SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1672 (34), Wednesday, August 31, 2011
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TITLE: Medvedev Gives Poltavchenko Advice
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly will vote Monday on an issue that was decided at the Kremlin some time ago: The identity of the next city governor.
Although, technically speaking, three candidates are standing — Deputy Governor Mikhail Oseyevsky; Vadim Tyulpanov, speaker of the city parliament; and Georgy Poltavchenko, the presidential representative in Russia’s Central District — nobody, President Dmitry Medvedev included, is pretending that they do not know the outcome of the vote.
After the United Russia party put forward these three candidates Saturday, Medvedev voiced his preference for Poltavchenko on Tuesday and promptly gave his protege some recommendations as to what problems the victor should tackle first.
“I have to admit that the city has really changed and became more presentable; a number of new important social and industrial objects have emerged; the transport infrastructure is improving and the courtyards are becoming cleaner,” Medvedev said Tuesday.
“However, taking into account all those positive changes, it does not mean that there is nothing to be done in St. Petersburg. The problems are multiple, with the housing and building maintenance issue being a most pressing one: In this historic city, there are many buildings that require complete renovation.”
Within hours of Medvedev accepting the resignation of former governor Valentina Matviyenko on Aug. 22, he appointed Poltavchenko as acting governor, although the charter of St. Petersburg advises that for a transition period, the job should go to the first deputy governor — in this case, Oseyevsky. Medvedev’s move was a signal to Matviyenko and her cabinet that a local candidate and member of her team stands a bleak chance of succeeding her.
Medvedev also hinted that staff reshuffles will be significant as he wished Poltavchenko success in “creating a successful new team that will be capable of responding to the many challenges the city is currently facing.”
Even Poltavchenko’s “rival” Tyulpanov spoke to reporters Tuesday as if the vote had already taken place. The parliament “will take an active role in discussing every potential member of Poltavchenko’s new cabinet,” he said.
The inauguration ceremony for the new governor is scheduled for 3 p.m. next Wednesday.
Poltavchenko, in the meantime, has assured Medvedev that he will go to any length to live up to the president’s trust and high expectations.
“As someone who grew up in St. Petersburg and is devoted to this city, I take your proposal as a sign of great trust, and I assure you that I will use all my skills and knowledge to prove your choice right,” he said. “Improving the quality of life in the city is a huge task that I will be pleased to be involved in. A lot has already been done; I have visited the district on the Petrograd Side where I grew up, and the difference was stunning. The courtyards have changed beyond recognition.
“The most important thing is that I have secured both your trust and the support of St. Petersburg residents, which makes me sure that we will succeed,” Poltavchenko concluded.
TITLE: Governor’s Meetings ‘Lacked Substance’
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Yulia Minutina, a coordinator for the preservationist organization Living City and an advisor to former city governor Valentina Matviyenko for the past few months, said this week that she was never able to reach Matviyenko to discuss pressing issues.
Speaking at a press conference Monday devoted to summing up the results of the negotiations with Matviyenko and deputy governors, Minutina said that recent telephone calls to Matviyenko had not been put through, and that she received no reply to two letters sent to Matviyenko about the state of the Anichkov Palace on Nevsky Prospekt and a controversial renovation program.
“I can say that [my appointment as advisor] was a gesture, demonstrative rather than filled with any substance,” Minutina said.
“My fate hasn’t changed in any way either since I was appointed an advisor or since the governor left her seat. In this sense, it can be said that [the gesture] was aimed at the public.
Minutina’s role as an advisor ended when Matviyenko left her seat last week. The preservationist continues to be a member of City Hall’s Cultural Heritage Council.
Minutina’s last meeting with the governor was in May. In June, President Dmitry Medvedev suggested that Matviyenko leave the post of governor and become the Speaker of the Federation Council in Moscow. Analysts have put the president’s move down due to Matviyenko’s unpopularity with residents over issues ranging from corruption, lawlessness, her authoritarian style of management and, not least, her town-planning policy.
Matviyenko began flirting with preservationists last year after finding herself under criticism from the Ministry of Culture and state-controlled television channels for illegally approving the proposed 400-meter height of Gazprom’s controversial Okhta Center skyscraper project that was due to be built opposite the 18th-century Smolny Cathedral.
The law forbids the construction of any building higher than 40 meters on the site, in order to protect the city’s UNESCO-protected skyline. The contentious project was eventually canceled at the end of last year, and is now due to be built in the Lakhta district on the city’s outskirts.
The negotiations between the governor and preservationists were initiated by film director Alexander Sokurov, who suggested the idea to Matviyenko at an awards ceremony in October. She first met with a group of preservationists selected by Sokurov in November.
“No governor of any other city of Russia has followed Matviyenko’s example and entered into a dialogue with representatives of the public, openly, with no defense,” Sokurov said.
Sokurov added, however, that Matviyenko’s government had turned out “not to be ready” to deal with the issues.
“Matviyenko was more ready than the government; that’s why we had so many problems,” he said.
The negotiations were criticized as being intended to improve Matviyenko’s image after she was criticized for allowing more than 100 historic buildings to be demolished and for authorizing the construction of new buildings that preservationists say do not fit in with the historic environment.
Thousands of St. Petersburg residents protested her town-planning policy at annual demonstrations against the Okhta Center project from 2006.
Despite the negotiations, a 19th-century building at 68 Nevsky Prospekt and the historic Preobrazhensky Regiment’s Barracks were demolished earlier this year in what preservationists described as a “telling way.”
Despite public outcry, Matviyenko did nothing to stop the demolition of either.
Summing up the results of the negotiations, Alexander Karpov, director of the Naturalist Society’s Expert Center (ECOM) said that despite 300 man hours spent by City Hall’s officials on meetings, the results were close to nil.
“Being a scientist, I can’t say that [the result] equals zero,” he said.
“It’s different from zero, statistically. But it’s on the threshold of discernibility.”
The group of preservationists involved in negotiations with Matviyenko said they are keen to continue the talks on town-planning issues with the city’s next governor.
TITLE: Pilot Dazzling Spreads to City
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The first reports of attempts to dazzle airplane pilots with lasers in St. Petersburg were received by police last week, Interfax reported, adding to the reports of similar incidents received in several other Russian cities during recent months.
The police received an anonymous phone call last Thursday night in which the caller said that a man near the city’s Pulkovo Airport was using a laser device to direct a green light at planes that were taking off.
Police went to the spot but did not find anyone there.
Rossiya Airlines later confirmed that it had also registered an attempt to dazzle the pilots of an AN-148 aircraft with a laser. The pilots of the plane, which was traveling from St. Petersburg to Novy Urengoi, noticed the lights hit their cabin four times at an altitude of 700 meters when they were taking off from St. Petersburg on Thursday night. They informed the dispatcher about the incident.
The plane, which had 68 passengers and five crew members on board, successfully landed in the city of Novy Urengoi. The pilots appealed to the police upon their return.
Vadim Bazykin, who holds the title of Honored Pilot of Russia, said the numerous cases of people attempting to blind pilots in various Russian cities with lasers were the result of the large amount of attention being paid to “laser hooligans,” including media coverage, Interfax reported.
“There wouldn’t be this problem if we hadn’t paid so much attention to the first cases of such hooliganism,” Bazykin said.
Published reports about such incidents have set an example for would-be hooligans, Bazykin said.
“Now it has become a serious problem that needs to be resolved,” he said.
“Loss of attention — even for a moment — caused by a laser may lead to a collision with a bird; the crew may fail to anticipate a gust of wind, and so on. It is particularly dangerous during night flights,” Bazykin said.
An investigation has been opened into the incident.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Police Shoot Thief
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A policeman shot dead a carjacker in St. Petersburg when the man attacked him with a screwdriver last Thursday, Interfax reported.
The incident happened when the police attempted to detain two men who had carjacked an expensive foreign-brand car.
When the thieves began to drive away in the stolen car, the police managed to block them. One of the criminals lay down on the ground but the other attacked a policeman with a screwdriver, reportedly aiming for the officer’s chest.
The policeman reportedly warned the criminal before shooting him in self-defense. The man died as a result of his wounds.
Hyundai to Export
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — St. Petersburg’s Hyundai Motor plant will start exporting locally made cars to CIS countries in 2011, the city’s Investment and Strategic Projects Committee said, Interfax reported.
The company plans to export about 1,000 KIA Rio cars by the end of this year.
The Hyundai plant will become the first among St. Petersburg’s automotive industry cluster to export cars beyond the border of Russia’s customs union with Kazakhstan and Belarus, Interfax reported.
Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Rus launched the production of KIA Rio cars in August.
The plant plans to produce 20,000 Rio models by the end of this year, and about 100,000 in 2012.
Magna to Expand
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Magna International car parts producer plans to build another construction plant on its St. Petersburg premises, the city’s Investment and Strategic Projects Committee said last week, Interfax reported.
By the end of 2012 or beginning of 2013, the total area of Magna’s production facilities in St. Petersburg may increase to 20,000 square meters. Currently Magna manufactures its parts on 12,000 square meters in the villages of Shushary and Kamenka outside St. Petersburg.
Magna launched its local car parts production line in September 2010. Its plant in Shushary produces body parts and internal elements for Hyundai, General Motors, Nissan and Volkswagen.
Hacker Given Fine
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A St. Petersburg court last week issued a hacker who hijacked the web site of the city’s Zenit soccer club to a 100,000-ruble ($3,460) fine, Interfax reported.
The hacker, who has been named as Nikita Volgin, cracked Zenit’s web site in April 2011.
He replaced Zenit’s information on the site with photographs of St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko and Vadim Tyulpanov, Speaker of the city’s Legislative Assembly. The photos were accompanied by profanities addressed to the authorities.
TITLE: Disabled People Get New Career Option
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The city’s disabled people are to get vital new training and career opportunities due to the launch of a special training course at the St. Petersburg State University of the Fire-Fighting Service of the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry.
According to the ministry’s press service, the new course, which targets disabled people and lasts for 72 academic hours, will allow those who successfully complete the course to work as operators of the Service 112 round-the-clock emergency call center.
“The training course will involve the study of both the technical aspects and logistics of the service and, most importantly, psychological training. The program is tailored specifically for emergency service phoneline operators,” the press office said in a news release distributed to the media Tuesday.
The training course begins in September.
Service 112 is a unified emergency call center similar to the U.S.’s 911 service. The service incorporates the fire fighters, ambulance service, police and rescue squads that can be called upon in various situations from floods to industrial accidents.
Course applicants will have to meet strict health requirements in order to be accepted. In particular, good physical coordination is essential, as well as 20/20 vision and hearing, and clear diction.
Russia’s disabled people struggle to find work, as employers seek to avoid taking on anyone who is likely to take sick leave regularly or who has significant health problems, let alone a disability. Staff at St. Petersburg’s state-run job center say that applications from disabled people linger in their database for months and years on end, with little chance of them meeting the criteria stipulated to fill a position.
Private agencies rarely even accept applications from disabled people.
Hiring a disabled person also often burdens employers with additional costs, such as the obligation to install elevators or ramps and purchase special furniture.
Training and education opportunities for disabled people in Russia are also very limited. In the vast majority of cases, disabled people attend special schools or colleges that are equipped to deal with their needs, but offer an extremely limited range of professional qualifications.
TITLE: comment: The Poltavchenko Play
AUTHOR: By Nikolai Petrov
TEXT: The political logic behind the decision to replace St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko with Georgy Poltavchenko, presidential envoy to the Central Federal District, is not clear.
If United Russia were suffering from low ratings in St. Petersburg and the unpopular Matviyenko was dragging the party even further down, why replace her with a gray, low-profile presidential envoy who has about as much charisma as State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov? For all of her shortcomings — and there were many of them — Matviyenko at least was a colorful and charismatic politician.
What’s more, the quartet that United Russia has selected for its St. Petersburg ticket for the December Duma elections — Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak; State Hermitage Museum director Mikhail Piotrovsky; Mariinsky Theater director Valery Gergiev; or Sergei Bagnenko, a doctor who won the primaries — underscores how important it is for the authorities to boost United Russia’s flagging ratings in the region.
The reason behind the Poltavchenko appointment could have something to do with the elections in December and March. It would have been difficult to appoint a major political figure in the governor’s spot during the next presidential term, when it will be necessary to make painful social reforms.
There is a similarity between the Poltavchenko appointment and that of Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin. Both capitals have thus been placed in the hands of individuals loyal to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and who both come from outside the local political elite.
The shuffle may also be connected with the future fate of President Dmitry Medvedev, who could end up in St. Petersburg after the 2012 presidential election — perhaps as chairman of the Constitutional Court. His relationship with Matviyenko has been strained, to put it mildly, as it has with Kozak. But Medvedev’s relationship with Poltavchenko is more neutral and less personalized, as would be expected between a boss and one of his subordinates. And judging from his 10 years as a presidential envoy, even if he were to hold the St. Petersburg governorship post for years, Poltavchenko would never become a “master” — at least not in the sense that Matviyenko was or Anatoly Sobchak earlier.
Moreover, Poltavchenko’s appointment does not disrupt the equilibrium that has formed between the major St. Petersburg clans. What’s more, Poltavchenko apparently does not have his own team, nor does he have the resources to form one. Finally, Poltavchenko has far less experience than Sobyanin as a major political player and administrator.
Another possibility is that this is a package deal in which Poltavchenko is only a figurehead whose main function is to guarantee that the clans will reach agreement on the distribution of power. In that case, we will soon see new high-profile appointments to major posts from other political teams.
The Mironov-Matviyenko-Poltavchenko three-step has been taken directly from Putin’s 2007-08 playbook when he replaced big-name players with more obscure individuals from his reserve of loyalists. With this round of reshuffling just beginning, more high-profile changes undoubtedly lie ahead.
Nikolai Petrov is a scholar in residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center.
TITLE: Medvedev Sets Duma Vote for Dec. 4
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev on Monday set Dec. 4 as the date for elections to the State Duma, the powerful lower house of parliament that has been dominated by Kremlin loyalists since the last vote.
The Duma is the only chamber of the national legislature that is directly elected. Since the last election in 2007, the United Russia party headed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has held 315 of the 450 seats, while opposition parties were squeezed out of the Duma.
The three other parties — the Communists, the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party and the populist A Just Russia — generally offer little opposition and support the Kremlin in most initiatives.
