SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1682 (44), Wednesday, November 9, 2011
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TITLE: Mariinsky Complex Expansion Totals $629 Million
AUTHOR: By Justin Varilek
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Moscow took center stage for the arts when the Bolshoi Theater opened on Oct. 28, but St. Petersburg, the historical cultural capital, will quickly answer Moscow’s challenge with an entire cultural complex set to open in fall 2012.
The complex will consist of the historic Mariinsky Theater founded in 1860, a new concert hall opened in 2007 and the Mariinsky second stage, which construction company Metrostroi promised to finish by fall 2012.
“These pieces … when put together will add up to more than the sum of their parts into a cultural complex that is unrivaled,” said Jack Diamond, designer of the new Mariinsky Theater.
Diamond told The St. Petersburg Times in an interview that he is proposing that all three structures rest on the same plane, connected by cobblestone, granite setts or some other paving material. Streets will remain flush with all the pedestrian paths and small light pillars will demarcate lanes for traffic.
He also hopes a tree line will unite the buildings. The narrow park just north of where the conservatory is situated will extend past the existing Mariinsky Theater and end at the door of the new building. A new footbridge will also connect the two theaters split only by the Kryukov Canal.
Diamond proposed two glass columns of light seated at the entrance and exit to act as gateways marking the cultural precinct. They would then be connected by a necklace of pedestrian-level lights to multiply the architectural effect, unifying the area. Neither the gateway nor the ring of lights has yet to be officially confirmed or budgeted, but Diamond believes that the concept is gaining favor.
According to Toronto-based Diamond and Schmitt Architects, the Mariinsky’s new stage will add 1,800 seats, span 70,000 square meters, reach up to eight stories high and cost 325 million euros ($446 million). It also offers a roof theater for events during the White Nights for a panoramic view of the monuments in a city where houses are limited to a six-story height.
“I have watched people climb all the way up to the top of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, a massive effort to get above and look across at the city. Well, we’re going to make it easy and celebrate that,” Diamond said.
The project, however, has been anything but easy, wrought with setbacks, inflated costs and controversy.
In September, the state agency Northwest Directorate for Construction, Reconstruction and Restoration switched construction companies overseeing the aboveground work. Metrostroi won the tender, promising a 30 percent discount and to finish the project by fall 2012. But ballet critic and expert Igor Stupnikov did not believe this, saying “it is a far-fetched idea.”
Designs were swapped in 2007 when the Northwest Directorate annulled its contract with Dominique Perrault, allegedly because the roof was not designed for St. Petersburg’s arctic climate. Stupnikov told The St. Petersburg Times that four years after approving the designs, a building committee from Moscow declared that the building also violated height restrictions. The Urban Toronto web site reported that by that time $20 million had already been spent on construction. The state agency was not available Monday to provide a comment.
Diamond and Schmitt were then chosen to rework the plans, and in 2009 they began construction incorporating the features already in place. The completion date has since been projected as late as 2015, and general director of the Mariinsky Theater Valery Gergiev gave a news conference in August to dispel the rumors.
The cost of the project has also sharply increased, rising from an estimated $100 million in 2003 to May 2011 when the government confirmed a total cost of 19.17 billion rubles ($629 million) — to be paid for by the Federal Treasury.
Despite all of the drama, Diamond flatly told The St. Petersburg Times that he would never have given up the opportunity to design the Mariinsky.
When asked how the residents of St. Petersburg were receiving the new facility, Stupnikov said, “For them, it is just another building.”

TITLE: Finland Dishes Out New Visa Rules
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Owners of real estate in Finland will face a more complicated process when it comes to getting Finnish visas, Fontanka reported.
In October, Finland introduced new rules stating that owners of houses in Finland will need to not only supply the standard visa documents required, but also submit a document showing payment of real estate taxes.
Previously, the owners of houses needed only to provide a copy of the act of purchase and sale of property in Finland.
“We need to see that real estate in Finland still belongs to an owner,” the Consulate General of Finland said in a statement.
The consulate pointed out that ownership of real estate in Finland allows people to apply for a two-year long visa.
The Finnish Border Service also plans to cancel the visas of tourists who enter Finland without medical insurance, Interfax reported.
“Until recently we asked such clients to provide proof of medical insurance on the spot, but we are considering more serious measures, including annulling visas right at border checkpoints,” said Juha Saari, a Finnish border service representative.
Saari said Finland’s border guards began doing selective medical insurance checks among Russian tourists and discovered that 10 percent of Russian citizens crossing the border did not have medical insurance.
The number of Russians crossing the Finnish border is increasing every year, said Saari. This year the border service registered 40 percent more crossings. At least 90 percent of all foreigners entering Finland were Russian citizens.

TITLE: St. Petersburg Synagogue Invites All With Open Doors
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg’s Grand Choral Synagogue will hold an open doors day on Sunday to mark International Tolerance Day.
From 12 p.m. to 6 p.m., people of all nationalities and faiths are invited to visit the synagogue to familiarize themselves with Jewish culture, the synagogues’s information department said.
Visitors will be able to see the building, learn its architectural secrets and interesting historical facts, try national Jewish dishes such as matzo and hummus, ask the rabbi questions and enjoy a Jewish folk music concert. 
“Many people want to visit the synagogue, but for some reason are shy to do so. Maybe they think that the synagogue is a closed establishment,”  said Mark Grubarg, chairman of St. Petersburg’s Jewish community. “We want St. Petersburg residents to know that the synagogue is open for everybody and not only on Tolerance Day,” Grubarg said.
 The synagogue is located at 2 Lermontovsky Prospekt.

TITLE: Photographer Claims A Cop Broke His Camera
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Union of Journalists has demanded a full investigation into an “unprovoked” attack by a policeman on a press photographer during a protest rally last week that resulted into costly equipment damages.
On Thursday, the union published a statement saying that award-winning photographer Pyotr Kovalyov of Interpress photography agency had been subjected to an unprovoked attack on Nevsky Prospekt by an OMON special-task police officer. 
“The policeman was deliberate in his attempts to disable the photography equipment,” the statement said.
In the statement, the Union of Journalists appealed to police chiefs, saying that such actions on the part of the police are a violation of the laws of the Russian Federation. 
It demanded a full investigation into the incident and that formal apologies be made to Kovalyov and Interpress agency, as well as reimbursement of the material damages.  
Speaking Monday, Kovalyov said he was attacked by a helmet-wearing OMON policeman during an unauthorized Strategy 31 rally in defense of the right to assembly on Oct. 31, soon after the rally had started. 
He said the officer deliberately went for his camera, breaking off his Canon Speedlite flash and damaging the Canon lens, causing estimated damages of 100,000 rubles (about $3,260).
“He was not after me, but rather after my camera; I managed to keep it out of his reach the first time, but he succeeded in getting to it on the second attempt,” Kovalyov said, adding that the policeman did not say a word to him during the scuffle.
“It was fast and silent. After he broke the flash off, I was pushed hard and fell down on one knee, hitting my Chestvest with the lens in it [against the ground]. So not only the flash, but also the Canon EF 70-200 millimeter lens was damaged.”
The police said Monday that the incident would be investigated after they receive a report from the victim or the Union of Journalists.  According to the union, a formal report will be filed with the police later this week.
Kovalyov said he would file a formal complaint when the Union of Journalists provides legal aid to him, as promised. “I know that the police have very strong legal support,” he said. 
“Journalists are now in a situation when raising any claims is virtually useless. Legal experts advised me not to attempt any action without legal assistance.”
He said neither he nor his agency could afford the services of a lawyer.
Kovalyov is a well-known local photographer who was awarded two journalism prizes by City Hall earlier this year.
The incident is the most recent one involving a journalist during Strategy 31 rallies, which have been held in St. Petersburg on the last day of months that have 31 days since January 2010.
On Dec. 31 last year, photographer Vadim Zhernov of the state news agency RIA Novosti was reportedly attacked by a police officer on the same site near Gostiny Dvor on Nevsky Prospekt.
“He had his flash broken off in a similar manner, but it was also stolen, as the OMON officer who broke it off took it away,” Kovalyov said. 
“Only after we [press photographers] approached the police spokesman Vyacheslav Stepchenko and complained about it to him, somebody from the OMON group came over and returned it.”
Earlier, several other press photographers complained of being arrested, harassed or having their photographs deleted by police officers during Strategy 31 rallies. 
No police officer has been held accountable for violating the rights of journalists.

TITLE: Zenit Edges Closer to Playoffs
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Zenit St. Petersburg is one step closer to realizing its Champions League dream. The team’s 1-0 victory over Ukrainian team Shakhtar last Tuesday now puts it on the brink of a first-time entry into the competition’s knockout stages.
Combined with its recent success, Tuesday’s result places the St. Petersburg team one point behind surprise group leaders APOEL. Two games remain in the group stage and a victory in either would virtually guarantee Zenit a place in the next stage of the competition. 
Last week’s confrontation between the two post-Soviet, European-cup winning giants was greatly anticipated by both sides. Rivalry steadily built up in pre-match interviews between Zenit coach Luciano Spalletti and Shakhtar manager Mircea Lucescu, and the attendance of President Dmitry Medvedev at the Petrovsky stadium marked the significance of the clash.
Much criticized after its home draw against Zenit in the previous round and sitting rock bottom of its group, last year’s Champions League quarter-finalist Shakhtar was clearly under pressure. Ultimately it was an injury-time header before the break from defender Nicolas Lombaerts that sealed the Ukrainian team’s fate.
Lucescu admitted before the match that it would be “the deciding match in the group stage.” 
“At this point we have no choice; we are obliged to win the game,” he added.
Comparing Lucescu to “an old football wolf,” Spalleti laid a clear challenge down to the Romanian: “Let’s see how the wolf comes to play in the lair of the lion. We’ll see who is stronger.”
Zenit will play its next Champion’s League match at home against APOEL on Nov. 23.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Suicide Case Opened</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — St. Petersburg’s Main Investigation Department has opened a criminal case under the article of “driving someone to commit suicide” into the death of a 12-year-old student in one of the city’s schools two weeks ago, Interfax reported.
Dmitry Fabrichny, a pupil at St. Petersburg’s School No. 163, jumped out of a fourth-floor classroom window during the lesson and later died in an ambulance from his injuries. The student reportedly jumped after receiving a bad grade for the year’s first academic term.
The teacher who allegedly gave the boy a bad grade was hospitalized with a heart complaint after the tragic incident. 
<b>Changes at City Hall</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — As Deputy City Governor Mikhail Oseyevsky moves to Moscow to work for the Economic Development Ministry, a number of other city officials have continued to leave or change their positions this week.
“I’m going to work in Moscow, at the Economic Development Ministry,” Oseyevsky said Monday, Interfax reported.
Oseyevsky will be working as an advisor to the head of the ministry, Elvira Nabiullina, specializing in supporting small and medium-sized business and the development of state purchase procedures and tenders, Nabiullina’s press service announced.
City Governor Georgy Poltavchenko proposed Igor Divinsky as a candidate for Oseyevsky’s position. Previously Divinsky had worked as Oseyevsky’s first deputy. 
Oseyevsky came to work at City Hall as the deputy governor in charge of economic alignment following the election of St. Petersburg’s former governor Valentina Matviyenko in 2003. In the summer of 2010, he was appointed head of the governor’s administration. 
After Poltavchenko became St. Petersburg governor, Oseyevsky retained his position, but responsibility for economic alignment was given to new deputy governor Sergei Vyazalov.
More city officials have had to leave their positions this week, including Yury Osipov, head of the Housing Committee, and Andrei Kutepov, head of the city’s Primorsky district administration, Interfax reported.
Poltavchenko said Osipov’s position will go to Valery Shiyan, and the Primorsky district will be headed by Vyacheslav Chazov, who himself was relieved of his position on the city’s Physical Training and Sports Committee.
The Sports Committee will now be headed by Yury Avdeyev, Interfax reported.

