SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1692 (3), Wednesday, January 25, 2012
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TITLE: $822 Million Misspent on Defense Contracts
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Military contractors misspent more than 25 billion rubles ($822 million) in 2011, or almost 3 percent of the total value of all defense orders for the year, the Federal Service on Defense Contracts said Friday.
More than 870 billion rubles ($28.6 billion) were spent on defense contracts last year, a spokesperson for the service said, Interfax reported.
The forms of misspending uncovered by the service included inflated costs and volumes of work, payment for incomplete work, and completed work not specified in the contracts, the spokesperson said.
The Audit Chamber said earlier this month that state officials had misspent a record 718 billion rubles ($22.7 billion) from the federal budget last year.
TITLE: Archivist challenges Kremlin in Wallenberg saga
AUTHOR: by VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — A former senior Russian archive official says he saw a file that could shed light on Holocaust hero Raoul Wallenberg's fate — challenging the insistence of Russia's KGB successor agency that it has no documents regarding the man who saved tens of thousands of Jews in Hungary before disappearing into the hands of Soviet secret police.
Anatoly Prokopenko, 78, told The Associated Press that in 1991 he saw a thick dossier containing numerous references to Wallenberg that suggested he was being spied upon by a Russian aristocrat working for Soviet intelligence. Russian officials later said the file didn't exist, in line with blanket denials of having information on Wallenberg.
"That file is extremely interesting, because it could allow us to determine the reasons behind his arrest," Prokopenko said, while acknowledging he had only a few minutes to flip through hundreds of pages of documents.
As Sweden's envoy to Nazi-occupied Hungary, Wallenberg saved 20,000 Jews by giving them Swedish travel documents or moving them to safe houses, and managed to dissuade Nazi officers from massacring the 70,000 inhabitants of the city's ghetto. The 32-year-old diplomat was arrested by the Soviets in January 1945 when the Red Army stormed Budapest, and imprisoned in Moscow.
The Soviets had stubbornly denied that Wallenberg was in their custody before issuing a 1957 announcement that he had died on July 17, 1947, in his prison cell of a sudden heart attack. They stonewalled international demands for information about his fate, and rejected allegations that Wallenberg could have lived as a prisoner under a different identify as late as the 1980s.
Prokopenko said that in the fall of 1991, on an inspection tour of the main KGB archive in a tightly guarded facility outside Moscow, he came across a hefty dossier on Count Mikhail Tolstoy-Kutuzov, a Russian aristocrat who left Russia after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and worked alongside Wallenberg in Budapest.
Prokopenko said that he only had a few minutes to peek at the dossier, but he saw Wallenberg's name mentioned repeatedly in what appeared to be Tolstoy-Kutuzov's reports to his handlers in Soviet intelligence.
"I realized that he was following every step Wallenberg made," Prokopenko said.
Prokopenko was fired just over a year later and deprived of his access to the archives — a move Prokopenko attributes to his efforts to reveal secret Soviet archives to the public.
He said he advised Guy von Dardel, Wallenberg's half-brother who spent years searching for clues to his fate, to ask the KGB successor agency for permission to see the files on Tolstoy-Kutuzov. They turned him down, saying that no such files existed.
When von Dardel said that he knew from Prokopenko that this wasn't true, officials asked him to come back in a few days and handed him a dossier that contained only a few pages lacking any reference to Wallenberg.
Prokopenko said that Stalin's secret police possibly suspected Wallenberg of being involved in secret contacts between the Western allies and the Nazis and were eager to learn about his connections.
Wallenberg had been recruited for his rescue mission in Budapest by a U.S. intelligence agent, with Swedish government approval, on behalf of the War Refugee Board created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. But he is not known to have been engaged in intelligence-gathering.
Susanne Berger, a German researcher who advised a Swedish-Russian working group that conducted a 10-year investigation that ended in 2001, backs Prokopenko's view that the Soviets likely saw Wallenberg as a valuable source of intelligence.
"The Soviet leadership was particularly paranoid about what it perceived as a possible Anglo-American conspiracy against Soviet interests," she said in e-mailed comments.
Berger added that Stalin might have hoped to use Wallenberg for future bargaining with the West.
"The most likely reason for Stalin to arrest Raoul Wallenberg would have been to use him as some kind of 'asset,' to bargain or negotiate for," Berger said. "Stalin may have felt that with Raoul Wallenberg, scion of a powerful Western business family, he held a rather interesting bargaining chip."
The former archivist said KGB officers privately told him that Wallenberg was killed because his refusal to cooperate made him a liability. "They couldn't have set him free, they would have needed to liquidate him," Prokopenko said.
The chief of the archives of the FSB, the main KGB successor agency, admitted in a rare interview with the AP in September that the Soviet version that Wallenberg died of a heart attack could have been fabricated and that his captors may have "helped him die." Lt. Gen. Vasily Khristoforov said that all documents related to Wallenberg likely had been destroyed back in the 1950s and denied that his agency was withholding any information related to his case.
Prokopenko, who headed the Special Archive containing documents from 20 European countries in the waning years of the Soviet Union, allowed researchers working for an international commission investigating Wallenberg's fate to search for clues to Wallenberg's fate amid Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's openness campaign.
They quickly found a document on Wallenberg's transfer from one Soviet prison to another, but the KGB immediately learned of the effort and ordered them out.
Prokopenko lost his job soon afterward, but continued his work to open the archives under the government of Boris Yeltsin, the first president of Russia until he lost his post of the deputy chief of the Russian state archive agency in early 1993.
TITLE: Putin Calls for Harsher Punishment of Immigration Law Violators
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Companies and individuals that employ and register illegal migrants should face criminal charges instead of fines, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Thursday.
Violations for arranging the illegal transit of migrants into Russia are currently punished with "a symbolic fine, and here the migration service is simply powerless," Putin said at a meeting of the Federal Migration Service, Interfax reported.
"I contend that here penalties of a criminal nature should be stipulated," Putin said.
Property owners who illegally register hundreds of people in their apartments should also face criminal charges, the prime minister said.
Putin also reiterated a proposal he made in an article published Monday, in which he wrote that migrants wanting to work in Russia should have to pass exams on Russian language and culture.
He said Thursday that the proper infrastructure should be built in countries with migrants wanting to come to Russia, to help them gain the necessary knowledge and qualifications to emigrate.
"This includes the creation of so-called pre-migration preparation centers, which include professional preparation, study of Russian language, fundamental laws, cultural norms and traditions of the peoples of the Russian Federation," Putin said, Interfax reported.
TITLE: Solar Flare May Have Caused Fobos-Grunt Failure
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Companies and individuals that employ and register illegal migrants should face criminal charges instead of fines, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Thursday.
Violations for arranging the illegal transit of migrants into Russia are currently punished with "a symbolic fine, and here the migration service is simply powerless," Putin said at a meeting of the Federal Migration Service, Interfax reported.
"I contend that here penalties of a criminal nature should be stipulated," Putin said.
Property owners who illegally register hundreds of people in their apartments should also face criminal charges, the prime minister said.
Putin also reiterated a proposal he made in an article published Monday, in which he wrote that migrants wanting to work in Russia should have to pass exams on Russian language and culture.
He said Thursday that the proper infrastructure should be built in countries with migrants wanting to come to Russia, to help them gain the necessary knowledge and qualifications to emigrate.
"This includes the creation of so-called pre-migration preparation centers, which include professional preparation, study of Russian language, fundamental laws, cultural norms and traditions of the peoples of the Russian Federation," Putin said, Interfax reported.
TITLE: State Fails Offenders Both In and Out of Jail
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Is it the responsibility of the state to look after former prisoners once they have been released? This question may seem unrelated to the life of the average person, but this is in fact an illusion. According to official statistics, every fourth man in Russia has either already served or is currently serving a term in prison — or will undoubtedly do so later in life.
Unemployment, social isolation, poor health and homelessness top the list of problems that Russia’s former prisoners have to tackle upon leaving jail. Their predictable failure results in every third former inmate going back to jail.
“This is a story as brutal as it is simple: A man is released from prison in the morning, and by the evening he is already hungry — and not everyone has a place in which to sleep or eat,” said Igor Potapenko, head of the St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast Penal Inspectorate.
“Most of the prisoners lose real connections with the outside world — their families, friends and colleagues often do not want to know them anymore, except for, of course, members of criminal gangs. We really ought to start thinking about these people’s futures when they are still in prison, to ensure they have some choices in their lives.”
The government has not been able to deliver on these expectations, except for declarations and a 2010 social rehabilitation program backed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin that has not yet created the much-needed positive change.
As Alexei Skripkov, an expert with the Russian Justice Ministry, points out, one important aspect that has so far been ignored by the authorities is that almost all prisoners’ health severely deteriorates while they are serving their terms.
“What is the point of training an ill person? They will not be able to use their skills until they get better,” Skripkov said. “So really, the number one task is to make medical rehabilitation accessible and available to those released from jail.”
The lack of transparency within Russian prisons and the penal system in general remains a serious problem. Human rights advocates often encounter serious problems or find it impossible to investigate rights abuses behind the thick walls of the country’s jails.
Russia’s penal system has for many decades been notorious for human rights abuse, the use of torture and repressive conditions, with inmates sometimes having to sleep in shifts in their cells and being allocated less than 0.7 square meters of personal space per person.
During the past decade, Russian authorities have been ordered to pay dozens of thousands of dollars in damages to the country’s prisoners following rulings by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
Russia’s prison population has shrunk from nearly one million people in 2000 to about 780,000 prisoners in 2011, and there has been a clear tendency to decriminalize the Russian law and replace prison terms with other forms of punishment — especially for economic crimes.