The election is to be followed by the presidential vote in March.
Medvedev made the announcement Monday during a meeting with leaders of political parties with a presence in the Duma at his summer residence in Sochi.
“I would very much like the makeup of our future Duma to maximally reflect the political preferences of the widest range of our citizens,” Medvedev said in televised remarks.
Under a 2005 election law, all seats in the Duma are chosen by proportional representation, and a party must get at least 7 percent of the national vote to qualify for seats. During the 2007 vote, opposition, human rights and vote-monitoring groups claimed the Kremlin orchestrated widespread machinations aimed at ensuring a high turnout and a big United Russia win.
Medvedev acknowledged the claims in his address.
“Two things are equally unacceptable to us — the administrative lawlessness of officials who are trying to manipulate the elections ... and ungrounded claims of falsifications that we often hear from those who lost,” he said.
Before the 2007 vote, half the Duma’s seats were filled by candidates from individual races, rather than party lists, allowing independents and members of small parties a hypothetical chance.
Only officially registered parties are eligible for votes, and official scrutiny serves as an effective tool to deny registration to Kremlin critics and liberal parties.
TITLE: United Russia Reveals Primary Victors
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A history teacher, a lathe operator and a potato farmer are the new faces of the revamped United Russia party, which wrapped up its joint primaries with the All-Russia People’s Front late last week.
The party acknowledged numerous violations during the vote, but still touted as a success its effort to compile lists of top 10 State Duma candidates across all 83 regions through public procedures, replacing party bureaucrats with grassroots activists.
But more than half of the top 10 lists are still occupied by card-carrying party members, and the independents may be culled further because a victory in the primaries does not guarantee them an actual nomination for the Duma vote.
United Russia presented three salt-of-the-earth victors of the primaries at a news conference in Moscow on Friday. All had to travel to the capital because none are Muscovites.
The lathe operator, the Perm region’s Valery Trapeznikov, turned out to be a tall, slim man with a delicate face who looked more like an aged university professor. But he shouted and shook his fists as he spoke about his social initiatives, which included a tax on luxuries and a crackdown on unemployment.
Alexander Bogomaz, who runs a thriving potato-growing business in the Bryansk region, told the conference that he “would at least be able to provide a meal to the people” because he knew “how to reduce the price of potatoes.”
The history teacher, Lyudmila Bokova, from the Saratov region, said she had “never thought” she would be in the Duma, but if she wins a seat, she intends to spend a lot of time with her electorate, which would be unusual for a federal legislator.
Of the 830 people on the regional top 10 lists for the primaries, 320 were put forward by nongovernmental organizations, not United Russia, senior United Russia official Sergei Neverov, a Duma deputy, told the conference.
Of those, 146 are not affiliated with any parties, he added, without elaborating on whether the rest were members of United Russia or other parties whose members have begun lately to trickle to the ruling party.
United Russia plans to field 600 nominees in the Duma vote. A quarter will be representatives of the All-Russia People’s Front, an organization established by Putin in May with the stated goal of bringing together nonpolitical groups to give them broader representation.
Putin, who heads United Russia without being a member, and the rest of the party leadership will whittle down the party’s list of Duma nominees after the primaries. Candidates will be announced at a national United Russia congress in Moscow on Sept. 23 and 24.
Earlier reports said party bosses would not take into account the actual results of voting in the primaries. Neverov did not comment on this, but he admitted Friday that some of the regional votes had been rigged.
“Of course, there were failures and violations, but there were many more positive moments,” Neverov told a St. Petersburg Times reporter at the conference.
“We are making very serious conclusions and will make serious amendments,” Neverov added.
Media reported violations in the cities of Moscow, Volgograd, Vladivostok, Artyom and Nakhodka, among others.
Reports said that in some cities, candidates and members of election committees allowed voters to cast multiple ballots and bring in pre-made guidelines on who to vote for, with only a few select names on the list.
But Vyacheslav Lysakov, a member of the federal council for the All-Russia’s People’s Front, told the conference that voters representing various organizations had followed colleagues’ instructions on how to vote. Neverov said he did not consider this to be a violation.
TITLE: U.S. Cables Speak Of Sexist Diplomats
AUTHOR: By Alexandra Odynova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — “Sexism” and “low pay” are the name of the game at the Foreign Ministry, and the country’s middle class is growing but remains devoid of a political conscience, according to new U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.
The whistleblowing web site published 133,887 cables over the last week — its biggest single batch yet — in an apparent attempt to reclaim its place in the public spotlight.
The Russia-related part of the exposes is too harmless to damage the plodding “reset” between Moscow and Washington, but offers instructive glimpses into challenges of Russian diplomats and well-off citizenry in general, an international affairs analyst said.
The life of Russian diplomats, as reflected by their American counterparts, is described in a lengthy cable signed by U.S. Ambassador John Beyrle in 2008.
While U.S. diplomats “frequently meet open and engaging Russian diplomats, the unique nature of the Foreign Ministry contributes to the challenging environment” in which they work in Russia, according to the cable.
“Sexism runs rampant” at the ministry dominated by men, where only 15 percent of Russian diplomats are women, said the cable, marked as “sensitive” and “unclassified, for official use only.”
The ministry’s chief of personnel, Vladimir Morozov, saw nothing wrong with the male dominance at his agency, the report said.
“Men were better equipped to handle long-term absences from home, harsh climates, and the ‘complex political and military situations’ in which Russian diplomats often found themselves,” Morozov was cited as saying.
This is why the Foreign Ministry “remains a bastion of Slavic males who went to Moscow’s top schools,” where education costs thousands of dollars, even as the staff of the U.S. Foreign Service has become “more diverse,” the cable said.
Access to ministry jobs is limited by the real estate market, among other things. Most diplomats are Muscovites with their own housing because people from the provinces cannot afford an apartment in Moscow on a ministry salary, which ranges from $150 to $4,000 a month.
Real estate also defines many a diplomat’s life: Male ministry employees are frequently married to women employed in the private sector who earn more than their husbands, the cable said.
Russian diplomats also complained to their U.S. colleagues that they sometimes have to leave their families at home when posted abroad because of a lack of schools for their children. Small diplomatic missions often have no Russian-language schools, or only classes for small children.
A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry declined to comment Monday.
A separate cable sent by Beyrle’s predecessor, William Burns, in 2006 focuses on Russia’s middle class, which it said was finally emerging but still a way off from growing politically active.
“The middle class is finally stepping out of the shadows,” Burns said in the cable published in Kommersant on Monday. “There must be someone other than the mega-rich, after all, to buy these TV sets, cars and mobile phones.”
The middle class is interested in politics, but given Russian political traditions, “it shouldn’t be expected to swiftly transform into activism,” Burns writes in the cable, cited in Russian.
But eventually, the cable said, well-salaried Russians will want to “have a voice and influence on how their country is managed and how to spend their money.”
Another cable specifically cites the skyrocketing popularity of social networks and an expansion of fitness chains in Russia as proof of the growing middle class. Curiously, interviews with several gym owners showed that many people are taking up sports following a fad started by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who often flaunts before cameras his love for judo, skiing and fishing.
WikiLeaks had its “moment of glory” — in President Dmitry Medvedev’s words — in 2010 when it published a classified video of a disputed American military operation in Iraq and has since emerged as a unique source for U.S. State Department cables.
But its clout has been waning recently, both due to lack of new publications and scandals surrounding WikiLeaks’ Australian-born founder and chief, Julian Assange, who is accused of rape in Sweden.
Recent publications are likely aimed at drawing the attention back to the web site, but it will have no significant political impact, said Oleg Terebov, a researcher with the Moscow-based Institute for the United States and Canada.
TITLE: Poland Exhumes Crash Victim
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WARSAW, Poland — Polish authorities have exhumed one of the people killed along with President Lech Kaczynski in a 2010 plane crash in Russia because his family said it didn’t trust the Russian autopsy.
A military prosecutor, Zbigniew Rzepa, said the body of Zbigniew Wassermann, a former minister for secret services, was exhumed Monday at a Krakow cemetery.
He was killed along with 95 others, including the president, first lady, and scores of government and military officials, in the April 2010 plane crash near Smolensk, Russia.
Wassermann’s daughter, Malgorzata Wassermann, said she demanded the exhumation because she believes the Russians falsified information on her father’s autopsy report and that the document is “inauthentic.” She noted that it referred to organs that her father had had removed years earlier.
The military prosecutors stressed that the exhumation was done due to doubts about statements in the autopsy, but said there were no doubts about Wassermann’s identity.
The crash has strained ties between Poland and Russia, historic foes, and some relatives of the victims have expressed distrust in how Russia handled the aftermath of the disaster.
Polish media say other families of Smolensk victims also have doubts about their loved ones’ autopsies and are considering requesting similar exhumations.
The crash occurred in heavy fog, and a Polish government investigation says it was largely caused by poor pilot training and errors but that poor guidance from Russian air traffic controllers also contributed. A Russian investigation said Russians bear no responsibility for the crash.
TITLE: New Job For Jailed Yukos Oligarch
AUTHOR: By Jonathan Earle
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Mikhail Khodorkovsky has a new job — as a magazine columnist.
The jailed former Yukos CEO on Monday published his first regular column in the opposition New Times weekly describing his experience in prison.
The column features the ghastly story of two fellow inmates he says suffered gross mistreatment at the hands of the criminal justice system.
Kolya, 23, whom Khodorkovsky describes as a lifelong outcast, gashed his own stomach to avoid being charged with robbing an elderly woman, a crime he did not commit.
Police asked him to plead guilty to the robbery to close the case, but Kolya refused, saying he would lose all self-respect over it, and pelted prison officials with his own innards when they pressured him, barely surviving the hara-kiri.
“I look at this man, a repeat offender, and think about all the people living in freedom who place a lower price on their honor, who don’t think it’s all that bad to swipe a couple of thousand rubles from an elderly man or woman,” Khodorkovsky writes.
Sergei, 30, an addict sobering up in Khodorkovsky’s cell after a drug binge, faced a lengthy prison term because investigators framed him for dealing drugs after he refused to identify his actual dealer.
But Sergei was saved by a near-miracle after the man who framed him came forward in court and, citing a terminal illness, confessed his crime and exposed police officers who provided protection to his business.
“The system is such. The people are such. Before the threshold. At the threshold. It awaits us all,” Khodorkovsky concludes.
It was not immediately clear whether Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, was being paid to write the column.
New Times editor-in-chief Ilya Barabanov said the column would appear as often as possible.
“Mikhail Borisovich will be telling the stories of the people he’s met during his time behind bars,” Barabanov said on Finam FM radio. “I think he will also share his views on the social and political state of our country. … He will do as he wishes.”
Officials have not commented on the project.
Khodorkovsky, in jail since 2005 for fraud and tax evasion, had his sentence extended to 2013 following a related trial on embezzling oil. His defenders say both cases were politically motivated.
He is serving his sentence at a prison in the Karelia republic near the Finnish border. A request for parole is pending court review, though his chances of walking out early appear low after a similar request by his former business partner Platon Lebedev, jailed on the same charges, was thrown out in July over technicalities.
TITLE: New Program Provides Parks With $82M
AUTHOR: By Irina Filatova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The government will spend a total of 2.4 billion rubles ($82 million) on a targeted program to develop specific nature reserves across the country over the next three years, as part of an ambitious preservation project, Natural Resources Minister Yury Trutnev said Monday.
About 1.5 billion rubles will be spent on building infrastructure, with the remaining funds allotted for transportation and communications services aimed to monitor the territory of reserves and fight poaching, he said at a meeting with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
The ministry examined more than 200 specially protected natural areas to choose 12 of the highest priority to be developed by 2013, Trutnev said, as people currently have limited access to the country’s nature reserves — which are poorly developed and have no appropriate infrastructure.
Financing will be provided for 10 nature reserves and two national parks, like Baikalo-Lensky and Baikalsky nature reserves on the coast of Lake Baikal, Vrangel Island located between the East Siberian and Chukchi seas and the Caucasus nature reserve.
“Work of such a scale has never been undertaken in Russia before,” Trutnev said.
He also said his ministry plans to build about 180 museums, 98 recreation places, as well as 290 tourist routes in the nature reserves, which will allow the number of visitors to double to 12 million a year by 2013.
Putin said that visiting the nature reserves must be affordable for people with low incomes. Trutnev promised that prices would be “minimal.”
Last year, Putin pushed to develop domestic ecological tourism in order to attract not only local residents but also visitors from abroad.
Trutnev said at the time that the country’s national parks could be profitable, just like in the United States.
He complained that the Geyser Valley in the U.S. Yellowstone national park has 2 million visitors a year, while a similar valley in Russia’s Kamchatka region has only 3,000 visitors annually.
National parks in the United States bring $14.5 billion a year, Trutnev said. “If we invest in national parks and nature reserves … we’ll see this money return to the budget.”
Meanwhile analysts said such projects in Russia are unlikely to bring high profit.
“Reaching a break-even point is the best that one can expect from such a project,” said Yana Kuzina, head of the strategic consulting and valuation department at CB Richard Ellis.
National parks are designed to be cultural and ecological sites rather than sources of profit, she said by telephone.
Trutnev also asked to extend financing of the program through 2020, saying 800 million rubles will be needed annually to expand it to the country’s about 200 other nature reserves after 2013.
Putin promised to discuss the issue at the presidium meeting.
TITLE: Bombing Targets Cop’s Luxury Car Amid Anarchist Attacks
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A luxury car driven by a Moscow district police officer was damaged shortly before midnight Sunday by a bomb, possibly the latest in a string of attacks by militant anarchists.
The bomb went off near a police parking lot in the Vostochnoye Degunino district in the city’s north, damaging the Toyota Land Cruiser Prada of local police deputy chief Eduard Zaitsev, RIA-Novosti said.
No injuries were reported, but the blast destroyed several windows in the nearby precinct building and damaged two more cars driven by local cops, an unidentified police official told Interfax. He did not identify the other cars or estimate the cost of the damage.
The bomb contained the equivalent of 50 to 100 grams of TNT, the official added.
Police have opened a criminal case into the attack on charges of hooliganism, which carry a maximum sentence of seven years in prison. No one has been detained in connection with the blast.
A police spokesman confirmed by telephone Monday that the blast took place, but refused to elaborate.