TITLE: United Russia Pulls Campaign Ad Trick
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova and Vladimir Tyurin
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — In a seemingly sinister attempt at subliminal advertising, United Russia has been plastering the Russian capital in campaign posters nearly identical to ones used by elections officials to encourage people to vote in December.
The billboards all feature dark-blue silhouettes of a family with two kids, an elderly couple and new parents with a baby carriage in front of a light-blue silhouette of the city skyline.
One of United Russia’s billboards bears the slogan “We preserve — for life, for people,” while one of the billboards hung by elections officials declares “Get out and vote!” and another “Vote for Russia! Vote for yourself!”
The only difference is in the upper left-hand corners, where the official one has the date of the State Duma elections — “Dec. 4” — superimposed on the Russian flag while the other bears the United Russia logo and reminds voters to check box No. 6 on their ballots.
The similarity between the two has opponents grumbling and observers questioning whether the posters cross a legal — or at least ethical — line.
United Russia officials, however, said there was nothing wrong with the party’s advertising campaign at all.
“I can assure you that there is no law violation here … [and] that we have all the necessary permissions to do it,” senior United Russia Moscow City Duma Deputy Andrei Metelsky told The St. Petersburg Times.
Metelsky insisted that the party  bought the copyright for the “image” on its billboards from a Moscow marketing organization. He declined to name the firm, citing “commercial secrets.” 
The election campaign for political parties officially kicked off Thursday, while the information billboards about the elections ordered by the Central Elections Commission and the Moscow City Elections Commission — a separate body — appeared earlier.
Yevgeny Kolyushin, a member of the Central Elections Commission, said that if the official and the party’s billboards were really identical, the commission was “risking” being accused of “campaigning” for United Russia.
Kolyushin has no right to speak for the whole commission and stressed that he was expressing his personal opinion.
He said the commission is empowered to assess possible election violations following a complaint or on its own initiative, but he refused to say whether they would look into United Russia’s billboards.
According to the Administrative Offenses Code, officials can be slapped with fines of up to 3,000 rubles ($100) and state agencies 30,000 rubles for illegal campaigning. Production and distribution of campaign materials that violate election laws can result in fines of up to 3,000 rubles for officials and up to 100,000 rubles for state agencies.
Dmitry Reut, a spokesman for the Moscow City Elections Commission, said by telephone that “at first sight, there is no violation of election laws, although there may be copyright violations.”
He said his commission’s banners were placed around the city by IMA-Consulting, a Moscow-based public relations agency, which had won a bid to do it. 
Independent election monitors said the ads raised troubling questions.
“[It] violates the principle of equality of all parties in the elections because one party uses a resource that gives it an advantage over other parties,” said Grigory Melkonyants, an expert with Golos, an independent elections watchdog.
“Even though United Russia’s billboard has some differences, the voter will, all the same, associate elections with United Russia,” he said. Melkonyants said it seemed sure that the similarity between the two advertisements was intentional and “in no way an unfortunate accident.”
He said it was not the first time that United Russia had used “someone else’s design of billboards in order to be associated with other organizations.”
Andrei Buzin, another expert with Golos, said both the election commission and United Russia used IMA-Consulting services for their billboards and they always turned out to be similar.
He called the commission’s billboards “indirect campaigning” and said that while election laws banned state agencies, and election commissions, from doing that, “no court” would move against the practice.
But Vadim Solovyov, a State Duma deputy and head of the Communist Party’s election campaign, said the similarity of the ads could mean that the party “violated election laws by attracting state money.”
Using illegal financing for campaigning is punishable by a fine of up to 2,500 rubles for a candidate and 20,000 rubles ($650) for a party. Providing illegal financing to someone’s campaign can earn a fine of up to 3,000 rubles for officials and up to 30,000 rubles for state agencies.
Oleg Mikheyev, head of A Just Russia’s election headquarters, called the “promotion practices” of United Russia “inappropriate” and said they were “nothing other than the programming of people to vote for a certain party.”
“Of course, such billboards violate the law, but it is impossible to prove,” he said.
“United Russia’s lawyers have coped with many similar accusations,” Mikheyev said.
In St. Petersburg, the posters calling on citizens to vote and United Russia campaign posters have in common a similar logo — a red and blue tick mark.

TITLE: Ireland, Russia Sign Visa Pact
AUTHOR: By Andrew McChesney
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Ireland and Russia signed a declaration on a partnership for modernization Monday as Irish Deputy Prime Minister Eamon Gilmore visited Moscow with an eye on easing visa rules for Russian businesspeople and working more closely with Skolkovo.
Gilmore, who also serves as foreign minister, signed the deal based on a partnership agreed upon between Russia and the European Union last year, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at noon Monday.
“It commits both countries to work together to modernize how we work in agriculture, industry, public services, and across a whole range of economic and social areas,” Gilmore said in an interview late Sunday.
Gilmore on Monday also co-chaired with Deputy Transportation Minister Valery Okulov a joint economic commission between Ireland and Russia, a grouping that some in the Irish business community said has been neglected in recent years.
“The main result that I hope to get [out of Gilmore’s visit] is that the joint economic commission will get back to working in a productive fashion,” said Constantin Gurdgiev, chairman of the Ireland Russia Business Association and co-author of a report submitted to Gilmore late last month on how Ireland could expand economic ties with Russia.
At the top of its list of recommendations, the report urged Gilmore to strive for eased visa requirements.
“We are easing visa restrictions,” Gilmore said in the interview, speaking in the living room of the Irish ambassador’s residence. “We have recently made changes in our visa arrangements whereby Russian citizens who secure a visa to visit the United Kingdom can use that visit to continue their travel to Ireland. We are doing that on a pilot basis, and we hope to be able to extend and to continue that.”
He said Ireland was also reviewing its visa arrangements with a view to making it easier for Russian citizens and citizens of other countries who want to do business in Ireland to secure visas.
“We are actively working on new, improved visa arrangements. Our Justice Department, which is responsible for our visa regime, will be putting proposals to the government in the near future about new visa arrangements,” he said.
Gilmore said he expected the joint economic commission to pinpoint areas where the two countries could boost trade, which he said reached 2 billion euros ($2.76 billion) last year and is expected to grow more this year.
Gilmore was also due to meet with the leaders of Irish companies working in Russia — he said there are about 200 — and launch the “Education in Ireland” brand, a government campaign to attract Russian students by marketing Ireland’s reputation as a friendly, safe country.
Gurdgiev praised Gilmore’s trip as a harbinger of better relations, noting that it was coming at a time when Ireland’s economy has been battered by the EU financial crisis. Dublin on Friday unveiled 12.4 billion euros ($17.1 billion) in austerity measures over the next four years, Reuters reported.

TITLE: Russia Seeks Bigger Role
AUTHOR: By Sophia Javed
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev was holding talks with the head of the International Monetary Fund Monday over how Russia can provide support to ailing eurozone countries.
The IMF’s managing director Christine Lagarde met with Medvedev for talks focused on the European debt crisis.
Medvedev opened the meeting by saying that he was willing to discuss issues related to global economy and the results of the last week’s summit of the leaders of the Group of 20 economies.
Russia has said it is willing to offer up to $10 billion to the IMF to help it support the eurozone, but has indicated it wants a bigger role in the global financial institution in return. Like other emerging economies, Russia has said developing nations should have a larger say in the IMF’s decision-making process.
The so-called BRICS countries - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - are pressing hard for a greater voice in global economic matters, and the G-20 summit last week ended with only vague offers from them to invest in the eurozone.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the BRICS had accumulated trillions of dollars in foreign reserves and were ready to channel their support through the IMF.
“Our countries are ready to take part in joint efforts, including the provision of credits, under those rules and channels that exist in the International Monetary Fund,” Lavrov said at a news conference.
In exchange for financial assistance, Lavrov said the emerging markets would call for implementation of previous agreements to reform the IMF and the global financial system.
In an interview published on Monday in the business daily Kommersant, Lagarde acknowledged Russia’s importance in the G-20 and as one of the IMF’s top 10 shareholders.
“Together with other emerging economies that make up the BRICS, Russia plays a key role as a driving force for global economic growth,” she said.

TITLE: Just Russia, Rot Front Face Off
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Election debates began this weekend when A Just Russia leader Sergei Mironov and Rot Front head Sergei Udaltsov squared off in a heated but friendly exchange on Dozhd TV.
The event can only pay dividends to one side in the State Duma vote in December because Rot Front has been banned by the Justice Ministry from running.
A highlight of the debate, aired Sunday night, came when Mironov announced that he would not support Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in his bid to return to the presidency because Putin is backed by the ruling United Russia.
Mironov said before Putin announced his return in September that his party would back no United Russia candidate. Mironov never named any names at the time and continued to profess loyalty to Putin.
He also stressed Sunday that A Just Russia would not have backed President Medvedev if he had chosen to run for re-election.
Udaltsov made a name for himself with street campaigning against corruption. He has served more than 100 short jail terms over his activism and was detained again Monday when he led supporters into an unsanctioned “Occupy Old Square” rally in Moscow, which houses the presidential administration office.
All registered parties running for the Duma will engage in televised debates starting Wednesday.

TITLE: Academic Had 29 Skeletons in His Closet
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Isachenkov
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — The historian had always been open about his interest in the dead and eagerly described how he loved to rummage through cemeteries, studying grave stones to uncover the life stories behind them.
What he failed to mention, according to police, was that he had dug up 29 bodies and taken them back to his apartment, where he dressed them in women’s clothes scavenged from graves and then put them on display.
A police video of the man’s apartment in the Volga River city of Nizhny Novgorod released Monday shows his macabre collection of what look like dolls. Lifesize, they are dressed in bright dresses and headscarves, their hands and faces wrapped in what appears to be cloth. Police said they were mummified remains.
Instructions for doll-making were found in the apartment, police said, and the video showed old-fashioned plastic dolls in frilly dresses lying about.
Police refused to name the suspect arrested last week, but released photographs of him, gave his age as 45 and described him as a well-known specialist in the history of the city about 400 kilometers east of Moscow.
Russian media reports identified the man as Anatoly Moskvin, a 45-year-old historian who was considered the ultimate expert on cemeteries in Nizhny Novgorod.
Russian newspaper reports quoted police as saying that the man had only selected the remains of young women for his grisly collection.
Police said he had photographs and nameplates from grave sites, which could help with the identification of the remains.
The arrest followed a long-running investigation into the desecration of graves at several cemeteries in Nizhny Novgorod beginning in 2010, police spokeswoman Svetlana Kovylina said. She did not explain how they tracked him down.
The national daily Moskovsky Komsomolets said Moskvin was detained at a cemetery while carrying a bag of bones. But Kriminalnaya Khronika, an online publication specializing in crime news from the Nizhny Novgorod region, said police investigators discovered the bodies when they visited Moskvin to consult with him about the desecration.
Alexei Yesin, the editor of a local newspaper to which Moskvin contributed, told The Associated Press that he was shocked by the reports and couldn’t understand how he could have squeezed all the bodies into his apartment, which he shared with his parents.
He described Moskvin as a loner who had “certain quirks,” but said he gave no indication that he was up to anything so strange. “I saw no signs of that while working with him,” Yesin said in a telephone interview.
Moskvin, who had long been known in the region for his interest in the dead, wrote several articles about cemeteries and historic sites in the region. A linguistic expert by training, he specialized in Celtic culture and studied 13 foreign languages.
In a 2007 interview with the newspaper Nizhegorodsky Rabochy (Nizhny Novgorod Worker), Moskvin said he had begun wandering through cemeteries when he was in the seventh grade. “I don’t think anyone in the city knows them better than I do,” he said.
Moskvin claimed that from 2005 to 2007 he had inspected 752 cemeteries across the region, often traveling about 30 kilometers a day by foot.
He said he drank from puddles, spent nights in haystacks or at abandoned farms and once even slept in a coffin readied for a funeral. He said he was repeatedly questioned by police, who then always let him go.
Just last month, he wrote a piece for a publication on necrology to explain his interest in the dead. He said that when he was 12, he came across a funeral procession whose participants forced him to kiss the face of a dead 11-year-old girl.
“An adult pushed my face down to the waxy forehead of the girl in an embroidered cap, and there was nothing I could do but kiss her as ordered,” Moskvin wrote in Nekrolog.
He said he later grew interested in the occult.