Even so, a number of experts in the field, including Yakov Gilinsky, a leading crime analyst with the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, describe Russia’s penal system as excessively repressive.
“Torture flourishes there, while anyone who works for the penal system is protected by an unwritten rule of impunity,” Gilinsky said. Torture methods used in Russian prisons include electric shocks, suffocation, suspension, waterboarding, binding, severe beatings and deprivation of food and water.
Alexei Skripkov stresses that, once released from jail, former prisoners continue to be treated as criminals, as if the punishment is supposed to last for life. As if in tacit agreement, employers refuse to employ former prisoners because they see them as a risk to security. In most cases, they are not afraid to say this directly to the former inmates’ faces.
“Back in the Soviet era, the country’s companies were obliged to employ former prisoners: It was part of the state-run social adaptation policy,” Skripkov said. “Now, there is no such rule.”
Similarly, the state is not obliged to provide a home for those prisoners who, for various reasons, lost their property while in jail.
St. Petersburg lawyer Igor Kucherenko said that although homelessness has become an acute problem for thousands of Russian people, current legislation offers no real way out of it.
“What the authorities tell people is that to solve their problem they must buy or rent a room or a flat,” Kucherenko said. “This is utterly cynical because everyone knows damn well that a tiny fraction of the Russian population can afford to buy real estate. And to be able to rent a room you need to get a job first — and for former prisoners, that is a difficult task.”
St. Petersburg has two rehabilitation centers that can temporarily provide shelter for former prisoners who do not have accommodation or a job. The conditions there are similar to those in prison: No alcohol, no smoking, no women and no domestic animals.
The management of these state-funded centers is unable to help inhabitants to find a job and move into their own homes.
“We write recommendations, and the city’s social services support them, but employers could not care less,” said Alexander Yegorov, director of St. Petersburg Rehabilitation Center No. 1 located in Kupchino.
“As for the conditions, it is not up to me to improve or change them. I have to adhere to the legal framework, however heartless it may be.”
TITLE: 100 Most Powerful Women
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Ex-St. Petersburg governor Valentina Matviyenko topped the list of the 100 most influential Russian women released this week.
St. Petersburg natives Svetlana Medvedeva, wife of President Dmitry Medvedev, and Ksenia Sobchak, a TV anchor and the daughter of St. Petersburg’s first mayor Anatoly Sobchak, also made the top 10 of the list, Interfax reported.
Medvedeva came in fourth, while Sobchak took seventh place.
Matviyenko, who is currently the speaker of the Federation Council, was followed on the list by veteran pop diva Alla Pugachova and the president’s spokeswoman, Natalya Timakova, Interfax reported.
Matviyenko told Ekho Moskvy radio station that “the most influential woman, as well as the most influential man, is a person whose ideas, actions and activities lead to noticeable changes in the life of society and the country as a whole.”
“It’s not important what area a person chooses to take these actions in, be it in a political, business, cultural or social sphere. What is important is that people see results and can evaluate them the right way,” Matviyenko said.
Matviyenko said that to be influential, a person needs to have qualities that make them a good leader, be effective and have a high profile.
“I have always stood for social politics that allow women to combine family duties with participation in other spheres as well,” she said.
Elvira Nabiullina, the Minister of Economic Development, was fifth on the list, while the country’s Minister of Health and Social Development, Tatyana Golikova, was rated sixth.
Chairwoman of the Moscow City Court Olga Yegorova and former gymnast champion Alina Kabayeva took the eighth and the ninth positions.
Lyudmila Alekseyeva, head of the Moscow Helsinki Group human rights organization, was 10th on the list.
Lyudmila Putina, wife of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, took 13th position in the rating, while Tatyana Yumasheva, daughter of Russia’s first president Boris Yeltsin, came in 17th, followed by his widow Naina Yeltsina at 19th.
Among the top 50 most influential women were many female politicians and public activists such as State Duma deputy Oksana Dmitriyeva from the Just Russia party, (15th), editor-in-chief of The New Times magazine Yevgenia Albatz (21st), TV anchor Tina Kandelaki (28th), actress and charity foundation co-founder Chulpan Khamatova (20th), singer Zemfira (26th) and ballerina Maya Plisetskaya (41st).
Former spy Anna Chapman came in 90th and tennis star Maria Sharapova 70th.
The rating was organized by Ekho Moskvy radio station, Interfax and RIA Novosti news agencies and Ogonyok magazine.
TITLE: City Celebrates Anniversary of End of Siege
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: More than 154,000 Siege of Leningrad survivors living in St. Petersburg will celebrate the 68th anniversary of the full liberation of the city on Friday, Jan. 27. Events dedicated to the anniversary will, as usual, be held around the city.
“Our city is unique in this sense: There is no other city in the world that experienced such cruel genocide at the hands of Nazi Germany,” said Irina Skripachyova, head of the city’s Residents of the Siege of Leningrad public organization at a press conference Monday.
Skripachyova said that “women and children were the face of the siege.”
“This is because most of the people who remained in the city were women and children. Despite the hunger, many women continued to work while their children stayed at home. Even when those mothers weren’t even strong enough to move, they still went back home because their children were waiting for them there,” said Skripachyova, who was 10 years old during the siege.
Marina Zhuravlyova, deputy head of the city’s Culture Committee, said the memory of the siege was imprinted in the blood of St. Petersburg residents.
“This date is therefore meaningful for many people in this city, and there will be many events aimed at marking it,” Zhuravlyova said.
Some events dedicated to the anniversary have already begun in the city.
On Sunday, local military and history enthusiasts reenacted one of the biggest attacks aimed at breaking the siege.
The event, which drew several thousand spectators, was held in the location where the large-scale “January Thunderstorm” military operation took place on the Leningrad Front near the village of Porozhki. About 300 professional reenactment aficionados portrayed the successful attack of the Red Army against Nazi troops.
On Friday, memorial ceremonies will begin at 9:30 a.m. when city residents will lay flowers by the board at 14 Nevsky Prospekt that warns citizens to shelter on the other side of the street during artillery bombing.
Later that day, flowers will be laid at the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad at Ploshchad Pobedy and at the Piskaryovskoye Cemetery, where many of those who perished during the siege are buried in communal graves.
The city will hold a number of concerts for siege survivors, including a traditional concert at the city’s Oktyabrsky Concert Hall on Friday, and an outdoor karaoke concert the next day due to take place near Gostiny Dvor, where veterans and others will be able to sing wartime songs.
From Jan. 24 through 28, the city will also hold the 21st International Siege Survivors Association conference. More than 130 siege survivors currently living abroad are expected to attend the conference.
TITLE: Putin’s Popularity Is Low in City Ahead of Elections
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Kravtsova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Opinion polls conducted in St. Petersburg last year show that people now see Prime Minister and presidential hopeful Vladimir Putin’s main trait as greed (cited by 46 percent of people), unlike in 2007, when the majority of people polled assigned Putin mainly positive qualities, and only 5 percent cited greed as his overwhelming trait.
Developments in Putin’s image and the qualities that people look for in a president were the focus of a roundtable discussion in the city this week ahead of the March presidential election.
According to the poll, honesty and decency are the main qualities people look for in a president. Experts agree with this sentiment.
“These are fundamental qualities; if they are absent, nothing else matters,” said Boris Vishnevsky, City Hall deputy for the Yabloko Democratic Party, at a roundtable discussion on Monday.
“Knowledge and genuine understanding of problems are acquired skills, while honesty and decency can’t be learned.”
As Putin’s rating continues to fall, politicians and pundits analyzed his behavior and recent controversial decisions, such as his refusal to participate in debates, the showing of propaganda on federal TV channels and his informal, sometimes crude vocabulary.
“Ten years ago Putin was more confident and free than he is now. Now he’s scared, and is no longer free as a politician,” said Marina Shishkina, a City Hall deputy for A Just Russia.
“We live in an artificial system in which Putin himself has become a puppet.”
“Most people’s political careers would be instantly ruined after refusing to participate in debates, but not Putin’s, seemingly,” said Vishnevsky. The deputy said he was confident that if fair elections were held, Putin would get less than 50 percent of the votes required for victory in the upcoming presidential elections.
“Just with an eye on getting those 50 percent, fierce attempts to elbow Yavlinsky out of the election race are being made,” said Vishnevsky, referring to Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky, who faces exclusion from the presidential election after many signatures submitted to register his candidacy were ruled inadmissible Monday by the Central Elections Commission.
“Yavlinsky could be a candidate for whom quite a number of honest constituents may vote, namely those constituents who don’t want to remain stuck in the trap of a pseudo-choice between Putin and those not posing a danger to him — from Zyuganov to Prokhorov,” said Vishnevsky.
According to Vishnevsky, there are two objectives behind the recent efforts to get Yavlinsky eliminated from the race. The first is not to allow a second round of voting.
“In the event of a runoff, lots of people will vote for anyone but Putin,” he said.
The second objective is to reduce the number of qualified observers, and Yabloko observers were acknowledged as the most qualified, concerned and active during the recent State Duma elections, he claimed.
Analysts believe that the removal of Yavlinsky from the list of candidates won’t have much of an impact on the elections, as the outcome has already been planned.
“These are not presidential elections, but an imitation of them entitled ‘Putin’s Elections,’ said Shishkina.
Vishnevsky said that some voters would spoil their ballots, and that unlike in Duma elections, this would have an impact on the presidential elections, as it could result in a second round of voting.
Analysts are confident that the mood of dissent currently present in society will not disappear soon and will continue to develop.