Zaitsev did not own the Toyota Land Cruiser Prada and had been driving it with permission from the owner, RIA-Novosti said. It remained unclear who entrusted to him the car, which costs 1.7 million to 2.7 million rubles ($59,000 to $94,000).
The average salary of a police deputy head in Moscow is 40,000 to 45,000 rubles, according to Moscow police trade union chief Mikhail Pashkin.
Precinct officers told Gazeta.ru that the incident was not linked to similar attacks by young radicals this summer, but the RIA-Novosti source said “informal youth groups and organizations are being investigated for links to the incident.”
Anarchists have claimed responsibility for other attacks on police property in the last two weeks, including the bombing of a police station in northwestern Moscow late Friday and the torching of a police parking lot in the Moscow region town of Khimki last Tuesday.
In early July, an obscure group of anarchists, the Earth Liberation Front, claimed responsibility on its blog, Blackblocg.info, for days earlier torching a police station, a luxury-car showroom, an upscale cottage and a bulldozer in Moscow and the surrounding region.
The earliest entries in the blog, which includes videos and photos of attacks, date back to May 2010.
Police spokeswoman Yelena Alexeyeva told The St. Petersburg Times in July that investigators have been reviewing the web site’s claims and found some, but not all, to be true.
No detentions have been reported in any attacks claimed by the anarchists.
This summer’s spate of attacks also includes the torchings of a BMW and a Maserati in central Moscow last week; of five cars in separate incidents on the same day in early July; and of 10 luxury cars attacked with homemade bombs, bricks and screws in June. No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks.
TITLE: Russia Plans New Aid Agency
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: headway in a plan to set up its own international development agency to finance projects in poorer countries, mostly around its borders.
The effort would bolster the country’s global status as a donor nation and help maintain peace in the often restive area of Central Asia.
The Finance Ministry has drafted a proposal to establish the Russian Agency for International Development, which will be reviewed by the Cabinet, a ministry source said Friday.
The agency would help finance supplies of industrial equipment, construction of various manufacturing facilities and work force training sessions, the source said.
“Almost nobody else is doing this now” out of the assembled Russian agencies that mete out international aid, the source said, Interfax reported.
Russia has recently stepped up its aid to the former Soviet republics and elsewhere fivefold over the past five years to $470 million in 2010, but the main focus was on disaster relief.
Under the proposal, the agency will start work on Jan. 1 next year, report to the Finance Ministry and have a staff of about 50 people. It will not deal with Russia’s aid contributions through the World Bank and the United Nations.
A greater healing effect on needy economies will result by having the agency aid specific business projects rather than [getting involved in] general government spending, said Vladimir Zharikhin, deputy director of the CIS Institute, a think tank that studies the former Soviet republics.
So far, Russian aid has helped rein in unrest in Kyrgyzstan — which is now led by interim leader Roza Otunbayeva, he said.
“Otunbayeva is not the strongest politician, but it has been half a year without any explosions out there,” he said.
“One can’t say it was purely altruistic,” he added. “We have visa-free travel with these countries, and whatever happens there affects Russia.”
Zharikhin identified Kyrgyzstan and Belarus, which has also fallen on hard times this year, as the prime targets for Russian aid.
“It’s not because they need it most,” he said. “It’s because there’s no one else to help them.”
In many other corners of the globe, Russia joined the European Union, the United States and China as donors that spread their influence.
Russia’s foreign aid efforts last year were dwarfed by those of the United States, which gave away $30.2 billion. But Russia is ahead of Brazil — another developing economy — whose aid to foreign countries equaled only $50 million last year.
The Soviet Union was one of the world’s most generous international donors, spending $26 billion in 1986.
Russia has been more active in helping neighboring countries via targeted financial support, by which it earns interest. Billions of dollars worth of loans have been extended to Belarus, and in the latest move a Russia-led anti-crisis fund agreed in June to let Minsk borrow $3 billion in several tranches.
Belarus has to undertake a set of economic measures to qualify for the loan, and a top executive of the Eurasian Development Bank, which runs the anti-crisis fund, warned on Thursday that Minsk had made little progress.
TITLE: Astronauts May Have to Desert Space Station
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — Astronauts may need to take the unprecedented step of temporarily abandoning the International Space Station if last week’s Russian launch accident prevents new crews from flying there this fall.
Until officials figure out what went wrong with Russia’s essential Soyuz rockets, there will be no way to launch any more astronauts before the current residents have to leave in mid-November.
The unsettling predicament comes just weeks after NASA’s final space shuttle flight.
“We have plenty of options,” NASA’s space station program manager, Mike Suffredini, assured reporters Monday. “We’ll focus on crew safety as we always do.”
Abandoning the space station, even for a short period, would be an unpleasant last resort for the world’s five space agencies that have spent decades working on the project. Astronauts have been living aboard the space station since 2000, and the goal is to keep it going until 2020.
Suffredini said flight controllers could keep a deserted space station operating indefinitely, as long as all major systems are working properly. The risk to the station goes up, however, if no one is on board to fix equipment breakdowns.
Six astronauts from three countries presently are living on the orbiting complex. Three are due to leave next month; the other three are supposed to check out in mid-November. They can’t stay any longer because of spacecraft and landing restrictions.
The Sept. 22 launch of the very next crew — the first to fly in this post-shuttle era — has already been delayed indefinitely. Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft have been the sole means of getting full-time station residents up and down for two years. The capsule is parked at the station until they ride it home.
To keep the orbiting outpost with a full staff of six for as long as possible, the one American and two Russians due to return to Earth on Sept. 8 will remain on board at least an extra week.
As for supplies, the space station is well stocked and could keep going until next summer, Suffredini said. Atlantis dropped off a year’s supply of goods just last month on the final space shuttle voyage. The unmanned craft destroyed Wednesday was carrying 3 tons of supplies.
For now, operations are normal in orbit, Suffredini noted, and the additional week on board for half the crew will mean additional science research.
The Soyuz has been extremely reliable over the decades; this was the first failure in 44 Russian supply hauls for the space station. Even with such a good track record, many in and outside NASA were concerned about retiring the space shuttles before a replacement was ready to fly astronauts.
Russian space officials have set up an investigation team and until it comes up with a cause for the accident and a repair plan, the launch and landing schedules remain in question. None of the spacecraft debris has been recovered yet; the wreckage fell into a remote, wooded section of Siberia. The third stage malfunctioned; a sudden loss of pressure apparently was noted between the engine and turbopump.
While a crew may well have survived such an accident because of safety precautions built into the manned version of the rocket, no one wants to take any chances.
One or two unmanned Soyuz launches are on tap for October, one commercial and the other another space station supply run. Those would serve as important test flights before putting humans on board, Suffredini said.
NASA considered vacating the space station before, following the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003. Back then, shuttles were still being used to ferry some station residents back and forth. Instead, the station got by with two-man crews for three years because of the significant cutback in supplies.
The space station’s population doubled in 2009, to six. It wasn’t until the space station was completed this year that science research finally took priority.
Even if the space shuttles were still flying, space station crews would still need Soyuz-launched capsules to serve as lifeboats, Suffredini said. The capsules are certified for no more than 6 1/2 months in space, thus the need to regularly rotate crews. Complicating matters is the need to land the capsules during daylight hours in Kazakhstan, resulting in weeks of blackout periods.
NASA wants American private companies to take over crew hauls, but that’s three to five years away at best. Until then, Soyuz capsules are the only means of transporting astronauts to the space station.
Japan and Europe have their own cargo ships and rockets, for unmanned use only. Commercial front-runner Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, plans to launch a space station supply ship from Cape Canaveral at the end of November. That would be put on hold if no one is on board to receive the vessel.
Suffredini said he hasn’t had time to consider the PR impact of abandoning the space station, especially coming so soon after the end of the 30-year shuttle program.
“Flying safely is much, much more important than anything else I can think about right this instant,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll have an opportunity to discuss any political implications if we spend a lot of time on the ground. But you know, we’ll just have to deal with them because we’re going to do what’s safest for the crew and for the space station.”
TITLE: Nightclub Death Prompts Lawsuit
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — As the Spartak Moscow football club urged fans to avoid a racist rally, the family of an ethnic Russian killed by a Dagestani mixed martial arts champion vowed to seek 1 million euros ($1.4 million) in court.
Ivan Agafonov, a 19-year-old Muscovite college dropout, died after Rasul Mirzayev, 25, struck him during a quarrel outside a Moscow nightclub earlier this month.
Agafonov’s family said Friday that they would sue the Russian Sambo Federation, of which Mirzayev was also a member, for at least 1 million euros in damages, Interfax reported, citing celebrity lawyer Igor Trunov, who represents the family.
The federation, which has suspended Mirzayev’s membership indefinitely, denied responsibility for his actions outside the mat.
Mirzayev apparently hit Agafonov after the latter flirted with his girlfriend.
The death has fueled simmering racial tensions in Moscow, and the Spartak Moscow football club asked its fans ahead of a Sunday night derby with CSKA to stay away from a banned rally scheduled by ultranationalists for after the game, Interfax said.
Right-wing radicals, many of whom are football fans, planned to rally in memory of Agafonov.
The team urged its fans to avoid “provocations” by “certain groups of people.”
Scores of police officers kept watch in the area around the derby late Sunday to crack down on any signs of a rally.
Mirzayev, who is in police custody, was denied bail, reportedly to placate the ultranationalists.
TITLE: Zubkov Keeps Gazprom Job
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — First Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov will remain chairman of the country’s biggest company, Gazprom, a Kremlin aide said Monday, in the midst of confusion about the position that sprouted from the Kremlin push to purge state companies of top government officials.
President Dmitry Medvedev has ordered Cabinet ministers and top dogs in his administration to forfeit their ranks as board members at state-controlled companies in two phases, to be complete by the end of next month. Zubkov appears to be an exception to the campaign that sought to level the playing field in the state-dominated economy.
“There will be no exit by Oct. 1” for Zubkov, said Arkady Dvorkovich, an economic aide to Medvedev. The final decision will respect the “interests of the company.”
The reasons for the government to continue to mull the resolution of the Zubkov case appear to range from his thoughts about leaving the government to handing over access to strictly confidential material at the world’s biggest natural gas company, according to Dvorkovich.
Under Medvedev’s April order, independent directors were to replace government officials on the boards. Dvorkovich said officials balked at giving access to top secrets to independents, apparently referring to some exploration data that the government classifies.
In addition, “given the current political cycle, plans by certain people to leave the government have already transpired,” Dvorkovich said, Interfax reported. “There’s no need to rush.”
The Cabinet will have to resign when Russia elects a new president in March. Zubkov has not made any public statements about his immediate or future career plans. He has, however, in recent months left all other company board seats he occupied.
Zubkov’s role at Gazprom has come into focus as time runs out for the company to schedule a special shareholders meeting to replace him on the board. Corporate rules prescribe a month’s notice for a meeting like this, meaning Gazprom would have to announce its decision by Wednesday.
That said, Medvedev’s order was not explicit about Zubkov’s removal from Gazprom in the first place. The order identified 17 state-controlled companies that should purge their boards of government officials by July 1. The specific mention of Gazprom said Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko was to leave, but it did not mention anyone else. Shmatko gave up his seat in June.
According to the order, the Oct. 1 deadline is for the remaining state-controlled companies, save the 17 firms that were listed by name, to reshuffle their boards.
Dvorkovich, however, on Monday did not dispute the idea that Zubkov was supposed to leave Gazprom.
The officials, whom Medvedev identified at the 17 companies, had to quit the boards because they supervised the industries in which the companies were dominant. Zubkov, on the contrary, oversees agriculture in the Cabinet.
TITLE: Fish and Trees Most Likely to Bring Profit
AUTHOR: By Irina Filatova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The overall profit of large and midsized companies jumped 40 percent in the first half of this year to reach 4.6 trillion rubles ($158 billion), while the number of loss-making firms increased slightly, the State Statistics Service said Friday.
Profit was made by 39,300 companies, excluding small businesses, banks, insurance firms and state companies, while 20,900 firms jointly lost 582 billion rubles, the service said on its web site.
In the first half of last year, 41,700 companies earned 3.3 trillion rubles, and 21,800 companies posted a loss of 556.5 billion rubles.
The figures indicate that the domestic economy is gradually recovering after the financial crisis, said Alexei Devyatov, chief economist at UralSib Capital.
“Companies are feeling all right,” he said by telephone. “The increase is significant and shows that the economy is recovering after the crisis. It’s big progress.”
Businesses increased their profit largely due to a conservative hiring policy and lowering costs, said Finam analyst Alexander Osin.
Meanwhile, more companies posted losses in the first half of this year than in 2010. The number grew from 34.4 percent in 2010 to 34.7 percent this year, which Devyatov said might be attributed to the increase of payroll tax.
“According to our estimates, companies will have to pay about 900 billion rubles in payroll taxes this year,” he said. “This is quite a big tax load.”
The payroll tax, which goes to state social funds like the Pension Fund and the Compulsory Medical Insurance Fund, was increased in January to 34 percent of an employee’s annual salary in big companies and 26 percent in small firms. Authorities subsequently agreed that the increase was a mistake.
President Dmitry Medvedev said earlier this year that the size of the tax was a large burden for business and that it must be lowered to 30 percent and 20 percent, respectively, starting Jan. 1 next year.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said last week that the decision on lowering the tax is ready and would be announced in the near future.
According to the State Statistics Service, the public utilities sector had the biggest number of loss-making firms, or 52.2 percent of the sector’s total.
The profit of public utilities companies depends on fixed tariffs, Devyatov said.
“One should also understand that many of these enterprises are extremely inefficient. Old Soviet-era boiler stations have a low capacity and consume a lot of expensive fuel,” he said, adding that public utilities tariffs do not compensate such firms’ costs.
The biggest number of profitable companies, or 77 percent, was in the agriculture and forestry sectors, the service said. There are also many profitable companies in retail trade (75.5 percent of the total in that sector) and fishing (74.9 percent).
TITLE: Mikhalkov Could Be In Line For Fewer Customs Royalties
AUTHOR: By Irina Filatova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Manufacturers and local distributors of electronic goods sent a letter to the government last week proposing to reduce the list of appliances for which they pay 1 percent of the customs value to compensate copyright holders.