TITLE: Merkel and Medvedev Open New Gas Pipeline
AUTHOR: By Juergen Baetz
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LUBMIN, Germany — Leaders of Germany and Russia are opening a 7.4 billion euro ($10.2 billion) natural gas pipeline that links western Europe directly with Siberia’s vast gas reserves.
Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Dmitry Medvedev met Tuesday in the village of Lubmin on Germany’s Baltic Sea coast, where the (1,200-kilometer) Nord Stream underwater pipeline reaches land.
The pipeline is to ferry the gas from Vyborg, near St. Petersburg, under the Baltic to Lubmin. That creates a direct link between the Russian and western European networks — circumventing sometimes troublesome traditional overland transit routes through Ukraine, Belarus and Poland.
Once the project is complete, gas will flow to Europe through two pipelines. The first line, being inaugurated Tuesday, will have an annual capacity of 27.5 billion cubic meters.
That volume will double once the second line is completed — expected next year. Nord Stream says it’s the world’s longest underwater pipeline.
Europe currently gets about 25 percent of its natural gas from Russia, which sits on the world’s largest reserves. The gas is mostly ferried through Soviet-era pipelines crossing the Baltic states, Poland and Ukraine.
The new pipeline received high-level political backing in Germany, but officials in Poland and Ukraine, bypassed by the pipeline, have given the project at best a lukewarm welcome.

TITLE: Topless Protester Detained in Vatican
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A topless protester from the Ukrainian women’s rights group Femen was arrested at the Vatican after revealing her breasts and railing against the “sexist policies” of the Catholic Church.
Video on the group’s web site showed the blond-haired woman — identified as Alexandra Shevchenko — drop to her knees in St. Peter’s Square at the end of Sunday’s Mass, hold up a sign reading “Freedom for Women” and remove her black see-thru top as police converged on her.
The officers quickly wrestled the screaming Shevchenko to the ground and took her into custody.
Femen said on its site that Shevchenko was supposed to be joined by two others but they had been detained earlier by Vatican police who had been tipped off about the impending protest.
All three were held for four hours before being released. The group said the purpose of its protest was to crusade against the Vatican’s “sexist policies.”
“The papal patriarchal propaganda continues to promulgate a medieval idea of a woman’s social and cultural place,” the group said on its site. “We stand for the rights of free women.”
The group has become notorious for staging similar topless protests around the world.

TITLE: Astronauts ‘Land’ After Mock Mission
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Isachenkov
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Staying inside cramped, windowless modules for nearly a year-and-a-half was a tough challenge for an international crew of six researchers simulating a mission to Mars under 24-hour surveillance by scientists.
They said Tuesday they coped with the fatigue and stress of isolation with simple methods: doing exercises, reading books, trying to learn foreign languages — but above all keeping themselves busy with their work.
The crew of three Russians, a Frenchman, an Italian-Colombian and a Chinese man appeared energetic and joyful at their first news conference after leaving their claustrophobic quarters last Friday.
“I wanted to take part in an interesting adventure and also do something useful for humankind, and I now feel happy that I have succeeded,” said Russian team leader Alexei Sitev.
He said there were no conflicts among the crew thanks to thorough preparations and training.
“I actually thought that it would be harder and more stressful for me, and I was surprised how smoothly it went,” said Sitev, a blue-eyed, soft-spoken former navy diver.
Sitev, who got married just a few weeks before the start of the mission, said his wife stoically accepted his absence.
“She would have liked for me to stay home of course, but she trusted me and felt that she had to cope with it since it was necessary for me to take part,” he said.
Scientists said that long confinement without daylight and fresh air put team members under stress as they grew increasingly tired of one another’s company. They warned that isolation challenges are actually stronger on a simulated mission because of the lack of euphoria and risk of a real space flight.
“A key thing that we can’t simulate is the feeling of danger,” said the mission chief, astronaut Boris Morukov. “They were always aware of us following them from behind the wall.”
He said the second half of the mission was the most difficult, as the initial challenges of learning to deal with scientific equipment were behind them and the daily routine grew increasingly monotonous.
Morukov said each crew member will be paid about $100,000 for the mission.
Along with more than 100 scientific experiments that kept them busy most of the day, crewmembers watched movies, played computer games and celebrated holidays together.
They communicated with their families and space officials via the Internet, which was delayed and occasionally disrupted intentionally to imitate the effects of space travel. They showered only once every 10 days or so, pretending to conserve water, and ate food similar to that on the International Space Station.
Midway through the simulation, the crew even imitated a landing on Mars, venturing from their quarters in heavy space suits to trudge into a sand-covered room.
“This mission was a success and so we can go forward and now plan to go to Mars and move confidently,” said Frenchman Romain Charles.
A real flight to Mars is a distant prospect because of huge costs and massive technological challenges, particularly the task of creating a compact and relatively lightweight shield to protect the crew from deadly space radiation. NASA is aiming for a nearby asteroid around 2025 and then on to Mars in the 2030s.
Italian-Colombian Diego Urbina said social networks helped ease the pressure. “You get the feedback, like all the kids that want to go to Mars, and they tell you so many nice things, many things about their own dreams, and that gives you a lot of impulse to go on,” he said.
Despite all the efforts to stay busy and motivated, the fatigue was building up and the crew was dreaming about what they would do after their return.
“I wanted to take my family to the sea, lie down and watch the waves at my feet,” said Sukhrob Kamolov, a Russian crew doctor. 
“And I also dreamed about something that would give me lots of adrenaline, something like bungee jumping in Australia.”
Kamolov said the isolation had changed him. “I realized that time goes fast, and I must spend more time with my family,” he said.
The crew said they weren’t paying too much attention to political news, but they were aware of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s decision to return to the presidency after the March election, which could potentially extend his rule for another 12 years.
“We are experts in long-term missions, so I can only wish him luck,” Sitev said.

TITLE: Caterpillar Places Bet on Mining Boom
AUTHOR: By Roland Oliphant
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: TOSNO, Leningrad Oblast — U.S. engineering giant Caterpillar launched in-country production of mining trucks in a bid to capitalize on a boom in metals and mining across the former Soviet Union, executives said.
“This isn’t an investment with a five- or seven-year time frame — it’s an investment for the next 25 or 30 years,” group president Steven Wunning told The St. Petersburg Times in an interview at the company’s plant in Tosno, Leningrad Oblast, late last week.
“Most of the world’s population now lives in cities, and the population of the world is set to grow by about 6 million a year for at least the next 30 years. The demand that is going to place on mining, which provides the raw materials for building housing, infrastructure, supplying clean water and other things that make cities work, is vast,” Wunning said.
The new truck, the 55-ton-payload 773-E, which went into production late last week, is a vast, six-wheeled monster that will be sold to extractive industries across the country.
Mumin Azamkhuzhaev, general director for Caterpillar Eurasia, told reporters the plant will be able to produce up to 300 trucks a year. The company already has a “horizon to sell all of the trucks produced in the first year,” many to mining operations in Mongolia, he added.
Caterpillar has invested a total of about $100 million in the Tosno plant, its flagship production facility in Russia established in 2000.
It invested about $10 million in setting up production of the 773-E, which will be the third Caterpillar model to be produced at the factory.
In 2008, the factory began to turn out 27-ton excavators — Caterpillar’s first Russian-produced vehicles. In January this year, the company launched production of a larger, 35-ton earth mover.
The chassis of the 773-E is built at the Leningrad Oblast plant, while the body is assembled at a plant in Novosibirsk. Other components, including engines, electronics and hydraulics, are imported from Caterpillar factories in the United States and Europe. There are no plans to localize that production in the foreseeable future.
While the company boasted about “localization of production,” Azamkhuzhaev refused to put a percentage on how localized the company has become — a practice common in the auto industry, where the federal government has provided incentives for companies that can prove a certain level of localized production.
No such incentives were on offer for the production of mining trucks or excavators, Azamkhuzhaev said.
Group president Steven Wunning confirmed to The St. Petersburg Times that the decision to start production of the 773-E was motivated primarily by the financial benefits of being closer to customers. “There were no incentives offered to us to do this,” he said.
Instead, the main motivation is to get closer to customers in a bid to cut delivery costs and provide better after-sale maintenance — a key part of the appeal of Caterpillar’s relatively expensive products.
The Russian mining industry has traditionally been served by Belarus’ BelAZ, whose heavy vehicles continue to dominate the market.
Caterpillar’s vehicles are more expensive to buy and maintain than BelAZ’s, but the American company is betting that a longer service lifetime and fewer repairs make its vehicles the most cost-effective option in the long term.
That logic does indeed make Caterpillar and Japan’s Komatsu more competitive for those who can afford them, said Nikolai Sosnovsky, a metals and mining analyst at UralSib.
“It depends on your financial abilities. Big companies definitely can afford expensive mining machinery. But smaller producers will use BelAZ — unless they can raise the money via credit at a decent rate,” he told The St. Petersburg Times.
The 773-E trucks cost “around about” $700,000 each, Wunning said, though he emphasized that this rule-of-thumb figure varies widely depending on customization and negotiation between dealers and customers.
The company is likely banking on the coal and precious-metal industries — both of which are set for large-scale expansion in the coming years.
“If you take the coal industry alone, a massive expansion is planned — about 30 percent, or 100 million tons of coal,” Sosnovsky said.
And a shift from the alluvial gold that Russia has traditionally mined to hard-rock deposits means the development of “big open pits with lots of trucks and processing plants,” Sosnovsky said.
“If you look at several projects planned in Russia by big gold producers, they’re going to require hundreds of trucks,” he said.
Nonetheless, although Caterpillar may corner a slice of the market, it is unlikely to dislodge BelAZ, which offers at least 10 different models of rock hauler, from its dominant position in the CIS in the near future.
“We want to walk before we run,” said Wunning, when asked if other models would be built at Tosno.

TITLE: Statoil Urges Shtokman Tax Breaks
AUTHOR: By Howard Amos
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Norway’s Statoil has said a Russian government guarantee of tax breaks for the Shtokman gas field is urgently required if a final investment decision on the project is to be made before the end of the year as planned.
The enormous Shtokman field, 600 kilometers from land in the ice-infested waters of the Barents Sea, could supply the whole world’s gas needs for a year, but formidable technical challenges and the dynamics of the world market have forced repeated postponements to a shareholder commitment to proceed with its development.
Gazprom is the operator of the Shtokman project, in conjunction with Norway’s Statoil and France’s Total. The companies are currently negotiating between themselves and with the Russian government over the undertaking’s financial structure.
The president of Statoil in Russia, Jan Helge Skogen said “significant fiscal relief” — in the form of discounted rates of mineral extraction tax and gas export duty — was required from the Russian federal government.
“The project as it is today is not commercially viable,” Skogen told the 300 gathered representatives of Russian and Norwegian business and politics in Moscow in a speech. “It is critical that things now fall into place.”
The Norwegian government, 67 percent owners of Statoil, also pressed for a decision. “It is essential that the Shtokman project produces a return on investment,” said Trond Giske, Norway’s minister of trade and industry.
Shtokman holds 3.9 trillion cubic meters of gas and 53.3 million tons of condensate. A final investment decision had been planned for May of this year, but was postponed.
Increased global gas production, particularly shale gas in the United States, has fueled fears in Moscow that there will not be sufficient demand to make Shtokman profitable. The United States was anticipated to be one of the main destinations of Shtokman liquefied natural gas, but shale gas technology has largely closed off demand for LNG.
Skogen said it was natural to expect tax breaks for a project as large as Shtokman. “Because of its size, location and pioneering setting, Shtokman is breaking new barriers in establishing infrastructure — and you need governmental support,” he said.
Skogen also argued that the development of Shtokman would not only be profitable in its own right, but could be the basis for Russia to take further steps in exploiting the Arctic’s hydrocarbons.
Jarle Forbord, managing director of the Norwegian-Russian Chamber of Commerce, told The St. Petersburg Times that a final investment decision would be a “big boost” for Russo-Norwegian relations.
Shtokman is particularly important for Norway, which is seeking to sell its significant offshore drilling experience in the Arctic to Russia and become an integral part of any large-scale energy ventures on the Russian Arctic shelf.
The first gas to be pumped from Shtokman is currently expected in 2016. At present, Norway is the world’s second-biggest gas exporting country after Russia.

