SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1681 (43), Wednesday, November 2, 2011
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TITLE: More Than 60 Detained at Local Strategy 31 Rally
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The authorities shut down yet another Strategy 31 rally in defense of the right of assembly in central St. Petersburg on Monday, arresting dozens, including a young Swedish woman who came to support residents.
The opposition said a number of arrested activists were beaten by the police, who made arrests without stating their name and rank or the grounds for arrest as required by law, and often acted brutally.
In a press release, the Yabloko Democratic Party said that its four Legislative Assembly candidates were arrested during the rally, while one of them, Denis Vasilyev, was beaten in a police bus.
According to Vasilyev, he asked the policeman who arrested him to identify himself. Instead, Vasilyev was handcuffed and beaten. He added that an employee of a private security firm helped to handcuff him, and that later that same person was presented by the police as a witness to the activists’ alleged crimes.
Yabloko’s Alexander Shurshev said Tuesday that by law, Legislative Assembly candidates may only be charged with administrative violations with permission from a prosecutor.  
The Strategy 31 organizers said that the beaten activists also included The Other Russia’s Maria Krylova and Alexander Rastorguyev, leader of the TIGR movement of car-owners and a Leningrad Oblast Legislative Assembly candidate.
Rastorguyev was arrested while trying to help the United Civil Front’s local leader Olga Kurnosova, whose arms were being twisted by several policemen who were trying to drag her into a bus where detainees were being held.
According to Andrei Dmitriyev of The Other Russia opposition party, more than 500 took part in Monday’s rally, more than 60 of whom were detained. Most of them — about 50 people — were held at five police precincts in different parts of the city overnight, he said, to be taken to court Tuesday.
The people shouted “Freedom,” “No to the Police State,” “No Putin for Russia” and “No to Elections Without a Choice.” 
Large-scale police presence was deployed in the city center. Arrests were mostly made by the OMON special task force police, wearing helmets and armored vests, who were assisted by the regular police, public order volunteers and private security firms.
The Swedish citizen, whose name was not released, was held at a police precinct overnight and taken to court Tuesday. She was arrested for holding a sheet of paper with the words “Sweden Supports the Right of Russian Citizens to the Freedom of Assembly” written on it.
A man wearing a large pigeon costume, who was first seen at a Strategy 31 demo back in January and continued to attend regularly without being arrested, was detained this time. According to Dmitriyev, he was recognized by the detained protesters as an activist with the pro-Kremlin youth movement Nashi, whose apparent goal was to distract the attention of people present and make the rally appear “unserious.”
The police prevented protesters from marching to the Legislative Assembly by blocking them near Dumskaya Ulitsa and making arrests, but a dozen later made it to St. Isaac’s Square, where the Legislative Assembly is located. 
The police arrested four young women belonging to The Other Russia on the square, accusing them of “crossing the street in the wrong place.” Although such an alleged violation does not usually lead to detention and is punished by a fine on the spot, the activists were forcefully put into police vans and driven to a police precinct.
Two of them, Anastasia Kurt-Adzhiyeva and Galina Khrenova, were still in Police Precinct No. 2 on Tuesday.
Most of those detained were charged with participating in an unsanctioned rally and failure to follow a police officer’s orders, violations punishable with anything from a 500-ruble (about $16) fine to 15 days in prison.
Strategy 31, the nonpartisan campaign of peaceful rallies in defense of the right to assembly guaranteed by Article 31 of the Russian constitution, was launched by author and The Other Russia leader Eduard Limonov in Moscow in 2009. Activists and concerned citizens come to protest on the last day of months that have 31 days.

TITLE: Pedophilia Suspect Caught
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg police detained 22-year-old student Alexander Kasatkin last week on suspicion of committing three instances of sexual violence against 10 and 11-year-old girls. The cases caused city police to hold preventative lectures on personal safety in city schools.
Kasatkin is believed to have been involved in about 15 more such cases, Fontanka reported.
Kasatkin was detained on Oct. 28, three days after the police asked city residents for help in identifying a suspect.
Several people called the police to identify the suspect, whose image had been caught on film by outdoor cameras on the buildings where the victims lived, Fontanka reported.
When asked, those who knew the man came forward with only positive things to say. He’s  a good student, fond of sports, but not aggressive, is never seen drunk.  He had relationships with women his age. Nobody suspected him of having sexual inclinations toward young children, Fontanka reported.

TITLE: Adolescent Suicide Rates Skyrocket
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The sudden increase in child and teen suicide during the last week has left St. Petersburg residents shocked and city psychiatrists seriously alarmed.
The city’s chief child psychiatrist, Lyudmila Rubina, said that this fall St. Petersburg is setting a record high for the number of suicides among minors, Interfax reported. This is mainly due to the fact that “parents do not know their children and do not speak with them enough,” Rubina said.
“Schools are also not particularly interested in the psychological state of a child. For instance, when we speak about the problem of unrequited love, it is hard not to notice a child being concerned by it. However, adults are not always ready to listen to and understand their child. They might even make some insensitive comment about the subject,” Rubina said at a meeting with St. Petersburg’s Children’s Ombudsman Svetlana Agapitova.
Marina Zemlyanykh, associate professor and chair of clinical psychology at St. Petersburg Pedagogy and Psychology Institute, said one of the major tasks for parents would be “to teach children to cope with failures and difficult situations, not to make a tragedy out of them.”
“Parents should teach their kids to resist stress, to be more thick-skinned. They should let their children know that they’re ready to support and help them in any situation,” Zemlyanykh told The St. Petersburg Times.
Last week the city was first shocked by the death of 12-year-old schoolboy Dmitry Fabrichny, a pupil at St. Petersburg’s School No. 163, who committed suicide seemingly because he got a bad grade for the academic term.
Fabrichny, a sixth-grade student, jumped out of a classroom window leaving two notes. In one, he pleaded “not to blame the teacher for his death.”
Preliminary reports said the boy committed suicide after getting an unsatisfactory grade in Russian for the first academic term that came to an end at the end of October, Fontanka reported.
The boy reportedly jumped out of the window during the lesson. Having jumped from the fourth floor, the boy sustained severe injuries and died in the ambulance.
Police who arrived on the scene found two notes in his notebook. In one of the notes, he asked his Russian teacher to give him a better grade in advance, promising to make up for it later on. In the second note, Fabrichny wrote not to blame the teacher for his death because he had made the decision to jump out of the window himself.
The teacher was also hospitalized after the incident with a suspected heart attack.
Teachers and students alike were left shocked by the episode. Fabrichny was considered a quiet child who had no problems at school and was a good student.
The boy had a twin brother who studied in the same class, and another older brother.
Fabrichny’s death was the second incident in the city stemming from problems at school. On Oct. 25, a passerby found a 10-year-old boy barefoot in Tavrichesky Garden. The boy said that a stranger had given him an injection and that he had regained consciousness barefoot and without a jacket on the bench in the park. Police later discovered that the boy had made up the story, fearing his parents’ reaction to a critical remark in his school report card that a teacher wrote after he tried to hit another boy with a chair, Fontanka reported.
Meanwhile, just two days after Fabrichny’s death, on Oct. 28 another 13-year-old boy committed suicide because of an unsatisfactory grade at school. This time the bad grade was awarded for English and it happened in the Russian city of Tyumen, RIA Novosti reported.
After getting a bad grade, the boy called his mother, who said he would be grounded during his fall vacation because of the bad grade. The boy jumped off of the roof of a nine-story building.
To add to the tragic list of child suicides, on Saturday, two St. Petersburg 15-year-old classmates jumped, one after the other, out of a tenth-floor window, both dying from their injuries. The girls left notes that indicated they had personal motives for their actions, the St. Petersburg Investigation Committee said.
Additional factors contributing to adolescent depression may be caused by negative conversations adults have around children.
“Discussions about ‘everything being bad,’ and all kinds of speculation about the end of the world cause psychological discomfort and a feeling of despair among children. Such talks have a serious impact on the immature and impressionable psychology of a child. These facts can become additional motives for such fatal decisions as suicides,” the psychiatrist said.
Agapitova said parents also tend not to seek psychiatric, but psychological help for their children, even after they have attempted suicide. The same is true of educational institutions, the ombudsman said.

TITLE: United Russia Adopts ‘Tolerance’ March
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: An organizer of the original March Against Hatred criticized the United Russia party, which held a similar event under the same name Sunday after the original organizers decided not to hold the march this year.
On Sunday, several dozen marched with Russian flags along the March Against Hatred’s traditional route from Yubileiny Sports Complex to Ploshchad Sakharova, where a standup rally was held.
United Russia announced it would hold the rally “to ensure the tradition was not discontinued” Friday, two days before the planned event. 
In a press release, the party cited the late Russian émigré philosopher Ivan Ilyin, notorious for his fascist sympathies, while organizer Artyom Murzakov warned gay activists that unlike at previous rallies, they were not welcome at the pro-tolerance rally, describing them as “perverts” on his blog.
“We will not be speaking about the problems of sexual minorities at this march,” Murzakov wrote Friday.
“We think that there is no hatred toward homosexuals in Russia. We want to speak about serious and topical problems for this country. We don’t want this march being turned into a perverts’ parade. Which is what always happens when LGBT activists join public events.”
Alexander Vinnikov, coordinator of the Russia Without Racism group, was among the organizers of the original annual March Against Hatred from its start in 2004, when it was held to commemorate the murdered anti-fascist Nikolai Girenko.
Vinnikov said the decision not to hold the rally this year was prompted by the upcoming State Duma elections.
“We didn’t want to turn the event into pre-election PR for the parties, which was impossible to avoid,” Vinnikov said Tuesday. 
“Tolerance should be with fists,” United Russia said in a press release for the event last week. “Evil — contrary to Tolstoy — should be resisted with force, according to the philosopher Ilyin.”
Vinnikov said the references to Ilyin, who once described fascism as “healthy, necessary and inevitable,” were highly inappropriate for the rally, whose official goals were to oppose national and race hatred. 
“So, on the one hand, people are promoting ‘tolerance with fists’ and commitment to Ilyin’s ideas, and on the other hand, [they] are concerned with preserving the memory of Girenko, who is absolutely incompatible with either. It’s utter nonsense!” he said.
United Russia had hijacked the March Against Hatred, Vinnikov said, to imitate anti-fascism.
“This attempt to imitate anti-fascism is very important for people who are trying to establish authoritarian and monopolistic power; in a society like ours they need to distance themselves from fascism formally. I think United Russia was quick to attempt to use this form to prove they’re good as well,” Vinnikov said.
Vinnikov said the organizers of the original March Against Hatred had no legal recourse to prevent United Russia’s rally from going ahead, but dismissed the party’s attempts to present it as a continuation of the marches held in memory of Girenko.
“We, human rights activists and the organizers of the March Against Hatred, friends of Nikolai Girenko (I was his close friend and co-author), have nothing to do with the undertaking that was held [on Sunday],” he said.
The original March Against Hatred may be discontinued because — according to Vinnikov — its goals have been largely fulfilled. 
“The March Against Hatred was a public event pursuing two goals,” he said.
“They were to put pressure on the authorities to make them find and punish the murderers of Nikolai Girenko, and also to take practical measures to lower the number of attacks on foreigners. Both goals have been fulfilled now; the murderers of Girenko received life sentences, while the number of killings motivated by racial hatred have substantially decreased, both in St. Petersburg and across Russia.”
Vinnikov said that new forms of activism appropriate to the new situation should be considered.
“Nationalists are striving to get in power though the elections and trying to form a positive public image for themselves. That’s why we should use other forms, different from those that we used during the past seven years, even if in my view, our actions were quite successful.”

TITLE: Bridge Tower Opens
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the opening of what is now Bolsheokhtinsky Bridge, one of its two lighthouse-like towers has been opened for inspection by the general public. 
The 334-meter bridge, which connects the historic city center with the right-bank district of Okhta, was unveiled in October 1911 as the Emperor Peter the Great Bridge, a name it kept until 1917 and that is still displayed in gilded letters on the bridge. 
A team of engineers led by Colonel Grigory Krivoshein and Colonel-Lieutenant Vladimir Apyshkov designed the spectacular Art Nouveau drawbridge, which was compared to a “horizontal Eiffel Tower.” An urban legend claims that one of its million-plus clenches is made of pure gold. 
A spiral staircase in the tower winds up to the height of a five-story building, where an observation point rewards visitors with impressive views across the River Neva of landmarks including Smolny Cathedral. 
The history of the bridge is outlined in several displays near the entrance to the tower, featuring archive photos and basic facts (in Russian only). Renovation work has just been completed on the bridge in time for its centenary.
The iconic bridge can be seen in the boat-chase scene in the 1983 Soviet Sherlock Holmes film, “The Treasures of Agra,” and was namechecked in a 1981 song by the rock band Akvarium, which referred to a sailor “as gorgeous as the Okhta Bridge.” A Tu-124 plane successfully ditched on the Neva in 1963, flying only 30 meters above the Bolsheokhtinsky Bridge. 
The tower is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. through Nov. 5. Entrance is free, but due to limited capacity lines are likely.