Among the devices they propose to exclude from the 63-item list are cameras, DVD players, radios, projectors and all telephones except for cell phones with memory of more than 1 gigabyte, said Alexander Onishchuk, president of the Association of Trading Companies and Manufacturers of Consumer Electronic and Computer Equipment, or RATEK.
“There are a huge number of devices on the list approved by the government. But can you imagine a situation when someone uses a voice recorder to copy a piece of music or a film? To say nothing of a radio,” he told a news conference on Wednesday.
“We ask to eliminate the absurd. It’s impossible to impose a fee on anything with a record button,” Onishchuk said.
The Federal Service for the Protection of Cultural Heritage authorized the Russian Union of Rights Holders late last year to collect a fee of 1 percent of the customs value of imported electronic devices and blank recordable media.
The union, which is headed by film director Nikita Mikhalkov, did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday. Onishchuk said that even if the proposal goes though, the total sum to be collected is unlikely to decrease significantly because the share of the appliances to be excluded is meager in comparison with the overall electronics market.
The size of the electronic goods market in the second quarter of this year reached 270 billion rubles ($9 billion), the company said.
The request to reduce the list of devices for which the levy must be paid was made after a survey showed that people use just a handful of such devices to copy data for their personal use, Onishchuk said.
Only 30 percent of Russians aged 18 and over copy films and music for personal use, of which 24 percent use a desktop computer, according to a RATEK-commissioned survey by the state-run VTsIOM pollster.
Among other devices most frequently used to copy such data are cell phones and laptops, with 15 percent and 9 percent of users, respectively.
VTsIOM interviewed 1,600 residents of 138 cities across Russia. The margin of error was 3.4 percent.
The players of the electronic devices market will benefit from reducing the list of taxable appliances because they’ll be able to save money, which could be used to develop new products, Onishchuk said.
“It will have a favorable effect on the companies’ business. … One percent of the customs value isn’t a huge sum, but it’s significant,” he said.
TITLE: Stocks Gain, But Analysts Remain Wary
AUTHOR: By Howard Amos
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian stocks rose sharply Monday in line with a global rally, but market insiders warned that nothing was standing in the way of another tailspin like the one the world witnessed in early August.
The MICEX Index closed up 3.6 percent at 1,512.36, its highest point since the 1,418.66 bottom hit on Aug. 11, paring this month’s loss of 11 percent.
But market players stressed that concerns over sovereign debt levels in Europe and the possibility of a “double-dip” recession in the United States — fundamentals that drove the sell-off in early August — have not receded.
There is plenty of scope for fresh panic on the markets, said Peter Westin, chief equity strategist at the Aton brokerage.
“If anyone goes in [now] with a conviction that we’ve reached the bottom, I’m afraid they’ll get burnt,” Westin said.
TITLE: Why the 2000s Were Better Than the 1990s
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Ryzhkov
TEXT: Most Russians still have negative feelings about the liberal reforms of the 1990s and are more positively disposed toward the 2000s. But at the same time, acts of aggression and nationalistic sentiment are growing throughout society. There has been a significant increase in the number of people wanting to work abroad temporarily or to leave Russia altogether.
Russians’ views toward their country are filled with contradictions. They tend to recognize the value of democracy but are pessimistic about its prospects. They support the country’s chosen path but do not anticipate any significant success in the near future. They value freedom and private initiative but support a range of paternalistic notions including the need for the state to control the economy.
These findings were confirmed in a major study by the Russian Academy of Science’s Sociology Institute that was conducted this spring under the direction of Mikhail Gorshkov in cooperation with the German F. Ebert Foundation. The report, “20 Years of Reform Through Russian Eyes,” analyzes the dynamics of Russian public opinion during the two decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The number of people with a negative attitude toward the reforms of the 1990s, although decreasing somewhat, remained high, shifting from 43 percent to 34 percent. But 69 percent of Russians felt that the reformers themselves did not intend to build democracy and a market economy, but wanted to seize power and to redistribute public assets among themselves.
Only 6 percent of respondents felt that the reforms were conducted properly. Russians listed only four positive outcomes from the reforms of the 1990s: an abundance of consumer goods, the freedom to travel abroad, an ability to earn unlimited money and an end of religious repression along with the strengthening of religion’s role in society.
Of the two post-Soviet decades, public opinion clearly favors the 2000s over the 1990s. Most of those questioned said the 2000s provide better opportunities to improve their standard of living, engage in business, develop professionally and even to participate in the country’s social and political life.
But having better opportunities does not necessarily mean they were successful in achieving those goals. The decade under Vladimir Putin only compares favorably to the 1990s, but on its own the 2000s are not considered a period of progress. Public opinion gave unqualified high marks to the current regime on only two points — strengthening Russia’s position in the world and restoring order at home. The authorities earned far lower ratings for their ability to improve the economy and the general standard of living, for defending democracy and political freedoms and for resolving the situation in the North Caucasus.
The sharp change in attitudes in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other major cities is another important development. In Moscow, 61 percent of the population is ready to “shoot” those responsible for their problems. Only two years ago, 69 percent of the people of Moscow and St. Petersburg gave an overall positive assessment of the situation in the country. Today, that number has fallen precipitously to 22 percent.
Two problems have worsened from the 1990s to the 2000s: the lack of a social safety net for those who are sick, old, unemployed or disabled and the lack of protection from violence.
The number of people wanting to leave Russia to study abroad, work or emigrate has risen steadily. Today, fewer than half of all respondents say they would never want to leave the country, while 13 percent would like to leave Russia forever — 150 percent more than felt that way 10 years ago. One in every five Russians under 30 years of age would like to emigrate.
Only 29 percent of those polled consider Russia to be a democratic country, while 48 percent believe it is not. What’s more, only 23 percent of people in the two capitals view Russia as a democracy – the lowest number in the country. The study showed that 71 percent of Russians believe that ordinary people have no influence over the affairs of the country. The result is a rapid loss of interest and participation in politics. At the same time, however, the number of people who believe that rallies, demonstrations and strikes are effective has doubled in the last 10 years.
And although a 57 percent majority of respondents favor stability, those wanting fast and radical change have grown to 42 percent and 54 percent among youth. The rapidly changing mood among the most progressive segments of the population — people living in large cities and youth — suggest that they will be more demanding of political change.
The future of Russia could very well depend on whether the Kremlin treats these demands seriously.
Vladimir Ryzhkov, a State Duma deputy from 1993 to 2007, hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio and is a co-founder of the opposition Party of People’s Freedom.
TITLE: Torching Peter the Great: Slandering the City’s Journalists
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
TEXT: On a rainy morning in mid-August, St. Petersburg journalist Konstantin Andrianov, a reporter with the influential national daily Kommersant, was out covering what he described as a brief and rather unexciting assignment.
In pouring rain, about five activists from the opposition movement Other Russia came to the courtyard of a district administration building carrying a poster that said, “Your Elections are a Farce!” The slogan referred to the municipal elections that were held in the district on Aug. 21, carefully orchestrated to allow St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko to gain a seat on a local council and then be propelled to the Federation Council.
The protesters, standing next to a small monument to Peter the Great, also threw around a few handfuls of leaflets and lit a flare. The protest lasted five minutes at the most. A few minutes later the reporters were stopped by police officers who checked their documents and let them go.
About an hour later, however, Andrianov started getting bizarre phone calls. His colleagues, former university classmates, and people he hardly knew, were wondering what on earth prompted him to try and set a monument to Peter the Great on fire. They also regretted that he was now in serious trouble with the police.
“I don’t even smoke, and I don’t carry a lighter or matches,” Andrianov said he told the callers, sensing that he was clearly missing something. When he got to the editorial office, the answer awaited him.
The short protest had been recorded by a surveillance camera installed on the government building. One of the clerks had reported the news to the head of the local administration, who, for some reason, declared the event “an act of hooliganism and vandalism committed by journalists of the serious media” on Twitter. Andrianov, along with other journalists who were present at the meeting, contacted the authorities to clarify the situation, only to receive insults via Twitter. Offensive comments continued to appear on the official’s Twitter stream for about 36 hours.
“A group of hooligans was detained just outside the administration building: They were throwing leaflets around and tried to set the monument on fire. They turned out to be journalists from well-known publications,” read the first tweet. Within a minute, a second one appeared, followed by a few dozen more. The official gave the titles of the publications and said his lawyers were busy preparing a letter appealing for the opening of a criminal case against “the vandals.”
“They [the reporters] are men of no honor […] This dirty provocation smells badly,” the official declared at one stage.
Sometime toward the afternoon, the official somewhat changed the angle of his criticism and accused the journalists of “passively and cynically assisting the vandals” and told everyone to rest assured that the vandals would not remain unpunished. “They wanted to play a dirty trick and then claim that the media is being strangled,” the official said. “Ha! But we got the whole thing recorded, and we’ve got witnesses!”
During the course of the Twitter attack, several news agencies and other media published reports relying solely on the official’s words on Twitter and creating a huge splash over the Internet.
As a result, three of the four media publications that were present at the protest, including Kommersant, asked for official apologies. Two publications threatened the official with legal action for slander and defamation.
The head of Kommersant’s regional editorial office issued the following statement: “This high-ranking official throws insults and accusations around very easily. … If there is any recording that proves his statements that the reporters were indeed involved in an attempt to damage the monument, this recording has to be made public. If not, the executive will have to offer an official apology for slander and defamation.”
The man’s only reaction was a Twitter post that said, “They don’t have the guts. Yapping is easy.”
Two weeks on, and nobody is talking about any legal procedures. I am not surprised that the “setting Peter the Great on fire” story did not get very far. The city police report that they received no formal complaint on the subject from the government. That is hardly surprising. Not so much because burning a bronze sculpture with a flare is tricky, but because the target of the action was, of course, the official (who was incensed) and not Peter the Great. What is surprising is the subsequent silence of journalists, who seem to have swallowed and digested the incident.
This episode has left a bitter aftertaste. Indeed, the value of public words, written or spoken, has hopelessly deflated. Even more disheartening is seeing officials confusing pride and honor with hubris and arrogance. Worst of all, however, is to then see journalists allow bureaucrats to bully them. It will be hard for readers to believe that journalists will efficiently serve and defend the interests of the public if reporters swallow insults and forgive them quite so easily. This hands-off attitude shows the weakness of the media as an institution, which appears incapable or unwilling to respond to an obvious slander.
A full version of this commentary is available at Transitions Online, an award-winning analytical online magazine covering Eastern Europe and CIS countries, at www.tol.org.
TITLE: CHERNOV’S CHOICE
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The city’s oldest surviving underground club will celebrate its 17th birthday with a concert and party on Friday, Sept. 2. Fish Fabrique opened at the artists’ squat at 10 Pushkinskaya Ulitsa in the heady 1990s and has become one of the city’s best loved underground venues, where all the best bands have performed.
Fish Fabrique, which opened in September 1994, was modeled after Berlin underground clubs and built with the help of German expats. Founders Oleg “Fish” Labetsky and Pavel Zaporozhtsev had already spent a lot of time in Western Europe and shared a dream of opening a music club in St. Petersburg.
Before Fish Fabrique, the duo hung out at the Russian-German venture Ost-West Cafe, which was closed in 1993 when a patron was arrested for throwing bottles from the club’s balcony.
Fish Fabrique’s alternative interior design (the work of Labetsky and Denis Kuptsov from the ska-punk band Spitfire) and weekly English-language film showings attracted students and ex-pats. The club adopted traditions such as second-hand clothing sales and Western holidays, having held — famously — the city’s first Halloween party in 1994.
The first band to perform, on Sept. 2, 1994, were the local alternative rock legends Tequilajazzz, who later mentioned the club in one of their best-known songs.
The building was falling apart, and the basement was flooded.
Later, as the result of a compromise between the artists and the city authorities and the building’s renovation, a large portion of it, including Fish Fabrique’s former premises, were given to the city, but after several months the club reemerged in the adjacent building, closer to Ligovsky Prospekt.
The tradition of celebrating Fish Fabrique and Tequilajazzz’s joint birthdays with unofficial parties started there, in Sept. 1998. The first such party was held amid the renovation works, with band members serving free drinks to the guests, who were mostly underground musicians and friends. Almost 300 revelers came.
During Tequilajazzz’s performance, blaring guitars brought the police to the location three times — though the cops, long familiar with the club, let the show go on.
The venue, much smaller in size than its original premises, officially opened with a Halloween party on Oct. 31, 1998. The club expanded last February with the opening of a second, larger room across the courtyard — once again, with a Tequilajazzz concert.
Called Fish Fabrique Nouvelle, the new room hosts more popular bands, while the old bar is reserved for smaller, more intimate gigs.
Sadly, Tequilajazzz split last year and will not be playing at this year’s birthday party, with its former frontman Yevgeny Fyodorov on holiday in Nepal.
Instead, there will be a concert by Jenia Lubich, the local indie pop singer, who is also known for her work with the French band Nouvelle Vague.
TITLE: Lucky number
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Ville Leinonen, the Finnish singer and songwriter whose diverse recording career has lasted for 14 years, encompassing everything from romantic schlager songs and folk to bossa nova and daring experiments, comes to the city this weekend to showcase his 13th album, which is a departure from all of his previous works.
Due out on Sept. 9, “Auringonsade / Pommisuoja” is split into two parts: The calm, atmospheric “Auringonsade” (Sun Ray) and the dark, intense “Pommisuoja” (Bomb Shelter).
Recorded during a nine-month period in Le Zen Tomb studio, Paris, the album, which features the revolutionary Afghan theater band L’Orch d’al-Fajr and Finnish pop singer Paula Vesala, is on Finland’s respected indie label Fonal.
In an interview with The St. Petersburg Times, Leinonen, 35, whose upcoming local concert will be his first in the city, speaks about the album, his beginnings and his approach to pop music.
Your new album, “Auringonsade / Pommisuoja” can be described as experimental, conceptual and psychedelic. It consists of two parts, which are entirely different in mood. Can you tell us about the album, its ideas and influences?
The album, like life itself, is an investigation of reality, hopes, chance and uncertainty. Some of the themes are influenced by events in my own life, some are universal. The soundscapes deal with these themes as well. I like to imagine what different emotions would sound like. What happens when you face something unexpected that forces you to face life’s uncertainty? How do things sound after an experience of immense happiness, sadness, satisfaction or fear?