“I consider Putin to be one of the [protest] rally’s organizers,” said Vishnevsky. “If on Sept. 24 these two accomplices [Putin and Medvedev] hadn’t announced together how they had decided to allocate power, there wouldn’t have been such a disaffected outburst,” he said.
Recent rallies have shown that there are people who can potentially make positive changes in Russia, but the problem is that in the current political situation, there are few opportunities for people to prove themselves, according to the roundtable participants.
“All of the current candidates are fake; we’re observing a large-scale imitation of presidential elections,” said philanthropist Sergei Gulyayev.
“If we had fair elections with public debates that different candidates participated in, Putin’s rating would be 2 percent at most.”
Gulyayev named former finance minister Alexei Kudrin and whistle-blowing blogger Alexei Navalny as those who could be a viable alternative to the current leaders.
“There are honest and decent people, but we don’t know about them,” said Vishnevsky. “We’ll only be able to hear them if there are fair elections and debates.
“When we have fair elections, the right people will appear.”
TITLE: Policeman Kills Teen
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A policeman has been suspended after a teenage boy died in police custody at the weekend.
Nevsky district police inspector Denis Ivanov, 24, acknowledged that on Sunday night he beat up a 15-year-old boy at the police precinct where the teenager had been taken after being detained for attempted robbery.
Ivanov hit the teenager many times using both his hands and a broomstick. Afterwards, when it was clear the boy was badly injured, the police called an ambulance, but the boy died on the way to the hospital, the St. Petersburg Investigation Committee said Monday.
Ivanov failed to explain the motives for his actions, it said.
Mikhail Sukhodolsky, head of the St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast police, said the teenager had died after the policeman “beat the evidence out of him.”
Sukhodolsky suspended Viktor Dmitrieyev, the head of the Nevsky district regional police administration, over the incident on Monday, Interfax reported.
“We live in 2012 and not in 1917. What is this?” said St. Petersburg prosecutor Sergei Litvinenko, Baltinfo news agency reported.
Prior to admitting the offense, Ivanov and several other policemen from the police department that detained the teenager “actively resisted the investigation procedures, saying that they used physical force against the teenager only at the moment of detention,” the committee said.
The investigation initially stated that on Saturday night, several policemen witnessed a teenage boy and his partner-in-crime steal a purse from a local 44-year-old woman. The policemen managed to catch and detain one of the thieves, an eighth-grade student. The other boy escaped. The policemen originally said that they brought the detained teenager to the police station and obtained information from him. After that, the boy was suddenly taken ill, and the police called an ambulance for him, the committee said.
Russia’s children’s ombudsman Pavel Astakhov said the policemen first tried to convince the investigation that the boy had had an epileptic seizure and died as a result, Interfax reported.
Astakhov said via Twitter that the police department where the incident took place should be thoroughly investigated and if other similar cases were discovered, the head of the police department put on trial.
The prosecution has opened a criminal case into the matter under the part of the Russian Criminal Code on causing severe harm to someone’s health resulting in the death of the victim due to negligence.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: CEO Killed In Crash
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The general director of the Russkii Standart vodka plant, Sergei Andreyev, was killed in a car accident in St. Petersburg on Jan. 14.
Andreyev crashed into a truck while driving his Volkswagen Tuareg.
The truck had stopped on the shoulder of the city’s ring road with its emergency lights on, and Andreyev’s car ran into the back of it.
St. Petersburg investigators are currently investigating the details of the accident, Interfax reported.
Pulkovo Rates Third
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Pulkovo Airport had the third highest passenger volume in Russia last year, the airport’s press service said.
In 2011, Northern Capital Gateway — the consortium that runs Pulkovo Airport and the company’s partner — launched 14 new regular routes. Four new airlines joined Pulkovo’s market, and the number of flights to existing destinations increased, the press service said.
These factors helped the airport to increase its number of passengers to 9.6 million — 13.8 percent more than in 2010.
The passenger volume on international airlines totaled more than 4.1 million people — 12 percent more than in the previous year. The volume on domestic routes consisted of more than 4.4 million people, which is more than 10.5 percent more than for the same period in 2010. The passenger volume to CIS countries increased by 42.5 percent and consisted of more than one million people.
Meanwhile, passenger volumes between St. Petersburg and Moscow — one of the most popular routes — decreased by two percent, due to the launch of new routes from Pulkovo and the active development of high-speed train links between the two cities.
The highest number of passengers registered at Pulkovo in 2011 was on July 1. On that day, Pulkovo I and II served 43,667 people.
Panther Gets Mate
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A five-month-old female panther named Slava will be shown to visitors at the Leningrad Zoo.
The panther arrived in St. Petersburg from the neighboring town of Zelenogorsk. The Leningrad Zoo bought Slava to breed with a young male panther named Bonifatsii.
The female panther is “very active, playful and communicative,” the zoo’s press service said.
The zoo decided to name the animal after Zenit’s goalkeeper Vyacheslav Malafeyev (Slava is both short for Vyacheslav and also means “glory” in Russian) after the second match between FC Zenit and FC Porto. Malafeyev helped lead the St. Petersburg soccer team to the Champions League play-off for the first time in history.
Dubai Visa Made Easy
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A Dubai visa center has opened in St. Petersburg at the initiative of Emirates airline.
The center is designed to make it easier for Emirates passengers to apply for a visa to the United Arab Emirates.
Emirates passengers who book a hotel in Dubai as part of a program called “Stop in Dubai” will be eligible for a free 36-hour visa to the U.A.E.
The visa center’s services include help in obtaining visas to the U.A.E. for durations ranging from 36 hours to 90 days for Emirates customers traveling from St. Petersburg to Dubai or who are in Dubai as transit passengers.
The free 36-hour visas are available until this October.
The Dubai visa center is located at 90 Nevsky Prospekt.
New Bristol Hotel
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The new three-star Bristol Hotel opened in St. Petersburg on Ulitsa Rasstannaya last week.
The hotel has 120 rooms, a restaurant and a parking lot with constant surveillance, Interfax reported.
Bristol is the 102nd three-star hotel in St. Petersburg.
TITLE: Young Girl Dies After Dental Treatment
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A criminal investigation was opened last week into the death of a three-year-old girl who died after being put under general anesthetic at one of the city’s private dental clinics.
The three-year-old girl underwent dental treatment performed with the use of general anesthesia at one of the city’s private Scandinavia clinics. After the treatment, the girl’s health worsened and she was taken to a children’s hospital where she died on Jan. 11, Fontanka reported.
The girl died as the result of an allergic reaction to the anesthetic, Vladimir Zholobov, first deputy head of the city’s Health Committee, was quoted by Interfax as saying.
“There is a medicine that could have saved the child, but it isn’t approved for use in the Russian Federation. [By the time it was clear the girl was having a bad reaction to the anesthesia], there wasn’t enough time to bring the medicine that could save her from abroad on time,” Zholobov said.
The Health Committee has now prepared an appeal to the Ministry of Health to register the medicine, Dantrolene, in Russia, he said.
Dantrolene’s registration in Russia was not extended in 1997 for economic reasons, as it was very rarely used. Since then, it has not been permitted to bring the drug into the country, Fontanka reported.
TITLE: Neo-Nazis Attack Anti-Fascist Group
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Dozens of neo-Nazis attacked anti-fascist activists returning from a memorial event for slain anti-fascists Stanislav Markelov and Natalya Baburova, shooting them with pellet guns in Mayakovskaya metro on Thursday, witnesses and activists said.
The police and metro deny that any attack took place.
One witness, who asked for her name not to be printed, said she saw scores of men waiting on the train platform at Mayakovskaya metro station at around 9 p.m. Thursday.
“Suddenly they rushed forward in what looked like an attack,” she said.
There were no fewer than five gunshots and smoke, she added. Later she saw police officers leading two teenagers to the metro police office.
Stefaniya Kulayeva, program director of the Memorial Anti-Discrimination Center, which organized the memorial event, said threats had been made against participants on neo-Nazi blogs and forums.
“The information is scarce, but what can be said is that neo-Nazis did attack the anti-fascists, whom they had followed, as they returned from the event,” Kulayeva said.
She said that in view of possible attacks, the activists had walked together to Vasileostrovskaya metro after the rally, accompanied by a police vehicle.
“The police did protect us, but then we entered the metro and started to say goodbye to each other. I left to go to my metro line, and the other guys went in a group somewhere,” Kulayeva said.
“Then there was an attack and a brief clash, but nobody got hurt. There were no hospitalizations or reports to the police.”
Kulayeva added that attacks were carried out on anti-fascists on the same day in Moscow and Voronezh, as well as in Sevastopol and Simferopol in Ukraine.
A source within the local Turkish community said that two Turkish men were badly beaten by six men on Ulitsa Rubinshteina in downtown St. Petersburg in what also appeared to be a neo-Nazi attack on Thursday.
There is speculation that the two attacks are connected, because they happened at approximately the same time and Ulitsa Rubinshteina is within walking distance of Mayakovskaya metro station.
Police spokesman Vyacheslav Stepchenko denied Tuesday that any attack had taken place at Mayakovskaya metro station.
He did not confirm or deny the attack on the Turkish citizens, suggesting that an official inquiry should be sent to him in order to obtain this information.
St. Petersburg Metropolitan said that neither a fight nor shooting was recorded on surveillance cameras, although it admitted that there had been a “loud sound” at the station at 8:46 p.m., Rosbalt reported late Thursday.
TITLE: Honest Elections Marchers Pledge to Take to Nevsky
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The St. Petersburg organizers of the March for Honest Elections, a national rally calling for open and fair elections, insist they will march on Nevsky Prospekt, the city’s main street, despite this being banned by City Hall.