TITLE: City Positions Itself as Cultural Hub
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Kravtsova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg was initially planned by Peter the Great to be a dream city, geared at attracting the best intellectual and creative resources.  
Three centuries later, City Hall plans to return to this idea and work toward transforming St. Petersburg into Europe’s largest art and cultural center and a core of creative human resources.
According to the city’s Cultural Sphere Development Concept, from 2012 to 2014 creative industries are the primary innovative key to the city’s artistic and cultural development. “Right now, St. Petersburg’s main advantage is its culture,” the plan’s authors say.
The concept hails cooperation as the most effective way of generating new ideas and increasing creative potential. Several communities of creative professionals such as Taiga have recently been formed, but they are still a new concept in Russia. More areas for public development, including recreation and entertainment, are part of the plan. 
The redevelopment of areas to be transformed into creative and cultural zones is currently of key interest to the project, following on the heels of Moscow’s Winzavod Contemporary Art Center, Flacon Design Factory and the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, which were erected on the sites of former factories and a bus depot. 
“Development of such places should be more intensive, it’s necessary to situate them throughout the city and into suburban areas,” Anna Manjuk of the Flacon Design Factory said at a roundtable discussion of the city’s cultural development at the Urban Development and Politics in Europe and Russia conference.
“A city is a complex and comprehensive system. It is impossible to confine its development to one sphere,”Anton Finogenov from the company Urbanica said at the round table.
“A city should have a high cultural level, but that’s not enough to make a city comfortable for residents. It is important not to turn the city into an illusion or movie set that hides its real problems,” Anna Karpenko, a researcher from Kaliningrad, added.
During the next three years the city plans to allocate some 3.5 percent of budget funds to cultural development. All other expenses must be covered by the private sector and cultural enterprises themselves, most of which have been switched to independent funding.

TITLE: Landmark Turns Pink for Charity
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The angel that resides atop the Alexander Column on Palace Square was illuminated in pink shades Thursday as St. Petersburg joined the list of cities participating in the global Breast Cancer Awareness campaign launched in 1992 by Estee Lauder skincare company.
Since the start of the project, hundreds of iconic buildings across the globe have participated in the campaign, including India’s Taj Mahal, the U.S.’s Empire State Building, Britain’s Tower of London and Italy’s Leaning Tower of Pisa.
The idea behind the project is very simple — use illuminated landmarks to remind women of the necessary breast checks that need to be done once a year. 
“Many people still perceive cancer diagnosis as something fatal; when women discover alarming symptoms they prefer to turn a blind eye to them, and only turn to doctors when the problem becomes impossible to ignore — which is, unfortunately, when it is often too late to help,” said Yevgeny Mukhametov, key account manager with Philips Healthcare, the company that supported Estee Lauder’s initiative and provided illimunation for the Alexander Column. 
“The truth is, however, that modern equipment can detect breast cancer at the earliest stages, when, in 95 percent of cases, surgery is not required to solve the problem, and recovery can be achieved solely through medication.”
Breast cancer is responsible for the highest number of deaths among all types of cancer among females. Unlike several decades ago, when breast cancer was most common among women over forty, today the illness sometimes hits 30-year-olds or even 25-year-olds, so doctors recommend annual mammograms for all women over 25. 
Every year in Russia, according to official statistics, breast cancer claims 20,000 lives.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Musical Elevator</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A musical elevator was installed in a residential building in the city’s Frunzensky district Tuesday.
The new elevator cabin will play classical music. The elevator will “make life more pleasant for the building’s residents and put them in a good mood,” the district administration’s press service said, Interfax reported.

<b>Resignations Continue</b>
ST. PETERSBRG (SPT) — The head of the city’s Print Media and Collaboration with Media Committee Alexander Korennikov has resigned from his post in the St. Petersburg government, Interfax reported.
Korennikov said he had been intending to leave the city administration for a long time.
“It’s not a spontaneous decision,” Korennikov said. He didn’t specify where he would work next.
The administration’s press service said Sergei Serezleyev had been appointed acting head of the committee in Korennikov’s place.
After current St. Petersburg Governor Georgy Poltavchenko took office, several local high-ranking officials left their posts, including deputy governors Alexei Sergeyev and Alla Manilova, head of the Culture Committee Anton Gubankov and head of the Monument Protection Committee Vera Dementyeva.


TITLE: 3 Russian Newborns Vie for 7 Billionth Baby Title
AUTHOR: By Lukas I. Alpert
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The global population officially topped 7 billion on Monday, and a worldwide fight immediately erupted over which lucky baby was the first to reach the milestone — with three infants from the distant corners of Russia vying for the crown.
The first recorded Russian birth came at 12:19 a.m. in the Far Eastern city of Petropavlosk-Kamchatsky when a 3.6-kilogram boy named Alexander came into the world, regional officials reported.
While they quickly claimed him as the record-setting baby, doctors in the Kaliningrad cried foul — saying a 3.6-kilogram boy named Pyotr Nikolayev born there at 12:02 a.m. was the real deal, despite the time difference, according to Interfax.
“He was born on this day, and that is a great honor,” said the boy’s mother, Yelena Nikolayeva, as she held up a certificate for photographers naming her son as the world’s 7 billionth resident. “I do not know what opportunities it will give our child.”
Anastasia and Roman Yegurnovykh came forward hours later in St. Petersburg to say their child — a 2.8-kilogram girl named Nelli who was born at 12:05 a.m. in hospital No. 9, was the true record-breaking baby, RIA-Novosti reported.
That’s not even taking into account babies in the Philippines and India — where at least six babies were born between 12 a.m. and 8 a.m. — who also laid claim to the title.
Kamchatka Governor Vladimir Ilyukhin pointed to geography as the only way to settle the matter — at least in Russia.
“Of course, there are many contenders for the title of the 7 billionth baby on the planet. But our country is known for starting in Kamchatka. Therefore, we believe that this child was the 7 billionth child and was born in Kamchatka, Russia,” he said in a statement on the regional government’s web site.
Experts said it was probably impossible to ever truly settle the question — given that 500,000 babies are born worldwide every single day.
A leading Russian demographer said he found the whole argument somewhat silly, given the country’s rapidly declining birthrate.
“I think it is far more likely that the child was born in either Africa or Asia than here,” Anatoly Vishnevsky, director of the Institute of Demography of the State University, told The St. Petersburg Times by phone. “The fact is the birthrate here is declining fast, while every minute a child is born in other parts of the world.”
The United Nations had declared Oct. 31 as the landmark day that the Earth’s population would eclipse the 7 billion person mark, but was less inclined to declare which baby crossed the finish line first.
“In Russia, we will issue three certificates, and a final decision will perhaps be made at UN headquarters,” Alexander Mordovin of the Russian office of the UN Population Fund told RIA-Novosti. “If the 7 billionth person is not officially chosen, we will assume that all of these children will hold the title.”
Still, the honor does carry some value. For her trouble, Marina Bogdanova, the 22-year-old mother of the boy born in Petropavlosk-Kamchatsky, was given a free two-room apartment by the regional government.
“Seven billion is a number we should think about deeply,” Dr. Eric Tayag of the Philippines Department of Health told The Associated Press following the birth of Danica May Camacho in a Manila hospital, whose arrival was among those in the running for the milestone.
“We should really focus on the question of whether there will be food, clean water, shelter, education and a decent life for every child,” he said. “If the answer is ‘no,’ it would be better for people to look at easing this population explosion.”

TITLE: Swapped Kids Get Cash
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: A maternity home Monday was ordered to pay 3 million rubles ($100,000) in compensation to two families whose babies it accidentally switched at birth.
The two families only found out recently through DNA tests that their 12-year-old daughters were switched by mistake after birth after the former husband of one of the mothers, Yulia Belyayeva, refused to support their daughter, Irina, because she did not look like him.
A DNA test revealed that neither of them were Irina’s biological parents. An official investigation tracked down her real parents and found Belyayeva’s child.
The parents laughed in joy and hugged each other in the footage from the courtroom in Kopeisk, Chelyabinsk region, after the judge delivered the verdict.
The girls don’t want to leave the parents who raised them, so the families are thinking about spending the compensation to get houses close to each other.

TITLE: United Russia Official Buys Veteran Votes
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The ruling United Russia party scrambled to distance itself Monday from a senior member in the republic of Udmurtia, who was filmed promising money for votes to local organizations at a closed meeting.
The party has been accused of buying votes for years, but this is one of the few instances when it has been caught red-handed, said a leading regional analyst.
In the video, dated Oct. 24 and available on YouTube, Denis Agashin, city manager for the republic’s capital, Izhevsk, explicitly tells veterans’ organizations that their funding will depend on how their municipal districts vote in the State Duma elections next month.
The sums would range from 500,000 rubles ($16,000) a year for organizations in districts where United Russia gets 51 to 54 percent of the vote, to twice that amount for a 60 percent vote.
 “We’ll keep this approach in the future for all financing,” Agashin said in the video. “If 41 percent vote for United Russia in the Oktyabrsky district, why should they get as much as the Leninsky district with its 60 percent vote? I think that’s unfair.”
The Oktyabrsky district got 41 million rubles ($1,331,750) based on the last vote, compared with 75 million ($2,436,000) for the Leninsky district, Agashin said. He added that the vote-based financing was introduced by unspecified federal authorities.
Buying votes is punishable with up to five years in prison. Fifteen State Duma deputies with the Communist Party on Monday signed a formal request to Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev, asking him to investigate the incident. Other opposition parties also criticized Agashin and called for measures against him and United Russia.
Senior Communist official Sergei Obukhov said Agashin’s actions amounted to abuse of office, which carries a maximum sentence of seven years in prison, RIA-Novosti reported.
A senior official with United Russia, Sergei Zheleznyak, said Monday that the city manager was not acting on party orders.
“The idea to tie funding for veterans’ organizations with United Russia’s vote results is Agashin’s own,” Zheleznyak said in a statement.
Agashin, who is a member of United Russia’s general council, also attempted some damage control on Monday, telling the Izvestia daily that the initiative was entirely his own and implemented while he was off-duty.
He added that he had been trying “to find a solution for the financial problems of the veterans’ organizations.”
Vedomosti reported in October that all regional United Russia officials were, indeed, tasked with ensuring a minimal percentage of votes for the party, ranging from 50 percent to 65 percent, depending on the party’s popularity in the given region. The party denied the report at the time.
Agashin, 35, became the city manager for Izhevsk, a city of 628,000 in the Urals, in 2010. Before that, he was a secretary for United Russia’s regional council and Udmurtia’s top transportation official.
He has proved himself capable and energetic at his current job, said Alexander Mokshanov, who heads the Udmurtia branch of opposition party Yabloko.
“But he’s gone too far,” Mokshanov said by phone.
The blogosphere seemed to agree, riled into action by whistleblower Alexei Navalny, a sworn enemy of United Russia, which he had christened with the now-widespread name “the party of crooks and thieves.”
Agashin’s own LiveJournal blog had garnered 1,900 comments denouncing his remarks late Monday, a day after Navalny reposted the video of his speech and provided a link to the city manager’s blog. “Let’s sink the shameless party of crooks and thieves,” one comment said.
Such violations are widespread but rarely exposed, Alexander Kynev, a regions analyst with the Foundation for Information Policy Development, said by phone. Commenting about the backlash, he said: “It’s an indication of the rise of civil protests and evidence that the Internet is becoming a powerful weapon.”
Mokshanov, of Yabloko, agreed that there was “nothing surprising” in the story. “Everyone [at United Russia] receives a plan to carry out at the elections, and it’s up to the bureaucrats to find a way to fulfill it,” he said.
United Russia now finds itself in a tight spot because a decision to protect Agashin would deal a serious blow to its own image in the eyes of pensioners who support the party, Kynev said.
What lies in store for Agashin remains unclear. No law enforcement official commented on the matter, and both the Kremlin and the Central Elections Commission kept silent.
The deputy speaker of the Izhevsk city legislature, Vasily Shatalov, said he saw no reason for Agashin to step down over the video. “If a court rules that laws were violated, then we’ll decide,” Shatalov told Interfax.
But the opposition pledged to push for legal action against Agashin and United Russia.
“They have spit in our face, and if we swallow this insult, they will wipe their feet on us,” Mokshanov said.