TITLE: China, Russia Praise Bloc
AUTHOR: By Mansur Mirovalev
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — The member states of a security pact dominated by Russia and China pledged Monday to boost their financial and energy cooperation, despite the global economic slowdown.
The members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization praised their economies’ “stability” and “attractiveness for investment” in a joint statement issued Monday in St. Petersburg.
The six-member bloc will create a joint development bank that will finance projects to improve transit potential and infrastructure, the statement said.
The pact is widely seen as a tool that China and Russia use to limit Western influence in the strategic, energy-rich region. It also provides a forum for China to display its rising diplomatic influence and economic might.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said in televised remarks that the infrastructure development will “help realize the (organization’s) colossal transit potential and strengthen its role as a link between Europe and the Asia Pacific region.”
Russia will invest $500 million into a 750-kilometer electricity power transmission line from ex-Soviet Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Putin said.
The project, known as CASA-1000, will cost up to $2 billion to complete. It has been mothballed for years due to instability in Afghanistan.
“Considering the improvement of the situation there, we could renew the project,” Putin said.
Analysts say China is using aid, diplomacy and investment to shove Russia aside in the region that Moscow still considers its backyard.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin’s hand has been weakened after Russia lost its monopoly on distributing Central Asian natural gas and its major role in other energy sectors in the region.
China and Russia were rivals in the communist camp during the Cold War, but ties have warmed in recent years, partly from a mutual desire to counter U.S. influence in world affairs.
The group took its present form in 2001 with the goals of addressing religious extremism and border security in Central Asia, but has grown into a bloc aimed at challenging U.S. influence in the region.

TITLE: The NavalnyLeaks Smear Campaign
AUTHOR: By Victor Davidoff
TEXT: Alexei Navalny is one of the most popular writers on the Russian Internet. His blog is regularly among the top 10 most-read sites. Last year in a virtual election of the mayor of Moscow, Navalny came in first place, way ahead of the political heavyweights.
Navalny is a lawyer who has an economics degree from the Finance University in Moscow and also was a World Fellow at Yale University. Both his degrees help him in his work, but he doesn’t work as a lawyer or an economist.
His real job is making people angry.
First, he enraged the top management at a number of state corporations, including VTB and Transneft, with accusations of lack of transparency. Navalny believes that opaque bookkeeping hides corruption and unacceptable levels of wasteful spending. Navalny fought them in court, using his minority shareholder rights to see documents that could reveal what was really going on in these companies.
His next step was setting up the site called Rospil, which in Russian is slang for kickbacks. Using open-source information on the state procurement site, Rospil looks for tenders with conditions that point to corruption. For example, Rospil found a request for bids from the Education and Science Ministry for an Internet project worth 12 million rubles (nearly $400,000) to be completed in only 20 days.
After Rospil publicized the tender, it was canceled. That wasn’t the only success of the whistleblower site. According to the Rospil site, it has been able to close down highly suspicious tenders worth more than 40 billion rubles ($1.3 billion).
His work has already drawn the ire of people in the top echelons of power. Now Navalny is under fire in a scandal that has already been dubbed “NavalnyLeaks” on the Russian Internet. At the end of October, Navalny’s personal electronic mailbox was hacked along with his account on LiveJournal, Facebook and his wife’s personal mailbox. All their personal correspondence was posted on an anonymous site registered in Kazakhstan.
Navalny has confirmed that about “90 percent” of the published texts are his. And he doesn’t disown the most “compromising” material — his correspondence with foreign officials. Navalny doesn’t see what all of the fuss is about.
“My letter to a representative of the U.S. Justice Department was sent several times,” Navalny wrote in his LiveJournal blog. “In the letter, I request that they provide documents on the so-called Daimler affair for our investigation here. What’s the big deal? I’ve written that we’ve been requesting these documents hundreds of times on LiveJournal.”
The question is: Who gains by breaking into Navalny’s mailbox? The most popular version on the Internet is that the culprits are in one of the organizations affiliated with United Russia, forcing a party representative to categorically deny the rumors.
Others blame the attack on the “Hell Brigade.” According to Vladimir Pribylovsky, head of the Panorama think tank who also suffered from a hack-attack, this is a group of Russian hackers spread all over the world who sometimes take on Kremlin contracts. This might explain why more than half of the blogs and sites hacked by the brigade have belonged to members of the opposition. Navalny was just the latest in a long line of hacked oppositional leaders.
So far Navalny’s blog hasn’t suffered at all from the publication of “compromising materials.” In fact, his rating has only increased. Journalist Oleg Kashin explained the seeming paradox in an article on Snob.ru: “The only compromising material that could harm Navalny would be correspondence with someone in the top management of United Russia. … But there weren’t any letters like that, and the rest doesn’t matter.”
Writer Leonid Kaganov wrote in his blog: “The only thing that would compromise Navalny would be facts showing that what he published about bureaucrats were lies. Instead, for two years an army of state-funded robots has been trying to dig up some kind of personal dirt on Navalny.”
This is the typical Kremlin PR modus operandi. For example, the television channel RT (originally Russia Today) had the stated mission of improving Russia’s image in the world, but instead most of its programming seems designed to smear the image of Russia’s “enemies” along a massive front line that stretches from Georgia to the United States.
Documents published from the archives of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee revealed the exact same kind of campaigns to blacken the reputations of dissidents during the Soviet era. Everyone knows how well that worked out.  
But perhaps not everyone knows. Someone ought to tell the guys fighting against the modern-day dissidents that it’s time to consider a truce.

<i>Victor Davidoff is a Moscow-based writer and journalist whose blog is Chaadaev56.livejournal.com</i>

TITLE: Russian unorthodox: The Bullies Who Wear White Coats
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
TEXT: The video shows a skinny, naked man of about 60 lying on the table, his stomach sliced open. An energetic team of nurses and doctors scurries around, flexing their muscles, filling syringes, sexily writhing their hips. Before you figure out what’s going on, the camera offers a close-up of the man’s intestines, to remove your last doubts that the whole thing is happening for real. And it is accompanied by a disco beat fit for a wild dance party.
 This recording, posted to YouTube by someone calling himself TvNovoaltaysk in early October, is part of a shocking series of homemade “reality shows” filmed by the hospital’s doctors. No important detail was spared. Viewers see not only a spinal tap being administered but also procedures including the removal of a cyst and sewing up the wound, with doctors smiling throughout.
 In October, some patients’ relatives recognized their family members in the video clips and sued the hospital for abusing the patients’ rights. The Altai Krai prosecutor’s office is investigating the claims, and the clips have been removed from the web.
Earlier this fall, another hospital video, this time from a psychiatric hospital in a village in the Krasnoyarsk region, shocked online audiences. A clinic nurse was staging erotic scenes and no-rules fights among the patients, filming them on his mobile phone, and then posting them on his blog. The man’s colleagues said the recordings were popular for their comic value and were widely circulated among residents of nearby villages.
 At some stage, the video got into the hands of someone who passed it to the police. But this nurse-turned-filmmaker may escape punishment because of a legal technicality: some of the episodes were shot three years ago.
 One of the clinic’s doctors, interviewed by Channel 1, attempted to defend the nurse by speculating that the scenes were not staged, given, he said, how common violence is in psychiatric hospitals. As for the ethical side of filming a disabled person without their knowledge and the public ridicule of sick people, the doctor offered no comment. The hospital’s chief doctor, Grigory Gershenovich, did admit that the filming incident had shamed the hospital and said the nurse had been fired.
 It seems that some medical personnel in Russia treat their patients as animals or human waste. In a recent scandal, it emerged that doctors in a hospital in the Far East had made their patients carry the corpses of fellow patients who had died of tuberculosis from their wards and load them into vehicles outside. Videos of patients carrying bodies were posted on the Internet. The head doctor of the clinic has resigned, but no criminal case was launched because the investigators found it impossible to prove that the patients had been forced to drag the tuberculosis-infected corpses.
  Why do medical personnel dare to behave like this? Clearly because they know that the punishment, if it ever comes, will be nominal. Even if they lose their jobs, there is no ban on continuing in the profession. If the abuse takes place in a psychiatric ward, doctors can blame just about anything on a patient’s mental condition. Because the system is essentially opaque, it would be virtually impossible to prove otherwise and get a sadistic medical worker prosecuted.
 There is almost no precedent in Russia of clinics paying compensation, even for straightforward medical mistakes. A group of patients infected with HIV in a hospital in Elista more than 20 years ago are still seeking justice. These people, who suffered discrimination and isolation because of their illness, still have not received a kopeck in compensation.
 A trip to the hospital is becoming something of a game of Russian roulette: You never know what’s going to happen  — doctors may be filmed toying with your internal organs, you may be made to carry infected corpses, or your fellow hospital patients may beat you up as the nurses cheer. And thank God if the doctors don’t infect you with HIV in the process. Only one thing is certain: the chance of moral damages being paid is zero.
<i>A full version of this commentary is available at Transitions Online, an award-winning analytical online magazine covering Eastern Europe and CIS countries, at www.tol.org.</i>

TITLE: CHERNOV’S CHOICE
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: As an annual vigil in memory of the punk musician and antifascist activist <b>Timur Kacharava</b>, who was murdered by a group of neo-Nazis in central St. Petersburg on Nov. 13 six years ago, is planned to be held Sunday, human rights activists say that the organizers of the crime are still at large.
Every year, friends, fellow musicians and activists and other concerned citizens of St. Petersburg bring flowers and candles to the Bukvoyed bookstore near Ploshchad Vosstaniya where Kacharava was killed.
Twenty-year-old Timur Kacharava was stabbed to death at about 6.30 p.m. by a group of eight to 10 attackers outside the Bukvoyed bookstore near the busy crossroads of Ligovsky Prospekt and Nevsky Prospekt. 
His friend Max “Zgibov” Zgibai, bass player with the punk band Potom Budem Pozdno, was also stabbed. He was badly injured.
Kacharava, Zgibai and others were apparently followed from Vladimirskaya Ploshchad, where they had taken part in a Food Not Bombs campaign event distributing food to the homeless. Suspected neo-Nazi lookouts were spotted on the square at around 4 p.m.
Some of the campaigners went into the bookstore while Kacharava and Zgibai stayed outside to finish a bottle of beer , which is when they were attacked. During the attack, which lasted about a minute, Kacharava was stabbed six times — the killers aimed at his throat — and died of blood loss on the spot.
Kacharava, who was in his fourth year of studies at the St. Petersburg State University’s philosophy faculty, played guitar with local punk bands Sandinista! and Distress and was active in anarchist and antifascist movements.
Two years later, most of the murderers were arrested and tried, but the trial raised many questions.
Although there were eight attackers, only one was sentenced for the murder itself (he was given 12 years in a penal colony). The rest were charged with inciting hatred, and got brief or suspended terms. Three were given between two and three years and are therefore likely walking the streets by now, while another three were given suspended sentences.
At the time of the sentencing, the court said that the punishment was mild because the accused had cooperated with investigators, and because three of them were minors when the crime was committed.
One attacker who is believed to be the organizer of the murder was put on a wanted list, but has not been caught.
Lawyer Olga Tseitlina, who represented the Kacharava family at the trial, said she was shocked by the murderers’ behavior at the trial.
“They clearly saw themselves as heroes, radiated bravado and covered the dock with swastikas, and none of them expressed remorse or even regret about what happened in their final pleas,” she told Kommersant soon after the trial. 
Friends, musicians and other people who care will gather outside the Bukvoyed bookstore at 10 Ligovsky Prospekt at 5 p.m. on Sunday.