On Monday, City Hall refused to authorize the march, citing “repairs and construction” along the proposed route along Nevsky Prospekt and Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa.
The organizers plan to start their march at 2 p.m. on Feb. 4 — a month before the presidential elections — near Oktyabrsky Concert Hall on Ligovsky Prospekt and end with a stationary rally on St. Isaac’s Square, near the Legislative Assembly and the City Elections Committee.
The authorities suggested an alternative route, from Yubileiny Sports Palace on the Petrograd Side to Ploshchad Sakharova on Vasilyevsky Island. The organizers said the authorities’ aim was to make the protest less prominent.
“Perhaps we’ll suggest some other routes starting from Oktyabrsky Concert Hall, for example, from Oktyabrsky along Suvorovsky Prospekt to City Hall, but the starting point will in any case remain the same and we’re not going to concede,” The Other Russia party’s local leader Andrei Dmitriyev said Tuesday.
He dismissed the route suggested by City Hall as unacceptable.
“First, the gathering point near Oktyabrsky has already been advertised, we’ve been campaigning, people have signed up for it on Facebook and other social networks, so they will go there in any case and it’s unrealistic to change it,” Dmitriyev said.
“Secondly, this is our city, and it’s for us to decide where we gather and where we go, rather than officials from City Hall.”
The majority of the organizers stand behind the original route, the United Civil Front’s executive director Olga Kurnosova said Tuesday.
“There are repairs going on on Nevsky all the time,” Kurnosova said.
“What amuses me most is that it’s not dangerous for pedestrians and cars that pass by there daily, it’s dangerous exclusively for opposition activists to march with political slogans. It seems that political slogans make bricks fall harder from the roofs.”
The opposition argues that the presidential campaign is just as dishonest as the Dec. 4 State Duma elections, which were marred by multiple violations and evoked large-scale protests across Russia.
“The presidential campaign is a continuation of what was happening in December,” Kurnosova said.
“I don’t think anybody has any doubts that this presidential campaign is not free or fair — there was no free nomination of candidates.”
The St. Petersburg opposition split last week over the participation of nationalist organizations in the protest. Yabloko Democratic Party, the LGBT rights organization Coming Out (Vykhod) and liberal youth groups vowed to hold their own, separate march on Nevsky Prospekt the same day.
City Hall refused to authorize that march as well, offering the same alternative route as to the main group, but at a different time, 10 a.m.
Dmitriyev described the offer as “gross mockery.”
“There are signals coming from them that they might agree to form a joint organizational committee and go to Oktyabrsky as well; it would be a good answer to these guys from City Hall who act in such a manner,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Strategy 31 rally in defense of freedom of assembly held on the 31st day of the months that have 31 days will take place on Jan. 31, as usual, though if in a “lighter” form, according to Dmitriyev.
City Hall refused to authorize the rally, as it has since the campaign started in St. Petersburg on Jan. 31, 2010, but a number of activists will come to protest in a form that is currently being discussed, he said.
TITLE: Demolition Law Reviewed
AUTHOR: By Nadezhda Zaitseva
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: The St. Petersburg prosecutor’s office has investigated a law adopted in 2009 on the preservation and protection of cultural heritage objects in St. Petersburg. The law prohibits the demolition of historic buildings, except for cases in which their condition is so poor that they can’t be restored. The prosecutor’s office has also identified “corruption related factors,” according to a document submitted to the Legislative Assembly on Dec. 27 last year and published on the assembly’s web site at the end of last week.
According to the document, the lack of clear criteria for deciding whether or not a building can be restored allows officials to approve the demolition of buildings at their own discretion. St. Petersburg prosecutor Sergei Litvinenko has appealed to parliament to exclude from law the amendment that allows the demolition of buildings deemed beyond repair. The prosecutor wrote that this request is to be reviewed by members of the State Duma during their next session.
If the amendments are adopted, they will remove the only exception in the law that allows historical buildings to be demolished. Their reconstruction, however, is often impossible without actually demolishing the building first, said Alexander Rassulov, general director of the Rightmark Group law firm. Members of the Duma are not obliged to grant requests from the prosecutor’s office, and even if the amendments are approved, the governor nevertheless still has the final word, he added.
Lawyer Dmitry Nekrestyanov from Kachkin and Partners described the prosecutor’s request as “populist and difficult to achieve.”
“There’ll be no reconstruction work in the city center; we’re going to wait until these historical buildings fall apart on their own,” he said. A strict set of criteria needs to be put in place concerning the demolition of such buildings, he added.
The law under scrutiny from the prosecutor is indeed in need of alteration, said Yelena Bodrova, a representative of deputy governor Igor Metelsky. According to her, Metelsky has argued for the necessity of establishing criteria for defining when buildings can be classed as beyond repair, for example, when the building is more than 80 percent dilapidated. While the term has not yet been defined, expert conclusions can vary greatly, causing conflicts when it comes to town planning, she said.
Three major developers conducting projects in the city center declined to comment on the initiative of the prosecutor’s office without studying it first.
Reconstructing buildings without demolishing them first is possible using modern construction technology; it is simply a question of money, according to Alexei Yarema, head of ERA Group.
The cost of investment projects can multiply in the event of having to reconstruct existing buildings, which can result in the investment being frozen, said Vladimir Sergunin of Colliers International St. Petersburg.
TITLE: Election Webcam Installation Begins
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: VELIKY NOVGOROD — In this historic city that was once the cradle of Russian democracy, an unprecedented new campaign kicked off over the weekend to install web cameras in every polling station around the country in an effort to prevent voting fraud.
The ambitious program — costing billions of rubles — was ordered by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin following the largest public protests in years in reaction to widespread allegations of ballot box-stuffing and other voting irregularities in December’s State Duma elections.
Some experts say the move to live-stream activity around polling stations serves as a strong statement to bloggers and the Internet-savvy who played an important role in whipping up dissent after the disputed ballot preserved a narrow majority for Putin’s United Russia in the Duma.
Yet skeptics say the camera initiative will fall far short as there are other ways to cheat. Still, officials say the effort will make a huge difference in promoting fair elections.
“It will have a certain psychological effect for people who come to the polling station. They will feel they are not being cheated,” the city’s Mayor Yury Bobryshev told The St. Petersburg Times on Saturday.
In the Novgorod region, United Russia took a beating in the December elections — receiving just 35 percent of votes compared with 63 percent in 2007.
At a press event to show the cameras in action at a local children’s art center, Communications and Press Minister Igor Shchegolyov recalled ancient Novgorod’s development of the Veche public assembly — a democratic electoral process dating back to early medieval times.
“It is symbolic that this takes place in Novgorod, which we all associate with Veche democracy,” he said. “The ability to monitor elections is also Veche democracy.”
The ancient practice survived for nearly 300 years until the Republic of Novgorod came under the direct control of Ivan III in 1478.
Putin has ordered cameras to be installed in each of the country’s 93,000 polling stations, setting aside 15 billion rubles ($478 million) for the project. A web site set to be launched on Feb. 1 will allow anyone interested to watch voting at any polling station, Shchegolyov said.
The sum for the project is almost twice as much as the total amount spent by the elections commission on the State Duma elections. The installation of cameras is being carried out by Rostelecom, the country’s national telecommunications provider.
The scope of the plan has surprised even the head of the Central Elections Commission, Vladimir Churov, who told reporters early on that he believed that equipping just 10 percent of polling stations would be enough.
But given the limited time before the March 4 presidential election, officials are already saying they will not be able to achieve putting cameras in every polling place.
Novgorod Governor Sergei Mitin told The St. Petersburg Times on Saturday that roughly 16 percent of voting points in the Novgorod region — primarily in far-flung areas — will not have cameras, but it would only affect stations serving about 1,900 people.
Deputy Communications and Press Minister Ilya Massukh told reporters that cameras will also not be installed in about 1,000 polling stations located in prisons, hospitals and military units.
The camera network is built to allow 25 million views per day. Shchegolyov said presidential candidates and the media will all have access to the broadcast, which will also be archived after the election.
Some experts have expressed skepticism about the project, saying the installation of cameras cannot prevent elections commission members from changing results.
But Igor Borisov, a former Central Elections Commission member, told The Moscow Times that the installation of cameras would go a long way in answering the challenges of critics vocal in the blogosphere.
“Cameras could not cover the whole program, but the decision is really a challenge to the Internet community,” said Borisov, who heads the Russian Public Institute of Electoral Law.
Election officials in Novgorod said personnel responsible for counting votes would also be under the watch of cameras.
“We are now teaching them not to be afraid of cameras,” said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
A survey conducted by the FOM polling agency last week found that the majority of Russians are in favor of placing cameras in polling stations. According to the poll released last Thursday, 63 percent of Russians in 43 regions spoke positively about the measure.
But Yelena, a Novgorod resident and a state employee in her 40s, said she had doubts over the transparency of the election — even with the installation of cameras — as officials will continue to pressure government workers to vote as a bloc.
She said that during the Duma election campaign she was told by senior officials to vote for United Russia.
“Today, they are telling us that those cameras will watch over our voting, but I don’t believe it. I know that the cameras will not be inside the polling booths,” she said.
Another local resident Konstantin, 45, an employee in the utilities sector, was more dismissive.
“They will continue to commit violations until people stop them. The people above are not responding to people below,” he said, noting that he plans to vote for Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov for president.
TITLE: Russia Plans to Sell Combat Jets to Syria
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Isachenkov
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia signed a contract to sell combat jets to Syria, a newspaper reported Monday, in apparent support for President Bashar Assad and open defiance of international condemnation of his regime’s bloody crackdown.
