin turned the country into a mafia state run by former security officers and systematically pilfered by its army of bureaucrats.
Among other things, the uproar over Putin’s award and the swift reaction by the Quadriga organizers show that the West is starting to realize that Russia is not an honorable partner. Germany has tossed Putin off its Quadriga but, unfortunately, the Russian people have gone down along with him.
Alexei Bayer, a native Muscovite, is a New York-based economist.
TITLE: Waging War
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The state’s pressure on the radical art group Voina — famous for its spectacular stunts spoofing the Russian authorities and the police — has increased in recent days, despite the broad recognition the group garnered after winning an important state-sponsored art prize, invitations to high-profile international art events, and the worldwide attention they have attracted.
Late last week, a local Petersburg court confiscated the bail money deposited for the release of Oleg Vorotnikov, the group’s de facto leader. The money (300,000 rubles, or $10,800) had been donated by British street artist Banksy from the proceeds of a special print sale in support of the group’s arrested members. The court ruled that Vorotnikov should be detained and placed in a pre-trial detention center for two months; it also issued an international search warrant for him. A national search warrant for Vorotnikov had been issued in May.
Despite attempts by officials to exclude Voina from the list of nominees, the Innovation Prize was awarded to them for “Dick Captured by the FSB” – a huge image of a penis painted on Liteiny Bridge, near the local headquarters of the Federal Security Service (FSB), in June 2010. The artists, however, are facing criminal prosecution for another stunt, “Palace Revolution,” which reportedly involved the overturning of one or more police cars in St. Petersburg in September 2010.
According to the artists, the action was a metaphorical demand for reform of the Interior Ministry and an end to police lawlessness.
In November 2010, Voina’s Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolayev were arrested in a Moscow apartment and taken in a bus, handcuffed and with plastic bags over their heads, to St. Petersburg, where they were charged with criminal mischief motivated by hatred toward a particular social group (in this case, the police) and remanded to a pre-trial detention center for three months. The offence is punishable by up to seven years in prison.
After Vorotnikov and Nikolayev were released on bail in February, the group became seriously involved in civil rights activism by helping prisoners whose sentences or lengthy pre-trial detentions appear to be connected with their political activism.
The artists have used the remainder of Banksy’s donation (4.5 million rubles, or $160,735) to help a number of political prisoners such as Taisia Osipova, a woman from Smolensk, in western Russia, who has been charged with drugs possession. Her supporters claim that police planted the drugs they allegedly found in her apartment during a search. Osipova is in her ninth month of pre-trial detention despite the prosecution’s dubious case, and despite the fact that she suffers from diabetes and has a young daughter.
Human rights organizations see her imprisonment as an attempt to halt the political work of her husband, Sergei Fomchenkov, an activist with The Other Russia opposition party.
Voina members also did a photo session with Osipova’s five-year old daughter Katrina to raise public awareness of the case. They have sent various sums from Banksy’s donation to support other imprisoned activists, including Petersburg anti-fascist Rinat Sultanov, who was sentenced to two years in prison in April for his alleged role in a street brawl with neo-Nazis in November 2008.
Earlier this month, Voina donated 400,000 rubles ($14,400), the entire sum of their Innovation Prize money, to the Agora Human Rights Association, a Moscow-based organization whose lawyers have provided legal assistance to the group and other activists.
A new criminal case against Vorotnikov was launched in April after he and his wife, Voina member Natalya “Kozlyonok” Sokol, were arrested during a March 31 opposition rally. He faces up to five years in prison for alleged disorderly conduct, violence against a police officer, and insulting a police officer.
Earlier this month, Sokol was also named as a suspect in the case. Investigators claim she insulted a police officer, an offence punishable by up to one year of correctional labor. Vorotnikov and Sokol have a two-year-old son, Kasper.
Despite this persecution, Vorotnikov — who is now in hiding — said in a recent exclusive interview with The St. Petersburg Times that through its clandestine practices Voina has helped art to stay alive and brought it back into the limelight.
After winning the Innovation Prize, Voina was harshly criticized by sections of the media and the public. What is your reaction?
I don’t expect sympathy toward our art from anybody. And I’m always surprised when people say they like Voina. I then take a closer look at those people. Almost all of them live hard lives, and many have grief, losses, and disappointments in their past. The passions that have injured those people! But they’re still full of hope. These are the most interesting people in the world. It’s their scars and defects that make them lovable. I can imagine how, during sex, they touch and kiss the scars on each other’s bodies. There’s no other reason to love someone in this life. Kasper already has scars from the cops.
Voina’s work and political activities have unexpectedly drawn criticism from some people who see themselves as leftists.
The thing is that Voina reveals certain concealed and, say, reactionary qualities in people. I agree with observers who have noted that, compared to Voina, many leftists are not leftists at all, but rather centrists, maybe even rightward-leaning centrists. Before Voina, they were extremely leftist, leftist radicals, and then suddenly it turned out that they were simply philistines. They’re people who live on grants and write articles, and who imitate real protest work with such activities. So with the emergence of Voina, all of a sudden they’ve moved from the left flank toward reaction.
Yes, we fight the regime, because the powers that be are philistine and narrow-minded in the same way. All their ideals begin and end with a helicopter and a villa. Then they go for two helicopters, four villas. And that’s it: they don’t go any further; their ambitions don’t soar any higher. In that sense, we are against philistines. The philistines are our enemy. The regime is just a particular problem of our war.
So the philistines have taken up arms against us: they’ve seen that we’re against them. There are a lot of philistines: all of society has become philistine; the nation has become almost wholly philistine. In this sense, our struggle is quite an idealistic one. Because everybody sees it as an attack on themselves, an attack on the cozy aspects of their lives.
The critics seem especially annoyed by the fact that you take Kasper to your stunts and protest demos.
They get so hysterical over Kasper because it’s an affront to the cozy aspects of their lives. They’re used to handing their kids over to someone else and going out to make money. For Koza (Sokol) and Kasper, it was a shock when the cops separated them for over twenty-four hours: they had never been apart for so long.
But the public object. They say, “If they’re together all the time, what do they live on? It means they’re not poor. It means they’re well-off people or bohemians.”
They can’t even imagine a different situation. That we stick together not because we have a lot of money, but for different, ideological reasons. So our life is based on that. We’re with Kasper [all the time], and so Kasper makes us bend to his life.
Now many people have begun to realize that our war is endless, that it’s broader than just a war against some absurd criminal, gangster regime. It’s more a struggle against an abnormal attitude to life.
The fact that the prize, founded by the Culture Ministry, went to “Dick Captured by the FSB” did shock and upset many people.
Everybody went into hysterics. How can this be? A dirty dick is getting a prize! It was kind of an insult to them, to their finest petit-bourgeois sensibilities.
It’s wonderful that it happened, really. This is a real slap in the face of public taste! The joke was played out to the end: it didn’t remain on the level of marginal manifestos or underground exhibitions – although we are against officialdom, of course.
The joke is that they [the public] did not see the Dick before [it was awarded the prize]. They could allow themselves to turn a blind eye to it, because it was not approved at the top.
But now it’s like matchsticks have been stuck in their eyes and they just can’t close them. In the shape of the award, of the statuette, the Dick is always before them. They cannot help but see it, even if they would be glad not to. That drives them crazy.
I think art is also didactic and has educational goals. By struggling against the authorities, we’re also educating the people. It’s all very Russian.
Can you explain your method of working illegally?
It’s very important to work outside the institutions. They’re trying now to herd art into institutions, and many leftists such as [artist Anatoly] Osmolovsky welcome it. They simply think that the main problem of contemporary Russian art is the fact that we are not educated, that we have no degree programs in [contemporary] art.