It took quite a long time — nine months — to record, and features an Afghan band and singer Paula Vesala. To what extent was the album composed in the studio?
One could say that every album is a process, from its birth to the present. Or perhaps just a period of coincidences. During a studio process, I often create an imaginary setting to support the atmosphere. It is influenced by facts and fiction. Mrs. Paula Vesala, though, is real and lovely.
Is the new album a departure from the romantic 70s-style songs that you also perform? Or do these different genres coexist in your work at the same time? And could you tell us about your reggae album, “2 Leijonaa – Rocksteady.”
I featured as a co-soloist with Mr. Niko Ahvonen on the album “2 Leijonaa – Rocksteady,” which was released at the beginning of this year. I like to stay open to all sorts of projects, styles and co-operation to learn more. Of course, the kind of music I make is influenced by the sounds my parents enjoyed when I was a kid and what I enjoy myself. Sometimes I like to give room for everything to coexist; some days, I narrow inspiration down to a few fragments. I like to offer my audience musical and imaginative pathways to the past, present and future.
Some of your repertoire is covers; what does it mean to you to perform songs by other artists? Who are your favorites?
Our music cultures experience similarities in melancholy and excitement. In Russian culture, I feel you are more open to your emotions. I admire that and would like to bring something like that to my performances as well. To simplify, my favorite songs are ones that make me feel happy or sad. It is often a matter of good lyrics when choosing a cover and it should somehow serve the ensemble. I like to sing or perform a good, moving piece, not imitate the original artist. That serves no purpose.
You were born in Savonlinna, into a musical family. What was the atmosphere like when you were growing up? What music did you like, and what made you want to become a musician?
I come from a family of four siblings. My father is a trumpet teacher and a musician and my mother is a great lover of music. Even as toddlers, we had our hands full of real instruments. The musical atmosphere and encouragement of my childhood home has been key to what I am doing now. I studied my parents’ album collection very carefully, and am still very driven by the popular aesthetics of the ’70s.
Is it true that you started out as a drummer with some bands before you became a singer and guitarist?
Yes, from a very early age I played drums in different kinds of bands and orchestras, from classical to punk. I studied percussion, flute and piano at a conservatory and was supposed to become a jazz drummer, but then I noticed that I was interested in rock music and had just enough courage to try my luck as a soloist.
When you started out, did you have similar music tastes to those of your peers?
We shared similarities, but when growing up, the weirder [music was], the better. I feel that music has been one of my most important companions in life since I was a teenager. I shared a band called VTH from 1989-1995 with some of my best friends and it was an important playground for styles and experiments.
How did you come to form your band Valumo, which was active from 1997 to 2005? What were your influences?
I wanted to form a group to support a vision of good, innovative rock music. My influences at this time were everything from industrial noise to Serge Gainsbourg, and from gospel to national anthems and folk music. This has not actually changed that much.
Saturday’s gig will be your first concert in St. Petersburg, though you performed at Ikra club in Moscow in 2007. Was the audience any different from typical Finnish audiences?
I have such good memories from my last visit to Moscow. We were greeted with great kindness. I suppose in Finland, audiences tend to warm up more slowly and interact less. I hope we can bring warm thoughts and interesting sounds from Finland to St. Petersburg, as well as enjoying each other’s company.
Is your local concert this weekend part of a tour in support of the new album? What kind of music and songs can the audience expect to hear?
The program features a wide range of songs from my career. It celebrates this new album and co-operation with the wonderful musicians Janne Lastumaki and Teemu Markkula I get to play with. I’d like to say the program, the arrangements and the realization are worth checking out, even if you do not know my material. Just come and share a moment with interesting sounds and songs. We would love to have YOU there.
Ville Leinonen will perform at 8 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 3 at Chinese Pilot Dzhao Da. Metro Chernyshevskaya / Gostiny Dvor. Tel. 273 7487;
+7 (911) 751 8339.
TITLE: The vampires are coming
AUTHOR: By Elmira Delorme
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Fearless vampires will invade St. Petersburg’s Musical Comedy Theater this week. Their victims — innocent Russian audiences going to see a celebrated European musical — do not yet have any idea just how dangerous the vampires are. They don’t bite, but they sing and dance, casting a spell on their victims and drawing them into a worldwide network of bloodsucker devotees.
The story began 14 years ago, when the eminent film director Roman Polanski directed the first stage production of “Dance of the Vampires” (“Tanz der Vampire,” in the original German-language version), a musical based on his own film of 1967. Since then, the show has traveled around the world, capturing the hearts of millions of spectators.
In 2009, the production’s authors created a new version of the musical in Vienna. The production features new sets, costumes, lighting and musical arrangements.
After lengthy negotiations, the St. Petersburg Musical Comedy Theater was able to purchase a two-year license to stage the Vienna version of the performance, making Russia the ninth country to stage the show.
“When I saw this musical for the first time in Vienna, I decided that we should bring it to St. Petersburg,” said Yury Shvartskopf, general director of the Musical Comedy Theater. “The genre of the musical is underappreciated in Russia; my goal is to introduce one of the best examples of this genre to our audiences,” he said.
The state-owned theater took a considerable risk by investing 1.5 million euros in the project. “It is the biggest adventure of my life, but I think it is worth it; our audience deserves to see the best European performance quality,” said Shvartskopf.
The musical features 33 actors: Nine soloists and 24 members of the chorus and corps de ballet.
Actors came to St. Petersburg from all over Russia to take part in casting for the show. The actors admit that the genre is new and difficult: It’s not easy to sing with vampire teeth in one’s mouth, or to dance the vampires’ strange and awkward moves.
The main roles in the show will be performed by Moscow actors Ivan Ozhogin and Yelena Gazayeva, and by the St. Petersburg actor Georgy Novitsky.
The musical will be performed in Russian, having been rewritten by Suzanna Tsiryuk, who has translated many musicals into Russian.
More than 200 people, including technical personnel, have been working on the musical’s production, and have encountered many technical problems during the preparations.
Cornelius Baltus, Polanski’s assistant who directed most of the previous productions, said that they had faced the same problem in other countries.
“The musical is difficult to stage from a technical point of view,” he said. “We had to re-equip many theatres to be able to put up our sets. The theater in St. Petersburg is no exception.”
Among the elements introduced to the theater in preparation for “Dance of the Vampires” is a revolving circle in the middle of the stage.
“We have moved the stage forward, so that spectators are even closer to the actors,” explained Baltus. “In a small theater it is difficult to connect so many moving objects. However, [in a smaller theater] the story becomes more intimate; the viewer can be fully immersed in the plot.”
The St. Petersburg show is the fourth staging to utilize sets and constumes by the painter Kentaur, whose imaginative costumes and magical sets transport the audience to Transylvania. The sets are changed 75 times, and the vampires wear more than 220 costumes and wigs, with each of them changing outfits three or four times. Half of the costumes were produced in Hungary, while the other half were made here in Russia.
“We’re proud that this outstanding painter is working with us,” said Tatyana Fadeyeva, one of the show’s organizers. “He has created fantastic Gothic-style decorations, and has used 3D technology to replicate a lunar eclipse, bridges, a castle and other elements to create a mysterious atmosphere.”
Two other people from Polanski’s original team who are working on the local production are choreographer Dennis Callahan and Michael Reed, a superviser of vocal and dance arrangements.
The performance is well known for its music, composed by Jim Steinman, whose song “Total Eclipse of the Heart” won a Grammy in 1983. For “Dance of the Vampires,” he used a mixture of classical and rock music to create a supernatural soundtrack.
The story of the musical revolves around a professor and his assistant Alfred, who are looking for vampires in a small village in the Carpathian Mountains. They find them, but Alfred falls in love with Sarah, a beautiful young woman who is also an object of passion for the main vampire, Count von Krolock, who invites her to a magnificent ball in his castle. Count von Krolock is tormented by his desire to bite Sarah, while Alfred attempts to save her.
“It is not a simple horror story about vampires who want to bite people,” said Fadeyeva. “There’s philosophy, a lot of humor. The vampires are not terrifying; they sing, dance.”
“During the musical, Count von Krolock suffers from his desire,” she explained. “In his main aria of solitude in a crypt, he sings about his longing to love, not kill, but the dark part of him takes over. He addresses the audience, saying that everyone has a dark side. He may lust after blood, but others long for money, success etc. So everyone has something that they can’t overcome,” she said.
The musical has passionate fan clubs around the globe. The more devoted fans travel around to see all the versions of the performance and their favorite actors playing the main character Count von Krolock: Kevin Tarte, Jan Ammann, Geza Egyhazi and others.
“We have tried to build up cooperation between the best known Counts von Krolock. We call them ‘blood brothers’,” said Fadeyeva. “We sent our main Russian vampire to meet the European ones, to invite them to come to St. Petersburg. We were very pleased that they welcomed us warmly and promised to come to our city.”
Kevin Tarte is expected to come to the city for Saturday’s premiere to greet the Russian Count von Krolock, Ivan Ozhogin, and Ozhogin’s German counterpart gave him a ring that he wore during his performances as a blessing in passing on the baton.
“When I produced this musical, I didn’t think that one day it would reach Russia,” said Polanski in a video address to producers and actors in St. Petersburg.
“I don’t know how to explain its success,” said Baltus. “I’ve been staging it for years, and I’m not tired of it. There is magic in our vampires.”
“Dance of the Vampires” premieres on Sept. 3 and initially runs through Sept. 11 at the Musical Comedy Theater,
13 Italianskaya Ulitsa. Tel. 570 5316. After that, it will run one week per month. For more information, see http://balvampirov.ru
TITLE: the word’s worth: Taste of Russian Bureaucracy in a Stuck Elevator
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: Âàø ëèôò íå ñäàí: your elevator hasn’t been certified for service
In an old Soviet joke, a hare runs for his life in the forest. A bear asks him why he’s running, and the hare says that camels are being caught and shoed. Bewildered, the bear points out that the hare isn’t a camel. The hare replies: Ïîéìàþò, ïîäêóþò, à ïîòîì äîêàçûâàé, ÷òî òû íå âåðáëþä (They’ll catch you and put shoes on you, and then go and try to prove that you’re not a camel).
Today äîêàçûâàé, ÷òî òû íå âåðáëþä (prove that you’re not a camel) is used any time you can’t prove something obvious to an obstinate bureaucracy.
For example — that you have an elevator.
You see, this year municipal funds were allocated to replace old elevators, including the one in my apartment building. Cool. Your tax rubles at work, right?
Installation began in May. True, the installers — three migrant workers in flip-flops — didn’t immediately inspire confidence. But appearances can be deceiving. All those nuts and bolts spread out on the floor were eventually put in place, and after a month of trudging up six flights of stairs, the elevator was installed.
The workers left. But the elevator wasn’t turned on. We were told: Íóæíî ñíà÷àëà åãî ñäàòü ïðè¸ìíîé êîìèññèè (First you must have it certified by an inspections board). Sounds sensible, right? I moved out to the dacha and gave over my apartment to a friend, whose rental was being remodeled.
We waited for the inspectors. And trudged up six flights of stairs. And waited. And trudged.
A month later, the elevator was turned on. True, it went out of service every other day. But sometimes it worked. ?
Then disaster struck. On Saturday night my friend came home late, got into the elevator, and ascended quietly to the sixth floor. The elevator stopped. The doors didn’t open. After pushing buttons and pounding, he pushed the emergency button. A cranky woman replied: ×åãî ó âàñ? (What’s the matter?) He replied. She screamed back: Íè÷åãî íå ñëûøó! (I can’t hear anything!)
This comedy went on for a while until my friend identified the problem: There was no microphone in the elevator.
Somewhat stunned by the irony of an emergency communications system without a microphone, my friend went back to pounding and pushing buttons. Finally, the door loosened enough for him to wedge in his hand and pry the doors open. My cheerfully drunk neighbors, drawn by the commotion, ran downstairs to push another emergency button. That didn’t alert the dispatcher, but it did set off a loud buzzing.
The buzzing went on all Saturday night and all Sunday. On Monday, my friend called the dispatcher, who refused to do anything because — wait for it — Âàø ëèôò íå ñäàí. Îí äëÿ íàñ íå ñóùåñòâóåò (Your elevator hasn’t been certified. It doesn’t exist for us.)
So then he called óïðàâëÿþùàÿ êîìïàíèÿ (the management company), where he was told: Âàø ëèôò íå ñäàí. Ìû çà íåãî íå îòâå÷àåì. (Your elevator hasn’t been certified. We’re not responsible for it.) In desperation, he called the manufacturer, but — you got it — Âàø ëèôò íå ñäàí. Íåò êîíòðàêòà ïî îáñëóæèâàíèþ. (Your elevator hasn’t been certified. There’s no service contract.)
Our nonexistent elevator has been buzzing for five days and nights. And we can’t figure out how to convince the bureaucrats that it’s not a camel — it’s an elevator.
Michele A. Berdy, a Moscow-based translator and interpreter, is author of “The Russian Word’s Worth” (Glas), a collection of her columns.
TITLE: Before Beethoven
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: From mugham and hogaku to Gregorian chant and baroque violin: The city’s groundbreaking Early Music Festival, now in its 14th year, is willfully expanding its geographic boundaries.
This year’s festival opens at the State Academic Cappella on Friday with a concert by Pratum Integrum, Russia’s only baroque orchestra, who will perform J. S. Bach’s celebrated Brandenburg concertos.
Early music, embracing everything created between the medieval era through to early classicism, long remained a missing link in the repertoires of Russian orchestras. The brainchild of local enthusiasts Marc de Mauny — who is no longer involved in the festival — and Andrei Reshetin, the Early Music Festival was originally designed for a narrow circle of the initiated and carried a mission to break down the stereotypes that have built up around the early music repertoire and musicians who perform it.
The festival’s ideologists seek to place early music outside the field of classical music, as an alternative to classical music, just like other alternative genres such as jazz and rock. Indeed, music as it was composed, played, and performed up to the end of the 18th century has more in common with both jazz and rock than it does with the music of the 19th and 20th centuries, according to the festival’s organizers.
The festival has, during more than a decade, attracted some of the biggest names in early music to St. Petersburg, including Spain’s violinist and conductor Jordi Savall with his ensemble, Hesperion XXI, Britain’s The Red Priest and Italy’s Musica Antiqua Roma. This year is no exception.