The respected business daily Kommersant, citing an unidentified source close to Russia’s Rosoboronexport state arms trader, said the $550-million deal envisions the delivery of 36 Yak-130 aircraft. A spokesman for Rosoboronexport refused to comment on the report.
If confirmed, the deal would cement Russian opposition to international efforts to put pressure on Assad’s regime over its attempts to snuff out the country’s uprising. The U.N. says more than 5,400 people have died over 10 months.
The Yak-130 is a twin-engined combat trainer jet that can also be used to attack ground targets. The Russian air force has recently placed an order for 55 such jets.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said last week that Moscow doesn’t consider it necessary to offer an explanation or excuses over suspicions that a Russian ship had delivered munitions to Syria despite an EU arms embargo.
Russia was acting in full respect of international law and wouldn’t be guided by unilateral sanctions imposed by other nations, he said.
Lavrov also accused the West of turning a blind eye to attacks by opposition militants and supplies of weapons to the Syrian opposition from abroad and warned that Russia will block any attempt by the West to secure United Nations support for the use of force against Syria.
In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that if the report is accurate “it would be quite concerning” and would be raised by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, Jeffrey Feltman, who is currently in Moscow.
“Our firm belief is that any country that is still trading in weapons and armaments with Syria really needs to think twice because they are on the wrong side of history, and those weapons can be used against innocents and have been,” Nuland said.
Russia has been a strong ally of Syria since Soviet times when the country was led by the current president’s father Hafez Assad. It has supplied Syria with aircraft, missiles, tanks and other modern weapons.
Igor Korotchenko, head of the Center of Analysis of the Global Arms Trade, an independent think-tank, said the jet deal apparently reflected Moscow’s belief that Assad would stay at the helm.
“With this contract, Russia is expressing confidence that President Assad would manage to retain control of the situation, because such deals aren’t signed with a government whose hold on power raises doubts,” Korotchenko was quoted by RIA Novosti news agency as saying. “It’s another gesture by Moscow underlining its confidence that Damascus will remain its strategic partner and ally in the Middle East.”
Another Moscow-based military analyst, Ruslan Pukhov, said, however, that Russia might be too optimistic about Assad’s prospects.
“This contract carries a very high degree of risk,” Pukhov told Kommersant. “Assad’s regime may fall and that would lead to financial losses for Russia and also hurt its image.”
“Armed elements shooting at government soldiers is materially different from government representatives shooting deliberately at unarmed civilians,” Carroll Bogert, the group’s deputy executive director, said at a news conference in Moscow.
“The continued support of this regime is immoral and not permissible,” Bogert said. “The West has already made serious mistakes with the support of Arab regimes. Russia’s repetition of those mistakes will lead to tragic consequences.”
Sofia Javed in Moscow and Matthew Pennington in Washington contributed to this report.
TITLE: PM Putin Calls Nationalism a Danger to the State
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin lashed out Monday at nationalists who call for cutting off government funding to the North Caucasus as well as those who want to create regional separatist parties, saying their positions could lead to the collapse of Russia.
While arguing for a return to the Soviet notion of “people’s friendship,” Putin also called for tougher rules on internal migration as part of his position on nationalist and ethnic problems as presented in an article published on both his web site and in the liberal-leaning Nezavisimaya Gazeta.
Listing the nationalist riots at Manezh Square in 2010 alongside other ethnic conflict zones around the country, Putin said the underlying problem for everyone remains “directly linked” to “unresolved social and economic problems, ineffective governance, corruption and multiethnic tension.”
“Nationalism and religious intolerance are becoming a base for radical groups and movements,” he said.
The article is the second in a series prepared by Putin as part of his presidential campaign, but some analysts said his arguments appear contradictory alongside other parts of his agenda.
Putin has long tread warily around the issue of nationalism — an area that remains one of the most polarizing in Russia today. A 2011 Levada Center poll found that 43 percent of Russians support the notion of “Russia for Russians” and that a xenophobic sentiment is on the rise.
Opposition groups from both the left and right have blamed Putin’s government for allowing uncontrolled migration from the republics of the Northern Caucasus and countries in Central Asia.
In the article, Putin suggested that migrants wanting to work in Russia should have to pass exams on Russian language and culture. He also suggested harsher punishments for internal migrants who commit crimes in other parts of the country.
But independent political expert Stanislav Belkovsky said such a hardening of rules only for internal migrants who “show disrespect toward traditions of ethnic Russians” couldn’t possibly be legal.
“I think it is unconstitutional to make regulations regarding one particular group,” he said. “It looks like this text was written by people with a particular point of view.”
Leading Russian migration specialist Vladimir Mukomel said the suggested policy harkened back to tsarist-era legislation that prohibited Russian Jews from settling in large cities.
“Is this a new policy for settlement?” he wondered.
He also said the article fails to distinguish between migrant laborers who only desire to work and those migrants seeking to integrate into society.
In his article, Putin calls for the reopening of a state ministry regulating national ethnic policy, a body that Mukomel points out was closed in 2001 under Putin’s earlier tenure as president.
Putin also raised a red flag on the matter of regional separatism. Having once called the collapse of the Soviet Union the “biggest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, Putin said Russia might follow suit if separatism is allowed to take root.
Putin earlier threw his support behind liberalizing the registration process for political parties, but said allowing regional or nationalist parties based on the notion of separatism would set a dangerous precedent.
“Those who would try to rely upon nationalists, separatists or similar forces or circles … should be immediately excluded from the election process, using democratic and legal procedures,” Putin wrote.
Some experts saw the remark as a reference to Boris Yeltsin who is blamed by opponents for allowing ethnic republics such as Tatarstan and Bashkortostan to gain relative independence from Moscow.
During the 1990s, Sverdlovsk’s powerful Governor Eduard Rossel also threatened to create a Urals republic.
Putin has stated previously that he saw the notion of’ “Soviet nationality” and the uniting of different republics under one umbrella as a positive model for modern Russia.
In 2010, he even publicly clashed with President Dmitry Medvedev who said the peaceful coexistence during Soviet times was only maintained through “tough” methods.
But opposition leader and political columnist Mark Feigin said the Soviet model could not be repeated in modern Russia, as the core population is now ethnically Russian, unlike in Soviet times.
“Putin is trying to create U.S.S.R. 2.0, which will have a place for all the nationalities, but Russia is no longer an empire,” Feigin said.
Putin’s own record on national policy is somewhat mixed. While he has always distanced himself from hard-line groups, he once called himself and Medvedev, “nationalists in a good sense of the word.”
During a recent conversation with a group of Russian editors, Putin criticized writer Boris Akunin — pen name of Georgian-born author Georgy Chkhartishvili — and accused him of opposing the Russian-Georgian war because of his ethnic roots.
Akunin has played a vocal role in the recent wave of protests spurred by allegations of fraud in December’s State Duma vote. A year before the rallies, Russian authorities faced demonstrations by thousands of nationalists and football fans who rallied on Manezh Square after police released several North Caucasus nationals suspected of killing an ethnic Russian fan.
Opponents of various political stripes have long expressed outrage at the problems in the Northern Caucasus, where Kremlin-supported authorities are viewed by many as corrupt.
Ramzan Kadyrov, president of Chechnya and a former warlord accused of human rights violations, has lavishly rebuilt the once war-ravaged republic using large subsidies from Moscow, which many critics say have been largely wasted.
The Caucasus issue, once a banner of hard-line anti-immigrant groups has recently been embraced by other Putin critics, such as prominent opposition politician Alexei Navalny, who coined the phrase “Stop feeding the Caucasus” and has joined in several nationalist rallies.
While not mentioning Navalny by name, Putin wrote in his article that such calls might lead other regions to repeat similar slogans like, “Stop feeding Siberia, the Far East, or the Moscow region.”
“Those kind of slogans were used by those who led the Soviet Union toward collapse,” Putin said.
Belkovsky said Putin was guilty of “contradicting” himself with such a position.
“On one side he says he is against the slogan “Stop feeding the Caucasus,” but on the other hand he is supporting Kadyrov,” he said.
But Putin’s proposals received a warm response from Vsevolod Chaplin, senior cleric of the Russian Orthodox Church, who called them “bright.”
“I think that those measures would be supported by an absolute majority of people and in the near future, they will become legal statutes,” Chaplin told Interfax on Monday.
Chaplin’s comments were in response to a statement from Duma speaker Sergei Naryshkin who said Monday that some of Putin’s proposals will be turned into laws, RIA-Novosti reported.
TITLE: Prokhorov’s Platform Courts Protesters
AUTHOR: By Jonathan Earle
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Billionaire and presidential hopeful Mikhail Prokhorov — who has presented himself as the candidate for the urban middle class — has unveiled a 15-page presidential platform that closely reflects the demands made by protesters at two massive opposition rallies last month.
Friday’s platform, which arrives a month after the greenhorn politician and former metals magnate announced his candidacy, could lure voters away from other liberal candidates, but it is unlikely to dispel suspicions about the independence of the Kremlin-linked businessman, whom the latest polls show lagging far behind the favorite, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Prokhorov’s manifesto, titled “Present and Future,” begins by saying, “The well-being of the individual has never been the Russian government’s priority,” and consists of a series of comparisons between Prokhorov’s policies and those he attributes to Prime Minister Putin.
As part of his platform, Prokhorov calls for new State Duma elections, a return to four-year presidential terms, a professional army by 2015, a visa-free regime for OSCE citizens, the privatization of state-owned companies and a 30 percent cut in the number of state employees by 2014.
Prokhorov also promises to free all economic “criminals” from prison, a nod to billionaire and former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev, who are considered political prisoners by opposition-minded voters.