But we show that the opposite is the case: that our salvation lies exactly in the fact that we don’t have these degrees. That we are cut off, not tied down, that we don’t walk like cows or calves on a lead. If we were on a leash, we wouldn’t be able to carry out our actions in the way we have. We would do something pathetic, something “creative” in the worst sense of that word. That’s why art should try as hard as it can to stay independent — even if it’s bad for your health, even if you might wind up with a prison term. Although it might be fraught with hardships for the individual, it’s the only way for art to survive.
The authorities began to persecute artists as early as the Yeltsin years, didn’t they?
Formally, it’s true. They started to persecute Avdei [Ter-Oganyan] for hacking up icons in 1998. But now I think we have recaptured a lot of space, because contemporary art — partly because of us — makes news. Before that news came from political life, public life, war, statements by prime ministers and maybe sports.
But now art is on an equal footing. If you look at the headlines, art makes news [as much as any other topic]. I don’t think there has been anything like this since the days of Leo Tolstoy or Solzhenitsyn. Art hasn’t been a newsmaker for a long time. That is a big achievement.
Your art stunts appear to be firmly linked to a specific city.
Yes, our actions are always linked to a concrete location. It would be wrong to say that they’re universal, that they could be taken to any city and performed there. On the contrary, we arrive at a location and have a look around.
Our Moscow actions were very Moscow-oriented, like “A Cop in a Priest’s Cassock,” where I dressed up as a “priest cop” and shoplifted an expensive supermarket. There are simply no such shops in St. Petersburg, the insanely posh ones. So I went into one of those unbelievably posh supermarkets and shoplifted it. It was a very Moscow thing.
“Dick Captured by the FSB” or “Palace Revolution” could have hardly happened in Moscow.
When we’re [planning our actions], we walk around Petersburg, thinking, “This can be done here, and that can be done there.” Say, the installation in front of the Russian Museum (“Palace Revolution”) was not accidental. It’s very important that it was right in front of the entrance.
Few people have noticed that artistically it’s important that we showed that the main work of art is not inside the museum, but outside, near the entrance. It’s very important, you see? That was also decided on right on the spot.
I can hardly imagine what kind of action I would make in London. A funny thing once happened to us. We had an exhibition in Zagreb. We arrived there, and [the organizers] met us with open arms. They said, “It’s great that you came as a group. We’ve already agreed with the mayor’s office that you can do whatever your hearts desire here.” We said, “What the hell! You’ve robbed us of the chance to do an action here.”
But then I took a walk around and realized that even if they hadn’t robbed us of this chance by making an agreement with the mayor’s office, we would have been out of context there anyway.
It’s a totally different life. Our actions can’t be transplanted [to different cities] because they’re specific. The Petersburg actions are very Petersburg. The Moscow actions are very Moscow. Location is an important factor.
Does the radical form your work takes have something to do with the abnormality of the current political situation in this country?
That’s how they see our work in the West. We get letters from American universities (from students and teachers) all the time. They inform us they’re writing an honor’s thesis about our work, which they find very interesting. Then they tell us how they interpret our actions: the abnormal situation in Russia deprives people of the chance to influence events using standard protest methods like pickets whose goal is to directly identify a problem and insist that it be solved immediately. But these don’t work, and so those American students think that the need for this form — for nonstandard protests — was forced on us. It’s an interesting take, but it’s only one aspect of the problem, and somewhat superficial in my opinion. It’s more of a journalistic viewpoint.
If you go deeper, I think our actions are rooted in Russian culture. Russians are like our actions. Russians are precisely just such a people, with a touch of madness.
Your work has been described as “true Russian folk art.” Do you agree?
That’s probably right. We do try to speak on behalf of the people.
TITLE: Let our fame be great
AUTHOR: By Tobin Auber
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: In the interests of full disclosure, I should immediately note that I used to work with the author of this book. Over a decade ago, we wrote up St. Petersburg nightlife together for Pulse, a local lifestyle magazine. He has traveled a long way since then, much of it for this book. It is not, in fact, immediately obvious quite why he should have traveled so far. This is after all a book about the North Caucasus, so why did he feel the need to visit a dozen countries to research it?
As the book progresses, that question is answered in dramatic fashion, and it becomes clear that even people who think they know about the North Caucasus, know very little indeed. The peoples of the Russian half of the Caucasus mountains – the Circassians, the Balkars, the nations of Dagestan and of course the Chechens – are currently living through difficult and turbulent times. But these times are nothing compared to some of the events that Bullough structures his book around.
The first of those is 1783, when General Alexander Suvorov asked the Nogai nation to a feast and then killed almost all of them. Surviving Nogai may well be unhappy about the fact that there is a Prospekt named after Suvorov in central St. Petersburg, as well as a military institute. As Bullough discovered, on visiting the site of the massacre, which is near the holiday resort of Yeisk on the Sea of Azov, historical amnesia has swallowed up the fate of the Nogais almost completely. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that no one stops to wonder whether Suvorov deserves to be remembered with such honour.
The Circassians too have vanished, and it is in describing their fate – which he calls Europe’s first modern genocide -- that he really gets into his stride. If we think of the Black Sea coast today, we think of the massed hotels of Sochi and the exposed flesh of the millions of holidaymakers who stay in them. But, Bullough takes us back to 1864, when the tsarist army finally defeated the Circassian nation and those beaches were packed with thousands of huddled refugees who were driven from their homes to a new life – or, in the cases of about a third of them, to agonizing death – in the Ottoman Empire.
And that is why he had to visit so many countries while researching the book. In conquering the North Caucasus, the armies of the tsars and of Stalin and of Yeltsin and of Putin, have driven out whole nations. The Circassians Bullough met live in Istanbul and Kayseri in Turkey, as well as in Israel, Jordan and Kosovo. On visiting their former homeland, which is now Russia’s holiday coast from Anapa to Sochi, he finds almost no trace of their existence.
In one of the book’s most touching scenes, he finds a pear tree in Krasnaya Polyana, which will be hosting the Winter Olympics in 2014. The tree predates the Russian conquest of Circassia and, he realizes, it was planted by a man whose nation has been all but wiped off the map.
After leaving Pulse magazine, Bullough worked for Reuters in Moscow, and reported on many of the most horrific events of the Second Chechen War: the theatre siege in Moscow, suicide bombings, Beslan. His writing, which is skilful and evocative, is almost painfully precise, particularly in scenes such as his description of the smell of children’s bodies in the morgue in Vladikavkaz.
His travels took him to find the Chechen victims of the war as well as the victims of Chechen terrorists, and he tracked them down in refugee camps in Poland, Turkey and Austria. He compellingly argues that the steady exodus of Chechens to Europe is a tragedy for their nation that is being unjustly ignored.
He repeatedly tells stories that have never been told before. At one point, he just dashes off a historical scoop about a massacre in the mountains by the Red Army during World War Two, before moving on to other matters. It is hard to believe that this is the first book in English to deal with the destruction of the Circassians, and only the second about Beslan.
In his enthusiasm, some readers will no doubt accuse him of being overly critical of the Russians, since the book is remorseless in its assault on what he considers to be the Kremlin’s deliberate erasing of its victims from history. Nevertheless, this is an important response to the current muted response of the Russian press on crimes committed in the Caucasus. It is lyrical, and passionate and excellently-researched.
It does not appear to be being published in Russian, and that is a shame. It would provide a balance to books that are available in Moscow and St Petersburg, and would give Russian readers access to the voices of their defeated foes.
TITLE: the word’s worth: Russian Girls Ready to Rip for Putin
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: Unless you’ve been out of the country or under a rock, you’ve probably seen the new “Hot Chicks for Putin” video. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. A Hot Chick strolls on 10-centimeter heels down a Moscow River embankment to meet up with her Hot Chick friends. As they chat seductively on their cell phones, you get a chance to finally understand an untranslatable Russian word. The camera lingers on close-ups of pneumatic breasts bursting out of tight tops … with chaste gold crosses dangling above them. That, my friends, is ïîøëîñòü (vulgarity, falsity, cheapness).