TITLE: Power to the people
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Yevgeny Schyotov recently spent seven hours on the mast of the Cruiser Avrora — one of St. Petersburg’s main tourist attractions and an iconic Soviet symbol — and 10 days in prison in the name of art and revolution. 
Better known as Flor, Schyotov is a member of Narodnaya Dolya (The People’s Share), a new anarchist art group calling itself a party, which occupied the cruiser, now a museum, to protest against poverty, corrupt authorities and oligarchs.
While three activists climbed up a mast using mountaineering equipment to unfold a modified Jolly Roger (the logo of The People’s Share) and another fired a large firework from the Avrora’s cannon, (which in October 1917 fired a blank shot to signify the start of the Bolshevik Revolution), the anarchist movement Food Not Bombs distributed free vegan food to the homeless onshore.
Called “Memorable October, or the Resurrection of the Avrora,” the event took place on Oct. 16 to mark the International Day to Eradicate Poverty.
Television reports and videos show Avrora’s crew — consisting of naval conscripts — attacking the activists and trying to knock them off the mast with two high-pressure water hoses.
“The nozzle on one of the pressure hoses came free and the conscript operating it got water all over himself; they also sprayed some casual visitors,” Flor said.
“It looked ridiculous; they did a great job of adding more absurdity to what was happening.”
Flor, who was on the mast with two other activists, said they climbed down to be arrested seven hours later, after their demand was met that activists being held by sailors in the ship’s hold be brought out where they could be seen. Efforts by the crew, OMON special task police, a team from the Ministry of Emergency Situations and river police to talk the activists down from the mast proved futile, he said.
The police arrested 15 activists out of about 40, but two of them escaped from the police precinct, so only 13 ended up in court. Flor was sentenced to 10 days in prison, while three other activists were given five days each. Several others were fined and the rest had their hearings postponed due to the lack of a lawyer. 
“The hearings were postponed to Oct. 20, but as far as I know, none of the activists turned up,” Flor said.
The police, who charged the activists with disorderly conduct, wrote in their reports that those arrested had been swearing and swinging their arms and refused to react to reprimands. Flor says he contested the charges but was overruled by the judge, who he believes was pressured to find the activists guilty.
One of the Avrora event’s more obvious references was to an infamous party held on the historic ship — which officially belongs to the Navy and is a branch of the Central Naval Museum — by billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov and attended by then St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko during the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June 2009. 
Described by the media as “debauchery,” the glamorous party was attended by the forum’s VIP guests, who were entertained by performances from Leningrad frontman Sergei Shnurov, ballet dancers and suit-clad actors who jumped into the waters of the River Neva.
“We considered jumping into the water, but couldn’t get wetsuits due to a lack of funds,” Flor said. “We could only use the little money that we had.”
Before the Avrora event, Flor was known as a member of the Affinity Group, which was originally created to hold a May Day anarchist event as part of the official May 1, 2009 demos, which were broken up by the police, who arrested nearly 200 participants and charged them with crossing the road in the wrong place. 
Flor was later seen participating in an artists’ hunger strike near City Hall calling for the release of imprisoned Novosibirsk anarchist artist Artyom Loskutov, and in a series of art exhibitions focusing on police lawlessness. More recently, he was involved in vandalizing “Media Strike,” an exhibit of protest art set up as part of the 4th Biennale of Contemporary Art in Moscow in September.
“We essentially buried the Affinity Group by vandalizing the Biennale’s opening in Moscow,” he says. 
“[The exhibit] was ridiculous and idiotic, so we wrecked and ruined everything, and I think that the Affinity Group will never be invited anywhere again. The exhibit was absurd; you can’t institutionalize protest, which they were doing, with such a number of state sponsors.
“They threatened to call the police, and it’s a pity they didn’t, because it would have been the apotheosis of the absurd: To display art that opposes the law, and call the police at the same time! So it was the conclusion of a project that had grown rather institutionalized itself, to a certain degree.”
Forming the People’s Share as a party was an attempt to break out of the limitations of a small art group, according to Flor.
“In activist art, it’s activism that should be at the forefront, rather than art; it should draw attention to social problems,” he says.
“There are too many art groups that have become institutionalized, and I don’t think this is right.”
The People’s Share party was formed at a congress in Moscow on Sept. 1 and held its first event the same day, bringing six live piglets to the Ministry of Education as protest against educational reform. The piglets had the names of state corporations such as Gazprom, Aeroflot and Sberbank written on their backs.
“[The piglets] defecated all over the place, and got a lot of coverage, so that the Minister of Education [Andrei] Fursenko had to comment on the event,” Flor says.
The group’s name is a reference to Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will, or The People’s Freedom), the late 19th-century illegal revolutionary organization responsible for killing Tsar Alexander II with a bomb on March 1, 1881, and for a series of other attacks and assassinations of state officials. Five members of the People’s Will were hanged and many imprisoned.
The logo of The People’s Share is a skull and bones, but the skull has its frontal lobe removed, while the motto calls for the people’s freedom from tyrants and for the people to get their share of oil and gas profits. 
“The flag with our logo was mistaken for the Jolly Roger, but we didn’t even try to point that out, because the aspect of piracy was also apparent in the Avrora event,” Flor says.
The activists also hung a sign with the word “Restoration” on it as a comment on the changed political situation, after President Dmitry Medvedev announced in late September that he would not run for presidency in 2012 and invited Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to return to the post.
“Of course, Putin helped us a lot, because Medvedev declared modernization, but Putin forced him to drop his claims to the presidency,” Flor says.
“The modernization epoch has ended and been substituted by the post-modernization epoch. Real postmodern!” 
According to Flor, the media reaction to the Avrora event surpassed the group’s expectations. 
“I didn’t expect that we would be shown on Channel One,” he says. 
NTV Television’s report showed St. Petersburg police chief Mikhail Sukhodolsky criticizing the activists, saying that while they were fighting “for freedom and rights, the rights of other citizens who wanted to visit the Avrora were infringed.”
In reality, the group boarded the Avrora several minutes before entrance to the ship closes at 4 p.m., Flor said. “They also claimed that the Avrora lost money, which is also not true, because entrance is free.”
Although many media reports described the activists as “hooligans,” Flor says that exposure probably made people read the group’s original materials on the Internet, adding that a blog entry about the event made No. 4 in a Russian blog rating last week.
“Even policemen say that television lies, so people should want to have independent information,” he says.
“We described in great detail how drastically living standards have dropped in Russia, while the number of billionaires has increased. People understand this on the level of class feelings, but exact figures are seldom available.”
While preparing for the event, the activists agreed not to use violence, which, Flor says, they later regretted, because the sailors behaved aggressively, attacking and beating activists.
“One activist tried to defend himself with a large plush cat,” Flor said. “We tried to bring the situation to the totally absurd. Our speaker wore a black ski-mask — like an aggressive radical — but with a red pompom.”
The detention center Flor was put in was, symbolically, a 19th-century political prison on Zakharievskaya Ulitsa, where Vladimir Lenin and members of the People’s Will were once held.
“On the first day, the guards who were on duty called me in and said, ‘Tell us how it was in reality, because we know that what they are reporting on television is all lies,’ so I spent the whole day giving political classes to them,” Flor said.
Flor believes that the authorities and oligarchs may underestimate the people’s potential.
“The Russian people keep silent and endure as they are bent further and further, but when they find themselves with their faces in the dirt completely, they will snap up all of a sudden,” he says.
“In January 1917, Lenin said that only the youth of that era would live to see the coming revolution. He couldn’t even imagine what would happen in February.”
While the People’s Will made bombs, the new art group works with the media and information, Flor said.
“I am not going to get involved in terrorism of any sort, except for the informational kind. In our times, bombs are different. There’s no point in blowing up anybody. We should blow up information space; it’s more effective.”
On Monday, Interfax reported that individual visitors were temporarily unable to visit the Avrora, which was only open to guided groups. The restrictions were explained as being “winter measures.”

TITLE: The man who changed Hollywood
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Kravtsova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Few can compare with legendary American filmmaker Orson Welles and his talent for depicting the rarities and complexities of human nature. Welles, who spent his life in a constant struggle with traditional Hollywood canons, will be celebrated this week at the Orson Welles: Citizen of the World film festival, taking place this week at Rodina movie theater. 
The director, actor and producer often encountered negative reactions and little appreciation from his contemporaries, but is now considered to be one of the best and most innovative filmmakers in cinema history. To this day, his films serve as visual aid and inspiration to cinema professionals. In 1999, the American Film Institute released a list of the top 50 screen legends of all time, in which Orson Welles was voted number 16. He was also the recipient of two Academy Awards as well as several Cannes Film Festival and Venice Film Festival awards.
Welles managed to break the trend of depicting heroes as either good or evil, and to show the ambiguity in every character. 
“He showed that the world is not confined to black and white, and found a gray area that characterizes the vagueness and uncertainty of human nature,”  said Marina Staudenmann, the festival’s director. 
“This very ambiguity of Orson Welles’ characters defines the relevance of his films today. Moreover, he abandoned the traditional ‘happy ending,’ which was almost inconceivable for Hollywood and American society as a whole, especially during the war and post-war periods when the film industry was supposed to keep the national spirit up.”
The organizers of the Orson Welles: Citizen of the World film festival — the Tour de Film festival agency with the support of the U.S. Consulate in St. Petersburg — have chosen to screen five films, including some very rare versions. The festival opens with ‘Citizen Kane’ (1941), a film fully representative of Welles’ unique talent, as it was the only film completely controlled by him, from the directing and casting to the montage of the final scene. In Hollywood history, this has never been done before or since.
Welles’ unusual directing, narrating and scene-setting techniques made his films one of a kind. He was among the first filmmakers to experiment with camera angle, focus range and lighting, which allowed him to broaden the traditional frames of film perception. 
“Welles by definition was one of the independent film pioneers,” said Staudenmann. “The retrospective of Orson Welles’ films at the festival perfectly demonstrates where contemporary independent cinema gets its origins.” 
“The Lady from Shanghai” (1947) and “Touch of Evil” (1958), two films of Welles’ favorite film-noir genre, will also be shown during the festival. The psychological tension present throughout the films and labyrinthine detective plots make Welles’ films a competitor to any contemporary thriller.
The version of “Touch of Evil” shown at the festival is a reedited version that has never before been shown in Russia. The film features Marlene Dietrich in a brief yet captivating appearance. 
“It may seem strange that Marlene Dietrich accepted such a short role at the peak of her career, but it’s necessary to remember what kind of role it was and how brilliantly she acted during this five-minute scene,” said Staudenmann. “Welles once said that Marlene Dietrich in this role encompassed all her previously played roles.”
The festival wouldn’t be complete without a Welles film based on a Shakespeare play. Welles’ “Macbeth” (1948) is a unique interpretation of the Shakespeare play. Welles remained very faithful to the original play by making the actors speak with Scottish accents, but also added his personal twist to some scenes, creating his own expressive version of the tale of bloodthirsty ambition.
Welles never failed to succeed in combining things that may seem incompatible at first sight, merging European and American cinematic traditions and attracting the best talents to his films, justifying the label of Citizen of the World.