Prokhorov and Yabloko founder Grigory Yavlinsky are the only presidential candidates to fully embrace the December protests, which arose amid allegations of widespread fraud during Dec. 4 State Duma elections.
Communist leader and presidential candidate Gennady Zyuganov has backed many of the protesters’ demands, and scores of his supporters rallied on Manezh Square on Saturday to protest the elections and commemorate the 88th anniversary of Vladimir Lenin’s death.
A Jan. 14 to 15 survey released by the state-run VsTIOM pollster showed Prokhorov and other challengers lagging far behind Putin in the race for the Kremlin.
Forty-five percent of respondents said they would vote for Putin on March 4, compared to 11 percent for Zyuganov and 10 percent for Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party. Prokhorov and A Just Russia founder Sergei Mironov scored just 3 percent, and Yavlinsky won the support of only 1 percent of respondents.
Prokhorov could get 15 percent of the vote if he can successfully appeal to traditional voters disillusioned by Yavlinsky, as well as voters looking for a miracle, said Alexei Makarkin, an analyst with the Center for Political Technologies, RBC reported Friday. RBC is controlled by Prokhorov.
TITLE: Why Putin Is Mad at Me
AUTHOR: By Alexander Golts
TEXT: Prime Minister Vladimir Putin got very angry last Wednesday when he met with the editors-in-chief of Russia’s top media outlets. He complained to Ekho Moskvy editor-in-chief Alexei Venediktov about the “complete rubbish” that he heard from two defense analysts on a recent program on the radio station. In addition, Putin claimed that the analysts were promoting the interests of a foreign power — implying the United States. I regret to say that the defense analysts who riled Putin so much were Alexander Konovalov and yours truly.
Putin began by saying that if the United States deploys radar installations for a missile defense system in Georgia, Russia might be forced to aim some of its missiles at Tbilisi. The problem with that argument is that Washington has no plans to deploy any radar facilities in Georgia. True, four Republican U.S. Senators proposed this idea last year, but it was little more than a propaganda stunt. No one in the White House — and few in Congress — took the proposal seriously, but the mere idea was grist for Putin’s mill in his attempt to produce more anti-U.S. phobia within Russia.
Putin was particularly angry over Konovalov’s suggestion that the location of U.S. missile defense installations should not concern Russia’s political and military leadership because they pose little, if any, threat to the country’s nuclear deterrence capabilities.
One day after Putin’s meeting with journalists, Dmitry Rogozin, Putin’s newly appointed deputy prime minister in charge of the defense industry, rushed to Putin’s defense in an interview, also on Ekho Moskvy. Rogozin explained that the insidious Westerners are hoping to place their missile defense installations closer to Russia’s strategic missiles to intercept them during their initial boost phase.
There are several problems with Rogozin’s argument. First, the U.S. Standard Missile 3 interceptors — or SM-3, which the administration of President Barack Obama plans to deploy in Romania and Poland — have ranges too short to reach Russia’s intercontinental ballistic missiles at their start position, much less in flight. This restriction applies to advanced versions of the SM-3 interceptor that might appear in 2018 or 2020. Thus, Russia’s nuclear deterrence would not be threatened either now or later.
Second, the United States recognized that trying to intercept an intercontinental ballistic missile during its boost stage would be futile because of the extremely narrow window of opportunity — just a few seconds. There is simply not enough time for a missile defense system to react to a missile launch. Thus, it is no surprise that the United States officially abandoned this strategy in 2009. Instead, the Pentagon stated that the most effective point to intercept a missile is during the intermediate phase.
In his interview, Rogozin describes a scenario in which the United States could deliver a massive, crippling nuclear missile strike against Russia, presumably hitting all of Russia’s land-based missiles at once — and hitting them so quickly that Moscow would have no time to respond with a land-based retaliatory strike. But, Rogozin argues, since the United States may not be able to hit every sea-based nuclear missile in its initial strike, Washington needs a small missile defense system of 30 or so interceptors to strike the two or three missiles Russia might still be able to launch in retaliation from one of its submarines.
At the same time that Rogozin and others describe this apocalyptic nuclear scenario, they are indignant that the United States won’t share every single technical detail about its missile defense system. Then, they claim that Washington not only has no interest in building a strategic partnership but is actually plotting to weaken Russia’s nuclear deterrence capabilities.
The Kremlin’s stance is schizophrenic. On the one hand, it proposes developing a joint missile defense system with the United States as a key step to boost the “reset,” while at the same time it suggests that the United States is developing its own missile defense system to allow it to launch a massive first strike and protect itself against a retaliatory strike.
It is as if Rogozin, Putin and many other top officials are living in the early 1980s, when the Kremlin truly believed that the United States might deliver a “decapitating” nuclear first strike, undermining the mutually assured destruction theory. What they conveniently ignore, however, is the fact that Russia has an effective early-warning system that can detect a massive missile launch from the United States about 20 or 30 minutes before they would hit their targets. This is more than enough time for Russia’s nuclear arsenal, consisting of about 500 delivery vehicles and 1,500 nuclear warheads, to respond. Moscow would be able to launch a counterstrike in retaliation within minutes after a U.S. first strike is detected in flight. This serves as the basis of nuclear deterrence and mutually assured destruction. Because the United States understands that a massive U.S. nuclear first strike would be met with a massive retaliatory strike before its missiles could reach Russian targets, this is a priori a guarantee against a U.S. nuclear first strike.
The irrationality of Rogozin’s and Putin’s arguments proves that Russia’s hysteria over U.S. missile defense has no relationship whatsoever to the country’s national security. My suspicion is that the real reason behind the Kremlin’s obsession with missile defense is to deflect attention away from any discussion about the deterioration of democracy in Russia, whether it be censorship of television, corruption among top officials or election fraud. This is probably the real reason Putin lost his temper.
Alexander Golts is deputy editor of the online newspaper Yezhednevny Zhurnal.
TITLE: regional dimensions: Losing Confidence in the Direct Election Bill
AUTHOR: By Nikolai Petrov
TEXT: The Kremlin is trying to present President Dmitry Medvedev’s new bill as a way of bringing back direct gubernatorial elections, but it is more of a Trojan Horse than a political reform.
According to the bill’s language, regional heads will be “vested with authority.” Previously, “vested with authority” was a euphemism for the president appointing them directly, with regional assembly deputies rubber-stamping his choice. Otherwise, they would run the risk of seeing their parliament dissolved by the president if they balked. Now, the phrase “vested with authority” is meant to mean “elected by the people.” But this is not a return to the previous system of direct gubernatorial elections that was in place before then President Vladimir Putin cancelled them following the Beslan school terrorist attack in 2004.
Medvedev’s bill aims to free the Kremlin of responsibility for governors that the people supposedly elected, while preserving the same control it always had over gubernatorial appointments. Under the new rules, parties would have the right to put forward a gubernatorial candidate of their choice but only in “consultation” with the president. Translated into Kremlin lexicon, “consultation with the president” essentially means “with the president’s approval.” In this way, the Kremlin very much retains the “filter” that it claims it had removed.
In addition, the bill allows the president to fire a governor who was elected by the people if the president has “lost confidence” in him based on just allegations of corruption or a conflict of interest. No court decision is required. Thus, the mere threat of being accused of corruption or a conflict of interest is enough to keep a governor loyal to the Kremlin.
In other words, it is only important if the president loses confidence in a governor. Apparently, the confidence of the governor’s electorate — the very people who voted for him and entrusted him with authority — matters little.
As simple as it is for the Kremlin to remove undesirable governors, Russian voters have no mechanism to do the same thing. To strip a governor of his post, voters would have to first obtain a court decision and then win an absolute majority among all registered voters, which is a near impossibility.
The main problem with Medvedev’s bill is that it doesn’t change the most important part of the old system, in which governors were appointed by the Kremlin. Governors still remain beholden to the president, not the people. Given a choice of loyalties, a governor will always throw in his lot with the president, who can strip him of power overnight by one stroke of his pen.
It is already clear that the Kremlin has no interest in improving the quality of governors. Take, for example, the unpopular Volgograd Governor Anatoly Brovko, who “voluntarily” stepped down just one day after Medvedev submitted his bill concerning gubernatorial elections. In his place, the president appointed someone even worse — the scandal-plagued former Astrakhan Mayor Sergei Bozhenov. This decision has already provoked public protests. Moreover, Medvedev’s bill specifically states that any governor who is appointed will enjoy diplomatic immunity for one full year.
As long as the dual Kremlin filters remain in the bill — de facto requiring gubernatorial candidates and their parties to “consult” with the president and giving the president the right to fire governors basically at will — the new law will be meaningless.
Nikolai Petrov is a scholar in residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center.
TITLE: CHERNOV’S CHOICE
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: This week’s music sensation has been mixed with politics, namely the protest mood on rise in Russia since the flawed State Duma elections in December.
A new YouTube video made by anarcho-feminist punk band Pussy Riot shows eight women with their faces concealed by colored balaclavas on the strictly guarded Red Square pumping out a punk song called “Putin Zassal.”
During the filmed performance, which took place on Friday, they use a flag with a feminist symbol and a flare.
The title was mistranslated by The Daily Telegraph as “Putin Pissed Himself,” though in reality it means “Putin Got Scared.” The song does, however, use mildly obscene language.
The video shows agitated police officers apparently at a loss as to what to do about the impromptu concert. Inevitably, the performance, which took place on Red Square’s Lobnoye Mesto — a 13-meter-long stone platform previously used for announcing the tsar’s ukases — resulted in arrests, with the whole band being detained by the Federal Protective Service (FSO), the body in charge of protecting high-ranking state officials.