At the end, one of the babes — excuse me — one of the soldiers in the self-described Àðìèÿ Ïóòèíà (Putin’s Army) uses her lipstick to scrawl on her T-shirt: Ïîðâó çà Ïóòèíà! (I’ll rip it for Putin!). Then ðÿäîâàÿ Äèàíà (Private Diana) lets it rip.
I didn’t get it. I mean, I get that sex sells everything, but why rip your T-shirt?
My Russian friends set me straight — well, after they picked themselves up from the floor, where they were rolling around in laughter. There’s nothing like a dumb foreigner with a poor command of slang to make a native speaker’s day.
You see, it’s a pun — quite an elaborate one.
Ïîðâàòü means to tear or rend. This can be innocent: Êîëÿ â÷åðà îïÿòü óïàë â ãðÿçü è øòàíû ïîðâàë. (Yesterday Kolya fell in the mud again and tore his pants.) But ïîðâàòü ðóáàøêó (to tear your shirt) is like King Kong beating his chest — one of those testosterone-fueled gestures of manly threat that can be seen in bars from Ukhta to Zanzibar. Flash your pecs, and they faint.
But ïîðâàòü can also mean to give a beating, to tear someone from limb to limb. Îíà ýòîãî Ïèðàòà íà êóñêè ïîðâ¸ò! (She’ll tear that Pirate to pieces!) Sometimes this is used with a simile: Îíà åãî ïîðâ¸ò êàê Òóçèê ãðåëêó. (She’ll rip him to pieces like a dog with a bone, literally a “hot water bottle” — that is, the way a dog tears a rubber toy to pieces.) But ïîðâàòü is more commonly used alone: Ìû ïîðâ¸ì èõ â îäíó ñåêóíäó! (We’ll beat them to a pulp in a second!)
The violent threat in ïîðâàòü can, of course, be used ironically. You’re sitting around the table, shooting the breeze, and someone makes a joke about your favorite actor. Ìîë÷àòü! ß ïîðâó çà Áðýäà Ïèòòà! (Shut up! One more word about Brad Pitt, and I’ll rip your head off!)
Ïîðâàòü can also mean to beat someone spectacularly in a game or sport. Êîìàíäà íåïëîõàÿ — îíà íåìöåâ ïîðâ¸ò! (The team isn’t bad — they’ll beat the crap out of the German team!)
So the Sexy Soldier in Putin’s Army rips her T-shirt in a (possibly ironic) gesture of threat and declares Ïîðâó çà Ïóòèíà! — describing what she’s doing and (possibly) promising to beat the daylights out of anyone who insults her idol or (possibly) swearing to do anything to see him win his (possible) electoral campaign.
Get it? I get the pun, but I still don’t get the point. Why would anyone in his or her right mind think that images of sex kittens stripping while uttering threats would be a good advertisement for any politician?
What’s the message? Vote for Vladimir Putin — a chicken in every pot and a feisty babe in every bed?
Oh. Got it.
Michele A. Berdy, a Moscow-based translator and interpreter, is author of “The Russian Word’s Worth” (Glas), a collection of her columns.
TITLE: Dreamscapes
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A twilight atmosphere, with random shades enveloping the stage, tinted mirrors and elfs fluttering about all abounded at the Mariinsky theater concert hall on Thursday July 21 and Saturday July 23 when the venue played host to the company’s new premiere, Claudia Solti’s mysterious take on Benjamin Britten’s opera “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
The visual aesthetics of Solti’s production and the chamber feel to her show bridge her staging with the Mariinsky’s most recent operatic offering, Daniele Finzi Pasca’s rendition of “Aida.” Solti’s approach to opera, however, is rather different from the philosophy of Finzi Pasca, who uses an operatic plot as a platform to make a humanitarian statement. Claudia Solti, by contrast, followed not only the music but the libretto to the letter, and made sure that the slightest orchestral tingling was paired with a visual touch.
Again in parallel with Finzi Pasca, who promised the audiences a “very intimate Aida,” Claudia Solti, who refrained from commenting on her philosophy before the show, created a most delicate and tender production.
As it is clear from its title, Britten’s 1960 opera is based on William Shakespeare’s comedy of the same name. The plot revolves around the events surrounding the marriage of the Duke of Athens, Theseus, and the Queen of the Amazons, Hippolyta, and takes place in three realities at once — in the forest, in a fairy land and under the moonlight. The opera has two pairs — Lysander and Hermia (Alexander Timchenko and Yulia Matochkina) and Helena and Demetry (Irina Matayeva and Vladimir Moroz) — who essentially run around chasing each other until they find some hard-earned peace.
Solti, the daughter of the late maestro Georg Solti, whom Gergiev succeeded as the principal conductor of the World Orchestra for Peace, has a strong background in filmmaking. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” a work very dear to the director’s father, was Claudia’s first experience with the world of opera. True to the style of the composer, Solti plunges audiences into a powerful ethereal atmosphere where the borders between the rational and the emotional are blurred.
The Mariinsky sang the opera in English. Maestro Valery Gergiev made a winning choice in recruiting the world-renowned bass-baritone Willard White — who in 2010 made a sensation in the title role in Bela Bartok’s opera “The Duke Blue Beard’s Castle” — to play the comic role of weaver Nick Bottom. It’s a character that the singer has played often to international acclaim. Another great success was countertenor Artyom Krutko’s first performance in the role of Oberon, King of the Fairies. Britten originally composed the role for a countertenor, a rare commodity on the contemporary classical music market. Krutko proved both technically adroit and dramatically sensitive.
With sublime elegance, Solti fused together magical flair and a hearty portion of comic relief.
In the episode when the weaver and other workers perform Pyramus and Thisbe in front of the newlywed Theseus and, the scene-within-a-scene of Pyramus (acted by the weaver Bottom) committing suicide, it was played for laughs to good effect: the audiences were treated to the sight of bass-baritone Sir Willard White, sighing deeply, his eyes rolling, preparing to give himself a final blow to the chest, whilst also arranging a safe landing for himself after impaling the toy-like sword safely beneath his arm pit.
The use of in-your-face toy-like guns is another parallel with Finzi Pasca’s “Aida,” where Radames is escorted to prison by a gang of guards armed with swords and shields made of something that looked no more solid than silver paper.
The Mariinsky’s experience with Benjamin Britten has so far been limited to the soul-numbing 2006 staging of the “Turn of the Screw,” which earned the company the prestigious Golden Mask award, Russia’s premiere theater prize. Solti’s compatriot, UK director David McVicar created an eerie take on Britten’s operatic version of the Henry James classic novella “The Turn of the Screw.”
Solti’s production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” does justice to this magical musical marvel. It takes the audiences on a captivating and a very safe journey back somewhere into one’s childhood fantasies. It’s a journey that few adults will be able to resist being taken on.
TITLE: In the Spotlight: Stars Selling Out
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Last week, pop star and actress Jennifer Lopez announced she was divorcing singer Marc Anthony, but the show went on, as she sang at the wedding of an Uzbek businessman’s son for a reported $1.8 million.
Lifenews.ru had grainy footage of the concert, where Lopez sang in a silver minidress and thigh-high boots with male dancers with holsters over their shirts. A nice touch that — even though they weren’t loaded — suggested that Lopez knew she wasn’t performing for a Sunday school picnic.
Audience members can be seen filming Lopez on mobile phones and shouting as she performs on a stage bare except for a giant silver heart. The abashed-looking groom and bride are pushed to the front to watch, while later a burly man can be seen dancing on an almost deserted dance floor to the sound of comedian Maxim Galkin singing about love.