TITLE: Trial Focuses on Hidden World of Arms Dealing
AUTHOR: By Stephen Braun
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK — The friends of Viktor Bout had code words for him in the emails and text messages they assumed were safe from prying eyes. Often, he was “Boris.” At other times, it was “Primus,” or just “the man.” When their talk turned to weapons, one of those former friends testified in a New York federal courtroom last week, the Russian businessman spoke guardedly of “farming equipment.”
For nearly two decades, as Bout grew infamous as the “Merchant of Death” — his unwanted nickname for the black-market weapons deals in which he was accused but long denied — the world he inhabited remained murky to outsiders. While UN investigators tracked his planes and U.S. Treasury analysts traced his bank accounts, only those few who dealt with him and saw him close up knew exactly how he did his business.
Closing arguments in his federal trial in New York on conspiracy charges were under way Monday and jury deliberations will follow, but Bout’s private world has already spilled wide open thanks to more than 70 transcripts compiled from wiretapped meetings and conversations and scores of phone calls and texts. 
Bout’s lawyers say he was aware of the American sting operation aimed at him, and only played along to trick the informants into buying two cargo planes. Whether Bout is found guilty or not, the massive cache of documents and three weeks of testimony have already provided new insights into his everyday dealings. Arms trade experts said the case is also reshaping some of their understanding about how weapons are bought and sold on the world markets.
“We’re seeing some useful snapshots of the way he operated,” said Alex Vines, a former UN arms investigator and a research director at Chatham House, a British international policy organization. “Certainly the gray areas of his involvement with the Russian government and arms industry are becoming clearer,” Vines added.
Earlier this month, official Russian displeasure about the case was made clear in a letter from the State Duma, the country’s national parliament, to U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin, who is overseeing the trial. The Russian deputies urged Scheindlin to ensure an impartial trial, describing Bout as an “exemplary family man” and warning that the case’s outcome could affect the ongoing diplomatic “reset” of relations between the U.S. and Russia.
Until last week, much of the prosecution’s case was provided by witnesses who targeted Bout from afar — U.S. narcotics agents and the undercover informants who lured the Russian to his sting arrest in Bangkok in March 2008. But Andrew Smulian, a South African associate who has known Bout since the late 1990s, displayed an insider’s knowledge of Bout and served as a primary witness.
Smulian, 70, spent almost two days on the witness stand, guarded at all times by armed U.S. marshals. Like Bout, he was charged with conspiracy to kill Americans and U.S. officials, deliver anti-aircraft missiles and aid a terrorist organization. Smulian pleaded guilty to all counts and cooperated with the government, hoping to reduce a mandatory minimum 25-year prison sentence. Bout could face life imprisonment if convicted on the same charges.
Smulian said he was running an aviation company in the 1990s when he met Bout. Smulian said he never saw Bout’s planes at the time loaded with weapons, but it was during that period that Bout was first identified by the UN as a prime violator of African arms embargos, accused of transporting small arms and weapons systems into Liberia, Angola and neighboring nations.
“Boris situation not so good,” an acquaintance of Bout’s wrote to Smulian in an email in late November 2007. “Dollars frozen plus all assets plus travel.” The coded note, Smulian testified, meant that Bout was hamstrung by financial sanctions that froze any movement of his funds and assets, and a UN travel ban kept him confined to Moscow.
Bout’s lawyer, Albert Y. Dayan, assailed Smulian’s motives and memory during cross-examination. He suggested that his narrative was shaded to curry favor with prosecutors and reduce his sentence and that he had a porous recollection of his dealings with Bout. Dayan pointed to one of Smulian’s own coded emails that same month warning that Bout did “nothing in gray items” as evidence that the Russian was not involved in any illicit arms deals.
But Smulian testified that when he flew to Moscow in late January 2008, Bout grew intrigued by the prospect of a big black-market weapons delivery to two officials of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, a South American terror group known for using cocaine deals to support insurgent operations. In actuality, the two terrorist leaders were informants working for the DEA.
The Moscow meeting was a pivotal moment, Smulian testified. He recounted a visit to Bout’s house in a Moscow suburb and a meeting with the Russian in his private office. Bout said nothing about the office complex where he worked, but as Smulian followed him down a corridor, the South African noticed suites that clearly “looked like security or military offices,” filled with defense-related items and paintings of Russian battle scenes.
A former Soviet military officer, Bout has long been linked by U.S. officials to Russia’s intelligence apparatus and arms industry. Smulian’s description of Bout’s inner sanctum and the Russian’s knowledgeable discussion of anti-aircraft missiles, helicopter gunships and other sophisticated weapons gave new credence to those ties.
“It’s why the Russians have always been so defensive about Bout,” Vines said. At the same time, Vines said, the trial’s revelations show that Bout’s operation “looked a little old-fashioned in some ways. Some of the tradecraft is a bit amateurish.” Despite using cell phone memory cards and elaborate code words, for example, Bout’s frequent electronic messages were apparently not protected by modern encryption.
Many of the communications to and from Bout came from Smulian’s laptop, which was seized during his arrest in Bangkok. Bout’s laptop was also taken and analyzed, and prosecutors have displayed some limited contents during the trial.
A U.S. official who insisted on anonymity to discuss the Bout investigation said the Russian’s seized computer also contained evidence that Bout’s business empire had set up hundreds of shell companies around the world for his air cargo and other business ventures, stretching from remote South Pacific islands to the state of Montana. 
“Anything and everything he touched, he was at the top of his game,” said Thomas Pasquarello, a police chief in Somerville, Massachusetts, who formerly was the DEA’s lead agent in Thailand for the Bout investigation. 
“He was extremely meticulous. He’d be head of a Fortune 500 company if he was in another line of work.”

TITLE: Pilot Error Caused Fatal Crash
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The pilot of the chartered Yak-42 that crashed in September, killing most of the Yaroslavl Lokomotiv hockey team, confused the plane’s brakes with footrests during takeoff, precipitating the tragedy, Kommersant reported Monday.
Having trained on a Yak-40, pilot Andrei Solomentsev thought he was putting his feet on footrests when he was actually slowing the plane down. Then, as he tried to lift off, he jammed on the brakes even harder, investigators said.
As a result, the Yak-42 failed to gain enough speed on the runway. It began to fall moments after takeoff, clipping a navigation beacon before crashing into the ground and bursting into flames.
Forty-four passengers and crew — including nearly the entire Lokomotiv team and Canadian head coach Brad McCrimmon — died in the crash. Only mechanic Alexander Sizov survived.
Investigators say it is not uncommon for Yak-40 pilots to confuse the pedals on the newer Yak-42s, but in most cases, the errors are quickly recognized and corrected. The Interstate Aviation Committee, which is running the investigation, has ordered airlines to conduct additional pilot training.
Solomentsev’s decision not to abort the flight after the Yak-42 failed to take off has been more difficult to explain. Investigators believe he was afraid that he and his company, Yak-Service, would be punished if Lokomotiv was late for its season-opener in Minsk. He also might have worried that braking at 185 kilometers per hour — the plane had already rolled off the runway — was dangerous.
The results of the investigation into the crash will be made public on Wednesday, the committee reported.

TITLE: Internet Transforms TV Trends
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: More and more Russians, especially those living in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other big cities, are waking up to the possibilities of Internet television. The Big Three — the top three federal television channels — are slowly but surely losing their audiences as they switch to smaller private, often locally managed, channels.  These are some of the trends in the television and new media market that were discussed at the Second Mediasphere conference held at the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library in St. Petersburg in October.
 The event gathered market analysts, advertising and media experts as well as major advertisers from St. Petersburg, Moscow and other cities.
 According to this year’s survey, carried out by TNS Russia Research Company, 60 percent of Russians have the possibility to receive at least one private TV channel. In St. Petersburg in particular, audiences tend to seek alternatives to the Big Three when it comes to sports, international events, social problems and cultural and criminal news. 
 According to diverse reports, 100 percent of Russians watch television at least once a month, while as many as 70 percent of those surveyed said they watch TV on a daily basis. The average Russian spends around four hours a day watching television, although figures are substantially lower among younger audiences, especially from the bigger cities.
 “Younger people are more active; they are more open to alternative forms of news consumption besides just sitting around watching TV,” said Ksenia Achkasova, director of television research at TNS Russia. 
“Still, the percentage of people who watch the news on their computers is much lower in Russia than in many European countries. For example, in the U.K., 25 percent of people get their news from the Internet. In comparison, in Russia the figure does not exceed 15 percent.”
Another recent trend is the growing number of those who get their news via various services on their cell phones. 
“In the U.K., three percent of people said they do this; this may not sound like much, but a year ago nobody reported doing so,” Achkasova said.
 Russia’s biggest television channels are seeking to launch Internet-related products in order to win over a greater part of younger audiences. Russia currently boasts 45 million Internet users, the second-largest user market in Europe.  It is expected that by 2014 there will be 80 million web surfers in the country.
 “With the launch of the Videomore social network, we have seen substantial interest from users; they spend time discussing and downloading various things, playing games and so on,” said Anna-Maria Treneva, director of new media projects for STS-Media holding. “We are also vigorously expanding our ties with Facebook and Mail.ru’s social networks. It is all about the simple truth that there is no better trusted recommendation than the advice of a friend.”
According to Sergei Veselov, a professor with the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and head of the market research department at the Video International advertising holding, the advertising market has only now regained the level of its pre-crisis position.
 “Before the crisis, the advertising market in Russia was one of the fastest-growing in the world,” he said. “This was not because the economy was doing all that great, but simply because the size of the advertising market had to correspond to the possibilities of the economy — which means that the advertising market had to grow to correspond to the economy in general.”
 Internet advertising reached its pre-crisis level of revenue of $880 million by the end of 2010.
In the print media sector, the advertising prospects do not look even remotely as good, an expert said. At present, print media advertising has only recovered to reach two thirds of its pre-crisis levels. 
“In the best-case scenario, print media will reach pre-crisis levels of advertising by 2015,” Veselov said. “In the most depressing scenario, this will never happen.”
 In the future, people should not expect the television advertising market to resume its dynamic pace, Veselov said. 
“Generally, the higher the dynamic of GDP growth, the more vigorous the advertising market,” he said. “This rule now applies to Russia, where the advertising market has reached its natural size, which reflects the state of the economy in general. My prediction is that in the next several years the advertising market will demonstrate growth of about 10 to 15 percent annually.”

TITLE: Business Bored by Politics
AUTHOR: By Howard Amos
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: LONDON — Unlike previous voting cycles, foreign investors are bored with political developments in the run-up to Russia’s parliamentary and presidential elections, according to a group of leading investment bankers.
Top executives from UralSib Capital, the investment banking arm of UralSib Financial Corporation, said last week that there was a lack of concern among investors over who occupies which top government post.
“The number of people who are interested in this is becoming fewer and fewer,” Maxim Shashenkov, managing director and head of international sales for UralSib Capital, said at a meeting with reporters in London.
“In 2005 or 2007, people were very interested in politics in Russia, and there were always questions about it. But now foreign investors understand how everything works.”
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced on Sept. 24 that he would seek a return to the presidency in elections next year. President Dmitry Medvedev is expected to become prime minister.
The news that Putin and Medvedev simply intend to switch positions in 2012 — a move that opens the door for Putin to become the longest-serving Russian leader since Josef Stalin — did not provoke a reaction on either of Moscow’s bourses.
More surprisingly, and contrary to many analyst predictions, the departure of Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin just 48 hours after the ruling tandem announced their intentions also failed to trigger any market response.
Though Kudrin had been held in high regard by foreign investors for his fiscal conservatism and tight budgetary discipline, Russia’s MICEX Index climbed 2.5 percent on Sept. 27, the day after his public spat with Medvedev and exit from front-line politics.
A growing awareness that dramatic change is not on the cards could have a positive impact. Russia currently trades at a discount to other BRIC countries, Shashenkov said, and the perception that political risk is receding might lessen the discount gap.
Putin has stressed political and economic stability at set piece meetings with foreign investors since the announcement that he will return to the presidency.
More important, however, is the impact of the global economic situation on Russia, the UralSib bankers said. Putin has promised that GDP growth will reach four percent in 2011 and quickly return to 6 or 7 percent.
But UralSib has forecasted that in an international scenario of slow growth, the Russian economy will only expand 3.7 percent next year — and if the world enters a deep recession and oil prices fall below $40 a barrel, the Russian economy will contract 5.6 percent.
Temkin warned that the current crisis was completely different to that of 2008 when, people remained fatally optimistic. Today’s wrangling over European sovereign debt was “a crisis of belief in the future,” he said.
Oleg Vorotnitsky, head of equity at UralSib, said initial public offerings by Russian companies in London were unlikely to take place before the end of this year, but might pick up again in 2012. “Greed is a tremendous force,” he said.

TITLE: Treaty Signed to Combat Fake Meds
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia, France, Germany and several other mostly European countries on Friday signed the first-ever international treaty to combat the growing multibillion-dollar counterfeit drug industry.
The Council of Europe-sponsored Medicrime Convention obliges signatory states to criminalize a broad range of activities that make possible the sale of fake medicines that harm patients and deprive legal producers of revenues.
Health and Social Development Minister Tatyana Golikova, who signed the treaty on behalf of Russia, said the government would beef up penalties for the crimes to comply with the new requirements, Interfax reported.
The convention introduces minimum standards for the criminal law of the signatory countries, said Council of Europe media officer Estelle Steiner.
“The global trend has been that these crimes were often not considered as serious enough to merit criminal law measures,” she said. “In some countries, these activities have already been criminalized. In others, the governments will have to introduce new measures.”
The treaty makes activities such as manufacturing, trafficking, supplying or offering to supply counterfeit medical products a criminal offense.

TITLE: Singapore Bets On Krasnodar Hub For Russia Access
AUTHOR: By Roland Oliphant
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The company that operates Singapore’s main airport will help Oleg Deripaska’s Basic Element Holding create a new air transport hub in southern Russia under an agreement of intent signed Monday, the companies said.
The deal paves the way for a three-way joint venture between Basic Element, Changi Airports International and Sberbank that will operate four airports in the Krasnodar region currently controlled by Basic Element.
“We want a modern, high level of service in southern Russia. We could create a hub that would be the best for both passenger service and airline use in Russia, and even Europe,” said Krasnodar Governor Alexander Tkachev, at the ceremony.
The company will be established in mid 2012 after completion of due diligence procedures, the companies said.