“The corrupt oligarchic regime is starting to bulge at the seams and Putin is scared to death, because he’s afraid above all of losing his power,” the band wrote on its blog on Livejournal.com.
“In the song ‘Putin Got Scared,’ we offer a scenario of rebellion in Russia; for this end Russians are urged to occupy key sites of the country and bring about political change.
“Be braver than the scared Putin and his security services. In this volatile and exciting time, in which the political regime in Russia has stumbled and The Protester was announced as the face of the past year, anarchists, feminists and LGBT activists, as well as liberals, Madonna and child and All Saints have all united in collective action.”
The police qualified the performance as an “attempt to hold an unsanctioned rally.”
The band, which does not disclose the names (or faces) of its members, does not perform at concert halls or in clubs.
Its unsanctioned performances have so far been held on the roof of a trolleybus, in the metro and next to a detention center in which Moscow protesters such as anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, sentenced to 15 days in prison for taking part in unauthorized rallies against electoral fraud, were being held.
A new song is written for each performance. It’s been reported that the band has four songs so far.
Pussy Riot’s work is reminiscent of The Sex Pistols’ notorious boat party, or, more recently, “Dick Up Your Arse,” Voina art group’s music performance in a Moscow courtroom in 2009.
The general tendency is refreshing. Pussy Riot shows the direction in which rock and roll should develop to stop stagnation and regain relevance.
TITLE: Silver Age spirit
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Kravtsova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: This year, the city’s legendary Stray Dog cafe, which endeavors to maintain the spirit and history of the Silver Age within its walls, celebrates its centenary. While the cafe may have changed drastically during its 100-year history, St. Petersburg’s artistic intelligentsia continues to cherish traditions and memories from time spent at the cafe.
An inexplicable confluence of circumstances, fateful clashes and intertwining of lives — often bordering on the fantastical — characterize the short but fruitful cultural period at the beginning of the 20th century known as the Silver Age. The history of the Stray Dog cafe, which became a focal point for the figures and events of the Silver Age, resembles a dramatic legend.
Opened at the end of 1911 and beginning of 1912 by the entrepreneur Boris Pronin with the active participation of the prominent writer Alexei Tolstoy, the Stray Dog cafe became Russia’s first literary and artistic night-cellar. Tolstoy was one of the young artists looking for a cultural refuge in the center of St. Petersburg. Here the first legend was born: Having spent some time searching for such a place, Tolstoy is said to have exclaimed, “So why are we running around like stray dogs?”
The cafe’s location — in a cellar that was not the easiest place to enter on Mikhailovskaya Ploshchad (now Ploshchad Iskusstv) near the imperial Mikhailovsky Theater — was deemed ideal as it was hidden from those not looking for it.
“In spite of this legend, the name of the cafe is associated not with the search for a place, but with the image of a homeless and unsettled artist, who could find refuge in this cellar, warm up by the fireplace and find himself in a friendly group,” said Yevgeniya Aristova, the current director of the Stray Dog cafe.
“The main idea of the cafe was to establish a place where young creative people, maybe not always well known, could get together, talk to each other and become inspired to create something.”
As it turned out, the Stray Dog attracted those who would eventually become a major part of the history of the Silver Age, leaving a deep imprint on world culture.
The poet Anna Akhmatova depicted the Stray Dog era through a large part of her creative works. Futurist writer Vladimir Mayakovsky started his creative path at the Stray Dog, where he read his poetry in public for the first time. For him, time spent at the cafe became a period of searching for new rhythms and dynamics. For Akhmatova’s friend and fellow poet Osip Mandelstam, the Stray Dog was associated with the classical times of European culture. Composer Arthur Lourié worked on and presented new musical compositions here, while painters including Sergei Sudeikin, Nikolai Sapunov and Nikolai Kulbin searched for new ways to represent human beings. Akhmatova’s husband, the Acmeist poet Nikolai Gumilyov, was a regular guest at the cafe, as were the writer Velimir Khlebnikov and theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold.
“They were people who carried with them a new creative consciousness, new lifestyle, self-perception as people of a new age, overcoming 19th-century limitations and prohibitions,” said Nina Popova, director of the city’s Anna Akhmatova museum.
In its original form, the Stray Dog cafe existed for just three-and-a-half years — until 1915 — when World War I and the revolutionary atmosphere took Stray Dog regulars — mainly preoccupied by their creativity — by surprise. But war was not the only reason the cafe closed. “The Stray Dog began to turn into a dump, as we would say today, into a typical trashy place where affairs and love triangles began,” said Popova. Mayakovsky poured fuel on the flames with his controversial poem “You!” in which he accused the cafe’s regulars of sitting comfortably in a bar while others fought in the war.
“There was a large scandal after this,” said Aristova. “Many women passed out [after he read the poem at the cafe]. The next morning, all of the papers wrote about the incident, which attracted the attention of the police and eventually led to the closing of the cafe after alcohol was found there, despite a dry law being in place,” she added.
During both world wars, the Stray Dog cellar was used as a bomb shelter. In August 1941, Akhmatova sought refuge in the nearest bomb shelter during an air raid. When she raised her head and saw the ceiling of the bomb shelter, she realized that it was the ceiling painted all those years ago by Sudeikin.
“The Stray Dog existed in their lives, but like some kind of retaliation,” said Popova. “I don’t feel that the Stray Dog period was a period that gave them a lot, it’s more likely that it took something from them. But what it definitely gave them was the impetus to reflect on what the 20th century was for people of their generation.”
“In Akhmatova’s imagination, the image of a cellar appears, not a real cellar, but it became her own perception of space and reality that could be traced in all her poetry,” Popova said. “But she — like all its visitors — never forgot about the Stray Dog, and in 1940 she wrote the poem ‘Mayakovsky in 1913’ about Mayakovsky’s creative activity during the Stray Dog period and about how Mayakovsky never fully fit in with the cafe’s atmosphere.”
The idea of resurrecting the Stray Dog cafe was carried out by Vladimir Sklyarsky, who began the project at the end of the Perestroika era. After many years lying derelict, the once famous cafe had become nothing more than an ordinary basement. It took years to reconstruct the cafe with the help of photographs. After 12 years of repairs, the cafe finally reopened in 2001. Sklyarsky died just a year before the Stray Dog reached its 100th birthday.
“We restored the chandelier,” said Aristova. “The ceiling was covered in plaster — now just a piece of plaster remains, we keep it as a museum piece, but the historic brickwork is original, and remembers those who have been here through its energy,” she added.
Today, the Stray Dog for the most part represents a memorial to its Silver Age guests, but it still hosts literary evenings and exhibitions, and preserves a glorious tradition of the past — showcasing new talent. The Comic Trust theater, theater director Andrei Moguchy and local cabaret rock group Billy’s Band all took their first steps in the Stray Dog.
“Historically and stylistically it’s an absolutely different place,” said Popova. “But it’s important that the name ‘Stray Dog’ is being heard again.
“To come here, to touch these walls, it’s a wonderful feeling.”
TITLE: Breaking stereotypes
AUTHOR: By Kristina Alexandrova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The idea of meeting Billy Novik — frontman of the local jazz quartet Billy’s Band and father of “alco-jazz” — in an ordinary café may seem strange to some. After all, the band’s public image has been determined by songs like “Let’s Drink Some Wine” and “200 Cubic Milliliters of Agdam” (Agdam was the producer of a well known fortified wine in Soviet times). Battling stereotypes is not a priority for Novik, according to the musician, but during a concert this weekend at which the quartet will be accompanied by piano and drums, fans will see a different side to the band.
“I want to transform the stereotypes about me into some kind of artistic performance, because I want audiences to realize that our lyrics are the versification of life, of what is going on around us,” says Novik.
“Some people still think that I hang around pubs all day, but it’s not true. I admit that I used to live like that; therefore there are a lot of texts about alcohol in our music. But all my songs have to be based on my own experience. I can’t write about things I haven’t been through,” he explains.
“Unfortunately, every song is behind schedule. I mean, it may take a text almost five years to mature. Most of our songs are about past events, therefore after some time, there will be songs that recreate the present.”
Novik confesses to feeling a responsibility for what he recounts from the stage, because every year more and more teenagers visit Billy’s Band concerts.
“Once during a performance in Novosibirsk, I met a guy who said that our music had made him be more careful with alcohol. I was really pleased,” he recalls.
Novik can rarely be found in pubs nowadays, though he has a theory on the importance of bars and pubs in combating alcoholism. “It may seem strange, but in my opinion, the bar is an institution that can help alcohol-addicted people to overcome the habit,” he says. “In Russia, heavy drinking at home is the first stage of alcoholism. It’s important to ban yourself from drinking at home, and better to go to a bar.”
Lest such words be mistaken for the propaganda of alcohol, it is worth noting that Novik himself has been teetotal since 2009. “I don’t understand artists who need to fall into oblivion to create something,” he says.
Aside from alcohol, a dominating theme of Billy’s Band lyrics is love, though the subject is rarely presented in a straightforward way. This, according to the band’s charismatic frontman, is not a bad thing.
“At school we were all made to read classical literature, though most of the stories were a bit beyond us, and only with the passing of time did we begin to understand the ideas.”
“If we were asked to choose any one of our songs for inclusion in a high school textbook for 15-16-year-olds, I think it would be “Let’s Sleep It Off In Coffins,” Novik adds.
Today, the musician spends a lot of time with his son, and says he is inspired by staying in at home. “If only I were able to stay in for a month, I would be really happy!” he laughs.
Like many musicians, Novik also follows the news.