Compere and television host Lera Kudryavtseva also spilled the beans by posting cell phone videos of Lopez on Twitter and gushing that the concert was “fantastic.”
Lifenews.ru reported that Lopez was paid $1.8 million for the party, while the Sun put her fee at a more modest ?620,000 ($1 million).
It’s not Lopez’s first such gig. Back in 2006 she performed at the birthday party of Telman Ismailov, the convivial owner of the now-defunct Cherkizovsky market. Ismailov likes to hobnob with celebrities and had Sharon Stone at the opening of his luxury hotel in Turkey in 2009. He then got his diamond-ringed knuckles rapped by the Russian authorities with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin angrily asking, “where are the jailings?” over a smuggling probe. But things seem to have simmered down now, after Ismailov decided to invest in Chechnya.
It’s a small world. Ismailov was at the wedding party, Lifenews.ru reported. And guess where Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov reportedly went for his holidays.
This time, Lopez performed at a sanatorium outside Yalta for the son of businessman Azam Aslanov. The son, Amon, 33, lives in Indonesia, the Segodnya.ua web site reported. Scanty information about the family online suggested that they were involved in aluminum mining in Australia.
Lopez reportedly shared the program with Russian rock star Zemfira, whose fans include Roman Abramovich, as well as the flamboyant “king of pop” Filipp Kirkorov and opera singer-turned-bland pop star Nikolai Baskov. There’s no accounting for taste, and perhaps the Uzbek businessmen had to keep up with the Karimovs, who persuaded Sting to perform at a festival in 2009. Uzbek President Islam Karimov is frowned upon internationally over torture and unfair trials of his opponents, but Sting explained that he did not see the point of a musical boycott.
Sting had an attack of conscience last month, however, and turned down the chance to perform for Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev at a festival after he was warned off by Amnesty International over a crackdown on striking oil workers. Poor Nazarbayev had to make do with musical star Sarah Brightman and French singer Lara Fabian.
The mail-order celebs who turn up for events in Russia often seem to have fewer qualms. One of the guests at the recent star-studded charity concerts organized by the Federation fund may have been familiar to avid Forbes magazine readers as No. 8 on its list of the most wanted fugitives. Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov, whose nickname is Taivanchik, is listed by Interpol as wanted in the United States over bribery, but Russia is not extraditing him and he is often snapped at arts events. Lifenews.ru reported that he took Steven Seagal out on the town after the concerts.
TITLE: THE DISH: Serafino
AUTHOR: By Shura Collinson
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Trial and (Human) Error
No corners have been cut, it seems, in the creation of Serafino. From the two olive trees flanking the entrance and the basket of fresh fruit and vegetables just inside, to the tiles on the floor, the wall lamps and window lanterns, no effort has been spared to create the appearance and ambience of an upmarket Italian eatery. Even the stylish angular white crockery and the weighty cutlery bear the invisible yet unmistakeable stamp of quality.
Serafino is housed in the third building down the street from the River Neva, and has a small wooden terrace decorated with cheerful flowerboxes overlooking the boulevard strip adorned with stylish green lampposts and benches that is Prospekt Chernyshevskogo. The street is not too traffic-clogged in the evenings, at least, and even the view of the building opposite the terrace, which is undergoing major restoration work on its facade, doesn’t really detract from the restaurant’s allure. Yet, as is so often the tragedy of dining out in Russia, no amount of investment can eliminate the risk generated by the human factor.
The menu is vast, and appears to include every dish that Italy has ever offered the world, from marinated antipasti and risottos to a range of pizza, pasta and classic meat and fish dishes.
The compliment from the chef — a small crispy base topped with a salsa-like mixture of red onion, cucumber, fresh herbs, olive oil and liberally seasoned with salt and pepper — was a very promising sign and raised expectations of the menu.
The eggplant Parmigiana (310 rubles, $11.25) — a litmus test for any Italian restaurant — was highly impressive and comes recommended. Instead of the usual individual eggplant slices, Serafino’s version comprised the entire end of an eggplant topped with the tomato and bell pepper sauce and adorned with Parmesan cheese. The eggplant was just on the right side of the border between firm and hard, and the unusual presentation plus the sublime combination of textures and flavors made this the highlight of the meal.
The salmon carpaccio (420 rubles, $15) was somewhat thicker than the dish’s title suggests, and was a generous portion for an appetizer. While the combination of fish with both pesto and Parmesan cheese seemed a little questionable, the pesto did not quite overwhelm the fish, and instead turned out to be a successful combination, while the salmon was laudably fresh.
It was around about the main courses that the human factor began to let the side down. In the absence of a pizza topped with vegetables on the menu, we ordered a capricciosa without ham or egg (in essence, turning it into a vegetariana). While the pizza base was excellent — authentically thin and sublimely crispy — it was not nearly as hot as it might have been, and the eagerly anticipated artichoke hearts were disappointingly chewy. But worst of all, the lack of ham and egg had been inexplicably compensated for by the unexpected addition of spicy sausage meat, which was not exactly what the vegetarian in our party had had in mind. To add insult to injury, we were billed for a full capricciosa (420 rubles, $15).
Penne with mushrooms and sausage (320 rubles, $11.60) also came with an unexpected addition, and one that was sadly no more welcome than the sausage on the pizza. The dish itself was a wisely sized portion (no mountains of spaghetti at Serafino) of perfectly al dente pasta in a very rich creamy sauce. But for some reason, instead of bringing a dish of grated Parmesan cheese and leaving its addition to the discretion of the diner as is the custom the world over, a very generous sprinkling had already been used to smother the dish, leaving the cheese-hater in our party crestfallen, to say the least. Despite the lack of any mention of Parmesan in the dish’s description on the menu, the waiter expressed great reluctance to return the dish to the kitchen, though he consented to bring a small dish for what proportion of Parmesan was able to be scraped off.
Serafino undoubtedly has great potential, but before it can really come into its own, a little more flexibility needs to develop among the restaurant’s chef and wait staff.
TITLE: Forget Chekhov. People Smile in Tomsk
AUTHOR: By Olga Razumovskaya
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: TOMSK — The 19th-century writer Anton Chekhov praised Tomsk’s food, criticized its women, and ultimately recommended that the city wasn’t worth visiting.
“Tomsk is not worth a wooden nickel. It is the most boring of cities, and the people are the most boring,” Chekhov wrote in his diary when he was traveling to Sakhalin and happened to make a brief stop at Tomsk.
“The city is not sober, the lawlessness is Asian. The dirt is impassible, but there occur the rudiments of civilization — at the inn where I was staying the maid, when giving me a spoon, wiped it against her backside. The dinners are excellent, unlike the women who are hard to the touch.”
Today’s Tomsk would beg to differ. A lot has changed since then.
The first thing that strikes you about Tomsk, if you have already visited Moscow and perhaps a few other big cities, is its people. They smile.
While the smiles may not be as plentiful as in the United States or some European countries, Tomsk might be one of the few cities in Russia where people will greet you with a polite smile. They’ll also pause if you’re lost and spend an extra minute with you in the restaurant as your waiter.
One explanation for this might be that 20 percent of the population are students at Tomsk’s six universities. The city is proud that the first Russian university beyond the Urals opened here in 1878. The first technological university in Siberia also opened its doors in Tomsk, in 1896.
The Tomsk region is rich in oil and gas, metals, coal and timber.
The president of the Tomsk Chamber of Commerce, Arkady Uskov, also boasts that the Tomsk region has infrastructure to support both local and foreign businessmen, including a technopark, 11 business incubators and four innovative technology centers. A so-called innovation zone, one of four in Russia to specialize in implementing technologies, was also founded in Tomsk. It specializes in nanotechnologies, IT, electronics, biotechnology and medicine.
