SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1693 (4), Wednesday, February 1, 2012
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TITLE: Equity Investors Send $237M Russia's Way at the End of January.
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: The last seven days in January saw foreign investors putting $414 million into investment funds that have Russian portfolios — the highest inflow seen since April of 2011.

Of that inflow, $237 million was specifically targeted to Russia. This represents a change in the direction of capital flows, since the last half of 2011 saw continuous flight from domestic markets.

Russia was the global champion for capital flight by institutional investors, with the average weekly outflow reaching about $200 million, starting last spring, said Sergei Yezimov, a portfolio manager at Wermuth Asset Management.

Investor reactions in December were excessive against the background of political risks, Verno Capital portfolio manager Bruce Bower said. "The MSCI Emerging Markets index then dropped 1.3 percent, versus a 10 percent drop on the Russian market," Bower added.

In Russia, investors are concluding that the political situation is still stable, Bower said. He expects inflows to continue.

Investors are including into their equity evaluations a victory for Vladimir Putin in the upcoming presidential elections and a return of stability, which, it seems, they lost in December of last year, said Vladimir Bril, head of equity market operations at JPMorgan. But, he adds, the positive mood is very fragile — "doom and gloom" can return, leading to a market turn around.

Furthermore, the domestic market is oversold, Morgan Stanley emerging markets strategist Mariana Kozintseva said. Russia is the cheapest market of all those in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, trading at a 29 percent discount to the historical average, and with a 48 percent discount to other emerging markets, she said.

TITLE: Russia to Buy Icelandic Underwater Drones
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Defense Ministry plans to spend 729 million rubles ($24.5 million) on eight underwater drones made by Icelandic firm Teledyne Gavia, according to an order posted on the ministry's website.
Applications of so-called unmanned underwater vehicles include surveillance, clearing mines, and anti-submarine warfare.

Teledyne Gavia, formerly known as Hafmynd ehf, has been developing underwater drones since 1997.

Russia has struggled in recent years to produce sophisticated aerial drones of its own, instead purchasing Israeli technology for its armed forces. Last month it was reported that the Defense Ministry had invested 5 billion rubles ($158 million) with state-owned holding Russian Helicopters to develop three new types of aerial drones that are expected to be completed by 2015.


TITLE: Presidential Candidates to Be Given Equal, Free TV Time
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: All five presidential candidates will be provided an equal amount of free airtime on state-owned TV channels when campaigning in the mass media begins Feb. 4.
Candidates will be given free airtime on channels Rossiya-1, Rossiya-24, Channel One and TV Center-Moscow for commercials, first-person monologues and debates, Kommersant-FM reported Thursday.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has said he will not participate in debates, prompting criticism from his opponents.

Last month state-controlled TV outlets Channel One, NTV and Rossiya-1 covered the presidential candidates for a total of 55 hours, with Putin gaining almost three times as much coverage as any other single candidate, according to data from website Telemarker.ru, Kommersant-FM reported. The channels showed Putin for a little over 23 hours in total, while each other candidate received about eight hours of coverage.

Before the last presidential vote in 2008, critics noted the overwhelmingly disproportionate coverage by state-owned television of Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev.


TITLE: Facebook IPO Could Give Boost to Mail.ru Group
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Shares of Internet company Mail.ru Group could rise as a result of the initial public offering planned by social-networking site Facebook, a VTB Capital report said.

Mail.ru Group owns 2.38 percent of Facebook, which said in a filing to U.S. regulators Wednesday that it seeks to raise up to $5 billion in an IPO. According to media reports, the company is hoping for a valuation of $75 billion to $100 billion.

Given such a high valuation, the share price of Mail.ru Group could rise 7 percent to 13 percent from its current level, the VTB Capital report said, Vedomosti reported Thursday.

Mail.ru Group is run by investor Yury Milner, who also runs Internet investment group Digital Sky Technologies. Milner's investment firm became known internationally after buying a $200 million stake in Facebook in May 2009.

The Facebook IPO prospectus said the social network's penetration is less than 15 percent of Russian Internet users, on par with the number of Facebook users in Japan and South Korea.

Russia's most popular social network is the Facebook look-alike Vkontakte, which is backed by Mail.ru Group. Vkontakte was considering an IPO but has put off its plans, Bloomberg reported Monday.


TITLE: Abandoned Newborn Survives Hour in -20 C Weather
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A one-day-old child was left on the ground outside a Moscow apartment building despite a temperature of minus 20 C, before being found and picked up by a passerby, Life News reported.
A closed-circuit camera captured images of a woman placing the child on the ground at 6:15 a.m. on Tuesday. Only an hour later did a passing kindergarten teacher discover the crying baby girl, whom the teacher picked up and took to her school.

The camera footage shows people parking nearby and walking past the child during the hour she lay on the ground, Life News reported.

The teacher who discovered the child called the police and an ambulance. Doctors who examined the girl said she was in good health and had been born less than 24 hours before.

Police are searching for the woman who abandoned the child.

Moscow has been experiencing bitter cold temperatures of late, with a low of minus 23 C on Wednesday. Twenty-four people froze to death in Moscow's streets between November and late January, head of City Hall's social protection department Vladimir Petrosyan said last week.


TITLE: Putin says he may face runoff in Russia's election
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Isachenkov
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Wednesday he could face a runoff in the March presidential vote, his first acknowledgement that he may fail to muster enough support for an outright victory.