TITLE: Serdyukov’s Reforms Three Years On
AUTHOR: By Ruslan Pukhov
TEXT: The third anniversary of the military reforms that Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov first announced to the top brass on Oct. 14, 2008, passed virtually unnoticed. We all remember the relentless criticism aimed at Serdyukov’s reforms throughout 2009 and 2010, but this has all but disappeared. And there is good reason for this.
First, despite backroom maneuvering to undercut the reforms, the military has largely adapted to them. Contrary to what many skeptics predicted, the reforms did not lead to the army’s collapse. Despite their many shortcomings, the reforms clearly gave a new dynamic to the armed forces. In fact, their success was due in large measure to how quickly they were implemented. Defense Ministry officials wisely avoided the temptation to make gradual changes — to “cut the tail off one piece at a time.” They rapidly and completely transformed the main body of the army and forced the military to accept the new reality.
Second, military reforms have vastly improved the situation for military personnel and weapons procurement. Officers’ salaries have increased significantly, and additional raises are expected in 2012. In addition, conditions for conscripts have improved, and military units have begun receiving new, modern military equipment. The initial steps toward creating a professional army has also been largely successful, although there is still a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done.
Third, since Serdyukov enjoys the full support of the political leadership, his critics and opponents have lost any hope of undermining his position as defense minister. And given the huge growth in funding for the armed forces, nobody can accuse political leaders of neglecting the interests of the military. As a result, the anti-Serdyukov camp has been severely weakened.
In the last three years, the military has taken concrete measures to create a smaller, battle-ready force — one that is better equipped and trained to fight limited, local conflicts such as the Russia-Georgia war in 2008 rather than a full-scale engagement against NATO.
Working toward this goal, the overall number of troops has been reduced. The only exception is in the Southern Military District, which was beefed up to better deal with the separatist threats from the North Caucasus. Many units were even dissolved and reductions were made to battle formations in the West and Far East. What’s more, the so-called ghost units that exist on paper only have been eliminated, and the basic formation of ground troops has shifted from divisions to the smaller brigades.
 What’s more, the quality of combat training has improved. The scope of daily training and large-scale annual military exercises has already surpassed Soviet levels. The massive rearmament program for 2011-20 could mean a real breakthrough for the military as it will equip the army with the latest technology to fight modern-day battles and wars. According to this plan, 70 percent of all weapons in the armed forces will be modernized by 2020.
But there is still a significant risk that the reforms could be derailed. The two main risks are money and people.
The urgent need to modernize and re-equip the army has led to an ambitious 20 trillion ruble ($673 billion) armament program for the next decade. The defense budget could increase from 1.5 trillion rubles ($50.5 billion) for 2011 to 6 trillion rubles ($202 billion) by 2020. The main problem is that Russia will be attempting to radically modernize its armed forces during a highly unstable global economic environment. If the global economy enters a new recession, it will necessarily hit Russia’s economy as it did in 2009. In this case, the country’s military programs will most likely be the first to experience cuts.
As for people, one of the main problems with the army’s new look is the Defense Ministry’s inability to make a complete transition to a professional army and eliminate the draft. This is due largely to resistance within the top brass by hard-line conservatives and a shortage of funds. But Serdyukov needs to make the full transition to a professional army a top priority because it is highly professional and trained people who win wars, not equipment.
Creating a fully professional army is a major component of the military’s modernization. To achieve this goal, however, political and military leaders need to show the same willpower that they have displayed over the past three years when they successfully carried out other important military reforms.

<I>Ruslan Pukhov is director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies and publisher of the journal Moscow Defense Brief.</I>

TITLE: between the lines: Medvedev Surfed His Way to Irrelevance
AUTHOR: By Alexei Pankin
TEXT: According to a joke that circulated during the breaks at the recent Russian Internet Week forum, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin did not allow President Dmitry Medvedev to run for a second term because Medvedev spends too much time on the Internet. The forum is the main annual event of the domestic Internet industry and closely reflects the main development trends in this most dynamic of all segments of Russia’s public life.
There is an element of truth in every joke, as the saying goes. Medvedev’s reputation as the main blogger in the country has clearly not helped his image.  
Perhaps Medvedev was a victim of his own clumsy propaganda machine. Each of his short Twitter messages, such as a recent announcement of an upcoming televised meeting with supporters, becomes headline news and is aired several times a day on all state-controlled national television channels. Eventually, any viewer — from the simplest to the most sophisticated — cannot help but become disappointed in the blogger-in-chief.
But the most important revelation to come out of the Internet forum was the finding by various research agencies that there is no reason for politicians to direct much of their time or resources at the Internet audience.
Yes, the number of Internet users in Russia is growing rapidly, with 60 million people 12 years of age or older going online at least once per month, and 40 million surfing the web daily.
What’s more, the digital divide is shrinking. The most dynamic growth in Internet use is now among older individuals and residents of cities with a population of 100,000 or less.
But what are those people looking for on the Internet? According to the Public Opinion Foundation, about 50 percent are interested in health and sports, but only 20 percent are interested in politics — fewer than those who want information on tourism and travel. The director of the Hyde Park social network corroborated these findings, saying the “politics” tag ranks in 29th place and attracts no more than 18 percent of all users.
Even more depressing is the limited sway that the Russian Internet has in mobilizing users to become active in social causes. One popular blogger, Sergei Dolya, led a campaign for a national trash cleanup day that, even with support from traditional media and national television, managed to mobilize only 16,000 volunteers from Kamchatka to Kaliningrad. And that is considered one of the most effective mobilization campaigns in the history of post-Soviet Russia.
At the forum, blogger Ilya Varlamov commented on the gap between the impassioned Internet response to various social and protest initiatives and people’s willingness to actually get off their rears and take action.
During the Soviet era, tens of millions of people regularly took part in subbotniki, or voluntary local cleanup campaigns. Organizations such as the trade unions, Komsomol and other Communist Party organizations urged everyone from children to adults to take part in these efforts.
I can imagine how angry Putin must be with Medvedev for having gotten too wrapped up in his iPad and failing to become a worthy successor. But it seems that the current prime minister and future president has not given up hope.
It is no accident that Putin anointed Medvedev to head the party list of United Russia, which has become a near replica of the Soviet Communist Party, thereby giving Medvedev a chance to gain more real world experience in addition to his virtual exploits.

<I>Alexei Pankin is editor of WAN-IFRA-GIPP Magazine for publishing business professionals.</I>

TITLE: CHERNOV’S CHOICE
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The controversy surrounding Western stars who went to Chechnya to congratulate its leader <b>Ramzan Kadyrov</b> — for a fee — continued this week.
The Independent on Sunday newspaper reported that Hollywood actress Hilary Swank has sacked the employees she found responsible for her ill-advised appearance at Kadyrov’s 35th birthday party, which was held on a floating stage on the River Sunzha.
“I could feel the spirit of the people, and I could see that everyone was so happy. Happy birthday, Mr. President!” Swank told the birthday boy in Chechnya, where human rights organizations report the widespread use of torture, disappearances of people and politically motivated killings.
For her work, Swank is believed to have received $1.5 million. As Kadyrov’s Chechnya is largely sponsored by the Kremlin, it’s likely that the money to pay Swank came from the Russian budget.
Incidentally, Kadyrov’s explanation of where money for building opulent palaces in Grozny comes from raised some eyebrows recently. “Allah gives it to us. We don’t always know exactly where the money comes from,” he was quoted as saying.
Former action movie star Jean-Claude Van Damme reportedly received 1 million for a similar job (“I love you, Mr. Kadyrov,” he said), while singer Seal and pop-classical violinist Vanessa-Mae who entertained Kadyrov and his guests are thought to have received $500,000 each.
After the controversy swelled to huge proportions, Swank apologized in a written statement. “I deeply regret attending this event,” Swank wrote. “If I had a full understanding of what this event was apparently intended to be, I would never have gone.”
The apology was seen as “weak” by human rights organizations, who had warned Swank about the nature of Kadyrov’s rule 10 days before she appeared at the event.
“We offered to brief her, but her manager cut us short and responded that Hilary had no plans to attend. Her claim of ignorance is laughable,” said the Human Rights Foundation’s Sarah Wasserman on the organization’s web site.
“Worse, the video of her birthday wishes shows her boasting about her knowledge of Chechnya and how she ‘reads’ and ‘does her research.’”
Swank’s apology may have been “weak,” but Seal refused to apologize at all. “Leave me out of your politics,” he wrote in his micro-blog on Twitter.
No reactions have come from Van Damme or Vanessa-Mae.
Still, it’s a little strange to hear people assert that the Chechen dictator should be boycotted by international stars. Officially, Chechya is a not an isolated country, but part of the Russian Federation, and Kadyrov has been appointed and supported by none other than President-turned-Prime Minister-soon-to-turn-President Vladimir Putin. 
International stars who are happy to rub shoulders with Putin or Medvedev (Hello, Bono!), should perhaps get a similar portion of the criticism that Swank received. Would that not only be consistent and logical?

TITLE: Rock revolution
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Leningrad Rock Club, which is celebrating the 30th anniversary of its founding this week with a big stadium concert featuring DDT’s Yury Shevchuk and Akvarium’s Boris Grebenshchikov, was never really a rock club. There was no bar or nightly gigs, and the monthly concerts were not open to just anyone.
Formed in 1981 under the rule of Leonid Brezhnev, the Leningrad Rock Club was meant to be an organization not unlike the Union of Soviet Composers, which made sure musicians did not go too far, censored lyrics and issued performance permits.
On the other hand, the club gave musicians somewhere to meet, discuss their music and occasionally perform to members of the public close enough to the organization or musicians to find out about and get an invitation to upcoming concerts, in the absence of any advertising. 
The Rock Club’s history is complicated: Active for ten years, it was essentially a different enterprise when it started in 1981 and when it effectively closed a decade later.
Some believe that the establishment of the Leningrad Rock Club led to the Russian rock revolution, which helped to put an end to the Soviet system, while others — like Akvarium’s former cellist Vsevolod Gakkel, who established Russia’s pioneering alternative rock club TaMtAM in 1991 — see it as a compromise that in fact harmed rock music by taking its “underground virginity.”
According to &#233;migr&#233; KGB general Oleg Kalugin’s interviews and memoirs, the Rock Club was formed at the initiative of the KGB’s Fifth Department, which was in charge of “counterintelligence work to fight ideological sabotage” and dealt with dissidents.
The department came up with the idea not to disperse unofficial yet relatively harmless rock musicians, authors and painters, but to let them get together in unions where they would be under the tight control of the KGB, the police and the Communist Party. 
The Leningrad Rock Club, the unofficial authors’ Club 81 and the Experimental Art Association all emerged in 1981.
Thirty years later, many people whose lives were connected with the Rock Club and Russian rock movement have only fond memories, perhaps because those were their young and active years. There was also a lot of idealism and youthful energy.
At a press conference last week devoted to Saturday’s concert, Auctyon’s Oleg Garkusha recalled how his band’s members used to go to a remote rehearsal room after their day jobs (Garkusha himself worked as a projectionist at a film theater on Nevsky Prospekt) and rehearsed without thinking about success or money — but simply because they enjoyed the process.
While many were happy simply to play music, Mikhail Borzykin, whose band Televizor was arguably the Rock Club’s most politically radical band, felt he had to speak out against censorship and oppression, describing the era as “a time of muteness and deafness.” Borzykin is as politically-conscious nowadays as ever, regularly churning out protest songs.
“It’s very sad that we’ve come full circle and returned to almost the same situation as 25 or 30 years ago,” he said.
The Rock Club’s long-time president Nikolai Mikhailov said last week that the club still exists on paper, although it has been kicked out of its famous location — at 13 Ulitsa Rubinshteina, close to Saigon, as the former coffeehouse and legendary bohemian hangout on Nevsky Prospekt was unofficially known.
Poet and music journalist Anatoly Gunitsky, who was on the Rock Club’s council, recalled the solidarity between musicians, mutual help and interest in each other that existed at the club. 
“Unfortunately, there’s nothing like this nowadays,” he said. “That’s what was most valuable about what started 30 years ago at 13 Rubinshteina.”
“Every one of us has their own version of the Rock Club’s development; that’s what makes it great,” Mikhailov said.
But the main advantage of the Rock Club for musicians was its authority to issue permits for concert performances.
The Rock Club was not free from Soviet doublethink, however. Less glorious moments saw Akvarium’s Grebenshchikov get a haircut and allow his band to be introduced as a “musical parody group” to get on local television in 1984, and Kino’s Viktor Tsoi attributing his song lyrics about Russian teenagers to their Western counterparts by renaming the song “We Want to Dance” into “Kings Road Kids” on a copy intended for censors.
In addition to handlers from the KGB, the party and the Komsomol Communist Youth Organization, the Rock Club held auditions at which a commission decided whether bands were good enough to be accepted as members.
Borzykin’s band Televizor — which entered the Rock Club in 1984 as a rather safe New Wave band but quickly radicalized — was banned from giving public performances by the Rock Club’s council twice, each time for six months. 
Both times the bans were issues as punishment for Televizor performing songs not sanctioned by the Rock Club’s censors. In one of those songs, Borzykin dared to call on listeners to “get out of control” and “sing about what you see, rather than what you’re allowed to.”  
Some fellow musicians disapproved of Borzykin as a “provocateur,” worrying that his uncompromising stance could lead to problems with the authorities, or even result in the organization being shut down. Punishment also followed for unsanctioned gigs.
The city’s best-known punk singer Svinya (The Pig, born Andrei Panov), who led a band called Avtomaticheskiye Udovletvoriteli (Automatic Satisfiers), was seen as unacceptable for the Rock Club until 1987, after Gorbachev lifted many official bans and allowed dissident academic Andrei Sakharov to return from exile to Moscow as part of the leader’s “glasnost” policies.
Further proof of the deep penetration of the KGB into the Rock Club emerged earlier this year, when Fontanka.ru news web site published four black-and-white photographs, two of which featured Tsoi.
The site claimed that former officers provided the photos because they were “moved by manifestations of nationwide love” for the musician.
Some of the photographs, which apparently date back to the early 1980s, had handwritten numbers next to the faces of the people pictured. According to the site, the reverse sides of the photographs bear comments written by KGB officers.
The Rock Club’s best moments, however, included Akvarium refusing to perform when the police arrested cellist Gakkel right before the concert — which led to the audience noisily protesting against the police’s actions, and finally forced them to release him. 
The other was Borzykin leading a spontaneous march of musicians and fans to the party headquarters at Smolny after the authorities banned a rock festival under the pretext of fire safety regulations in 1988. The party wavered and lifted the ban.
“The atmosphere, mood and spirit of Russian rock is alive, only it takes some other musical forms,” Borzykin said.
“We’ve lost a lot, but young people are coming, a lot of rappers are coming and in some ways trying to take over this spirit. All the attempts to evoke a response are doomed to fail now, because the wave is not ripe yet. We have to wait a little.
“We were lucky to catch that happy time of resonance, when everything around breathed this energy of freedom. That’s what we’re moving toward now. I’m sure it will be repeated in the near future.”
In March 1991, the Leningrad Rock Club celebrated its 10th anniversary with a rock festival at Yubileiny Sports Complex, but its days were numbered, as were the days of the Soviet Union, which collapsed later the same year.
It was also the year when TaMtAm club emerged, spawning a wave of real rock clubs as we know them today. The need for an official organization for rock musicians no longer existed.