<i>The Orson Welles: Citizen of the World film festival runs from Nov. 11 through 14 at Rodina movie theater, 
12 Karavannaya Ulitsa. Tel. 571 6131. 
For a full schedule, visit 
www.rodinakino.ru.</i>

TITLE: the word’s worth: United we stand
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: <i>Åäèíñòâî:</i> unity

The main buzz on the street last week was about Friday’s holiday — as in: <i>Íàïîìíè ìíå, ïîæàëóéñòà, ÷òî ýòî çà ïðàçäíèê?</i> (Remind me, what’s this holiday?)
Well, it is a long story. It begins with the <i>Âåëèêàÿ Îêòÿáðüñêàÿ ñîöèàëèñòè÷åñêàÿ ðåâîëþöèÿ</i> (Great October Socialist Revolution). This “revolution” (read: coup d’etat), which occurred on Oct. 25, 1917, was commonly called <i>Âåëèêèé Îêòÿáðü</i> (Great October) or just <i>Îêòÿáðü</i> (October), as in <i>Ñëàâà Îêòÿáðþ</i>! (Glory to October!)
Soon after, the Soviet government switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. Oddly, while the government was busy destroying religion, it kept the church tradition of celebrating holidays on the new date, 13 days after the original event. And so, for 74 years, the holiday was celebrated on Nov. 7. This was a bad omen.
I mean, what could you expect from a country that celebrated Great October in November?
By 1992, the Soviet Union was no more, and Great October was an anachronism. But people were used to a holiday in November, and so <i>“â öåëÿõ ñìÿã÷åíèÿ ïðîòèâîñòîÿíèÿ è ïðèìèðåíèÿ ðàçëè÷íûõ ñëî¸â ðîññèéñêîãî îáùåñòâà”</i> (to mitigate the level of confrontation and reconcile various strata of Russian society), the name was changed to <i>Äåíü ñîãëàñèÿ è ïðèìèðåíèÿ</i> (the Day of Accord and Reconciliation). There was no official parade on Red Square and no sign of accord or reconciliation.
Not a great holiday.
Apparently, the authorities recognized that and started casting around for a replacement holiday. After all, even if a whole generation had no memory of Nov. 7 parades, it’s a long stretch from June 12 to Dec. 31 without a day off.
Lo and behold, they found a pre-revolutionary state holiday on Nov. 4. True, it was a church holiday, <i>Ïðàçäíîâàíèå Êàçàíñêîé èêîíå Áîæèåé Ìàòåðè</i> (the Commemoration of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God). But it had a patriotic element: It was held <i>“â ïàìÿòü èçáàâëåíèÿ Ìîñêâû è Ðîññèè îò ïîëÿêîâ â 1612 ãîäó”</i> (in memory of the liberation of Moscow and Russia from the Poles in 1612).
The story is that after the Poles invaded Russia during the Time of Troubles (<i>Ñìóòíîå âðåìÿ</i>), a meat and fish merchant named Kuzma Minin did some fundraising in Nizhny Novgorod for the <i>íàðîäíîå îïîë÷åíèå</i> (voluntary army) and eventually joined up with the commander, Prince Pozharsky. They marched to Moscow. According to one version, on Nov. 4, 1612, holding aloft the miracle-working Kazan icon of the Mother of God, they attacked the invaders in Kitai-Gorod and took back the Kremlin the next day. Exit Poles, stage west.
Enter stage east — a few decades and centuries later — a three-day religious state holiday and a beautiful church for the icon and a grand statue of Minin and Pozharsky on Red Square.
In 2004, the holiday was revived — sort of. It has remained a religious feast day, but now it has been declared a day of <i>íàðîäíîå åäèíñòâî</i> (national unity). Minin and Pozharsky are cited for being <i>îáðàçåö ãåðîèçìà è ñïëî÷¸ííîñòè âñåãî íàðîäà âíå çàâèñèìîñòè îò ïðîèñõîæäåíèÿ, âåðîèñïîâåäàíèÿ è ïîëîæåíèÿ â îáùåñòâå</i> (an example of heroism and unity of the entire nation regardless of origin, religious beliefs or position in society). Russian nationalists don’t buy the bit after “regardless of” and celebrate it as a day to get rid of us pesky non-Russians.
And the people? They do what they’ve always done on the November holiday: Put snow tires on their cars.

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

TITLE: Glad rags from around the world
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Ethnic diversity and tolerance take center stage at the forthcoming Ethnic Fashion Festival (Etnomoda) that takes place in the city this weekend.
The event, which will be held at the Vyborgskaya Storona cultural center, brings together fashion designers from far beyond St. Petersburg: Moscow, Kazan, Yakutsk and other Russian cities.
The festival opens at 1 p.m. Saturday with the Show Room event, showcasing pieces by experimental fashion designers, who will also be giving master classes during the course of the day.
The next day sees a fashion contest in which designers, handmade art specialists, ethnic clothing collectors and private fashion galleries will compete in a wide range of categories including ethnic motifs in modern clothes, exotic fashion (meaning a fusion of various ethnic motives or elements), stage costume with ethnic details, traditional ethnic costume, ethnic art photography and children’s fashion theaters. The contest starts at noon. During the competitions, handmade ethnic fashion accessories will be on sale in the club lobby.
The festival’s jury is made up of leading experts from the Russian Ethnography Museum, professors from the St. Petersburg University of Technology and Design and the Stieglitz Academy for Art and Design, as well as art historians and high profile professional stylists. The list of prizes is diverse enough to incorporate sewing machines, gift certificates from local ethnic restaurants, tickets to a course of lectures on the history of fashion from international fashion expert Alexander Vasiliev and dance classes.
The Ethnic Fashion Festival is supported by the state-funded five-year Tolerance program, which was launched by City Hall in 2008. Entrance to all festival events is free.
While Russia’s top politicians regularly pledge to work toward ensuring cultural diversity in the country, Russia has a disturbingly high level of hate crime, with St. Petersburg reigning as one of the most affected regions. Human rights groups describe the state of ethnic tolerance in the city as “deeply worrying.” 
St. Petersburg was once considered to be Russia’s most liberal and progressive city. It still advertizes itself as Russia’s “cultural capital.” In recent years, however, the city has become infamous as the scene of a chilling spate of racist attacks. 
Human rights advocates say that Russia’s cultural and ethnic diversity, one of the country’s greatest assets, is treated with neglect, and criticize the authorities for their cursory attitude toward the high level of hate crime and widespread ethnic intolerance. 
Sociologists say that more and more Russian citizens feel alienated from one another. Not only are their social values and political beliefs different, but many people focus with hatred on the differences between them — be it a different skin color, political persuasion or social status — and are unwilling to open the door to dialogue and reconciliation. 
Experts agree that it is a lack of interaction with people of different ethnicities that leads to intolerance. During the past five years, local sociologists have been investigating the level of exposure that locals have to foreign cultures. The results were somewhat at odds with what a megalopolis purposely built as a cosmopolitan center and a “window to the West.”
According to official statistics, at least 50 percent of local citizens have never traveled abroad. 
Various polls show that approximately every second St. Petersburger has never dined in a restaurant serving any cuisine other than Russian, and half of locals admit they have never attended an art exhibition by a foreign artist. 
In order to improve the situation, City Hall launched its Tolerance program, which sees regular festivals of ethnic music, art and gastronomy held both at a district and municipal level. Local religious communities have also been active in organizing lectures and weekend schools offering insight into the world’s main religions. 

<i>The Ethnic Fashion Festival (Etnomoda) runs from Nov. 12 to 13 at the Vyborgskaya Storona cultural center, 13 Ulitsa Smolyachkova. M. Vyborgskaya. Tel: +7 911 903 1746. http://etnomoda.spb.ru</i>

TITLE: Taken in by a urinal
AUTHOR: By Olga Panova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: It’s difficult nowadays to find a good art critic with an original point of view, according to film director and screenwriter Andrei Konchalovsky, organizer and curator of the Art & Reality Annual International Forum. 
On the eve of this year’s forum, which takes place in St. Petersburg from Nov. 25 to 27 and focuses on the topic of art criticism, Konchalovsky talked to The St. Petersburg Times about the modern art critic, conforming and the fate of Russian art.

<i>Why was St. Petersburg chosen as the location for the forum?</i>
Petersburg is the European capital of Russia. St. Petersburg is in every way the “window to the west,” and it is intellectual. The Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library kindly offered to host the event as it was specially created for this type of intellectual meeting.

<i>Why now, in 2011, is it so important to draw the public’s attention to the problems of contemporary art and the figure of the art critic in particular?</i>
When we think about art critics, it is necessary to notice that they are becoming more and more uniform. Bright names are vanishing. Critics with independent, self-sufficient, maybe even controversial but interesting points of view on art are very rare. 
Some years ago, 200 art critics were asked to name an outstanding work of contemporary fine art. The number one choice was … Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” [a urinal]. I believe that half of these critics inwardly, secretly don’t agree that the most outstanding product of the 20th century is a urinal! I consider it a shame to give in to the conformist herd instinct, a dictatorship of political correctness, a fear of going against the grain and looking unmodern. 
It seems they know what Duchamp wrote in 1962: “I have thrown a urinal in their faces and now they admire its aesthetic perfection.” That is frank recognition that the young Duchamp wasn’t trying to express his representation of beauty and its comprehension, he simply wanted to spit in the face of critics and viewers, which was necessary in order to shock them. To tell the truth, shame on them, or rather, maybe they should be pitied.

<i>What do you think the participants of future forums are going to be like?</i>
People who have something to say, who are capable of expressing their point of view on modern art, on the condition of the relationship between critics and modern art… Also those who have nothing to add, but want to learn and listen, because for them the forum is no less important than for the ones who are going to speak.

<i>What is your vision and image of the contemporary art critic?</i>
It doesn’t seem to me that a modern art critic should differ from an “unmodern” art critic. Just as they did a hundred years ago, they should sincerely try to understand the artist, the creator, instead of paying attention to what is fashionable at the moment. Unfortunately, the majority of critics today try to outdo each other with their knowledge [of art] instead of simply trying to explain and understand the artist in a humanistic way. If they don’t understand it, it’s better to say, “I do not understand,” than to write an infinite number of pages of intellectual masturbation about this modern conceptual “masterpiece.”

<i>What perspectives and new opportunities will the forum offer young participants?</i>
It will enable them to think a bit more about the fate of European and Russian fine art in particular — where it’s going and if it’s possible to estimate the losses already incurred.

<i>Of what interest is the forum to professionals in the art market?</i>
I don’t know, I am not a professional. I am just a thinking person.

<i>Is the forum dedicated to international development trends in the art market, or is it mainly focused on trends in Russia? What are its main features and problems?</i>
I don’t know. I am not an art dealer. I only know one thing: The trend that can be labeled the “art of marketing art” is becoming more important and almost like propaganda. The art of marketing has become more important than the art itself. This is clear if we look at what kind of artists are becoming best sellers today. 
I have already made myself hoarse saying that [artistic] fraud is on the rise. People are charging high prices for pieces that shouldn’t even be called works of art.