During this year’s festival, which ends on Sept. 29 with a concert by the Spanish ensemble Regina Iberica at the Estonian Church of St. Ioann, audiences will be treated to performances by Dutch early music patriarch Gustav Leonhardt, who will play the organ, and by the Spanish ensemble Tasto Solo and Italian singer and guitarist Pino di Vittorio.
The highlight of this year’s program is the Sept. 15 organ recital by Leonhardt, a living legend of baroque music. Titled “The Apotheosis of Baroque,” the concert will take place at the Finnish Church of St. Maria and start at 10 p.m.
“Leonhardt is an admirable musician and unique personality who fully corresponds to 17th-century aesthetics,” said violinist Andrei Reshetin, artistic director of the Soloists of Catherine the Great ensemble, and the festival’s organizer. “A person of encyclopedic knowledge, he knows everything about baroque.”
Leonhardt’s wife Maria, a patron of the festival, will give a series of free master classes on baroque violin on Sept. 19, 20 and 21 at the Derzhavin Museum.
A fascinating four-part series of free master classes on Gregorian chant will be presented by France’s Father Andre Gouzes on Sept. 20 and 21 at the Derzhavin Museum and on Sept. 23 and 24 at the St. Catherine Church on Nevsky Prospekt. The church will also host a concert of Gregorian chant on Sept. 23.
The distinguished Spanish ensemble Tasto Solo will bring a delicious new flavor to the festival with a performance of late Renaissance music on early Renaissance keyboard instruments, including a miniature harpsichord.
“Although the instruments are not original, the sounds are fantastic — and, importantly, completely unheard of in Russia,” said Reshetin. “The ensemble is the leading one in its field in the world.” Tasto Solo will perform on Sept. 24 at the Estonian Church of St. Ioann.
The festival, which originally focused on Western Europe’s musical culture, has gradually evolved into a more cosmopolitan event and now stands at a cultural crossroads, with this year’s programs featuring concerts of traditional Japanese hogaku music as well as mugham, an Azeri folk vocal art.
Hogaku, which literally translates as “Japanese music,” will be represented by a trio of Japanese musicians — Reitei Nishimura, Satomi Tarumoto and Toshiko Yonekawa — playing traditional instruments. The concert will take place at the Sheremetyev Palace on Sept. 10.
The Azeri theme of the festival emerged in 2010 with a lecture and concert by local musician Faik Chelebi, who performs on a tar, a traditional Azeri folk instrument. Mugham, which translates from Persian as “time” or “the moment,” is the predecessor of Azeri folk song. A mugham transcends the performer’s visual, emotional and aural experiences, from the singing of birds and flowing of rivers to exultation at the birth of a child or sorrow at separation from loved ones.
This year, Chelebi will be joined by his counterparts from Azerbaijan, singer Teyub Aslanov and musician Mirnazim Acadulaev, who will play the folk instrument kemancha at the Derzhavin Museum on Sept. 6.
“The festival is more than just a string of decent concerts; we perceive it rather as a musical instrument,” Reshetin said. “When in good hands, a musical instrument can produce magical sounds that touch your heart and get under your skin.”
A more recent festival tradition of spending a whole day packed with concerts and lectures at a former imperial estate outside St. Petersburg will continue this year. On Sept. 4, the action moves to Gatchina, with a “Musical Portrait of Paul I” program, featuring the Pratum Integrum Ensemble, while on Sept. 25, the festival will visit Oranienbaum to pay tribute to Francesco Araia, the first choirmaster and composer of the Russian imperial court. The performance will feature the Belgian ensemble Les Muffati and Reshetin’s Soloists of Catherine the Great ensemble.
“We would really love to establish this form of event — in which audiences can enjoy a day out at a historic estate, with concerts taking place throughout the day — and develop it further,” Reshetin said.
“Oranienbaum played a very special role in the history of Russia. This place was once Russia’s most European spot. This is, for example, where Catherine the Great read her first Voltaire book and where the first court theater was launched to become the inspiration for the Hermitage Theater.”
The Early Music Festival runs at various venues around the city from Sept. 2 to Sept. 29. For more information, visit the festival’s web site at www.earlymusic.ru.
TITLE: in the spotlight: 90 Bottles of Champagne and an 86,000-Euro Bill
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
TEXT: When it comes to excess, Russians tend to take the biscuit, especially abroad, when there is national honor at stake. This week, a group of Russians walked out of a nightclub in Sardinia forgetting the little matter of the bill: 86,000 euros, including more than 90 bottles of Cristal champagne.
Extraordinarily, that huge drinks bill was run up by just six people, the local L’Unione Sarda newspaper reported, saying the group consisted of three young men and their “beautiful girlfriends.” The club they went to was called Billionaire and is owned by Flavio Briatore, who once owned a Formula One team. It apparently never asks the names of its clients, so the booking was just in the name of their yacht, Kismet.
When none of the party wanted to pay the bill at the end of the night, the club came to an agreement that the captain of their 70-meter (hired) yacht would turn up the next day with the readies. How naive can you get? Naturally, there was no sign of the captain or the guests by then.
Their sins did catch up with them, as a group of carabinieri intercepted the yacht and questioned a representative of the boat’s owners and the captain. Then a fraud investigation was launched by prosecutors, La Gazzetta dello Sport reported, although the actual culprits appeared to still be at large.
On Thursday, lawyers were negotiating to pay the bill and close the case, L’Unione Sarda wrote, calling the group the lovely term of scrocconi, or freeloaders.
Back in Russia, speculation mounted on who these mystery scrocconi were. And how they managed to drink so much champagne.
“It’s known that the young men are children of wealthy Moscow businessmen,” Newsru.com reported.
“The Russian tourists not only drank but also poured the wine on one another, the other clubbers said, which is logical because it would seem hardly possible to put away 90 bottles among six,” Moskovsky Komsomolets commented.
Rossiiskaya Gazeta wrote a little homily, not about drinking 90 bottles of champagne, but about being tightfisted when it came to the bill. “We know how to go out in the old style, noisily, on a grand scale, bathing in champagne. … But when it comes to paying for going out on the town like merchants did, pulling out a great purse and paying for everything drunk and eaten with a tip for the waiters, too, there we have problems,” it wrote regretfully.
It even got an analyst, Larisa Pautova, to comment, who said: “Our people unfortunately do not like to fulfill obligations, even small ones. And they don’t need to order 90 bottles of champagne to leave without paying the bill, a bottle of beer is enough.”
The culprits were “little show-offs who tried to carouse in a big way, to make an impression, but not to spend any money,” she said disapprovingly.
But promoter Andrei Fomin, who organizes the annual Bal des Fleurs for rich Russians on the Cote d’Azur, disagreed. “Our distinguishing feature is more the opposite: huge tips and paying bills even for items that we did not eat or drink,” he told Business FM radio.
The Corriere della Sera posted an amateur video that it said showed the blaggers, with clubbers wearing T-shirts with the slogan “Happy Birthday, Sabir.”
Journalist and blogger Andrei Malgin alleged in his blog that the party boy could be Sabir, son of Kazakh billionaire Patokh Shodiyev, who lives in London.
But Sabir Shodiyev denied the accusation to Business FM radio station, saying the video showed his birthday party in 2009. “And I always pay for my champagne,” he added.
TITLE: THE DISH: Magnolia
AUTHOR: By Emma Rawcliffe
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A Room With a View
This brand new haven of Georgian cuisine has an enviable location overlooking the Neva River and Palace Bridge, and will undoubtedly draw tourists from the neighboring Peter and Paul Fortress and log cabin of Peter the Great — not to mention the mammoth gift store next door. Magnolia is set back slightly from the busy embankment, but its smart glass exterior is difficult to miss. The fact that we were the only diners there was a little worrying at first, but our waitress explained that the restaurant’s official opening will only take place at the end of September.
Upon entering, there is an attractive bar on the left at the end of a spacious dining room and a cloakroom straight ahead — a somber reminder of the approaching winter months. The second large dining room upstairs is however by far the best of the two, with its vast windows beautifully lighting up the stylish interior and boasting impressive views of the Neva. The restaurant’s bare brick walls are offset by elegant bronze lamps and cozy stone-colored armchairs. The background music, while not strictly Georgian, was appropriately soft and soothing, adding to the enticing atmosphere.
Fortunately, the food did not fail to impress, either. Magnolia is a perfect place to get acquainted with Georgian cuisine for the first time, as our waitress was very efficient and happy to make recommendations. The plate of Georgian cheeses (500 rubles, $17.35) was huge, and comprised a selection of four very fresh, delectable cheeses: Sulguni, naduhi (two light, creamy cheeses), smoked cheese and cottage cheese, all attractively presented in a fan shape and decorated with lettuce and parsley. The mountain herbal tea (180 rubles, $6.25), with its subtle and refreshing taste, was the perfect accompaniment.
The lobio (380 rubles, $13.20) was a thick, filling blend of kidney beans, herbs and spices. It was a great hit with our party, though the spicy flavor may be too strong for some taste buds.
In that eventuality, a delectable way to cool down is the chef’s homemade matsoni (150 rubles, $5.20), which closely resembles kefir or plain Greek yoghurt. It was divine and very fresh, with a subtle taste of herbs. Due to its thickness, it had to be consumed with a spoon — a strange concept for something advertized as a drink.
Magnolia boasts an epic list of appetizers, meat and fish dishes, all incredibly filling, in keeping with the finest Georgian traditions. The turkey baked in a traditional Georgian ketsi (pan) with apples (550 rubles, $19.10) was unusual and sensational, and comes highly recommended. The tender turkey meat was perfectly complemented by the plentiful freshly baked apples and a creamy cottage cheese topping. In sharp contrast, the lamb shank (490 rubles, $17), was more fat than meat, and the accompanying cabbage was very watery and therefore rather unappetizing.
Unfortunately for those with a sweet tooth, the Georgians do not specialize in sweet dishes — perhaps because Georgian food is generally so filling that little room is usually left — so the dessert menu is quite limited. However, the assortment of Georgian sweets (380 rubles, $13.20) is not too filling or rich, and so provides a pleasant end to a meal. The selection consists of baklava, churchkhela (walnuts covered in flour and thickened grape juice) and kozinaki (balls of crushed walnuts and honey). These were all delectable, but of course only worth trying if you are a fan of walnuts. There are two of every sweet, so this is an ideal dessert for sharing.
Despite the steep prices, Magnolia is worth every kopeck, as every dish there is a meal in itself. The restaurant is also the perfect place to enjoy a long, relaxing evening meal while watching the sun set over the Neva River.
TITLE: It All Started With a Bear Fight
AUTHOR: By Howard Amos
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: YAROSLAVL — Whether they realize it or not, anyone who has spent more than a few hours in Russia has glimpsed some of the sites of Yaroslavl. The luridly turquoise 1,000-ruble bank note features both ancient and modern vistas of the city, with the 17th-century, 15 onion-domed St. John the Baptist Church on one side and new 1990s buildings on the other.
The bank note also features the Yaroslavl crest — on a glowing purple or green background depending on the age of your note — that famously shows a bear on its hind legs with a halberd slung casually over one shoulder.
The almost certainly apocryphal legend behind the city’s adoption of the bear and ax symbol relates to its founding by Yaroslav the Wise in 1010. Intrigued by the trading potential of the site where the Kotorosl River flows into the Volga, the Kievan prince was exploring the area when angry locals set a sacred bear on him. Accosted by the beast in all its ferocity, Yaroslav the Wise casually disposed of it and its unwelcome attentions with his halberd, deciding subsequently to found a city in commemoration.
A thousand and one years after Yaroslavl’s supposed tussle with the four-legged carnivore, the site where the city originally sprang up on a tongue of land that licks out into the Kotorosl and Volga rivers has been transformed — with the financial assistance of state gas monopoly Gazprom — into a flower-filled park complete with music and “dancing” fountains.
The area — known as Strelka — is packed on summer evenings with young couples, the elderly and tourists, who stroll up to a monument unveiled as part of the city’s millennial celebrations and then back along the Volga embankment. Children, their feet a blur, weave around the walkers in pedal-driven cars.
Like other cities that have received significant federal investment for a historic anniversary, Yaroslavl underwent a face-lift as a part of its 1,000-year celebrations in 2010. About 30 billion rubles ($1 billion) was channeled to the city, and the state commission on preparations for the event was chaired by President Dmitry Medvedev.
Major projects completed in time for the anniversary included improvements to a new bridge over the Volga, the complete rebuilding of the Cathedral of the Assumption dynamited in 1937, the reconstruction of the Volga embankment and the opening of a zoo. Zurab Tsereteli, the favorite sculptor of former Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, even donated a 3-meter-tall metal bear to mark the occasion.
But Yaroslavl has more to offer than shiny new walkways, a Tsereteli sculpture and a motley collection of caged animals filched from the African savannah. The city’s center was granted world heritage status by UNESCO in 2005, and there are dozens of beautiful churches from the 16th and 17th centuries. During that period Yaroslavl was Russia’s second city, and its merchants who had grown fat on profitable Volga trade financed religious artistry of the highest quality.
Yaroslavl’s commercial status as the biggest port on the Volga lasted until 1937, when the Moscow-Volga canal was completed, allowing river traffic to proceed directly to the capital.
Church architecture and an important historical role have also earned Yaroslavl pride of place on the Golden Ring — the tourist route around the old cities of Russia’s heartland. For a casual visitor, this status manifests itself in gaggles of Central European tourists earnestly following their guides around the city center and the waiting queues of coaches. Half of all tourists arriving in the city are non-Russian citizens.
Yaroslavl has also been under the national and international spotlight in recent years thanks to the Global Policy Forum — a major set-piece international conference held in September — that has been driven by Medvedev. Although the event is a huge public relations opportunity for the city, it is organized by Moscow and heavy security keeps ordinary citizens far away from guests.
What to see if you have two hours
Yaroslavl’s rich history should be the priority for any time-strapped visitor. Start a visit by entering the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Monastery with its thick white walls and spiked golden balls. The monastery was the site of the first higher education institute in Russia, and Ivan the Terrible took refuge behind its walls from the Mongols when they threatened Moscow. Entrance to the monastery is ticketed with separate fees applying to all the attractions within. One of the most worthwhile things to do in the religious complex is climb the six-story belfry that offers panoramic views over the city.