<I>Rock Club’s 30th Anniversary Concert, featuring Yury Shevchuk, Boris Grebenshchikov, Alisa, Piknik, Mify, Auctyon, Televizor, AVIA, NOM, Fyodor Chistyakov, Razniye Lyudi and Nastya Poleva, will take place at 6 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 5 at Yubileiny Sports Complex, 18 Ulitsa Dobrolyubova.</I>

TITLE: TALK OF THE TOWN
TEXT: The first week of November will see the arrival of a stylish new <b>Parker</b> boutique on the local shopping scene. The elegant venue at Leto retail center was designed and furnished by Bruno Moinard, an internationally established architect, stage designer and artist who has collaborated with clients including the Cartier Foundation, Yves Saint-Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld and the MoMa Museum in New York. 
A distinguished pen specialist since 1888, Parker brings to St. Petersburg not only its best-selling classical writing masterpieces but also a range of ultra-modern specimens from their new Ingenuity line that blends innovation with artistic creativity. The Ingenuity line fuses the design elements of a ballpoint, rollerball and fountain pen in one model. Another innovative feature of the series is that each pen naturally adjusts to the owner’s handwriting after several uses. In short, the new boutique may well bring writing in ink back into fashion.
 As the weather gets colder, the city’s Oriental massage salons get busier. So the timing was perfect for <b>Royal Thai</b>, the city’s oldest chain of Thai massage parlors, which has just opened its fourth branch at 1 Bolshaya Konyushennaya Ulitsa. All staff at Royal Thai are Thai natives and have diplomas from Thailand’s Health Ministry. The chain’s new offers include spa programs titled “Coffee and Cinnamon,” “Green Tea,” “Ginger Sprite” and a four-hour “Honey Delight” treatment.
In other options for combating the autumn blues, <b>Barbaresco</b> restaurant (2 Konyushennaya Ploshchad) has added an intriguing new dish to its menu, with the recipe coming from none other than French actor <b>Gerard Depardieu</b> himself. The “Depardieu-style” leg of lamb can be sampled from Friday through Sunday every week. The leg, served with couscous and baked vegetables, takes an hour to cook, so consider ordering in advance.
Depardieu is reportedly a frequent visitor to Barbaresco, hence the arrival of his signature dish. On top of that, Barbaresco has also launched a seasonal menu of Piedmontese cuisine. The most daring diners might want to sample Piedmontese style finanziera (translated into English as “frock coat”) with cockerel comb, chicken liver, veal and beef cooked in wine with mushrooms.
English-speaking art-lovers may be interested to know that <b>Erarta Museum and Gallery of Contemporary Art</b> is organizing its second English Evening on Nov. 4. The idea of the evening is to meet people in an artistic atmosphere while speaking only English.
The evening’s program includes small guided group tours of the museum. The highlight of the event is a “Mad Tea Party” with characters from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland.” While sitting in a mirrored hall around white table-clothed tables, guests will drink real English tea and discuss the news, as well as listen to funny stories told by The Mad Hatter and The March Hare. 
“You can lose youself here for a whole evening… Great!” said one participant of the first English Evening, held last month.  
Erarta’s English Evening is due to start at 6 p.m. on Friday, Nov 4. Entrance costs 500 rubles per person.

TITLE: ‘They had no other choice’
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Gas masks for horses, body armor for dogs and various accessories for pigeons, snakes and other animals went on display at a thought-provoking exhibition dedicated to the use of animals in war that opened at St. Petersburg’s Artillery Museum on Friday.
The “Animals in War” exhibition details many different uses of various animals in war. Visitors can see stuffed animals in military garb, including a model of a horse dressed in Oriental armor from the 15th to 16th centuries and a dog in a gas mask.
A collection of paintings, graphics, sculpture compositions and rare photos also help to illustrate the life of animals under war conditions.
Valery Krylov, director of the Artillery Museum, said the exhibition’s theme resonated with the Animals In War memorial in London dedicated to the countless animals that have served and died under British military command throughout history.
“There is a very heartbreaking inscription on that monument which reads, ‘They had no other choice.’ We have had as many animals die in war in Russia, but there are not yet enough monuments to them. Therefore we hope this exhibition will partly pay tribute to them,” Krylov said.
Sergei Yefimov, deputy head of the museum and a curator of the exhibition, said that “animals have fought in wars together with people from ancient times, and people sometimes used them in rather unusual ways.”
The Carthaginian military commander Hannibal employed pots and jars full of snakes when fighting ancient Romans, throwing them onto enemy ships as a weapon. When the jars broke on board the ships, the snakes escaped, biting and distracting the sailors, giving the Carthaginians an advantage, Yefimov said, showing a model of such a jar at the exhibition.
History has records of other rather strange animals being used in battle. During World War II, the Red Army employed moose as a means of transport, as their hoof prints raised less suspicion than those of horses.
“Napoleon, in his turn, ordered his officers to carry miniature poodles in their backpacks when they went into battle,” said Yefimov. “The dog’s task was to get out of the pack in the event that its master was wounded and bark in order to attract medical attention.” 
Military messenger pigeons were also key players in helping humans out in war.
In 1942, a female messenger pigeon saved a British submarine that had begun to sink after a Nazi bombing and which could not report its coordinates ashore. The resourceful sailors then remembered that they had a couple of messenger pigeons on board. They put the birds into special capsules and released them with the help of torpedo devices. As a result of severe weather conditions, the male pigeon died, but the female one made it to the navy base, carrying a message asking for help. The submarine and its crew were rescued.
Carrier pigeons are able to locate their home base from as far as 500 to 600 kilometers away. This fact, and many more, are all presented as part of the exhibition’s interactive section, designed specially for children, where they can also draw animals and solve puzzles about them.
It is in this section that both children and adults can see a picture of Dick, a sheepdog and World War II hero who served on the Leningrad front. During the war, Dick sniffed out almost 13,000 mines and helped to prevent the former imperial Pavlovsk Palace from being blown up, having found a bomb under the palace’s basement less than three hours before it was due to explode. Dick was injured three times, but lived to a ripe old age.
Not all of the stories end so happily, however. Another mission that Soviet dogs were used for during World War II was to explode enemy tanks by running under the vehicles with explosives tied to their sides. In order to train dogs for such heartbreaking missions, their food was always given to them under tanks. However, the practice tanks were not moving, and when the dogs were finally sent to jump under moving Nazi tanks, they often got scared and would simply run next to the vehicles. The Germans soon realized the purpose of such dogs, and used to shoot them dead before they could complete their missions. After a number of such failures, the Soviet army stopped using dogs for such missions.
A copy of such an explosive device is on display at the exhibition.
Horses have played a pivotal role in battles for centuries. After World War I, in which gas was used extensively, the Red Army prepared gas masks for all its horses. A number of gas masks were even custom designed for certain horses and had their names written on them. The horse gas mask on display at the exhibition was designed for a horse named Veter (Wind). But since gas was not used after World War I, the masks were fortunately not needed, Yefimov said.
During the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II, the Soviets gathered camels and used them to carry essential cargo for battle. However, the animals moved slowly and served as a perfect target for the German army.
“After one such attack, there was a whole field of dead camels outside Stalingrad,” Yefimov said.
Nevertheless, two Russian camels, Masha and Yasha, made it from Stalingrad to Berlin, surviving the whole war while towing a large canon. When they got to Berlin and the war ended, the commanders were unsure what to do with them. One then suggested killing the camels for their meat. The soldiers, however, refused to do so, and brought them to the Berlin Zoo, where the Germans later took very good care of them, Yefimov said.

<I>“Animals in War” runs through April 8 at the Artillery Museum, 7 Alexandrovsky Park. Tel. 232 0296. M. Gorkovskaya.</I>

TITLE: the word’s worth: Actually, this is exactly the way to say it
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: <I>Êàê ðàç: just right, just now, exactly, actually</I>
Let’s see what the digital mailman has just delivered in my weekly mailbag of reader’s questions. Misha in Ukhta asks: “Is it true that Americans don’t speak English?” It’s definitely true in Brooklyn.
Susan writes from Dallas: “Can you help me understand my 15-year-old stepson from Moscow?” No, I don’t speak teenager.
And here’s one from “VVP”: “What’s your problem with stability?”
Ha ha. Very funny, guys.
Oh, here’s a good one from a reader after my own heart: “Can you explain the meaning of <I>êàê ðàç</I>?” Yes!
But before we get to <I>êàê ðàç</I>, we should take a look at <I>ðàç</I>, a little word that packs a lot of meaning.
First of all, it’s first. That is, it is the word you use for “one” when counting. <I>Ðàç, äâà, òðè</I> (one, two, three).
Then ðàç is a kind of generic unit of something, rendered in English as “time.” <I>Ñêîëüêî ðàç ÿ òåáå ãîâîðèëà!</I> (How many times do I have to tell you!) <I>Â äðóãîé ðàç âñòðåòèìñÿ</I> (We’ll get together another time). <I>Íà íîâîé ðàáîòå îí çàðàáàòûâàåò â ïÿòü ðàç áîëüøå</I> (He earns five times more at his new job).
In colloquial speech, ðàç is a bit of a chameleon. It can be used in place of åñëè (if) or <I>ïîñêîëüêó</I> (since): <I>Ðàç òû íå ïðèä¸øü, ÿ ëÿãó ñïàòü ïîðàíüøå</I> (If you’re not coming over, I’ll go to bed earlier). <I>Ðàç ýòî íóæíî, òî ìû ñäåëàåì</I> (Since it’s necessary, we’ll do it).
Less commonly, ðàç can replace <I>îäíàæäû</I> (once): <I>Ðàç ÿ æèë íà äà÷å äî õîëîäîâ</I> (Once I stayed at the dacha until the cold weather set in). Or it can be used to describe a sudden and unusually unexpected action: <I>Îí ïîäîø¸ë è ðàç — ñõâàòèë ñóìêó è óáåæàë</I> (He walked up to me and wham! He grabbed my purse and ran).
With çà, ðàç can describe a one-time event: <I>Çà ðàç îí ïîäíÿë 50 êèëîãðàììîâ</I> (He lifted 50 kilograms in one try).
But if you move those little words around to <I>ðàç çà ðàçîì</I>, it means “time after time”: <I>Îí ðàç çà ðàçîì ïîäíèìàë ãàíòåëè</I> (He lifted the weights again and again).
<I>Â ñàìûé ðàç</I> is an idiom that means “just right,” most commonly in terms of fit: <I>Ñàïîãè áûëè â ñàìûé ðàç</I> (The boots fit me perfectly).
This brings us to the idiom <I>êàê ðàç</I>, which, among its many meanings, can be a synonym for <I>â ñàìûé ðàç: Ïëàòüå íå ìàëî, à êàê ðàç</I> (The dress isn’t too small — it’s a perfect fit).
In time expressions, êàê ðàç can mean “exactly at the time (when)”: <I>Òû óø¸ë èç êèíî êàê ðàç ïåðåä òåì, êàê íà÷àëîñü ñàìîå èíòåðåñíîå</I> (You left the movie just when it was getting interesting).
Or it can mean “at exactly this time.” For example, when someone phones you, you might say: <I>ß êàê ðàç î òåáå äóìàë!</I> (I was just thinking about you!) <I>ß êàê ðàç ãîòîâëþ óæèí</I> (I’m in the middle of making dinner — that is, “just at this moment”).
In nontime expressions, <I>êàê ðàç</I> can act as an intensifier that means “exactly”: <I>Ýòî êàê ðàç òî, ÷òî ìíå íóæíî</I> (It’s exactly what I need). <I>Îí êàê ðàç çäåñü æèâ¸ò</I> (He lives in this very house).
Sometimes we express this with “actually” in English. To answer “VVP,” I’d say: <I>Ýòî êàê ðàç íå ñòàáèëüíîñòü, à ñòàãíàöèÿ!</I> (It’s actually not stability but stagnation!)
<I>Êàê ðàç øó÷ó</I> (I’m just kidding).

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

TITLE: After the fall
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Kravtsova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Traditions not only unify a nation and keep its spirit up, but also inspire it to push forward with new creative achievements, according to the organizers of the tenth St. Petersburg Autumn international festival of Russian art that got underway last week and runs through Nov. 14. 
The festival, which was first held in 2002, aims to showcase the potential and talent of contemporary Russian artists from a historical perspective and to unite Russian performers working abroad.
This year’s festival opened with an Italian evening devoted to the celebration of the Year of Italy in Russia. Ilya Demikhovsky, who works in Italy, together with Pavel Yelyashevich performed music by Dmitry Shostakovich, Boris Tishchenko and Mikhail Zhuravlev.
The festival takes pride in the fact that it is without boundaries. There is no distinction between professional performers, beginners and amateurs, nor between different art genres and forms. Church music is represented alongside Russian folk music; contemporary St. Petersburg musicians play both their own music and that of classic composers such as Bach, Schubert and Rachmaninov. 
The organizers of the festival closely collaborate with music schools and the Mikhail Glinka School of the Arts and give children the opportunity to play their own music. 
This year, the festival also includes an illustration exhibition, literature forum, and, for the first time, an international independent film festival titled ArtoDocs. 
“Film screenings and discussions previously took place within the festival, so the creation of an independent film event was a rather logical step,” said Mikhail Zhuravlev, composer and art director of the festival. 
Both fiction and non-fiction films will be shown. Every evening during the film festival, screenings of classic films by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky will be held. 
“Krzhizhanovsky was a real genius. His films are not only a national but a world treasure. It’s a tragedy that lots of people have never heard of him and his films,” Zhuravlev added.
The presentation of unique yet unjustifiably forgotten works of art that can nowadays be difficult to find is another distinctive feature of the festival. 
“People who work on the festival can be described as Don Quixotes, because they often try to save what has already been destroyed either by time or by people,” Zhuravlev said.
This year Camel Studio and Virgorod publishing house have succeeded in completing a project to find, restore and present an audio recording of the song “Pinezh,” recorded in 1976 by the eminent folklorist Andrei Kabanov for visitors to the St. Petersburg Autumn festival.
One of the participants in the St. Petersburg Autumn festival is the young musician and composer Alexei Chernov. He has won numerous international competitions and festivals, including the International Tchaikovsky Competition, but his first steps were taken at the St. Petersburg Autumn festival several years ago. His composing style is influenced by traditional Russian music and the late romantic style. 
Chernov makes regular appearances at many European concerts, but like many Russian artists, remains in the shadows in his homeland. At this year’s St. Petersburg Autumn festival, he will perform at the State Academic Cappella and will conduct a workshop for music beginners.