<i>The Art & Reality Annual International Forum takes place from Nov. 25 to 27 at the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library, 3 Senatskaya Ploshchad. M. Sennaya Ploshchad / Sadovaya. Tel. 305 1621. For more information or to register for the forum (before Nov. 15), visit www.aifaar.com.</i> 

TITLE: THE DISH: Fresh Point
AUTHOR: By Ronan Loughney
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: <b>To the point</b>
Fresh Point, tucked away behind Ploshchad Vosstaniya metro on the corner of Stary Nevsky and 1st Sovietskaya Ulitsa, represents a new format for the local dining scene, with its pre-made sandwiches and takeaway-friendly menu.
In terms of the food on offer (the sandwich has never been a staple of Russian cuisine), the cafe’s simple white and lime-green plastic interior comprised of easy-to-clean surfaces and sharp angles, and indeed its display of neatly packaged and date-labeled products, Fresh Point is highly reminiscent of an Eat outlet (a U.K.-based deli-caf&#233; chain). 
Ordering is refreshingly simple: It is done at the cash register rather than from the table as is so often the way in Russia, even in bars where it seems a needless waste of time and resources.
Indeed, it was at the cash register itself that the cafe revealed its most impressive side. Our server spoke fluent English (all the staff spoke a commendable level of English), and all of the employees were exceptionally friendly and helpful. The dilemma of choosing between two different kinds of soup was solved by the offer of a sample cup, while the staff smiled throughout, checking on the meal’s progress with what seemed to be genuine interest, and one waitress even offered to retrieve an erroneously discarded check from the trash can.
As a result of the soup tasting session, the pea and mint (105 rubles, $3.40) triumphed over the chicken noodle: Thick, well-balanced and served at the perfect temperature, it was an excellent starter despite its companion — an overpriced half-slice of very ordinary bread for another 10 rubles ($0.33).
A quick check on Fresh Point’s Facebook page reveals that the eatery prides itself on having a “new thing appear on the menu practically every day,” from Beef Bourguignon to Uzbek plov. However, in order to try out any of these new additions, it is recommended to arrive at lunchtime or before, especially on the weekend. At 4 p.m. Saturday, the choice of sandwich fillings was restricted to BLT, coronation chicken or salami salad, and the salads to Greek, Nicoise or hummus and falafel. Yogurt with granola and a variety of fruit and desserts are also available, and the staff insisted the small selection was due only to the caf&#233;’s popularity.
Fortunately, as far as main dishes were concerned, the choice was also limited in terms of price, the salads ranging from 60 rubles ($1.95) for a Greek salad to 150 rubles ($4.90) for a hummus and falafel salad, and the sandwiches between 135 rubles ($4.40) for coronation chicken and 155 rubles ($5) for a BLT. While such low prices might instill fear of low quality among some, the reality was quite the opposite. The hummus salad was incredibly fresh, with the falafel retaining a welcome crunchiness despite having been wrapped in packaging for, presumably, at least several hours. The coronation chicken sandwich, substantial in size and filling, was also certainly worth its price, though the sauce left a slightly strange aftertaste of something resembling tahini.
However, as if to balance out the excellent value of the main courses, the drinks and dessert menu leaned the other way. The chocolate brownie was buttery, soft and rich, but considering it was devoured in about three bites, 40 rubles ($1.30) seemed a little steep. While cold drinks such as coke (45 rubles, $1.45 for 330ml) are averagely priced, the real shock comes with the coffee. 120 and 95 rubles ($3.90 and $3.10) may not sound like a lot for a cappuccino and Americano, but only if the coffee is fresh and aromatic. The reality however, was an insipid, thin filter coffee reminiscent of the kind served at highway truck stops.
The only other slight concern at Fresh Point is that while it seats approximately 50 people, the caf&#233; has only one toilet — a potential problem during the busy weekday lunch hours attested to by the staff. Overall, the restaurant delivers in all of the ways in which it is supposed to: Fast, easy service (ideal for popping in and out on a work break), as well as food that is healthy, affordable and — most important of all — fresh. 
Just don’t try the coffee.

TITLE: Land of Churches and Kinder Surprise
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: VLADIMIR — Drivers heading to this city’s biggest tourist attraction should be careful when approaching Cathedral Square: The parking space in front of the magnificent Assumption Cathedral is for busses only.
Other vehicles are likely to be met by a local traffic police officer, eagerly waiting for motorists who decide to head off the square with a left turn, thus crossing over a solid line on the road.
On a recent visit, a reporter was singled out for a fine even though he had only turned on his blinker to make the forbidden turn. But he was let off after the policeman noticed the foreign driver’s license.
But even bad-tempered police officers cannot spoil a visit to Vladimir, a city 160 kilometers east of Moscow that prides itself as being the heart of the Golden Ring, a collection of ancient towns that comprise the country’s prime tourist attractions.
Perched on a steep bank overlooking the beautiful Klyazma River basin, Vladimir’s historic center is dotted with historic sights.
City officials claim that Vladimir was founded in 990 by Vladimir the Great, the legendary ruler of Kiev who is revered as the founder of Russian Orthodoxy because he adopted Christianity in 988.
Interestingly, this theory was only introduced in the 1990s. The city earlier celebrated its founder as Prince Vladimir Monomakh, who built a strong fortress here in 1108 and named it after himself.
Whatever the truth, the name retains a powerful ring today because it is borne by Vladimir Putin, the uncontested strongman of the country’s politics.
But the city’s attraction lies less in its name than in its sites and its location on the main route to Nizhny Novgorod, which ensures that it is the first destination for almost everybody heading out east from Moscow.

<b>What to see if you have two hours</b>
Visitors arriving by car are bound to pass the Golden Gates, a rare example of ancient Russian city entryways.
Once you have parked your car legally, stroll up to the Assumption Cathedral and take a deep breath of cool air inside the 12th-century temple, which is said to have served as a model for the Kremlin’s Assumption Cathedral.
If you like the church’s outside carvings, make sure you see more of them by taking the short walk along the ridge to the St. Demetrius church. Built in the same century, the one-domed church is renowned for the some 600 stone carvings of saints and mythical creatures that make up its facade.
Next on the list of must-see sites is the Church of Intercession on the Nerl, which ranks among the country’s most treasured architectural gems. Sitting on a meadow at the confluence of the Klyazma and Nerl rivers a short drive east of Vladimir, the little church is famed for its elongated proportions, which make it look slender but resulted in the interior being too dark to hold services.
To see the church, you need to take a 10-minute walk through a meadow, which is a regular ritual for tourists from all over the world. In the spring, you might want to bring a small boat for that because the footpath tends to vanish under seasonal flooding.
The walk starts at the train station of Bogolyubovo, the first village beyond the Vladimir city limits. To find the station, motorists must take a right turn just behind Bogolyubovo’s impressive blue-domed monastery.
That monastery also boasts the Castle of Andrei Bogolyubsky, son of Moscow’s founding father, Yury Dolgoruky.
Bogolyubsky, who died in 1174, presided over Vladimir’s golden age, when the Vladimir-Suzdal principality rose to become a challenge to Kiev.
Converted into a church, which was rebuilt after an 18th-century collapse, that monument is often overlooked by visitors — but actually it is Vladimir’s fifth item on the White Monuments of Vladimir and Suzdal, a list of eight monuments that were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992.

<b>What to do if you have two days</b>
Off the beaten tourist track along the plateau overlooking the Klyazma River lies the city’s north, which is characterized by a typical Soviet mix of urban housing and industrial sites and offers a skyline radically different from the center’s Orthodox crosses and spires.
This is where the sprawling Vladimir Tractor Engine Plant lies, as well as several electrical and machine-building works.
It is here that the city generates added value to its almost 350,000 inhabitants, of whom only a few can live off tourism. Across the northern city bypass lies the Globus hypermarket, where many of the locals do their shopping.
From here, it is just a 30-minute drive to Suzdal, whose Kremlin and St. Euthymius Monastery continue the UNESCO site and the Golden Ring. Do not miss the Church of Boris and Gleb in the Kideksha village, just 20 minutes west of Suzdal.

<b>Where to eat</b>
By far the most attractive restaurant in Vladimir is Traktir, housed in a two-story log house (1A Letneperevozinskaya Ulitsa, +7-4922-324162; policanov.ru/tractir.php) a stone’s throw from the Golden Gates. The restaurant, which also has a summer cafe next door, is located conveniently at the western entry to the city center, meaning that you can regain your strength here with the help of traditional Russian cuisine after some grueling hours on the road from Moscow. An average meal for one costs about 600 rubles ($20).
Sadly, most other restaurants in the city center expect their guests to eat in dimly lit rooms with no windows.
Cafe Van (61A Bolshaya Moskovskaya, entry from Podbelskaya Ulitsa, +7-4922-326377) is no exception to this widespread habit, but as consolation this Armenian-themed eatery offers some of the best shashlik in town. An average bill for one amounts to 1,000 rubles ($32.75).

<b>Where to stay</b>
Tucked away in the western center, the Monomakh Hotel (20 Ulitsa Gogolya, +7-4922-440444; monomahhotel.com) won’t win a design award but boasts a summer terrace overlooking back gardens, and the staff are trying hard to fulfill the slogan of “princely hospitality.” The 16 rooms cost between 2,300 rubles ($75) for a single and 5,400 rubles ($175) for a deluxe double.
On the other, eastern end of the center is the rather attractive Erlangen House hotel (25 Bolshaya Nizhegorodskaya Ulitsa, +7-4922-323795; erlangen.ru), a by-product of the city’s partnership with the German city of Erlangen. Apart from German classes, the house offers five rooms priced at 2,000 rubles ($65) to 4,000 rubles ($130) per night.
If both those hotels are full, you will have to resort to the Hotel Vladimir, located bang in the center (74 Bolshaya Moskovskaya Ulitsa, +7-4922-324447; vladimir-hotel.ru), where a midsize room costs 4,200 rubles ($135).

<b>Conversation starters</b>
While officials and business representatives tend to praise Vladimir’s proximity to the capital as an advantage, this view is not shared by everybody in the local population.
“Moscow makes prices go up,” complained Yevgeny Petrov, a youth activist for the Liberal Democratic Party, who was campaigning outside Vladimir’s Drama Theater during a recent visit.
Yet despite this, he said, many young people are seeking work in Moscow, where wages are significantly higher.
The average wage in Vladimir was 18,781 rubles, or some $600, in the first half of this year, according to a report published on the city administration’s web site.
And while some of the city’s official economic indicators are not bad, like a 16 percent rise in retail sales and an unemployment rate of just 1.7 percent, a closer look at such figures reveals that the picture is not that bright.
A more telling number for the state of the labor market is that of those officially registered as employed, which in July stood at 112,000 or just a third of the city’s population, according to the report.

<b>How to get there</b>
The best way to get to Vladimir from St. Petersburg is via Moscow.  Many trains leave daily for Moscow with prices starting from 1,000 rubles. Flying is also an option.
The road from Moscow to Vladimir is called Shosse Entuziastov, but it usually elicits little enthusiasm among drivers because it is riddled with traffic lights and is notorious for its traffic jams, which can make the 190-kilometer trip from city center to city center last four hours or more.
The situation improved for rail passengers last year, when Russian Railways launched the Sapsan high-speed rail link to Nizhny Novgorod. Currently, Sapsan trains leave Moscow’s Kursky Station twice a day, at 6:45 a.m. and 7:30 p.m., and stop at Vladimir after one hour 45 minutes. One-way tickets cost about 1,000 rubles, depending on the day of the week. Cheaper and more frequent connections are by regular train, but the trip then takes about three hours.
<hr />

<b>Vladimir</b>

<i>Population:</i> 350,000

<i>Main industries:</i> manufacturing, electronic components and machine building, chemical industries, agriculture

<i>Mayor:</i> Sergei Sakharov (United Russia)
<i>City manager:</i> Andrei Shokhin (United Russia)

<i>Founded in</i> 990

<i>Interesting fact:</i> Tucked away on Letneperevozkinskaya Ulitsa stands a typical U.S. house, a wooden bungalow with an open garden and garage. This is The American Home, an exchange and language teaching center founded in 1992 by Ron Pope, a scholar from Illinois. Currently, the home’s English program enrolls 400 students per term. Find out more at serendipity-russia.com

<i>Sister cities:</i> Babruysk, Belarus; Canterbury, Britain; Kardzhali, Bulgaria; Chongqing, Haikou, China; Usti-nad-Labem, Czech Republic; Kerava, Finland; Saintes, France; Erlangen, Jena, Germany; Anghiari, Campobasso, Italy; Jelenia Gora, Poland; Bloomington-Normal, Sarasota, United States.