Just outside the monastery’s entrance is a statue of Yaroslav the Wise that stares in the direction of Moscow and was inaugurated by Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine in 1993.
A short walk along the city’s colonnaded trade rows, down one of the pedestrianized shopping streets and past the regional government building will bring you out onto Sovietskaya Ploshchad and the green-domed Church of Elijah the Prophet. The asphalt square hosts Yaroslavl’s parades, and the only traffic permitted on it on nonfestival days are speeding local government cars. Inside the church are well-preserved 17th-century frescoes.
A whistle-stop tour can be concluded by wandering down to the city’s long Volga embankment and the so-called Strelka where Yaroslavl’s two rivers meet.
What to do if you have two days
There are enough churches in Yaroslavl to keep an enthusiast occupied for a long time. But for the less-dedicated, highlights include the 17th-century red-brick Church of St. John the Baptist on the western bank of the Kotorosl, the traffic-surrounded Church of the Epiphany opposite the statue of Yaroslav the Wise with its beautiful ceramic tile work, and the Church of St. Nicholas Nadein on the bank of the Volga that boasts yet more impressive frescoes.
A way to see a more quirky side of the city is to get in touch with Our Unknown Country (+7 4852-74-54-66; travel@yarobltour.ru; kommunalka.a-prohorov.ru), a group that runs tours of the city’s communal apartments. The tours come complete with real-life stories from Soviet-era occupants about “family secrets, horrible crimes, merry shared holidays, scandals and squabbles, and the details of everyday life — in short, a cocktail of memories,” according to the web site of the group, created by Alexander Prokhorov, who teaches economics at Yaroslavl State University.
Other attractions include the Museum of the History of Yaroslavl (17/1 Volzhskaya Naberezhnaya; +7 4852-30-41-75) and the Yaroslavl Art Museum (23 Volzhskaya Naberezhnaya; +7 4852-30-35-04).
Yaroslavl is also a convenient base for exploring some of the other Golden Ring cities east of Moscow — particularly Pereslavl Zalessky, Rostov Veliky, Uglich and Kostroma. All can be reached easily by train, bus and car from Yaroslavl. Uglich and Kostroma can also be reached by boat.
What to do with the family
For children chafing at the bit of museums and religious architecture, the Yaroslavl Zoo (137 Prospekt Shevelukha; +7 4852-71-01-91; yaroslavlzoo.ru) has everything from bears and zebras to flamingos. The zoo claims it was visited by 30,000 people in the first month after its opening in 2010.
Families would enjoy the city’s new planetarium (3 Ulitsa Tchaikovskogo; +7 4852-72-93-61), which is named after Valentina Tereshkova, a Yaroslavl native and the first woman to go into space. The city’s old planetarium is being converted into a church.
Time can also be whiled away at the city’s amusement park, with its aging rides and refreshment stands reached by a pedestrian bridge onto a small island alongside Strelka or, during hot weather, on the sandy river shores behind the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Monastery where various forms of water sports can be tried out.
Nightlife
Yaroslavl is home to Russia’s oldest theater, founded in 1750 and called the Volkov Drama Theater (1 Ploshchad Volkova; +7 4582-72-91-22; volkovteatr.ru). Its stage saw the first Russian production of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and, though its neoclassical yellow-and-white facades are crumbling slightly, it still hosts an eclectic repertoire of plays with local and touring performers.
If dramatic spectacle is not for you, the Med nightclub (Ulitsa Podzelenye; +7 4852-72-88-99; mednightclub.com) is one of the most self-consciously cool places in town — and has prices to match. Located close to Strelka, you can order drinks and food electronically via your table.
More cheap and cheerful, but also widely frequented, is Club Joy Party (2 Volzhskaya Naberezhnaya; +7 4852-30-33-33; joyparty.ru).
Where to eat
If you’re looking for the bizarre, the Texas Country Cafe (26 Prospekt Tolbukhina; +7 4582-48-67-48; www.texas76.ru) is a must. Waiting staff will serve you classic Russian dishes of borsch and plates of pickles dressed in Wild West outfits and cowboy hats. A meal for one without alcohol will come to about 1,000 rubles. Despite — or perhaps because of — the fact that the last Saturday of every month sees a cowboy-themed party, Texas is also popular with regional politicians and their visiting guests.
Another kitsch spot, this time closer to the city center and popular with tourists, is Ioann Vasilyevich (34 Revolyutsionnaya Ulitsa; +7 4852-91-47-07; ivyar.ru). Located next to the Marilyn Monroe hairdressers, it serves traditional Russian dishes in a stylish modern decor at about the same prices as Texas.
For something cheaper and more informal, try the Premiera Cafe (5 Pervomaisky Bulvar, +7 4852-72-86-01) tucked behind the Volkov Drama Theater. An average meal for one will cost 300 to 400 rubles and the cafe has free Wi-Fi.
Where to stay
The Ring Premier Hotel (5 Pervomaisky Bulvar, +7 4852-72-86-01, ringhotel.ru) is one of the most luxurious hotels in town, popular with business visitors and near the historical city center. Standard rooms start at about 4,000 rubles a night. For foreign visitors missing home comforts, there is a McDonald’s and Irish bar close by.
Another common choice amongst business travelers is the Yubileinaya Hotel (26 Kotoroslnaya Naberezhnaya, +7 4852-72-65-65, www.yubil.yar.ru) that overlooks the Kotorosl River. Rooms start at 3,250 rubles a night.
Conversation starters
Yaroslavl has significant sporting traditions that might strike a chord with locals. The Lokomotiv Yaroslavl team has three Russian ice hockey championship titles under its belt, and the Shinnik Yaroslavl football club plays in the country’s first division. Horse riding is also popular in the region, and the city is scheduled to be one of the host venues for the 2018 football World Cup.
If sport fails, you are likely to be able to share a moan with locals about the disruption to city life during Medvedev’s flagship September forum. Or ask about their experience during the 1,000-year anniversary celebrations in 2010.
How to get there
There are about five trains leaving St. Petersburg for Yaroslavl every day from the city’s Moscow and Ladozhsky train stations. The journey takes from 12 to 17 hours, and a one-way ticket will set you back 940 rubles or more. Of Yaroslavl’s two stations, the Yaroslavl Central offers the most convenient access to the city center, and most intercity trains stop here.
Yaroslavl is located 250 kilometers northeast of Moscow and is most easily reached by road or train from the capital, with dozens of trains leaving Moscow for Yaroslavl every day.
Yaroslavl’s main airport, Tunoshna (+7 4852-43-18-09, tunoshna.com) primarily focuses on cargo but also runs one weekly commercial flight to St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo on Fridays, and two daily flights to Moscow’s Domodedovo. The two-hour flight costs from 3,000 rubles one way. Tickets cannot be booked online, but through a list of agents on the Tunoshna web site.
The ideal way to reach Yaroslavl is by boat. Waterways connect Yaroslavl with Moscow (1 1/2 days sailing), St. Petersburg, Kazan and Nizhny Novgorod. Seven-day cruises departing from St. Petersburg and ending in Nizhny Novgorod include a stop in Yaroslavl.
Yaroslavl
Population: 591,486
Main industries: machine building, metalwork, chemical and hydrocarbon.
Mayor: Viktor Volonchunas
Founded in 1010
Interesting fact: Unlike many Russian cities, Yaroslavl has never changed its name — it has always been Yaroslavl.
Sister cities: Exeter, Britain; Jyvaskyla, Finland; Poitiers, France; Hanau, Germany; Kassel, Germany; Palermo, Italy; Coimbra, Portugal; Burlington, Vermont, U.S.;
Da Nang, Vietnam.
Helpful contacts:
Mayor Viktor Volonchunas
(+7 4852-40-40-05, info@city-yar.ru);
Alexander Lavrov, president of the Yaroslavl Chamber of Commerce (+7 4852-32-88-85; ptpp@yartpp.ru);
Yevgeny Chekin, head of the regional department for state-private partnership (+7 4582-40-01-45, chekin@region.adm.yar.ru).
Major Businesses
• The Yaroslavl Tire Factory
(81 Sovietskaya Ulitsa, +7 4582-79-19-31, yashz.ru) is one of the largest and oldest tire factories in Russia. Established in 1928 and completely destroyed by German bombers in 1943, it is now owned and operated by Sibur-Russian Tires and produces more than 160 types of tires for trucks, cars and aircraft.
• Of the 100 Baltika breweries in Russia, the Yaroslavl outfit
(63 Ulitsa Pozharskogo, +7 4582-58-32-03, www.corporate.baltika.ru) is one of the most productive, pumping out more than 6 billion liters of beer annually. Built in 1974, it underwent extensive reconstruction between 2000 and 2006, including the building of a new malt plant.
• The Yaroslavl Electrical Machine Building Plant (74 Prospekt Oktyabrya, +7 4582-78-00-00, www.eldin.ru) manufactures electrical machinery, particularly pumps, for a European and Russian client base. The factory began production in 1928 as part of the Soviet electrification drive.
Viktor Volonchunas,
Mayor Volonchunas, 62, is one of the longest-serving mayors in Russia. He held a top political position in the city’s administration in the Soviet Union and has been mayor since 1991. He is a member of United Russia.
Q: Why should investors come to Yaroslavl?
A: The government of the Yaroslavl region, the governor and the mayor conduct a united political policy to create an attractive tax base for investors. The investment platforms that we have and are constructing create the conditions for an investor to establish production facilities. We are prepared to look at the establishment of industrial sites, pharmaceutical sites and services for our local population like waterparks. There are opportunities in the hotel industry because our work here is not finished — Yaroslavl is a Golden Ring city that is much visited by tourists. Only last week we saw another hotel being opened, which was built by a Turkish firm. And it’s interesting to live among us — investors should not pass Yaroslavl by.
Q: Which sectors of the economy are developing the quickest in Yaroslavl?
A: We have independent, developed sectors in oil refining, manufacturing and the delivery and export of hydrocarbons. We have a developed paint and varnish sector. The city also builds engines and diesel engines. In the Yaroslavl region, the governor devotes a lot of attention to pharmaceutical clusters and, for this, we have concrete plots that we can allocate. We are also a town of railwaymen — the headquarters of Northern Railways is here. We have a locomotive depot and an electric locomotive repair factory. We have the Yaroslavl water canal that we are ready to discuss and, to a certain extent, divide up its shares to boost its future development prospects. We are also willing to talk about the city’s public transportation: trolleybuses, trams and buses. Apart from all of this, the Yaroslavl region is looking at areas for agriculture-industry business and its development. If there’s an interest, then please let us know! We are prepared to talk.
Q: What problems need particular attention in Yaroslavl?
A: There is one problem that we are focused on: It’s important that we create employment opportunities. Actually it’s not a problem but our task. That means the modernization of production and, against that background, the generation of qualified working positions with good salaries. The city of Yaroslavl is a working city — it doesn’t stand still, it doesn’t ossify, and it doesn’t give in to unemployment. We have an unemployment rate of 1.3 percent today.
Q: What would you personally recommend a visitor to do in Yaroslavl?
A: We have everything for all tastes. If you want to look at our Yaroslavl women — that’s no problem! We have a lot of them. Unfortunately — or fortunately if you want to look at women — there are more women than men. If you are talking about tourist sites, there’s something to see. If you are interested in business there’s something to talk about. If you are talking about a vacation, there’s that too. If you want to go hunting or fishing, we can arrange something. If you want to drink tea and coffee, there are places. If you want to spend the night in a hotel, we can accommodate that. If you want to look at bears, or wolves, or camels, we can show you them. My favorite place is Yaroslavl!
Yasuhisa Tsukamoto,
General director of Komatsu Manufacturing Rus,
the Japanese-headquartered construction equipment producer that competes with firms like Caterpillar. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited the factory in Yaroslavl’s Novosilki Industrial Park in 2010.
Q: How long have you been working in Yaroslavl? What successes have you had?
A: I moved to Yaroslavl 3 1/2 years ago when it all had just begun for Komatsu Manufacturing Rus. We had to do plenty of work to start up the project. Despite the economic crisis, we completed everything in accordance with our initial plans. The construction itself took a comparatively short period of time, just one year and three months. We did it on time, but it is too early to relax. Komatsu has much to do in order to strengthen its position on the Russian market — and to make the company profitable.
Q: Why did Komatsu choose Yaroslavl?
A: The construction of the plant was preceded by a long process of studying the Russian regions. We were primarily guided by the need to be closer to distributors and customers. Marketing research has shown that on the territory between the Urals and the western borders of the country we could sell 80 percent of our products — 80 percent of Russia’s population lives in that area. The transportation system of the European part of Russia is also convenient in terms of logistics. The Yaroslavl region possesses a high industrial potential. The machinery industry here is developed and has a long history. But the most important thing is that the region’s universities and vocational schools provide us with highly skilled personnel. In addition, Yaroslavl is a city with a 1,000-year history and is very beautiful. Being located close to such industrial and transportation hubs as Moscow and St. Petersburg, this city and its region undoubtedly will attract new investors.
Q: What do you like to do in Yaroslavl?
A: I like the great and beautiful River Volga with its picturesque riverbanks covered with birch trees. I often walk along the river’s embankments and go on boat trips and picnics. I even go roller-skating with my colleagues. The local people are very welcoming, and life here is quiet — but not at all boring.
TITLE: The Cynical Conveyor Belt of Russia’s Film Industry
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Filmmakers in today’s Russia are very similar to cargo-handlers: Their relationship with contractors easily fit into the formula “cargo dispatched, cargo accepted.”
This bitter comparison comes from Viktor Buturlin, one of the country’s most talented and successful filmmakers, the man behind the award-winning 2004 TV series “Chest Imeyu” (“I Have the Honor” — a formal expression used by Russian soldiers when taking leave of their superiors) and the popular TV series “Uboinaya Sila” (“Deadly Force.”)
The cargo-handler analogy was easy for Buturlin, who celebrated his 65th birthday this summer, to prove.
“After filmmakers submit their work to, say, a television channel that commissioned it, they have no way of influencing or even following its fate,” he explained. “It is quite common that several parts of the series or some key episodes might be cut out, and no explanation whatsoever will be offered. Even in the Soviet years, editors were obliged to at least discuss the changes they considered necessary and give reasons for shelving your work.”