Today’s Tomsk is a little innovation island in the middle of Russia. Fairly dense and with imperfect roads, it is not without its charms and legends: from underground tunnels to Alexander I, who came to Tomsk as elder Fyodor Kuzmich to die and be canonized.
Wherever you go, you will be touched by the Siberian charm and the sense of humor that is shown in almost all the local monuments of the city’s recent history: from the monument to happiness depicting a well-fed wolf to Chekhov seen from the perspective of a drunken man.
If you are looking for a glimpse of the lives of Siberian merchants and boyars and the 19th-century sensibility of university professors, Tomsk is the place to go.
What to do if you have two hours
For the time-pressured visitor, there is no better way to see the city than at Resurrection Hill. The oldest place in the city, it is where its history began. Walk up the cobblestones of Obrub, the city’s oldest street, climb a few steps, and you are atop the hill. Here stands the old police station, which dates back to the 19th century and was likely in full operation when Chekhov visited. Today it houses the local history museum, where you can find artifacts like ceramics and arrows made from bone. The bird’s eye view from the museum’s tower is absolutely breathtaking. The Roman Catholic Church of St. Rosary is on the same hill and is worth stopping by.
If you still have time, walk back to Prospekt Lenina and Ploshchad Lenina and take a stroll along the Tom River. You will see Tomsk City Hall and the spellbinding white of the local stock exchange. The culmination of the walk should be Slavyansky Bazar, one of the most popular local restaurants, and the infamous monument to Chekhov, which was built in response to the author’s uncomplimentary comments about the city. It is called “the monument to Anton Pavlovich Chekhov as seen by a drunk man who never read ‘Kashtanka.’” (“Kashtanka” is Chekhov’s odd tale of a lost dog.) The monument is a caricature of Chekhov with oversized bare feet.
What to do if you have two days
After completing the sightseeing tour around Resurrection Hill, you will want to enjoy a stroll past some of the most beautiful and well-preserved wooden houses in Russia. A sort of open-air museum of 19th- and early 20th-century wooden architecture, Tomsk takes you back in time better than any time machine. For the best examples of wooden architecture, try Ulitsa Shishkova, Ulitsa Gagarina, Ulitsa Belinskogo, Ulitsa Kuznetsova and Ulitsa Krasnoarmeiskaya. Don’t forget to stop by the Museum of Wooden Architecture (7 Prospekt Kirova; +7 3822-56-40-97).
A walk in Lagerny Garden is an absolute must-do in Tomsk. The mixture of Siberian air, giant trees and a magnificent view of Tomsk are stunning. It is part of the beautiful university quarters that start at Novosobornaya Ploshchad.
Tomsk is also known for its monuments. In addition to the Chekhov monument, make sure to check out the monument to a pregnant woman outside the Siberian State Medical University at 38 Prospekt Lenina and the monument of a baby in a head of cabbage in front of Maternity Home No. 1 at 65 Prospekt Lenina. While storks may deliver babies in the West, Russian babies are born in cabbage patches.
Nightlife
The jazz cafe Underground (46 Prospekt Lenina; +7 3822-51-63-91; jazz.tomsk.ru) and its mix of Dali art and contemporary jazz is the go-to place for the local beau monde. Among its regulars are Arkady Mayofis (Tomsk Media Group, TV-2), Vadim Holin from GlassExpert, deputy mayor for investment Denis Molotkov, and Igor Itkin, president of the defense plant Kontur.
The mayor can be spotted in Lagerny Garden, which serves as a venue for concerts, jazz picnics and the Dance Battle in June. You can also bump into Mikhail Rodionov, general director at Tomgiprotrans, and Itkin here. The garden is one of the most popular spots among the locals and dates as far back as 1798, when Russians set up camp in the area during the Crimean War. The garden overlooks Tomsk and features a giant monument depicting Mother Russia giving a weapon to her son — a tribute to those who died during World War II.
The city also has its own Chamber Drama Theater (7 Pereulok Nakhanovicha; +7 3822-53-15-80;), the Tomsk Regional Drama Theater (4 Ploshchad Lenina; +7 3822-51-22-23, 51-29-04; drama.nts.su), the Tomsk Regional State Philharmonic (12a Ploshchad Lenina; +7 3822-51-59-56; philharmonic.tomsk.ru) and the Children’s Theater (4 Pereulok Nakhanovicha; +7 3822-51-36-55).
Where to eat
Slavyansky Bazar (10 Ploshchad Lenina; +7 3822-52-81-67, 53-33-00) is a special place for those who live in Tomsk. Since 1888, it has been a restaurant popular among merchants who dropped in to shake hands over important deals. Chekhov took to the place and singled it out as one of the few establishments in the city worth visiting. Today, after a renovation by Yukos, it continues to be a place where people come to eat and talk business. The redbrick building stands right on the Tom River embankment. Serving dishes of Siberian and European cuisine, it is good for family brunches from noon until 4 p.m.
If you are in Tomsk on business or are looking for a romantic evening, make sure to stop by Parmesan (15 Ploshchad Lenina; +7 8322-51-17-74; parmesan.tomsk.ru). The restaurant is located in the same building as the Magistrat Hotel and offers a wide variety of Italian dishes. The restaurant, done in a Balzac-esque style with candle-lit dinners, flower arrangements and an Italian oven where you can see how your pizza or pasta is made, was built to impress. It also boasts Tomsk’s biggest wine menu, a chef trained in Italy and a piano ordered by Tsar Nicholas II. An average dinner that includes all the courses and four glasses of wine costs about 5,000 rubles per couple.
Tired of Starbucks, looking for a small and cozy cafe? Yes, Tomsk may not be Paris or New York, but the Bulange chain (133 Prospekt Lenina; +7 3822-40-22-22; see bulange.tomsk.ru for other locations) would be just the right place for you, with friendly staff, simple but inviting interiors, good coffee and exquisite pastry and cakes. Feel free to choose between any of the five locations. A Tomsk smile will be sure to greet you in all of them.
Where to stay
Magistrat (15 Ulitsa Lenina; +7 3822-51-11-11; magistrathotel.com) is where visiting politicians stay. It is conveniently located in the city’s historic business, financial and cultural center. Created in 1802, it was reconstructed in 2004 and offers rooms ranging from 4,900 rubles ($174) a night for a single on a weekend to 9,500 rubles per day on weekdays for a suite with the fine Tomsk city view and wonderful mansard windows. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and members of the German Cabinet stayed here during a 2006 Russian-German summit.
Another option for high-level politicians and the wealthy is Delovoi Mir (1 Ulitsa Naberezhnaya, Siny Utyos village, Tomsk region; +7 3822-22-81-30; 70-19-51; delovoimir-hotel.ru), a hotel about 20 kilometers outside Tomsk and right on an 80-meter cliff. The hotel is an ideal place for those who like the outdoors and the comfort of a European room. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov are among the guests who have stayed here. Prices start at 4,200 rubles a night for two and go as high as 11,850 rubles for a three-bedroom suite.
For a more affordable option, try hotel Oktyabrskaya (12 Ulitsa Karla Marxa; +7 3822-51-21-51, 51-39-62; october.tomsk.gov.ru). Although far from the most artful building in Tomsk, it is nestled in the city center and overlooks the Tom River. Quite a few museums, universities, and walking routes are close to the hotel. Prices start at 1,800 rubles and reach 6,900 rubles for a three-bedroom suite.
Conversation starters
Anything student-related will get Tomsk residents talking, because every fifth person living in the city is a student. “The male part of the population talks about women because, in Tomsk, there are always a lot of female students walking by,” Tomsk Mayor Nikolai Nikolaichuk said.
How to get there
If you are traveling from Moscow, there are three airlines you can use for the 4 1/2-hour flight to Tomsk’s Bogashevo Airport (tomskairport.ru): Transaero, S7 Airlines and UTair. The first two leave from Domodedovo Airport and the latter from Vnukovo. Ticket prices start at about 15,000 rubles round trip.