TITLE: A holy history
AUTHOR: By Kristina Aleksandrova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A unique collection of 450 works of Russian art that attracted more than 26,000 visitors to the Louvre last year is now on show in St. Petersburg at the Mihailovsky Castle. 
The French opening of the “Holy Russia” exhibit, the centerpiece of 2010’s Year of Russia in France celebrations, was attended by President Dmitry Medvedev and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. It was at the opening that Medvedev first suggested showing the impressive collection selected from 25 Russian museums and libraries in its native country.  
“I’m confident that the Holy Russia exhibition will become a brilliant milestone in Russia’s cultural life and leave an unforgettable impression on museum-goers,” wrote Medvedev in his welcoming message to the Russian incarnation of the show.
Only 300 pieces from the original collection have in fact come to St. Petersburg. Some of the exhibit’s treasures — such as an armilla (a shoulder decoration) — can only be seen in the show’s catalogue. The armilla, depicting the resurrection scene, is believed to have been a part of the 12th-century prince Andrei Bogolubsky’s ceremonial dress. During the Stalin era, it was sold to a buyer abroad for 60 million euros ($84,960,000).  
Despite the fact that the collection is incomplete, it still includes many rare and fascinating items. The real jewel in the crown of the exhibition is a collection of pages from the Ostromir Gospel, the oldest surviving East Slavic manuscript book. The book has never been displayed in its entirety. 
Another highlight is the Icon of the Vladimir Mother of God, which dates back to the time of the celebrated icon painter Andrei Rublev.
“We have also added three icons from the Russian Museum’s own collection,” said Irina Solovieva, head of the museum’s ancient Russian art department.
Such a large-scale show of icons and holy objects was completely unthinkable during the atheistic Soviet period, but now visitors have a chance to see many “living” pieces from a lengthy and crucial period in Russian history. In contrast to the Louvre’s decision to display the items following a historical timeline, in St. Petersburg and Moscow, where the exhibit was shown earlier this year, the masterpieces are arranged thematically. 
“Most visitors here are Christians, so they know a lot about Russian religion, but in the Louvre it created a real furor because there had been no such exhibition there since the 60s,” said Solovieva. 
The exhibition is devoted to the 10th through the 18th centuries of Russian history. The Christianization of Kiev, which was then at the center of what would eventually evolve into Russia, took place in about 980 AD. Christianity came from Byzantium, so Byzantine culture had a great influence on sacred paintings and beliefs in Rus. Before accepting Christianity, Vladimir the Great, the ruler who converted Kievan Rus, familiarized himself with other religions such as Islam and Judaism, as well as with Catholicism. 
Vladimir sent ten of his servants to neighboring countries to find out more about people’s beliefs. After they returned, they reported the best religion to be in Greece. 
“Your grandmother Olga had a good reason to convert to the Greek religion,” his ambassadors are reported to have said, sealing Vladimir’s decision. 
This pivotal period of Russian history is represented by works of applied art, Byzantine and Western European coins and jewelry, fragments of murals that were used to decorate churches in Kiev, Smolensk and Staraya Ladoga prior to the Mongol invasion, and the dazzling Golden Gates from the Nativity Cathedral in Suzdal.
These objects have never been shown together before. At the opening of the local show last week, Deputy City Governor Vasily Kichedzhi described the exhibition as “a symbol of the holy Resurrection of Russia” and claimed that the government would always support such projects, because “every object here shows moral purity.” 
The history of the Russian church, however, hasn’t always been so serene. Another significant but bloody period is evoked by a pointed helmet belonging to Ivan IV, otherwise known as Ivan the Terrible. The 16th-century ruler is infamous for organizing the Massacre of Novgorod during the Oprichnina, a period marked by mass repressions, executions and land confiscation. 
It is significant that St. Petersburg is the last city in which the collection will be exhibited. It was Peter the Great, founder of St. Petersburg, who changed the course of Russian sacred art and placed the church under state supervision. But ultimately, even his project to build a “window on the West” couldn’t make his countrymen turn their backs on the country’s religious past.

<I>“Holy Russia” is on show through Jan. 20 at the Mikhailovsky Palace, part of the State Russian Museum, 4 Inzhenernaya Ulitsa. Tel. 595 4248. M. Gostiny Dvor. www.svyatayarus.ru.</I>

TITLE: in the spotlight: When socialites get political
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
TEXT: Last week, socialite and media personality Ksenia Sobchak caused a bit of a sensation in an Italian restaurant by going up and filming the founder of pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi, Vasily Yakemenko, having a pricey lunch with his wife.
Sobchak grinned malevolently into the camera before asking why Yakemenko was having lunch at “the most expensive restaurant in Moscow,” Mario. She then went up and asked him to give her an interview for GQ magazine, which he refused, saying he would only do it if she changed her opinion about him. She reproached him on his choice of lunch spot, saying: “It’s alright for me, I’m a socialite,” but that he should “give it all to the party, to Nashi.” Before disappearing in a puff of smoke, Sobchak wished Yakemenko — dressed in a white diamond-pattern jumper — a pleasant meal and recommended the Belon oysters. She then posted the whole thing on Twitter.
No real scandal there, you would think. After all, Yakemenko now heads something called Russian Youth and has a respectable salary, allowing him to eat as much linguine as he wants.
But the video caused a huge reaction, with many relishing the discomfiture of Yakemenko, a kind of Kremlin scoutmaster. It even got picked up by opposition blogger Alexei Navalny.
And Russian Youth’s spokeswoman Kristina Potupchik reacted furiously. In an extraordinarily outspoken blog entry titled “Why is Sobchak looking into other people’s plates?” she asked why a classy restaurant let in “cheap prostitutes like her.”
In an interview with Moskovsky Komsomolets, Potupchik suggested sweetly that Sobchak could not understand why Yakemenko was taking his wife out “since everyone knows about her unsuccessful attempts to get married.”
Even Interfax noted that “the press secretary had a more than impressive grasp of insulting words and descriptions.”
Yakemenko himself did not comment, telling Interfax that he had “nothing to talk about.”
But Russian Youth wrote to media demanding they remove the video from their web sites because it invaded Yakemenko’s private life, MK reported. Sobchak wrote on Twitter that the Metro newspaper was ordered to take down the video and remove mentions of Sobchak’s Twitter, which it refused to do.
Evidently enjoying the scandal, Sobchak didn’t turn a hair. She told Moskovsky Komsomolets that Potupchik’s attack made her think of the elderly ladies who gossip on benches.
And, “Adding a bit of bitterness to Yakemenko’s dolce vita won’t hurt,” she said.
Yakemenko is no stranger to looking into other people’s plates himself. He headed a ludicrously bullying campaign against overweight young people at the pro-Kremlin Seliger summer camp in 2010, when he told one bewildered man that “A person who eats more than necessary is stealing from his country and from Putin in particular.”
Yakemenko headed Nashi and its predecessor, Going Together, from 2000 to 2007. Last year there was a scandal when bloggers found a photo of Yakemenko with a blonde girl, Anastasia Korchevskaya, a Nashi commissar. She apparently wrote in a caption that it was taken at Seliger 2008 and added that “Yakemenko still thinks I am madly in love with him,” Moskovsky Komsomolets reported.
A reply in the blog, seemingly from Yakemenko, said that: “If you twice came into my tent, which means once a year, and something happened, that does not mean that I think you are in love with me.” The posts were soon deleted.

TITLE: THE DISH: Bella Vista
AUTHOR: By Shura Collinson
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: <b>A view with a price</b>
Bella Vista, which opened in August in the former premises of the upscale restaurant Kashtany (Les Chataignes), more than lives up to its new name, with windows looking out across the River Neva directly onto the stately Academy of Arts. Back in the summer, it had a summer terrace, which is undoubtedly the best way to make the most of the view.
Inside, much of the appearance of its predecessor has remained, such as the unvarnished floorboards, and the feeling of quality that oozed from every inch of Chataignes has also been inherited by its successor, from the thick embossed cream menus that are reminiscent of wedding invitations to the funky designer crockery and dazzling starched tablecloths. 
Bella Vista has also inherited its predecessor’s tradition of excellent service. On a recent visit, the endearing waiter could not have been more helpful, while managing to avoid even approaching obsequiousness. In addition to an excellent breadbasket accompanied by olive oil and balsamic sauce, two generous porcelain ladles of olives were brought out as a compliment from the chef. 
The menu is seafood heavy, and consequently, not cheap. An octopus salad at Bella Vista will set you back 850 rubles ($28), while seafood soup is an extravagant 1,900 rubles ($62). Oysters are available at 220 rubles ($7) per mollusc. Bella Vista does not have a business lunch; it does however have a “day menu” on which nothing exceeds 360 rubles ($12).
As well as the seafood and a range of traditional Italian dishes, chef Stefano Zaffrani, who also launched the kitchen at Serafino earlier this year, offers his own original dishes, such as avocado soup with pink pepper and strips of smoked salmon. From this range of atypical culinary creations came the cold tomato soup with Burrata cheese. 
The pink soup was an extraordinary dish that tasted like nothing else on earth. The only things that could be established with any certainty was that the soup contained a healthy amount of fresh basil, and that the generous lump of delightfully salty Burrata in the center was almost enough to warrant the 760-ruble ($25) price tag on its own. Beyond that, all was conjecture. Were there hints of cucumber and even strawberry in the frothy liquid, or was that our imagination? The ever-helpful waiter confided that the pink color was a result of yet more cheese being blended in with the tomatoes, which explained why, despite the zesty freshness and apparent lightness of the dish, it suddenly revealed itself to be extremely filling. (It should be added that it was also an extremely generous portion.)
Another appetizer of rich sundried tomatoes with oregano priced at 180 rubles ($6) served in a hip bowl with an oversized rim was equally generous — especially for the price — and would be a perfect dish to order for a group to share, tapas-style. 
The presentation at Bella Vista cannot be faulted. An entree of seabass (1,200 rubles, $40) was a healthy portion of fish artfully decorated with cockles and mussels still in their shells, and drizzled with a divine ratatouille and pine nut sauce. The garnish in fact turned out to be more impressive than the fish itself, which was disappointingly bland and would have benefited from being served with fresh lemon to add some zing. 
A pizza Margherita (280 rubles, $9), transformed at our request into a pizza Vegetariana (for which the price almost doubled to 530 rubles, $17), was another bitter disappointment, especially after the high standards set by the spectacular soup. Surprisingly chewy and soggy, close inspection revealed its base to be only half-cooked at best. Liberal application of both tomato sauce and chili oil — back in the kitchen, rather than upon request at the table — exacerbated these flaws. 
The main mystery at Bella Vista, however, is not the discrepancy between the quality of various dishes, but whom the restaurant is targeting from its discreet location on the English Embankment. We were the only diners there for the entire duration of our visit.
The restaurant is located next to the city’s romantically named Wedding Palace No. 1, but with these prices, only the most well-heeled couples could afford to celebrate their big day here. 