Buturlin has first-hand experience of such treatment. His latest TV series, “Zhit Snachala” (To Start Anew) — the story of a talented 17-year-old provincial singer who is preparing to take the entrance exams for the Moscow Conservatory but instead ends up in the notorious Gulag prison-camp system owing to a miscarriage of justice — has been gathering dust somewhere on the shelves of Channel One since the director completed it in early 2010.
“When I call the studio, I get the same answer every time: We will call you when the time comes,” said Buturlin. “At the same time, I am getting news from my friends that the film is showing — and very successfully — in other countries, most recently in Kiev. I have no idea what is going on.”
Vera Mikhailova, the main character in “To Start Anew,” learns about life largely through the political prisoners with whom she serves her term. Some of the sentiments and even phrases spoken by some of the characters echo ideas voiced at meetings staged by contemporary Russian opposition movements, such as The Other Russia. The heroine, however, remains apolitical throughout the movie, and the main things that she learns in the camps of Vorkuta is that people who want to help others must be careful and cautious, that the kindest people around you can be helpless against any injustice that may suddenly befall you, and that even the most detestable person can suddenly reveal their human side.
“To Start Anew” is a story of the survival of a noble heart.
A noble heart is something Buturlin always tries to give his main characters, he said, regardless of their age, gender or social status.
“I often ask myself what the words ‘a man of honor’ mean,” Buturlin said. In “I Have the Honor,” one of the main characters returns to the hell of war just because ‘there are ten people waiting for me there.’ Here is a valid answer to that question.”
“On a more general note, there are lines that a decent man should not cross, and these lines are defined not only by the law, but by their inner self,” the filmmaker continues. “A person of honor does not strike deals with their conscience.”
The director’s stance is that life is at times more complicated than any legal or moral standards, and he is attracted to stories that illustrate this reality.
During the filming process of “I Have the Honor,” some of which took place in a real military camp near Novorossiisk, where the soldiers were being trained in between their missions to Chechnya, Buturlin was once shocked by the sight of an officer beating a soldier. That evening, over a shot of vodka, the officer explained himself in a way that shook the director even more than the beating had done.
“The guy doesn’t know how to crawl flat on his stomach; the way he does it — his back and ass high in the air — he makes a perfect target and has zero chance of surviving his very first battle,” the officer told Buturlin.
“I ran out of words a long time ago. So I am beating military science into him so that when he is crawling under fire, he will remember my fists and my angry face and keep his bloody ass to the ground!”
In “I Have the Honor,” the director mixed real soldiers with actors to the effect that nobody could tell the difference. Buturlin and his crew arrived at the camp with brand new uniforms and shiny new guns, only to be presented with the sight of “soldiers with their wounds sewn up by something resembling barbed wire and wearing shoes that were falling to pieces as they walked.” The actors swapped garments with the soldiers, and the spirit of fraternity settled in, ultimately ensuring the future success of the series.
Buturlin is not alone in finding his film being shelved with no reason given. His colleague, the internationally renowned filmmaker Alexander Sokurov — a fellow Petersburger — said last week that he, too, was being treated in the same way.
“The channel that shelved my film keeps telling me that the schedules are packed with high-rated American films, apparently blockbusters,” Sokurov told reporters.
“I have developed a strong feeling that filmmaking in modern Russia serves first and foremost the big advertisers, meaning that if your stuff is not commercial enough, you either do not get to film anything, or you will have trouble getting it shown,” Buturlin said.
What worries Buturlin even more than the mystery behind his latest series is the fate of his alma mater, Lenfilm, one of Russia’s oldest and most venerable film studios, which looks set to merge with the private company Sistema Financial Corporation, Russia’s largest diversified consumer services company, headed by the tycoon Vladimir Yevtushenkov.
Buturlin shares the concerns of his fellow filmmakers Sokurov and Alexei German, who have sent a petition regarding the Lenfilm situation to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. They fear there will be no place for art house films in the new studio.
“Of course, among ourselves, we have all known for a long time that the issue at stake is the prime land that Lenfilm occupies, a stone’s throw from the Peter and Paul Fortress,” Buturlin said. “Many of us think that Lenfilm is doomed for that reason alone. Too many powerful people want to get access to the land, and nobody apart from the filmmakers themselves can oppose it.”
TITLE: Report Slams Libyan Atrocities
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK — Libyan troops loyal to Moammar Gadhafi forced civilians to act as human shields, perching children on tanks to deter NATO attacks, human rights investigators said. It was part of a pattern of rapes, slayings, “disappearances” and other war crimes that they said they found.
Physicians for Human Rights was able to get a team of interviewers into the embattled city of Misrata from June 5-12, just after Libyan rebel forces expelled Gadhafi’s loyalists.
Interviewing dozens of survivors of the two-month siege, the Boston-based PHR found widespread evidence of crimes against humanity and war crimes, including summary slayings, hostage-taking, rapes, beatings, and use of mosques, schools and marketplaces as weapons depots.
“Four eyewitnesses reported that (Gadhafi) troops forcibly detained 107 civilians and used them as human shields to guard military munitions from NATO attacks south of Misrata,” said the report, which was released Tuesday.
“One father told PHR how (Gadhafi) soldiers forced his two young children to sit on a military tank and threatened the family: ‘You’ll stay here, and if NATO attacks us, you’ll die, too.’”
PHR obtained copies of military orders as evidence that Gadhafi ordered his troops to starve civilians in Misrata, while pillaging food caches and barring locals from receiving humanitarian aid.
Rape was also “a weapon of war,” Richard Sollom, the lead author of PHR’s report, told the Associated Press on Monday. While he said no one has evidence to prove that rape was widespread, the fear of it certainly was, he said.
And it had deadly consequences in the form of “honor killings” of rape victims by their shamed family members.
“One witness reported that (Gadhafi) forces transformed an elementary school into a detention site where they reportedly raped women and girls as young as 14 years old,” the PHR report said. It added that it had found no evidence to confirm or deny reports that Gadhafi troops and loyalists were issued Viagra-type drugs to sustain their systematic rapes.
The school where the rapes were said to have taken place was in Tomina, near Misrata, PHR said.
In at least one instance, PHR reported, three sisters — aged 15, 17 and 18 — were raped at Tomina, and their father subsequently slit their throats as an “honor killing” to lift the shame from his family.
PHR also noted that “some in Tomina have stood up against this practice, including a well-known sheik who has publicly advocated for raped women and girls to be seen as brave and bringing honor to their families.”
Physicians for Human Rights only investigated the abuses committed by Gadhafi forces. The timing of their visit, and its focus on Misrata, meant that PHR was not in a position to comment on allegations of rights violations by the Libyan rebels or by NATO, the group said.
However, PHR urged the rebel National Transitional Council to enforce law and order, suppress vigilantism, and hold all right violators responsible and prevent them from occupying positions of power.
It said NATO should investigate any credible claims made against the allied force that supported the rebels, largely through thousands of bombing sorties.
PHR particularly raised the issue of medical neutrality in war time, accusing the Gadhafi forces of attacking hospitals, clinics and ambulances, and preventing doctors from reaching or treating injured civilians.
Last week, the New York-based Human Rights Watch said it had collected evidence that “strongly suggests that Gadhafi government forces went on a spate of arbitrary killing as Tripoli was falling.”
Meanwhile, Amnesty International, which is based in London, also accused pro-Gadhafi guards of raping child detainees, but added that Libyan rebels are abusing children and holding migrant workers as prisoners.
All three major human rights groups have called on both sides to respect prisoners — and beyond that, to build a post-Gadhafi Libya.
“Individual perpetrators need to be brought to justice and held to account for their crimes,” Sollom said. “And as we’ve seen historically in places like South Africa and Bosnia and Rwanda, it’s a cathartic experience for the country, and a necessary one, to move forward.”
TITLE: NI to Review Other Papers
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON — Rupert Murdoch’s scandal-hit News International confirmed Tuesday it is reviewing journalistic standards across the company, a U.K. media empire that includes The Times of London newspaper.
The British newspaper arm of Murdoch’s global empire has been shaken by widespread allegations of illegal behavior at the now-defunct News of the World tabloid, once Britain’s most popular Sunday paper. More than a dozen News of the World journalists and executives have been arrested over claims that they systematically intercepted mobile phone messages and illegally paid police for tips.
Allegations of wrongdoing at other U.K. newspapers have since spread a cloud of suspicion over the entire U.K. media industry. The publishers of the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail, which both compete with Murdoch’s papers, have announced their own, separate reviews of editorial procedure in the wake of the scandal.
In a statement, News International said its internal review was launched “a number of weeks ago” and was being carried out with the assistance of London law firm, Linklaters. It said the review was under the control of News Corp. independent director Viet Dinh and Murdoch advisor Joel Klein, both of whom have served as U.S. assistant attorneys general, as well as the company’s management and standards committee.
News International is a wholly-owned subsidiary of News Corp.
The statement gave few further details, but a person familiar with the matter confirmed that the review would examine News International publications including the 226-year-old Times, its sister-publication the Sunday Times, and The Sun, Britain’s biggest-selling daily.
Meanwhile an independent inquiry is preparing to put the country’s press under the microscope.
TITLE: New U.S.-Afghan Pact Puts Strain on Relations
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KABUL, Afghanistan — A pact aimed at clearing up mistrust and confusion between Washington and Kabul about the future of U.S. troops and aid in Afghanistan has instead sowed more of the same.
Afghan officials worry that the United States is looking for a way to decrease support for Afghanistan after the combat mission ends in 2014, especially in light of U.S. economic woes and waning public support for the war, now in its tenth year. American officials insist the agreement is designed to allay that fear, but acknowledge the draft agreement is less precise than the Afghans want, and unenforceable.
With Kabul seeking detailed guarantees but Washington insisting on something more vague, it’s not surprising that each side is looking warily at the other.
Negotiators from both countries are to meet in Washington early next month to continue their talks. Discussions come at a time when relations are already strained, anti-Americanism is running high in Afghanistan and uncertainty abounds over what will happen to the nation as foreign forces continue their march home.
The document is meant, in part, to give Afghans confidence that the United States will not abandon them after 2014, when U.S. and other foreign combat troops have left or taken on military support roles. At the same time, it will give the U.S. a legal framework to continue counterterrorism, counter-narcotics and training missions, according to a senior U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing negotiations.
The goal is to have an agreement done before an international conference in Germany on the future of Afghanistan in December, but many sticking points remain. Among them:
— Will American forces be stationed on joint or Afghan-run bases?
— Who will take the lead in conducting nighttime kill-and-capture raids, a flashpoint for anger over foreign meddling in Afghanistan?
— Will detention operations be run by the Afghans or Americans?
— What long-term commitments will the U.S. make to support the struggling Afghan government, education and health care?
The document will leave several major questions unanswered, including how long American taxpayers will foot the bill for Afghan security forces, which in 2014 will cost an estimated $8 billion a year.
The agreement also sets up a potential conflict between two U.S. goals for Afghanistan — a base of operations for counterterrorism and a peace deal between the Afghan government and the Taliban insurgency. The Taliban demand a complete withdrawal of foreign forces.
The so-called “strategic partnership agreement” was sought by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and U.S. officials are confident that Afghans’ desire to get something in writing is likely to trump their worry that the document is not specific enough.
But the talks have gone on longer than the Americans wanted, and there is palpable frustration at what two U.S. officials described as circular and repetitive discussions. The two sides have already held talks twice this year.
Karzai has a string of specific demands, including that U.S. troops stop conducting nighttime raids to nab suspected insurgents and that Afghans be put in charge of detention facilities. He also wants a ban on U.S. launching operations into other nations from Afghan soil. The U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan was launched from Afghanistan.
Some Afghan officials also want the U.S. to equip them with F-16 fighter jets and Abrams tanks — military wares that U.S. officials say are too costly and not needed by the nascent Afghan security forces.
“We will come to an agreement only if our conditions are accepted,” Karzai boldly told a group of Afghan security officials at a recent meeting.
A senior U.S. official familiar with the negotiations said the Obama administration is not trying to water down the agreement, but can’t — or won’t — negotiate so many details of the relationship at once. The official said the agreement is supposed to be broad and by design will not carry the force of a treaty.
But Afghans say a vague agreement could leave them vulnerable to the Taliban, and that they need guarantees of support if they are going to risk the ire of neighboring nations like Iran by signing a long-term deal with the U.S. — especially one that will allow tens of thousands of American troops to stay in Afghanistan.
TITLE: Protests Signal Power Struggle in S. Africa
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: JOHANNESBURG — Violent protests Tuesday by supporters of South Africa’s firebrand youth leader are the latest political salvo in a power struggle that could determine the future of South Africa’s president and the man who helped catapult him to power, youth league chief Julius Malema.
Demonstrators burned flags of the ruling African National Congress and ran through the streets of downtown Johannesburg holding up flaming T-shirts bearing the image of President Jacob Zuma.
“Zuma must go!” they chanted.
When the protesters began lobbing stones and bottles, police detonated stun grenades and turned water cannons on the crowd of thousands. Later, they fired rubber bullets to get protesters off the roof of an armored car.
The focus for Tuesday’s demonstration was the start of a disciplinary hearing for Malema and five other youth league officers accused of bringing the ANC into disrepute with their calls for the ouster of the democratic government of neighboring Botswana. They face expulsion or suspension from the party.
Analysts say the hearing is a pretext to confront the growing power of Malema, who has mobilized disillusioned and unemployed youth with demands that the government nationalize the wealthy mining sector and appropriate white-owned farm land for black peasants.
Malema, 30, says that is the only way to address growing inequality and poverty in Africa’s richest nation and better distribute wealth that remains firmly entrenched in the minority white community and among a few thousand blacks who have grown wealthy off government contracts.
Malema indicated Monday that he too believed that was the real issue, telling reporters that “This (disciplinary hearing) does not delay our economic struggle. We see this as a setback for the revolution we are pursuing. We will continue to push for economic freedom in our lifetime.”
On Tuesday, he emerged from the hearing to appeal to thousands of cheering militants for a peaceful protest and to chastise them for burning the party flag. He urged them to respect the ANC and its leaders.
“You are here because you love the ANC. We must exercise restraint,” he said.
The cheers turned to a roar when Malema insisted that the ANC youth league speaks “for the poorest of the poor” and will pursue a “radical and militant” revolution that also must be peaceful.