A cab can take you from the airport to the city center. The number for the city’s taxi company is +7 3822-69-69-00.
More adventurous types can opt to take a train. The “Tomich” leaves Yaroslavsky Station at 10:40 p.m. on odd-numbered days and completes the 3,610-kilometer trip to Tomsk after two days and nine hours of travel. Prices start at about 5,000 rubles for economy class one-way.
Tomsk
Population: 522,900
Main industries: fuel, electrical energy, chemical and petrochemical industries, mechanical engineering, metalworking, timber, woodworking, food industries and IT.
Mayor: Nikolai Nikolaichuk
Founded in 1604
Interesting fact: Vyacheslav Shishkov, who wrote “Grim River” (Ugryum-reka), started his writing career in Tomsk.
Sister cities: Ulsan, South Korea; the U.S. cities of Monroe, Michigan, and Toledo, Ohio.
Helpful contacts:
Alexander Tyomkin, deputy CEO of investor relations for the Tomsk Innovation Zone, one of 24 special economic zones in Russia (6 Tverskoi Bulvar, Moscow; +7 495-645-27-77; e-mail: atemkin@oao-oez.ru);
Arkady Eskin, president of the Tomsk Chamber of Commerce (71a Krasnoarmeiskaya Ulitsa; +7 3822-43-31-30, 43-31-26; e-mail: tpp@cnti.tomsk.su; eng.oao-oez.ru).
Nikolai Nikolaichuk,
Tomsk mayor
Q: Why should investors planning to invest in Siberia choose Tomsk?
A: We have an absolutely transparent system to consider investment proposals. Issues of land use and the work of the investment committee are transparent. You also should invest here because we have a system of project management in place where we basically single out a person from the administration to follow this or that investment project. We ensure that investors don’t have to run around in the corridors but instead our project managers find the solutions.
Q: What advantage does Tomsk offer investors compared with cities in the European part of Russia?
A: There is no advantage. On the contrary, our country’s transportation system worsens Tomsk’s investment attractiveness. Yes, the city is far away, and yes, it may often seem disadvantageous.
But those who choose to come here get a whole new level of opportunities through Tomsk’s special economic zone, innovation work, universities and foundation in the sciences. This gives investors three opportunities: the use of modern technologies, students from universities who don’t need training, and the support of the government. These three components, we believe, compensate for our remoteness and admitted disadvantageous situation compared with cities in the European part of Russia.
Q: What sectors should a potential investor consider?
A: I think that a potential investor should decide for himself what business he wants to have in Tomsk. If it is a beach business, then I doubt we could compete with Thailand. But if it is an issue related to innovation, the development of information technology, attracting students through business incubators or attracting the youth segment, then they should come to us.
TITLE: Tips for Drivers on Surviving Russian Roads, Traffic
AUTHOR: By Roland Oliphant
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — About a decade ago, Sergei Moiseyev became so fed up after enduring years of hair-raising driving experiences in his job as a salesman that he enrolled in a driving school that offered lessons on how to cope on Moscow’s roads.
He liked what he learned so much that he quit his job and became a teacher.
“Like all salesmen, I was trying to reach as many customers in a single day as possible. So I was driving fast on pretty bad roads and from time to time found myself in pretty dangerous situations,” Moiseyev said.
It’s a decision that might have saved his life. Russia annually suffers almost twice as many road deaths per capita as the United States according to World Health Organization figures.
But it also saved him money and an untold number of hours in police and insurance company offices. Corporate fleet managers estimate that even the most harmless fender-bender costs at least $1,000 and three days of man-hours — not counting lost earnings or missed sales.
And more and more businesses are tuning into the idea of equipping employees with the skills to cope with Moscow’s legendary traffic — even as drivers buy licenses on the black market.
In 2001, Moiseyev left the school and set up the Active Security driving school, which focuses exclusively on teaching drivers how to avoid and deal with the recklessness of other drivers.
At first, he specialized in “active defense” — the kind of split-second decisions that can save a driver’s life as an accident unfolds. But while the courses proved popular with individual drivers — especially men — he soon realized that not everyone is a James Bond waiting to happen.
So he expanded into “defensive driving,” which involves constant alertness and being able to recognize in advance typical situations that can lead to accidents.
“If you can spot a dangerous situation earlier, you can react calmly, thoughtfully, and without that knee-jerk urgency,” he said.
Individual drivers found such training less fun — but corporations pricked up their ears.
Today Moiseyev’s business caters almost exclusively to the corporate sector, with clients including BP and Shell, and he has teachers and freelance instructors in cities including Moscow, St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg. He’s even opened a subsidiary in Kazakhstan.
Danger on the Road
Officially, Russia’s roads are getting safer.
In 2004, some 34,000 people were killed on the country’s roads, according to police figures. In 2010 that figure was 26,567 — a drop of 23 percent in six years.
Moscow suffered 11,757 accidents in 2010 and 762 fatalities, according to police figures. That’s down from 14,018 accidents and 1,103 deaths in 2005.
In fact, said Natalya Agre of Zavod, a consulting company that has produced several road safety campaigns for the traffic police, Russia is “one of the leading countries in terms of reducing death rates on the roads, well ahead of almost all European and Asian countries, the United States and Australia.”
“Personally, I think it has got a bit better — not as quickly as we might like, but I think things are slowly improving,” Moiseyev said.
Cutting accidents saves lives, of course. But for many companies there is also a strong economic incentive.
“It costs a total of $360 to $370 a day to keep a salesman on the road, taking into account salary, insurance, petrol and other costs,” said Andrei Trifonov, head of Philip Morris’ corporate fleet in Russia.
“If a driver has an accident he will have to spend a minimum of three days with the traffic police to make statements and get the right documents for an insurance claim. That’s $1,000 wasted right there,” he pointed out.
And that doesn’t include a likely 10 percent insurance premium hike if the police find the driver to be responsible for the accident.
Like many multinational companies, Philip Morris runs its own internal fleet safety program — but it has turned to Moiseyev as a consultant to help adapt its course to “Russian realities.”
“It’s things you don’t usually notice, but then you recall times when that has happened to you — like a pedestrian appearing from in front of a stopped trolleybus,” said Trifonov, who manages a countrywide fleet of more than 1,000 vehicles.
Another tip is simple — take nothing for granted.
“In Europe, for example, if you see a green light at a crossroads you assume you can just drive straight through,” Trifonov said. “Over here you can’t assume anything — a driver could come from behind and turn in front of you.”
Another tip for expat drivers is to be ready for drivers of even the toughest-looking SUV to suddenly slow to a three-kilometer-per-hour crawl when approaching tram lines or level crossings.
Moiseyev has seen his business boom in the past few years as word gets out about his school and the idea of corporate fleet training gains a certain fashion in the corporate world.
But the economic calculus still has to make its way across a cultural divide.
Moiseyev said practically all of his clients are Western firms or their Russian subsidiaries that tend to have a “more mature” attitude to safety issues.
Idiots and Roads
“It’s already a cliche, but its true. Russia has bad roads,” Sergei Udalov, director of the Avtostat research agency, said when asked about the main cause of accidents. “It’s the No. 1 cause of crashes in this country.”
But after roads comes a “cultural problem.” “People just have a lax attitude to safety,” he said.
Drunk driving caused 11,845 of all accidents in 2010 — more than 10 percent — killing 1,954 and injuring 17,280.
Agre claims a high-profile television advertising campaign managed to bring down road accidents caused by drunk drivers by 75 percent in five months in 2009.
One of Agre’s upcoming public awareness campaigns for the traffic police will be to push for “passengers rights” and the introduction of seatbelts in minibuses and coaches, as well as the replacement of aging mass transit vehicles. And she says a major problem is simply attitudes.