TITLE: Krushchev’s San Francisco
AUTHOR: By Irina Filatova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: VLADIVOSTOK — Just months after Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev jokingly promised to show “Kuzka’s mother” to the Americans in Moscow, he made his first official visit to the United States — and ended up taking a trip that proved crucial for Vladivostok.
Impressed by the views of San Francisco and the Golden Gate bridge, Khrushchev called for the residents of Vladivostok, which he visited on his way back home in 1959, to turn the city into “our San Francisco.”
This speech, delivered at a local shipbuilding plant, was followed by a massive construction effort aimed at transforming the city into a “Big Vladivostok,” which Khrushchev hoped would rival the American prototype.
Khrushchev never attributed his threat to show “Kuzka’s mother” — an idiomatic expression meaning “to teach someone a lesson” — to the changes the city faced 50 years ago. But he probably would do so today as Vladivostok faces a new wave of construction ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum, which it will host in 2012.
On a recent visit, the city looked like an enormous construction site, with cranes rising above dug-up streets, as workers upgrade transportation infrastructure and build a new campus for Far East Federal University on Russky Island, which will host the summit. Local and federal authorities believe that any inconvenience caused by the construction works is worth it because the role of host city for the summit could result in a huge breakthrough in the development of Vladivostok and the surrounding Primorye region. Among the major benefits are two huge bridges that Vladivostok will get by 2012 and that will ease movement around the city.
One of the bridges will stretch across the Eastern Bosporus Strait to connect the continental part of the city to Russky Island about 800 meters to the south. It will be the longest cable-stayed bridge in the world, with a main span length of 1,104 meters.
The other bridge will connect the city center to Cape Churkin lying across Zolotoi Rog, or Golden Horn, one of the city’s biggest bays.
Vladivostok residents have been waiting for these bridges for decades, and the new infrastructure will facilitate access to the city’s remote territories, part of which are located on islands in the Sea of Japan, where a ferry is the only way to reach them.
Vladivostok — Russia’s biggest port on the Pacific Ocean — is located on the northwestern coast of the Sea of Japan and borders the Eastern Bosporus Strait and part of the Amur Bay. The city was founded in 1860 as a military post on Zolotoi Rog Bay and two years later got the status of a free trade port.
The city’s name apparently originates from the Russian expression “vladei vostokom,” which means “rule the east.”
Indeed, the city’s location makes Vladivostok a strategic transportation hub in the Far East for international cargo shipments. The port handles cargoes primarily from South Korea, China, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.
Asian companies also like Vladivostok’s location. A subsidiary of Japan’s Sumitomo Corporation, Summit Motors Vladivostok, is the local dealer of Toyota vehicles, while South Korea’s Hyundai Corporation, which has a local office, built a business center in the city jointly with the local authorities, the international terminal at the airport, and the Far East’s largest tanker, Primorye, which carries oil from the island of Sakhalin to the countries of the Asian-Pacific region.
Among the big domestic companies operating in Vladivostok are carmaker Sollers, which assembles South Korea’s SsangYong SUVs at its local facility, and Gazprom, which recently completed a pipeline delivering gas from the island of Sakhalin to Vladivostok that could one day also supply Japan, China and South Korea.
Local residents are excited about the city’s location. Making a shopping getaway to China for the weekend is as common as visiting a shopping center in the Moscow region city of Khimki is for Muscovites. “We usually go shopping in Suifenhe, where you can find everything from cheap mass-produced consumer goods to high-quality clothes, stuff for cars and home appliances,” said Anna, a 20-year-old student. A weekend bus tour to China with its numerous “cheap restaurants and cafes serving incredibly delicious food” is a good way to relax after the work week, she said.
Another passion for the locals is cars. Most Vladivostok residents — from the 18-year-old student to the retiree — own vehicles, largely right-hand drives imported from Japan.
“We have no metro and there are places where you can’t get by bus, so a car is a necessity for families,” said Anna.
Some families have several cars, she added.
Heavy traffic together with narrow streets results in huge jams, which locals say last nearly around the clock.
But no matter what problems the city has, it became dear to many Russians in the late 1990s when Ilya Lagutenko, frontman of the popular rock band Mumy Troll, devoted a song to the city where he had spent his childhood and youth.
Lagutenko, who visits the city twice a year to perform concerts, explained the name of the song “Vladivostok 2000” in a book published last year.
“We’ve been told since childhood that the year 2000 would come and Vladivostok would become ‘our San Francisco,’ like Khrushchev said,” he wrote.
The city is developing at a slower pace than hoped, but residents have retained their sense of humor and are confident about tomorrow, he said.
“Every Vladivostok resident is a real sailor in his soul, who believes that one day he will come back to the land where his friends and loved ones are waiting for him,” he said.
<b>What to see if you have two hours</b>
Numerous observation points provide a breathtaking view of the city and the surrounding islands. To get the best impression, ride on a funicular from the station near the Pushkin Theater to an upper observation point near a Far East Federal University campus. This observation point — popular among visiting foreigners — offers a stunning view of Zolotoi Rog Bay, where workers in orange helmets are bustling on a bridge construction site and look like hardworking ants from here.
The bay is especially beautiful on sunny days, when flecks of sunlight play on the water, justifying the bay’s name.
The funicular itself is worth seeing. Launched in 1962, the 183-meter rail link — a brainchild of Khrushchev and inspired by San Francisco’s cable-car system — is the only funicular system in the Far East. It runs along a slope of the Orlinoye Gnezdo, or Eagle’s Nest, Mountain, which rises to 200 meters above sea level and is the highest point in the old part of Vladivostok. The funicular trip from the lowest to the highest point takes about two minutes and costs 6 rubles.
After admiring the view, go down the hill to look at ships tied up at Korabelnaya Nabarezhnaya, which stretches along Zolotoi Rog Bay. While walking along the embankment, stop by the submarine museum (66 Svetlanskaya Ulitsa; +7-4232-216-492, museumtof.ru/index.php/filials/s-56), which is organized inside a real S-56 submarine that first set sail in 1939 and participated in World War II. Visitors can see three sections of the submarine preserved in their original state.
Drop into one of the cozy cafes on Vladivostok’s main street, Svetlanskaya — the local equivalent of Moscow’s Tverskaya, with the city’s main department store and name-brand fashion stores lining both sides — which runs parallel to the embankment. Don’t miss a chance to make a wish under the Nikolayevskiye Triumphal Gates, following the local tradition. The gates were built in 1891 ahead of a visit by a young Nicholas II.
<b>What to do if you have two days</b>
In the winter, follow young Vladivostok residents to the Arsenyev ski resort (arsgora.ru), a small one-industry town 255 kilometers northeast of Vladivostok.
The resort is located on 870-meter-high Obzornaya Mountain and has three ski slopes and one for sleds. One ski lift ride costs 100 rubles for adults and 50 rubles for children. Skis are available for rent at 300 rubles per hour, and an instructor is also available for 400 rubles per hour.
Accommodation is possible in a local hotel located just 10 minutes by taxi from the ski base. One possible option is Tayozhnaya (1 Gostiny Proyezd, +7-4236-143-261, gostinicataejnaya.ru), where prices start at 1,100 rubles per night for an economy single.
In the summer, take a ferry boat to nearby islands to admire breathtaking landscapes. Explore the majestic rocks of Popova Island or swim in the blue waters of the Sea of Japan on Russia’s southmost island of Furugelma, with its white sandy beaches. (Tours to the islands are organized by a number of local travel agencies. One of the most affordable options is ForiTur Primorye, which focuses on ecological tourism. 123B Okeansky Prospekt, Office 401, +7-4232-504-153,foritour.ru).
<b>Cultural tips</b>
The city boasts a number of interesting museums that locals say are worth visiting.
The antique car museum, Avtomotostarina Museum (2A Sakhalinskaya Ulitsa, +7-4232-212-477, automotomuseum.vl.ru/eng/), has a unique collection of old cars and motorcycles made in the Soviet Union and abroad in 1920s to 1970s, including the car that Khrushchev used during his visit in 1959.
The Vladivostok Fortress Museum (4A Batareinaya Ulitsa, +7-4232-40-08-96, vlad-fort.ru/english/index.php) offers an overview of the city’s fortification history, with exhibits that include weapons and the equipment used to build the fortress of Vladivostok — a complex of 16 forts, some of which are open to tourists — from 1910 to 1917.
<b>What to do with the kids</b>
The Vladivostok circus — which is more than 100 years old and once received a gift of 100 rubles from the visiting Nicholas II — stages regular performances from Fridays to Sundays. In 1973, the circus got its current building with a winter garden on the upper floor (103 Svetlanskaya Ulitsa, +7-4232-268-115, +7-4232-268-133, circus.vl.ru; prices start at 400 rubles).
<b>Where to eat</b>
Thanks to its seaside location, Vladivostok boasts a wide choice of local fish and seafoods in many restaurants. One good option is Sem Futov (17A Ulitsa Leitenanta Shmidta, +7-423-2988-888, sevenfeets.ru), which is located in one of the the city harbors and provides a picturesque view of the Amur Bay from a terrace that is open from May through October. The restaurant, frequented by visiting foreigners, focuses on European cuisine. A meal for one costs about 2,500 rubles, including alcohol.
For a breathtaking panoramic view of the city go to Orlinoye Gnezdo (1 Aksakovskaya Ulitsa, +7-4232-651-551, restoran.orlinoe-gnezdo.ru), located on top of the mountain with the same name. The restaurant focuses on French cuisine, with fried frog legs served with risotto being the main attraction on the menu. A meal for one costs about 3,000 rubles with alcohol.
For those preferring a luxury design rather than a picturesque view, try Versal (10 Svetlanskaya Ulitsa, +7-4232-264-201, versailles.vl.ru). The restaurant, popular among local officials and visiting celebrities like French singer Patricia Kaas, is located in the city center and is part of a hotel with the same name. The venue with large chandeliers and red satin-covered chairs offers European cuisine. The average bill is 2,000 rubles without alcohol per person.
<b>Where to stay</b>
Two hotels located in the city center are popular among visiting government officials and celebrities.
Versal (10 Svetlanskaya Ulitsa, +7-4232-264-201, versailles.vl.ru), which occupies a historic building, has been located on the city’s main street for a century. The hotel opened on the upper floor of a two-story house, right above numerous stores, in 1909 and provided high-end accommodation preferred by visiting foreigners. The hotel was reconstructed in 1992 after a fire destroyed part of the interior, but its original appearance was restored thanks to old photos and sketches. The hotel offers 41 rooms, with prices starting at 5,000 rubles per night for a single.
Opened in 1997, Hyundai Hotel (29 Semyovovskaya Ulitsa, +7-4232-402-233, hotelhyundai.ru) also boasts a good location — just a few minutes’ walk from the major places of interest. The hotel has 155 rooms, with prices ranging from 7,000 rubles per night for a single to 60,000 rubles per night for a presidential suite.
<b>Conversation starters</b>
You’ll make many friends if you start complaining about the traffic jams. Construction ahead of the summit is another evergreen topic, since locals are very excited about finally getting the long-awaited bridges.
<b>Other helpful hints</b>
Vladivostok is located on the same latitude as Sochi, but the summer temperatures here are lower. Although summer — usually warm and humid — is rather comfortable in Vladivostok, strong rainshowers accompanied by strong wind that blow in from the ocean can be a real problem, paralyzing local sea and air transportation.
Take a lot of warm clothes if you happen to go to Vladivostok in the winter. The weather is usually sunny with rare snowfalls, but high humidity due to its location on the sea combined with strong winds can make the cold unbearable.
Finally, make sure you leave for the local airport far in advance, because a trip by taxi from the city center, which should normally take up to an hour, can last for three to four hours due to traffic jams and repair works on the roads.
<b>How to get there</b>
Vladivostok is the endpoint of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, connecting the Far East with the western part of Russia and the largest Siberian cities in between.
Choosing this route would definitely be a memorable experience because it takes a train departing from the railroad’s starting point — Moscow’s Yaroslavsky Station — six days to cover the 9,288-kilometer route. Prices start at 11,000 rubles for a round trip in a third-class sleeper. Getting to Moscow from St. Petersburg is nothing in comparison, with many trains departing daily for the capital. Prices start from 1,000 rubles
A faster option to get to Vladivostok is by plane, albeit also with a layover in Moscow. A one-way trip from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok takes about ten hours in flight time, in addition to a layover in Moscow, with prices for a round trip starting at about 16,000 rubles.
The city’s international airport (vvo.aero), which is home to the biggest airline in the Far East, Vladivostok Avia, is located 44 kilometers north of Vladivostok and has two terminals — for international and domestic flights. 
Vladivostok’s time difference with St. Petersburg is seven hours.
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<I>Population:</I> 616,884

<I>Main industries: car and equipment construction, shipbuilding, fishing, food production, timber processing</I> 

<I>Mayor:</I> Igor Pushkaryov

<I>Founded in</I> 1860

<I>Interesting fact:</I> 
The name of Vladivostok’s only sister city in Russia — Vladikavkaz — has a similar origin and comes from the Russian phrase “vladei Kavkazom,” which means “rule the Caucasus.”

<I>Helpful contacts:</I> 
• Mayor Igor Pushkaryov (20 Okeansky Prospekt, Office 710, +7-4232-614-223, +7-4232-614-221, vladcity.ru); 
• Vladimir Brezhnev, chairman of the Primorsky region’s Chamber of Commerce (13A Okeansky Prospekt, +7-4232-26-96-30, ptpp.ru).

<I>Sister cities:</I> Dalian and Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture (China); Manta (Ecuador); Niigata, Hakodate and Akita (Japan); Kota Kinabalu (Malaysia); Wonsan (North Korea); Vladikavkaz (Russia); Busan (South Korea); San Diego, Tacoma and Juneau (the United States).