“I do follow political news, and I think it was the right decision to protest against the falsification of election results,” he says.
When he goes out, Novik is immediately recognized due to the distinctive pork pie hats, bought at flea markets, that he always wears. “It happens in St. Petersburg, but in other cities people confuse me with musicians from other bands — Uma2rman or Tiger Lillies — and ask for my autograph. And I never refuse, because I don’t like to disappoint people,” he says.
Last year, the singer did manage to partially shed some stereotypes, trying new roles as the presenter of a documentary about Rasputin and as an actor. His efforts were not in vain — Novik was awarded the city’s Golden Floodlight theater prize for his debut as the fool in “King Lear.”
“It surpassed all my expectations, though I made painstaking preparations for my role,” he says. “I watched all the fools in previous adaptations, and tried to take the best from them.”
Good luck and success appear to follow Novik. But he doesn’t stop dreaming up new ideas. “I would like to do a duet with a diva who has mastered different singing techniques,” he says. “I think [folk-rock singer] Pelageya is a good choice, because she has a great vocal range. I don’t really like folk music, but it would be easy for her to learn to sing jazz. It would also be good to experiment with a military orchestra.”
Sunday’s concert at Jagger isn’t an experiment on that level, but it is rare that fans have the chance to see performance by Billy’s Jazz Sextet instead of the usual quartet. “We realize that some fans will be seeing us for the first time, so at every concert we want to show our best,” says Novik.
Novik says that it is important to be able to dream, and indeed, it seems his main dream has already come true, judging by the widespread comparison that has been made for years between the musician and his American idol. For Novik makes no secret of his original dream: “I always wanted to become a Russian Tom Waits.”
Billy’s Jazz Sextet performs at 8.30 p.m. on Sunday, Jan. 29 at Jagger club,
2 Ploshchad Konstitutsii. Tel. 923 1292. M. Moskovskaya, Leninsky Prospekt.
TITLE: Art for a wintry day
AUTHOR: By Tatyana Sochiva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: As the mercury finally plummets to more usual St. Petersburg winter temperatures, the city’s museums and galleries have come up with plenty of indoor entertainment.
Back at the end of last year, the city’s Artillery Museum unveiled an exhibition titled “Weapons of the East in the 16th to 19th Centuries.”
Despite the fact that the museum is home to the largest collection in Russia of eastern weapons from the 18th century, the last time a similar exhibition was held — devoted to the traditional weapons of Turkey, Iran, the Caucasus, China and Japan — was in the 1930s, some 70 years ago.
The current exhibit consists of the most interesting and typical examples of weapons, firearms and armor used in Eastern countries. Most of the objects in the exhibition are on display for the first time. The collection details many different cultural aspects of North Africa, Turkey, the Balkans, Iran, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Afghanistan, India, Nepal, Indonesia, China, Tibet and Japan.
While some may already have an idea of the shape of a saber blade, dagger, or samurai sword, the Artillery Museum offers visitors the opportunity to learn far more. The items on show include a kris, famous for its distinctive wavy blade, a zulfiqar, a sword with a blade that splits into two parts that was reportedly once given by the Prophet Muhammad to the Islamic leader Ali, and a sword with large teeth on the blade, used more to scare the enemy than to kill them.
The exhibit has also brought together weapons used as ritual or ceremonial objects and as indicators of high social status. A large number of showpieces belonged to royal families or were created by renowned craftsmen.
The weapons are decorated with silver, turquoise, and coral and are impressive not only for their deadly power, but also for their beautiful, complex and exotic patterns. The exhibition is therefore not only historically informative, but also highlights the craftsmanship put into each piece.
Over on the other side of the Neva is a photography exhibit that offers just as much insight into other lands. “One Hundred Wonders of the World” showcases National Geographic USA’s Gold Collection: Unusual, exotic and consistently spectacular images from all over the planet. One hundred pictures from the 35,000 photos included in the magazine’s gold collection were selected to be part of the exhibit at the Perinnie Ryadi art center, which last year hosted a National Geographic photography exhibition entitled “The Wildlife of Botswana.”
The organizers’ main goal is to capture all of the Earth’s amazing phenomena, encompassing people and animals, the underwater and terrestrial world, and natural and urban landscapes. These elements are often photographed together, creating a harmonious whole. The exhibit strives to show that mankind and its creations exist as an integral part of nature.
The photos selected were judged by organizers to be the most beautiful and the ones that depict the most exciting stories.
The Sigmund Freud Museum of Dreams, in the meantime, is hosting a photo exhibit that is in sharp contrast to that above in terms of its artistic features and concept. Yelena Elbe’s fourth exhibit to be held at the Freud museum is entitled “Ghosts” and focuses on exploring memory, personal feelings and loss through photo.
“With pain come ghosts. Ghosts are not only the people that we lost; they are also lost feelings, pain from our childhood that returns to us when we are adults,” said Yekaterina Sintsova, the exhibit’s curator.
The photographer, who appears in her own works, believes that we create ghosts through sorrow.
Elbe does not use Photoshop or any other photography programs, and all of the colors captured in the pictures are natural. She often uses mirrors for layering and transparency effects.
“I am interested in reflections, because self-awareness begins from the moment we look at ourselves,” said Elbe. “My work is a kind of therapy. As for the ghosts, it looks like they were circling around me and I could not help but take photos of them,” she added.
Elbe was born in St. Petersburg, but has exhibited her work in the U.S. and Europe. In Russia, her work can also be seen at St. Petersburg’s Marina Gisich gallery, as well as at the Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art in Moscow.
“Weapons of the East in the 16th to 19th Centuries” runs through Oct. 30 at the Artillery Museum, 7 Alexandrovsky Park. Tel. 232 0296. M. Gorkovskaya.
“One Hundred Wonders of the World from National Geographic USA’s Gold Collection” runs through Feb. 26 at Perinnie Ryadi art center, 4 Dumskaya Ulitsa. Tel. 8 904 601 0000. M. Gostiny Dvor / Nevsky Prospekt.
“Ghosts” runs through Feb. 17 at the Sigmund Freud Museum of Dreams, 18a Bolshoi Prospekt, Petrograd Side. Tel. 456 2290. M. Sportivnaya.
TITLE: THE DISH: FARTUK
AUTHOR: By Chris Gordon
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Home on the range
In the world of pain that frequently masquerades as dining out in St. Peterburg, it’s the little things that can often make a disproportionately huge difference. A spontaneous offer of a wine tasting to help make choosing the right bottle easier, friendly advice on which dishes the server recommends, or something as simple as an unaffected smile are all things that are typical of standard service elsewhere, but can never be taken for granted in Russia.
Because it provides these delights and more, Fartuk, which translates as apron, deserves to be celebrated for its homely hospitality. That the kitchen is often merely passable is less of a problem than it might be elsewhere, since the restaurant’s whole concept hinges on the idea that one is being looked after by friends. And it’s a churlish houseguest indeed that picks apart the food on their plate with a disapproving sniff. That said, paying customers might reasonably expect a bit more.
Decorated in a style that is instantly familiar, the rustically tiled floors and cozy banquettes bring to mind any number of favorite neighborhood haunts in New York, London or Paris. A central island surrounded by high stools that accommodates single diners, a blackboard chalked with daily specials and trendy music played at thoughtfully low volumes all lend a buzzy and sophisticated vibe to the place while encouraging conversation.
The changing menu is refreshingly straightforward and lists reasonably priced continental classics alongside Russian favorites — some with a few twists — while the wine list offers an affordable, well-chosen selection from around the world.
Choosing to follow the server’s recommendations turned out to be the best option. All the suggested dishes were spot on, while other choices disappointed in either execution or flavor — sometimes both. The first suggestion was the chef’s mushroom cappuccino (160 rubles, $5), an unctuous, dun-colored pool of woodsy muskiness topped with a layer of creamy foam. While lusciously rich, it missed a logical grating of nutmeg that would have taken the flavor profile from something respectably homely and filling to another level altogether.
A salmon carpaccio (250 rubles, $8) was a tangle of pale pink slices of fish tumbled over a heap of arugula. Liberally strewn with capers, it was pleasantly astringent and bright but served several degrees too cold. Feeling as if it had just been pulled from the refrigerator, the temperature closed down the delicate oiliness of the fish, which was nonetheless impeccably fresh.
Gratifyingly, a modest steak (360 rubles, $12) was an unexpected bright spot. Seldom does meat ordered rare arrive at the table as anything other than well done in most Russian restaurants. But when the dish appeared, it was perfectly cooked and simply seasoned with a crunch of freshly ground black pepper and chunks of sea salt. Unfortunately, the Boeuf Bourguignon (310 rubles, $10), while extraordinarily tender, suffered from a lack of sauce and so was much too dry to offer any real pleasure. A piece of grilled salmon in a tarragon sauce (310 rubles, $10) was slightly overdone and brought to mind a rather sad wedding dinner.
For dessert, a ginger panna cotta (110 rubles, $3.50) seemed a tempting choice but what emerged from the kitchen was a flavorless rubbery lump that defied eating and was instantly abandoned. Thankfully, a few glasses remained from a bottle of dark and luscious Pugliese Primitivo (900 rubles, $29) which was both a relative bargain and eminently drinkable.
While Fartuk is far from distinguished, it is familial and relaxed — no small feat in a city like St. Petersburg. Sadly its nod to local and seasonal cooking extends only as far as a changing menu and ingredients found along the aisles of the supermarket across the street. The resulting lack of imagination and personal vision make for a confusing story on the plate. More focus, more imagination and more wit could turn what is essentially a pleasant spot for friends to meet into a real destination. Hopefully it will survive long enough to see that transformation through.