“In May we conducted a public opinion poll, and some of the responses were simply stunning. Only 2.4 percent of our countrymen believe that the transportation of children without a child seat is a serious offense, and only a quarter of respondents always carry children in car seats,” she said in e-mailed comments.
“But success of social campaigns cannot be separated from the other work being done in the field of road safety,” she added.
“It requires a powerful integrated approach to the problem: build new roads, improve vehicle safety requirements, work at the legislative level, introduce new rules of behavior for people on the road,” she said.
Those in the know suggest that the integrated response has to include a change of attitude on the part of the authorities.
One road safety professional who asked not to be identified because of the nature of the subject attributed the success of the campaign against drunk driving to a zero-tolerance policy from the traffic police — meaning that the average bribe for getting off a drunk driving charge rose to a prohibitive 300,000 rubles.
The St. Petersburg Times could not verify that figure.
TITLE: Vegetarianism No Longer Seen as a Bourgeois Luxury
AUTHOR: By Alex Chachkevitch
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — When Ekanga Davova decided to become a vegetarian in 1993 in an effort to cleanse her body, it made her the odd one out in her social circle.
Davova, an Uzbek native who was then 25, recalls her friends’ extreme wonder and disbelief with her “new” lifestyle, which excluded meat, fish and poultry.
“It was hard to keep up with it then because there were no other vegetarians around me,” she said. “I struggled to find inspiration.”
Davova, now 42, works at Cafe Ganga, a vegan restaurant in Moscow, with a staff of about 30 other vegans and vegetarians, and she said the environment for those abstaining from meat is blooming.
Vegetarian restaurants such as Cafe Ganga and Jagannath have been around for more than a decade but have noticed a jump in visitors in the past three years.
The trend may be reflecting a tectonic shift in gastronomic habits of Muscovites and Russians elsewhere, who are finally drifting to vegetarianism after decades of rejecting “bourgeois” meat-free diets.
The way is long. There are no recent statistics, but data from the mid-2000s indicates that only about 200,000 Russians — 0.14 percent of the population — were actually vegetarian, according to figures circulating on Russian vegetarianism web sites. By comparison, according to the European Vegetarian Union, Germany and Britain combined boast more than 12 million vegetarians.
But efforts to educate people about vegetarian and vegan cuisines and philosophies, as well as raw foodism — a diet based on unprocessed food — are spreading, even sparking an annual vegetarian festival that last year drew about 2,000 people.
The second vegetarian festival, which will be held from July 29 to July 31 in the Kaluga region, will offer informational panels, seminars, live entertainment and a vegetarian market and — most important — the chance to taste delicious vegetarian food, said Yevgenia Repnikova, a coordinator for 2011 VegFest.
There are no aggregate statistics for Moscow’s vegetarian restaurants, but all agree that business is blooming. For example, Cafe Ganga, which has two locations in Moscow, noticed a 45 percent jump in demand for its delivery services over the past 18 months, said Lolita Tomayeva, its director of development.
Restaurant Avocado, which opened a second location in 2008, has seen a 30 percent rise in traffic every year for the “past few years,” said its director, Anna Raisner.
Loving Hut, an international franchise of vegan fast-food places and restaurants, arrived in Moscow in October and has seen a steady increase in customers since, said the restaurant’s director, Oleg Dmitriyev.
Of course, restaurateurs react accordingly, and both chains and menus expand, new establishments tickling their guests’ appetites with exquisite Oriental meals like samosa (stuffed pie) and pakora (vegetables covered in crispy batter).
Conservative new converts will also find themselves on familiar ground, because popular Russian dishes — which always include meat — are transformed into vegan and vegetarian with the help of soy products. Thus, pelmeni, plov and even shashlik remain on the menu.
Shy diners can opt for food stores catering to vegans and vegetarians, such as Indian Spices, Produktovaya Apteka (Food Drugstore) and Jagannath’s own shop.
Besides easily found staple crops, such as rice, potatoes and bread, stores are offering soy products and rare spices used for preparing Indian cuisine, which is largely vegetarian and vegan.
“It’s increasingly easier now for vegans and vegetarians to eat out in Moscow,” said Tomayeva of Cafe Ganga.
Anna Kuznetsova, director of development at Jagannath restaurants in Moscow, said she noticed more people coming to Jagannath, which opened two new locations in February, in search of new tastes and getting interested in learning about vegetarianism.
For Cafe Ganga’s Davova, who said she adores almost all fruits and vegetables, it was not hard to switch to a meatless lifestyle.
As she learned more about vegetarian cuisine through the years, Davova grew fond of creamy avocado, fried spiced tofu and tangy ginger drinks.
“People don’t realize it, but there is a lot of variety in vegetarianism,” she said.
Now other hungry but health-conscious souls can share that discovery. Cafe Ganga, Jagannath and Loving Hut each have more than 80 different menu items to choose from.
Vegetarianism itself is not a new concept in Russia. The global meat-free movement, whose roots reach back to the late 19th century, was strongly supported by literary legend Leo Tolstoy, who linked it to his Christianity-based religious teaching.
The first Russian vegetarian society was formed in 1901 in St. Petersburg. This was also when predecessors of Cafe Ganga and Jagannath began to pop up, cafeterias offering tasty meatless dishes that were especially in demand during Lent.
But the 1917 Revolution did away with both religious fasting and the vegetarian movement, ruling vegetarianism an invention of a rotten capitalist society. And after 70 years of a bad reputation, skepticism about vegetarianism still lingers.
“Eating habits are the most stable and hardest to change,” said Kuznetsova of Jagannath.
Not much research has been done on vegetarianism in Russia compared with Europe and the United States, which may fuel some people’s concerns, said Yekaterina Belova, who heads a Moscow-based dietetics center called Palitra Pitaniya (Nutrition’s Palette).
Not all worries are unfounded, as vegetarianism can potentially deprive a person of some vital amino acids, vitamin B12, calcium and iron if he or she is not careful in picking the right supplements and foods, she said.
But a well-planned vegetarian diet is generally considered to be healthier, especially for those who need to lower their cholesterol level, Belova said.
“Russians tend to look at everything new with a touch of doubt,” said Irina Denisova, 50, a vegetarian for two decades, adding that she had never even heard the word “vegetarian” as a child.
“But it’s really just ignorance and lack of information that causes that,” said Denisova, who is married to a vegetarian and has raised three vegetarian daughters.
She said even doctors are often biased about not eating meat. When her husband got an infection and went for a medical check, his problems were immediately blamed on his vegetarian diet, though it turned out not to be the cause, Denisova said.
But Denisova said she believes that people will become more open and understanding of vegetarianism eventually as information spreads.
“I tell people, ‘food is just food,’” said Marina Gladkikh, a raw foodist who has written several books on the topic. “It’s not fair to judge a person from what’s on his or her plate.”
Vegfest 2011 will be held July 29-31 in the Kaluga region village of Petrov, about 100 kilometers southwest of Moscow. Tel. +7 495-627-5190, 710-7345, vegfest.ru.
Cafe Ganga is located at 37b Leningradsky Prospekt in the Start shopping center. Metro Dynamo. Tel. +7 495-743-4984, cafe-ganga.ru.
Jagannath has five locations. Tel. +7 495-628-3580, jagannath.ru.
Loving Hut is located at 1B Pravoberezhnaya Ulitsa in the Kapitoly shopping center. Metro Rechnoi Vokzal.
Tel. +7 495-785-1236, lovinghut.ru.
Restaurant Avocado has two locations: 12/2 Chistoprudny Bulvar (Metro Chistiye Prudy) and 5/6 Tverskaya Ulitsa (same building as Yermolova Theater; Metro Okhotny Ryad). Tel. +7 495-988-2656, 506-0033, no web site, but its menu can be viewed at en.restoran.ru/msk/detailed/restaurants/avokado.