<b>Major businesses</b>
• Sollers (3 Ulitsa Stanyukovicha, +7-4232-607-265, +7-4232-513-711, sollers-auto.com/en), a local facility of the domestic carmaker assembling UAZ and SsanYong SUVs, as well as FIAT passenger and commercial vehicles and Isuzu trucks.
• Coca-Cola (1 2nd Shosseinaya Ulitsa, +7-4232-308-608, coca-colahellenic.ru), the beverage maker’s local factory, which was opened in 1997 and has about 500 employees. The plant produces Coca-Cola, Fanta, Sprite, Schweppes, Fruktaim and BonAqua for the Far East.
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<b>Q: What role does the Vladivostok plant play in the company’s operations in Russia?</b> 
A: Coca-Cola Hellenic’s plant in Vladivostok is very important because it serves the entire Far East population — about 6 million people. Our distribution chain includes all the major cities in the Far East, and we have units and exclusive distributors to supply remote territories.
<b>Q: What makes Vladivostok a special place to work?</b> 
A: The logistics operations are difficult due to the landscape, which consists of bays and mountains. But the company can supply products to consumers quickly because major retail outlets in the heavily populated Vladivostok are located close to one another. It’s also worth mentioning that all big production sites are located outside the city.
<b>Q: What would you recommend that other foreign investors consider about Vladivostok?</b> 
A: Vladivostok is a good platform to invest in ecological tourism, the restaurant and hotel business, and the aircraft and automobile industries. Speaking of the Primorye region in general, investors could look into the chemicals industry, oil and gas refining, timber processing, the processing of ore and rare-earth metals, agriculture and development of scientific innovations. The region is also seen as a future site for the construction of plants for international car makers.  
<b>Q: What is a must-see site in Vladivostok?</b> 
A: The main place of interest is the Vladivostok Fortress and its oldest unit, the Bezymyannaya Battery. The antique car museum, the S-56 submarine and the funicular are also interesting and will impress guests of our Far East capital.
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<b>Q: What are the most promising industries for investment in Vladivostok?</b> 
A: The tourism industry, including the hotel, restaurant and entertainment businesses, have good potential for investment. Vladivostok has a unique geographic location; it’s a big port on the Pacific Ocean whose major neighbors are China, Japan and South Korea. The city also has unique and well-preserved historic and architectural landmarks and can boast rich nature. I’m sure that all this creates the perfect conditions to develop domestic and international tourism and is a good basis for attracting foreign private investors. We also welcome investment in health care and education. We’d like to have big foreign medical companies here that operate globally and would like to develop medical equipment that use high technology. The key project that could attract investment in education is the campus of Far East Federal University on Russky Island, where 50,000 domestic and foreign students will study.
<b>Q: What are the city authorities doing to attract foreign investors?</b> 
A: We support investment by reducing administrative barriers. For example, we’ve reduced the time of getting construction permits. We’re also in the process of forming legislation on public-private partnerships. We guarantee investors transparent rules for doing business and equal access to transportation and energy resources.
<b>Q: How are preparations for the APEC summit progressing?</b> 
A: They are in full swing. The construction of bridges over Zolotoi Rog Bay and to Russky Island is under way. Several university campuses and dormitories have been built on Russky Island; a road to the Knevichi International Airport has been put into service, and a new airport building that will accept all types of jets and have a capacity for 5 million passengers a year will soon be completed. Construction of two five-star hotels is about to finish as well.
<b>Q: How will the city benefit from hosting the summit?</b>
A: Hosting the summit and the current preparations will make people’s lives more comfortable and ensure sustainable social and economic development for Vladivostok, turning it into Russia’s Pacific gateway and a prospective center for cooperation in the Asian-Pacific region.
<b>Q: What would you recommend seeing in Vladivostok?</b> 
A: I would advise seeing the Nikolayevskiye Triumphal Gates, the Vladivostok Fortress Museum, Russia’s only antique car museum and the S-56 submarine. I would also invite guests to ride the funicular to enjoy the breathtaking views of our sea city. Taking a photo in front of the bridges under construction is a must. Each of these sites has its own story, which you’ll keep in your heart after leaving Vladivostok.
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A 45-year-old Englishman who has been living in Vladivostok for 13 years. He co-owns the Five O’Clock English bakery and catering service, which he opened in 2007 together with his Russian wife, Anna.

<b>Q: Why did you come to Vladivostok?</b> 
A: I used to work as a casino manager in Moscow, and my company sent me to Vladivostok to work at one of the casino’s branches. I met my wife here, and it was her idea to start up our own business. The laws changed at the time, making casinos illegal. So two things just came together at the right time, and I stayed. 
<b>Q: Is it difficult to run your own business in Vladivostok?</b> 
A: We find it quite easy. We just prepare all the documents that need to be prepared. In our market, in catering, it’s been straight-forward.
<b>Q: What challenges do you face?</b> 
A: Logistically, things are difficult. The traffic is very heavy. We found that delivery is not always profitable because a driver spends a lot of time in traffic. So we’re limited to a very close area in deliveries. Also receiving products on time and the quality we demand is not always perfect. We need fresh products constantly because we bake.
<b>Q: Why did you choose to open a bakery?</b> 
A: We just felt that there was a gap in the market. There were coffee shops here, but nobody really specialized in tea and home baking. So we took advantage of that.
<b>Q: What do you like most about the city?</b> 
A: Vladivostok is a very young city because it’s full of students. It keeps me young. I like the people. They are very friendly, very welcoming. Now they make me feel part of the city. And the sea. It’s nice to live by the sea. The Zolotoi Rog Bay potentially could be very nice. At the moment it’s full of rusting ships, but it’s a beautiful place potentially.
<b>Q: Do you think that the city will change for the better due to preparations for the APEC summit?</b>
A: The infrastructure is already improving, roads are being built and upgraded, they’re building a new train line directly from the airport to the city. Hopefully the whole city will benefit. 
<b>Q: What is a must-see in Vladivostok?</b> 
A: I would recommend seeing Zolotoi Rog Bay. Also the submarine museum, which provides a good opportunity to get inside a submarine. There’s no other place in the world where you can do that. The train station is very nice — it is at the end of the line of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, and you can see a lot of foreigners around there. I would also say: If you come to Vladivostok, get off the main street and look at the tiny side streets — you’ll see old architecture, an old Vladivostok.

TITLE: FBI Releases Videotape Showing Russian Spy Ring
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — FBI surveillance tapes, photos and documents released Monday show members of a ring of Russian sleeper spies secretly exchanging information and money during a counterintelligence probe that lasted about a decade and ended in the biggest spy swap since the Cold War.
The tapes show a January 2010 shopping trip to Macy’s in New York’s Herald Square by former New York real estate agent Anna Chapman, whose role in the spy saga turned her into an international celebrity. She bought leggings and tried on hats at the New York department store, investigators wrote in a document, and transmitted coded messages while sitting in a coffee shop.
On another occasion, Chapman is visible in a video setting up her laptop computer at a Barnes & Noble bookstore. “Technical coverage indicated that a computer signal began broadcasting at the same time,” noted part of a heavily redacted FBI report on the incident, apparently showing an effort by Chapman to communicate with her handlers.
Other photos and video from the surveillance operation, which the FBI called “Ghost Stories,” show some of the 10 other conspirators burying money in a patch of weeds, handing off documents in what looks like a subway tunnel, meeting during a stroll around Columbus Circle or just taking their kids for a walk.
A photo of one spy, Donald Heathfield of Cambridge, Massachusetts, shows him at what appears to be a university graduation ceremony. Heathfield received a degree from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 2000. The school revoked the degree a month after the FBI rolled up the spy ring in June 2010.
Called illegals because they took civilian jobs instead of operating inside Russian embassies and military missions, the spies settled into quiet lives in middle-class neighborhoods. Their long-range assignment from Moscow: Burrow deep into U.S. society, and cultivate contacts with academics, entrepreneurs and government policymakers on subjects from defense to finance.
While the deep-cover agents didn’t steal any secrets, an FBI counterintelligence official said they were making progress. They “were getting very close to penetrating U.S. policymaking circles” through a friend of an unidentified member of President Barack Obama’s Cabinet, FBI assistant director for counterintelligence C. Frank Figliuzzi told The Associated Press. He did not give details, but Russian spy Cynthia Murphy of Montclair, New Jersey, provided financial planning for a venture capitalist with close ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton.
The investigation’s code name, “Ghost Stories,” was an apparent reference to the ring’s efforts to blend invisibly into the fabric of American society. An FBI spokesman said that releasing the material on Halloween was coincidental.
The linchpin in the case was Colonel Alexander Poteyev, a highly placed U.S. mole in the Foreign Intelligence Service, who betrayed the spy ring even as he ran it. He abruptly fled Moscow just days before the FBI rolled up the deep-cover operation on June 27, 2010. Poteyev’s role in exposing the illegals program only emerged last June when a Russian military court convicted him in absentia for high treason and desertion.
The United States swapped the 10 deep-cover agents arrested by federal agents for four Russians imprisoned for spying for the West at a remote corner of a Vienna airport on July 9, in a scene reminiscent of the carefully choreographed exchange of spies at Berlin’s Glienicke Bridge during the Cold War.
While freed Soviet spies typically kept a low profile after their return to Moscow, Chapman became a lingerie model, corporate spokeswoman and television personality. Heathfield, whose real name is Andrei Bezrukov, lists himself as an adviser to the president of Rosneft on his LinkedIn account.
President Dmitry Medvedev awarded the 10 freed spies Russia’s highest honors at a Kremlin ceremony.
The swap was Washington’s idea, raised when U.S. law enforcement officials told Obama that it was time to start planning the arrests.
The case was brought to a swift conclusion before it could complicate the president’s campaign to “reset” U.S. relations with Russia, strained by years of tensions over U.S. foreign policy and the 2008 Russia-Georgia war. All 10 of the captured spies were charged with failing to register as foreign agents.
An 11th suspect, Christopher Metsos, who claimed to be a Canadian citizen and delivered money and equipment to the sleeper agents, vanished after a court in Cyprus freed him on bail. The FBI released surveillance photos of Metsos on Monday.
Attorney General Eric Holder said officials decided to arrest the spies because one was preparing to leave the United States and there was concern that “we would not be able to get him back.”
Both Holder and Figliuzzi said the spies represented a real threat to U.S. security. “This was a massive investigation that spanned the entire field offices of the FBI,” Figliuzzi said Monday. “Resources were dedicated in multiple field offices, multiple counter-intelligence squads across the nation and certainly here in Washington at FBI headquarters.”
But former Soviet intelligence officials now living in the West scratched their heads over what Russia hoped to gain from its ring. “In my view this whole operation was a waste of human resources, money and just put Russia in a ridiculous situation,” said Oleg Kalugin, a former KGB major general who spied against the United States during the Soviet era, in an interview earlier this year. He now lives near Washington.
Alexander Vassiliev, a former KGB officer and journalist who has written extensively about Soviet spying in America, said the illegals were supposed to act as talent spotters and scouts, identifying Americans in positions of power who might be recruited to spill secrets for financial reasons or through blackmail.
Spies with the protection of diplomatic credentials would handle the more delicate task of recruiting and handling the agents. Moscow’s ultimate aim, Vassiliev said, was probably to cultivate a source who could provide day-by-day intelligence on what the president’s inner circle was thinking and planning in response to the latest international crisis. But he said there was no evidence the Kremlin made any progress toward that goal.
“How are you going to recruit someone like that, on what basis? That’s quite a successful person. Why should he spy for the Russians? I can’t see any reason.”
Vassiliev said Russia’s intelligence services seem unable to shake their Soviet-era habits. “The current practice of the Russian espionage agency is based on the practices which existed before 1945,” said Vassiliev, who now lives in London. “It’s so outdated.”

TITLE: New Book Challenges Leningrad Siege Myths
AUTHOR: By Robin Munro
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Seventy years after the events and with only a handful of survivors left, there are still new angles to approach the tragedy of the 872-day World War II Siege of Leningrad.
 In “Leningrad: Tragedy of a City Under Siege,” British journalist and writer Anna Reid has compiled information from recently opened archives, literary works, interviews, recent research and diaries. It gives a sweeping overview of how civilians, about 750,000 of whom died, experienced the siege. Hunger killed most of them.
 Reid also addresses the mishandling of the defense of Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was then known, by the fat cats in power.
She challenges myths about the siege, particularly the Soviet line of continuous and heroic defense that is still believed by many. In fact, after switching focus to Moscow in late 1941, the Germans had little chance of seizing the city and would not have accepted any surrender. Nevertheless, the siege dragged on until January 1944.
“Yes, the regime successfully defended the city, devising ingenious food supplements and establishing supply and evacuation routes across Lake Ladoga,’’ Reid writes. 
“But it also delayed, bungled, squandered its soldiers’ lives by sending them into battle untrained and unarmed, fed its own senior apparatchiks while all around starved, and made thousands of pointless executions and arrests.’’ 
 In one photo in the book, a well-fed man in uniform is pictured close to a starving and exhausted Leningrad survivor. 
 As for ordinary citizens, some “did turn out to be heroes, others to be selfish and callous, most to be a mixture of both,” Reid writes.
 Most of the civilian deaths occurred in the winter of 1941-42, an especially cold one in which the mercury dropped below -30 degrees Celsius.  
 While attempts were made to release the city from the grip of the Germans and the Finns in the north, none were successful, even after the Road of Life was opened across Lake Ladoga. A rationing system was introduced, but supplies fell well short of what was needed.
 Reid describes people’s ingenuity: “Zoologists survived … because they knew how to catch rats and pigeons. Impractical mathematicians died.” They used their contacts, called in favors and sold off valuables. The most desperate robbed, killed and ate human flesh.
Neglected by the authorities, almost all the peasants who took refuge from the Germans in overcrowded and disease-ridden villages around the city died.
Among the dead as a whole, “mortality rates were particularly high among men (71 percent of the total), over-sixties (27 percent of total) and babies (14 percent),” Reid writes.
Whole families were wiped out with the order of death typically being grandfathers and infants, then grandmothers and the father (if not at the front), and finally the mother and older children.
“The point at which an entire family was doomed was when its last mobile member became too weak to queue for rations. Heads of households, usually mothers, were thus faced with a heartbreaking dilemma: Whether to eat more food themselves so as to stay on their feet or to give more to the family’s sickest member — usually a grandparent or child — and risk the lives of all. That many prioritized their children is indicated by the large numbers of orphans they left behind.”
 By the next winter, after so many deaths and with most civilians evacuated, conditions improved vastly.
 Reid is less successful at addressing the perspective of Germans, who, she suggests have been loath to discuss the atrocities, maltreatment or war crimes committed in their name. However, excerpts from Fritz Hockenjos’ diaries give some idea of the experience of an ordinary soldier.
Reid’s work puts the siege, one of the greatest tragedies of the last century, a century marked by inhumanity, in its rightful place and is likely to be the most authoritative English-language source for many years to come.
The book is written in the tradition of British writers Orlando Figes (“The Whisperers”), Simon Sebag Montefiore (“Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar,” “Young Stalin,” “Sashenka”) and Anthony Beevor (“Stalingrad,” “Berlin — The Downfall 1945.”) All three are listed as having advised her.
 
<I>“Leningrad: Tragedy of a City Under Siege, 1941-44,” by Anna Reid (416 pages), is published by Bloomsbury, priced at about $18.</I>