<i>Helpful contacts:</i> 
• City Hall’s press service (+7 4922-53-28-17); 
• Sergei Shedrin, spokesman for Mayor Sakharov (+7 903-833-33-33; speaks German); 
• Viktoria Deripaska, spokeswoman for city manager Shokhin (+7 910-777-71-20).

<b>Major Factories</b>

• Ferrero Chocolate Factory (Vorsha, Sobinsk District; +7 4922-37-91-91; ferrero.ru) produces Kinder Chocolate, Raffaello and Nutella. Opened in 2008 with a total volume of direct foreign investment of more than $275 million, the plant is located some 30 kilometers west of Vladimir and it employs some 500 people.
• Vladimir Tractor Engine Plant (43 Traktornaya Ulitsa; +7 4922- 53-86-38; vladtractor.ru), part of Machinery & Industrial Group N.V., an industrial holding based in Cheboksary, focuses on small and medium-sized agricultural vehicles.
• Globus (28 Suzdalsky Prospekt; +7 4922-37-68-66; globus.ru) is a German-owned hypermarket with about 50,000 goods altering regional consumer behavior.
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<b>Q: Why did Globus open one of its supermarkets in Vladimir?</b> 
A: Based on the proximity of the most moneyed region, Moscow, the retail market and purchasing power of the local population are both strong enough.
<b>Q: What are Vladimir’s biggest advantages as a place for foreign investment?</b>
A: This is a cultural and historic site with global significance, attracting a big number of tourists. At the same time, it is a huge transit corridor. The country’s biggest logistics artery, linking Central Russia with the east and northeast, goes right through the Vladimir region.
<b>Q: What are the biggest problems in Vladimir?</b> 
A: The infrastructure is not developed well enough — roads and supply networks do not fit modern investors’ demands. However, this situation is typical for many Russian regions. Also, land prices have gone up considerably in recent years, leading to tax hikes. For instance, the land tax in Vladimir is already more expensive than in the Moscow region. This considerably raises expenditures for investors owning big pieces of land, and rents for land are also affected.
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<b>Q: Why did Ferrero choose the Vladimir region for its factory?</b> 
A: When Ferrero Group decided to construct its own factory in Russia in 2007, our specialists analyzed several sites in the Central Federal District. Their key criteria were: the land’s legal status, compliance to technical requirements, infrastructure and the availability of skilled labor. Another feature that was taken into account was the availability of appropriate legislation for foreign investment.
<b>Q: What are the main advantages of Vladimir, both as a town and as a location for foreign investment?</b> 
A: The administration is actively using its resources to assist investment projects. A stable socio-economic situation, high education and qualification levels and a well-developed market infrastructure are factors that contribute to making the Vladimir region very attractive for foreign investors.
<b>Q: What are the challenges of working and living in the Vladimir region, and what do you recommend to improve conditions in Vladimir?</b> 
A: The main challenge is to really understand my Russian friends and to learn from them on the job and in life. I would improve public transportation: If there were more connections to Moscow, Vladimir could become more attractive, even as an alternative to the capital for international companies.
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<b>Sergei Sakharov</b>, Mayor and Speaker of the city legislature 
The 43-year-old was regional director for the VimpelCom mobile carrier and a member of the Vladimir regional legislature before being elected speaker of the city legislature in March 2011, thus automatically becoming mayor. He is a leading member of United Russia’s Vladimir branch. 

<b>Q: Why should investors come to Vladimir?</b> 
A: Because it pays off! We are just 160 kilometers east of Moscow and strategically placed on the main trade route all the way to China. Despite our proximity to the capital, rent prices for office and production space are much lower than in Moscow and the Moscow region. Our work force is also much cheaper. And recently we incorporated large territories formerly outside the city limits and designated the land for construction of housing and business projects. 
<b>Q: Why should foreigners invest in Vladimir?</b> 
A: We have already attracted some foreign investors to Soviet-era factories inside our city, like Avtopribor [the auto parts manufacturer created a joint venture with Fiat unit Magneti Marelli in 2007]. Our regional laws offer attractive tax discounts to foreigners. And last but not least we can offer stable political and social conditions.
<b>Q: What is your favorite part of Vladimir?</b> 
A: The historical center, which makes us very proud. We celebrated our city’s 1,021st birthday this year, and we are the center of the Golden Ring.

TITLE: On the Hunt for Lost Treasure After 94 Long Years
AUTHOR: By Lena Smirnova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — It’s been nearly 100 years since a jewel case containing family and imperial jewelry crashed through the ice to the bottom of Lake Baikal. The last hands it touched before disappearing into the watery depths were those of a Russian woman who was fleeing the country to save her life.
The year was 1917. The Bolsheviks had seized power, and White Russians were forced to move out of their homes or face execution.
Vadim and Zinaida Smit had no hope of staying in the country. Vadim was railway minister for the east-west Siberian route and a personal friend of Tsar Nicholas II, and Zinaida was the godchild of the queen mother.
With little time to think, they packed up whatever they could and fled St. Petersburg to China, from which they would catch a boat to Europe. They traveled by any means and walked when no transportation was available. They trudged through the Siberian snow and ice, losing their belongings in their haste to get to safety.
Just when they were crossing the frozen Lake Baikal, they heard the crack.
The ice had shattered beneath them, and the case that Zinaida was carrying slipped from her grip and plummeted to the bottom of the lake. It contained jewels that her husband and the imperial family had given to her. The Smits couldn’t afford to stop to search for it. They continued on, paying bribes at border checkpoints until they finally arrived at their destination in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.
The story of the jewel case was passed down through generations of the Smit family until it reached Helen Cleary, Vadim and Zinaida Smit’s great-granddaughter. Cleary, who lives in Melbourne, Australia, was in her 40s when she first heard the story from her mother.
Cleary’s grandmother and father, direct descendants of the Smits, have already died, but her 81-year-old mother still hopes to find out what happened to the sunken treasure.
“It would be amazing for it to be found,” Cleary said by telephone. “It’s astonishing that it all happened.”
The family has waited 94 years to solve the mystery of the lost treasure chest. Now some people in Russia could be getting close to the answer.
<b>Giving Treasure Hunters a Hand</b>
Rudolf Kavchik found his first antique coins 15 years ago when he was scouring the beach with a metal detector owned for his work at a biology institute. But once he dug up the coins, Kavchik got hooked on treasure hunting.
Kavchik is now one of the most experienced treasure hunters in the Irkutsk region and a countrywide distributor of Australian metal detectors. Kavchik said there are up to 300 other treasure hunters in the region who are on the lookout for lost valuables. And their searching brings results.
A group of treasure hunters, including Kavchik, conducted a series of dives into Lake Baikal at the beginning of September. The dives produced a handful of old coins and a heavy case, which Kavchik believes was used for carrying weapons. Last year, another group found a female prosthetic hand made out of silver in the lake. The hand was discovered at a 50-meter depth, and treasure hunters are still scratching their heads over how it got there, Kavchik said.
Such large finds are rare, though. It is more common to find coins and other small trinkets.
“People didn’t use to have pockets,” Kavchik said. “They dropped coins, and [the coins] always have value.”
Kavchik said 90 percent of the 300,000 treasure hunters across Russia go searching for valuables as a hobby. Professional hunters also exist but, even as a hobby, treasure hunting can be profitable. A silver ruble dating to the times of Peter the Great or Catherine the Great will fetch upward of $3,000 on the market. A rare test coin recently found near Yekaterinburg was valued at a price equal to that of an apartment in the city.
Irkutsk enthusiasts plan to open the world’s first and only museum of treasure hunting in their city in January to showcase their finds and change the negative perceptions some people have of their pastime.
“Many people have a bad outlook on the hobby,” Kavchik said. “They have little interest in it. That is unfortunate.”
But people are hearing the call, and many of them are heading out on the hunt.

<b>Russia’s Treasure Maps</b>
It doesn’t take a master sleuth to go online and find information to get started as a treasure hunter. There are numerous forums with advice for beginners. Some even provide treasure maps of various Russian regions. The odds of finding treasure are very good, according to the treasure hunters.
“There are more chances of finding treasure than winning a lottery,” Kavchik said. “People lived everywhere, which means they always lost something, hid something.”
The Moscow region is particularly abundant with treasure. Moscow-based hunter Roman Katko has found coins, crosses, icons and jewelry in the region.
“There is always a possibility of finding treasure,” he said.
Treasure hunting has become more popular in Russia recently, Katko said. Each year he sees more people with metal detectors around old village sites when he goes on his own weekend explorations. Sometimes he even stumbles on places that have already been searched. But even in these places he can always find something, Katko said.
The key is to know where to look.
Katko uses archived maps to find where old villages were located. Kavchik studies the history and legends of the region where he is going. One out of 10 legends turns out to be true, he said.
The locals of one village told Kavchik the story of a rich man who had buried treasure beneath an oak tree in his garden. Kavchik and his fellow treasure hunters went to the spot with their metal detectors and quickly retrieved an old chest filled with paper money and coins. Kavchik said he was amazed that everybody in the village knew the legend, yet nobody bothered to see for themselves whether it was true.
“What stops the Russians from taking out a shovel and digging up treasure?” he said.
<b>Lost History</b>

But not everybody wants Russians to take out their shovels and go on treasure hunts. Archeologists warn that treasure hunters devalue artifacts when they take them out of their cultural context. The archeologists are then not able to piece together the story of the object.
“There is somebody’s life behind every treasure,” said Alexei Alexeyev, senior associate at the archeology department at the Pushkin Historical-Literary Museum in Bolshiye Vyazyomy, outside Moscow. “For us it is a historical reference.”
Another risk is that artifacts will be lost if they end up in the hands of people who don’t realize their full value, Alexeyev said. Experienced treasure hunters agree that this lack of knowledge is a problem.
An elderly woman once approached Kavchik to show him a gold coin that she had found. The coin was cut in half because she molded a part of it into a tooth. Kavchik determined that the coin was from the times of Catherine the Great and would have brought the woman $20,000 if it had been undamaged.
“For this amount of money she could have put in three layers of teeth,” Kavchik said.
Archeologists are so overwhelmed in number by treasure hunters that it makes monitoring such cases difficult. There are 20 archeologists working on digs in the Moscow region, Alexeyev said. In comparison, the region has an estimated 20,000 treasure hunters.
By law, people who find treasure are required to give three-quarters of it to the government. In reality, the rules are rarely enforced. Kavchik said the government doesn’t have the structures to take in treasure, so treasure hunters simply don’t declare their findings.
“We are losing our history,” Alexeyev said. “In five to 10 years if this continues we will lose all artifacts in the Moscow region, and future archeologists will be left with a desert of looted archeological sites.”
So far no one has announced that they have found a chest with jewels in Lake Baikal. Kavchik said the Smits’ treasure would be hard to find since the lake is very deep. Divers can go down 50 to 60 meters, and 100 meters if they have special equipment, but the chest could be even further down.
In Australia, Helen Cleary wears the wedding ring she inherited from her grandmother. The ring bears the inscription “1917” — the year of her grandmother’s wedding and the year when the jewels fell into the lake. Clearly said she is not giving up hope that her family’s heirloom will be found.
“It sort of like a fairy tale. It just doesn’t happen to normal people,” she said. “To be a part of it, it’s just amazing.”