Indian Spices has five locations.
Tel. +7 499-240-1236, indianspices.ru.
Produktovaya Apteka is located at 8/10 Ulitsa Artyokhnoi Dom. Metro Tekstilshchiki. Tel. +7 499-178-0680, prodap.ru.
Vegetarian Sabji Maharaja (Jagannath)
You will need:
* Fresh vegetables: zucchini, bell peppers, cauliflower, olives, eggplant, tomatoes and broccoli
* Cheese
* Buttered bean sprouts with sesame seeds
* Other greens and spices of your choice
* Flat bread
Preparation:
1. Chop vegetables, mix and stew for 5 to 10 minutes in a pan, adding cheese and spices.
2. Serve on flat bread.
TITLE: Foreign Architects Big Players on Market
AUTHOR: By Lena Smirnova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Foreign architects have become a profitable marketing brand in Russia, and their domestic counterparts are raising concerns about the preferential treatment they receive and the poor quality of some of their work.
“The way that our market is organized can’t be classified as anything but mad,” said Andrei Bokov, president of the Russian Union of Architects. “No country in the world lets in foreigners the way we do.”
Experts have noted significant growth in the number of foreign architects in the country in the past three to four years.
The involvement of foreign architects has become an effective marketing strategy for developers. A famous name is a big draw for customers, but even with the less-known architects, customers expect that foreigners will design better quality housing.
“The involvement of a foreign team becomes a integral part of the marketing of the project,” said Anna Dvurechenskaya, senior consultant at Cushman & Wakefield. “It tells clients that this is a quality project.”
The demand for projects that involve foreigner architects is particularly strong in the residential sector because foreigners are seen to have more experience in designing comfortable and ecological homes, Dvurechenskaya said.
All properties in the Capital Group Legenda Tsvetnogo commercial development, developed with foreign architects, got letters of intent within half a year after being put on the market, said Dinara Lizunova, head of the communications department at Capital Group.
The higher salaries for foreign architects can be compensated for by raising property prices. The better quality, foreign-designed properties can cost up to 20 percent more, Lizunova said.
“It is difficult to put a concrete measure on the influence of architecture and design on the speediness of the sales or the final cost of square meters, but it is clear that for real estate in the deluxe category this is a key component that influences market demand,” Lizunova said.
The surge of foreign architects into the country has left the Russians struggling to keep up.
Sergei Gnedovsky, vice president of the Union of Architects, said it is difficult for Russian architects to compete for projects because competition rules require developers to pay up to 30 percent of the cost of the project in advance, which Russian firms can’t manage.
Domestic architects also noted that some foreigners don’t know how to work in the Russian landscape, which leads to poor quality work.
Gnedovsky said foreign architects designed their project in Sochi without consideration of the local ecology. In this case — as well as with the design of a football arena by Japanese architects in St. Petersburg — Russians had to step in to fix the mistakes, he said.
“You can’t complain about a mistake in a project,” Bokov said. “All the foreigners have left, and we have to deal with the mess.”
The Union of Architects will draft a new law on architecture in September to present to the State Duma that they hope will promote freer competition between local and foreign architects.
TITLE: Inaccessibility Boon to Local Office Market
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Shanghai and Moscow were identified as the most popular business locations across all emerging markets in research conducted by CB Richard Ellis.
According to the real estate services company’s Business Footprints report released last week, which compares the office presence of 280 major companies across 101 countries and 232 cities, 17 of the top 30 most popular company office locations are in emerging markets.
Shanghai is home to 172 of the companies profiled (61.4 percent) and is closely followed by Moscow, where 170 (60.7 percent) are present.
Russia ranks 14th in the country ranking, with 174 companies, which is 62.1 percent of the companies present. In the city ranking, Moscow is sixth globally, with 170 companies, 60.7 percent of the sample. While the size of the Russian market makes it attractive to occupiers, Moscow’s high position reflects its level of accessibility — it is particularly difficult to do business in Russia without a domestic office.
In the industrial goods and services sector, Moscow is seventh, with 23 companies, 70 percent of the sample. Cities like Moscow are often locations serving as head offices controlling nearby production facilities. In the professional services sector, Moscow is fifth, with 29 companies, 83 percent of the sample.
TITLE: Moscow Luxury Shopping Street Ranks Third
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — According to a Jones Lang LaSalle study of Europe’s most important luxury shopping destinations, London, Paris and Moscow have the most expensive luxury shopping streets in Europe.
The global market for luxury goods has emerged from the financial crisis significantly faster than expected, according to a study of 100 luxury brands and 21 European shopping destinations by Jones Lang LaSalle released last week.
The luxury retail sector has bounced back in Europe, the study said. Leading international luxury groups have recently reported double-digit sales growth or even record annual sales. Companies’ own store networks have played a significant role in accounting for this success. In 2010, one-third of total revenue for some brands was generated with the highest sales recorded in Italy, followed by France, Britain, Germany and Russia.
London’s New Bond Street is the most expensive luxury shopping street in Europe, with top rents reaching 7,900 euros ($11,350) per square meter. On Avenue Montaigne in Paris rents reach up to 7,500 euros, and on Moscow’s Stoleshnikov Pereulok rents are as high as 7,015 euros.
The highest density of international luxury labels can be found in Paris. The top 100 luxury labels operate more than 150 luxury stores there, proving that the French capital remains Europe’s uncontested center of fashion and luxury shopping. Only London has a similar density with 125 luxury outlets from the top 100 brands. Milan has just fewer than 90, while Moscow and Rome follow with 66 and 59 luxury label stores, respectively.
TITLE: City to Pay $1.4Bln for A Luzhniki Culture Hub
AUTHOR: By Bela Lyauv
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW — City Hall plans to turn Luzhniki into a cultural center as well as a sports complex, with reconstruction in the run-up to the 2018 football World Cup estimated to cost 40 billion rubles ($1.4 billion).
City Hall consolidated 75 percent plus one share in the Luzhniki complex, a mayor’s official told Vedomosti. Buying up the rest of the shares is unnecessary, another source said. APS-tsentr — thought to be controlled by the complex’s former general director, Vladimir Alyoshin — owns 24 percent.
The project’s planning phase should be completed by Sept. 1. “Construction of a skating rink, reconstruction of the swimming pool, remodeling of main areas, and preparation for 2013 World Championships in Athletics are in the works,” Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said.
Authorities are also reviewing plans to build a new Rossiya concert hall at Luzhniki to replace the one demolished in the Zaryadye district in 2006, several mayor’s officials told Vedomosti. According to one of them, the building may go up next to a market that closed on July 1.
The Rossiya concert hall, with an area of about 30,000 square meters and able to seat an audience of 2,500, was part of the Rossiya Hotel in Zaryadye. It currently leases Luzhniki’s Lyodovy Dvorets to hold concerts.
“We are considering construction of a comprehensive hall like Luzhniki’s Druzhba,” a mayor’s official said. “It should be the largest movie theater and concert hall in Moscow,” another official said.
If the hall is going to be the same size as the one planned in Zaryadye [about 55,000 square meters], then construction could cost more than $200 million, said Konstantin Kovalev, managing partner at Blackwood.
Last week authorities also discussed reconstruction of the Luzhniki sports arena, where the opening match, semifinal and final of the 2018 football World Cup will take place. At a meeting with Sobyanin, it was reported that reconstruction of the stadium — Mosproyekt-4 — had been estimated at 40 billion rubles, said one of the meeting’s participants.
“This estimate was made in 2008 to bid for the football World Cup, but no one will take it as a base. For that money, it’s possible to build three stadiums,” a mayor’s official explained. According to him, the sports arena will first be prepared for the 2013 World Championships in Athletics, then changes for the football World Cup will be decided on.