Putin's statement signaled he might be willing to accept tarnishing his father-of-the nation image if he fails to win more than 50 percent in the first round on March 4, rather than risk igniting more public outrage through blatant vote rigging.

Evidence of fraud in favor of Putin's party in a December parliamentary election triggered the biggest protests since the Soviet collapse two decades ago.

Putin said at a meeting with election monitors that "there is nothing horrible" about a runoff and he's ready for one, according to Russian news reports.

But he also warned of the dangers of a second round, saying it would lead to a "certain destabilization of the political situation." The need for stability in Russia has been the mantra of Putin's campaign.

Putin won his previous two presidential terms in 2000 and 2004 in the first round. After moving into the prime minister's job due to term limits, he has remained the No. 1 leader, but has seen his support dwindle amid growing public frustration with his rigid controls over the political scene, rampant corruption and rising social inequality.

Opinion polls show support for Putin between 40 and 50 percent. If he fails to get a majority of the vote, he will face a runoff on March 25, most likely against Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov.

Putin announced his bid to reclaim the presidency in September and said he would then name Dmitry Medvedev, his protege and successor as president, his prime minister.

The job swap was seen as a show of cynical disrespect for democracy, fueling public anger that spilled into the open during the December protests.

Another mass rally is planned for this weekend. In a sign of the increasingly bold defiance of Putin's rule, opposition activists hoisted a giant "Putin Go Away" billboard to the top of a building across the river from the Kremlin on Wednesday. It took authorities more than an hour to remove it.

Putin initially played down the rallies and derided the participants as U.S. puppets working to undermine Russia. He later took a more conciliatory stance, in an apparent effort to split the opposition.

He promised Wednesday to give government jobs to some of his political opponents if he is elected.
Putin also instructed vote monitors to ensure strict observance of election rules. He previously has ordered web cameras installed in all polling stations in an effort to fend off opposition claims of vote rigging.

He warned local authorities that they would only damage his interests if they tried to manipulate the vote in his favor.

Putin also sought to reach out to young voters, saying that any attempt to impose restrictions on the Internet would make no sense and even promising to consider joining a social network. He said he hasn't had time for that and didn't want his aides making posts for him, but he promised to think about it.

The Moscow protests have been organized largely through social networks, which have been filled with criticism of Putin.

Unlike the iPad-toting, tweeting Medvedev, Putin has shown little visible interest in modern communications technologies and said a few years ago that he doesn't even need a cell phone.

Putin's four rivals have avoided criticizing him directly. Billionaire businessman Mikhail Prokhorov, the only new face in the race, said Wednesday that Putin is "the only man who can somehow control the current inefficient system," but added that he could do better.

Opinion polls put Prokhorov, the 46-year-old owner of the New Jersey Nets basketball team, at the bottom of the list of contenders with support of around 4 percent, but he voiced hope that he could make it into the second round.

"Putin has been at the helm for 12 years and has done a lot of work, but it's time to stop," Prokhorov told a news conference.

Mansur Mirovalev contributed to this report.

TITLE: Residents Tired and Ticked Off by Summer Time
AUTHOR: By Olga Kalashnikova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: “Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” — it was Benjamin Franklin, the author of this proverb, who first suggested implementing daylight saving time. 
But as Russia reaches the end of its first winter spent on summertime, many city residents complain that they feel anything but healthy.
The practice of temporarily advancing the clock to conserve electricity in the evening has been widely used around the world since 1916 when it was first tried by Germany. In Russia, the practice was only introduced in 1981.
Last February, President Dmitry Medvedev announced that Russia would no longer change the clocks, but would remain permanently on daylight saving time. The clocks were changed — onto daylight saving time — for the last time last March.
“Moving the clocks forward and back every spring and autumn, everyone swears that the human biorhythm is really disturbed; it is annoying, people either oversleep or wake up earlier and do not know what to do during this extra hour,” Medvedev was quoted by Interfax as saying in February of last year.
“I think [not changing the clocks] will be of interest to our country and rather helpful,” he said.
This is not the first time that the country’s rulers have seen fit to put it on permanent summertime, however, meaning that as a result, Moscow’s time zone now has a standard time two hours ahead of that suggested by its geographical location. 
In 1930, in order to make the nation run on daylight saving time all year, Decree time was introduced in Russia, meaning clocks in each of the country’s time zones were set one hour ahead of the standard time for that region — a time known as UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) +3. In 1981, Russia introduced the practice of changing the clocks in the summertime, making Russian time zones UTC +3 in the winter and UTC +4 in the summer. 
On Feb. 8 last year, when Medvedev announced the decision not to change the clocks, 73 percent of Russians approved of the decision, according to research carried out by the state-run pollster VTsIOM, and only 6 percent did not approve. However, since the law has come into force, public opinion has changed dramatically.
More than half of those polled (52 percent) do not see the reform as logical, according to research carried out by HeadHunter recruitment agency for the RIA-Novosti state news agency. Forty-six percent of employees believe that the long hours of darkness in the morning — a result of not changing the clocks — has had a negative effect on their work. Almost every fifth employee feels sluggish and drowsy and cannot concentrate on the work they need to do. Fifteen percent started being late more often, and 18 percent cannot make themselves work at all, according to HeadHunter data.
Specialists from the Ancor recruitment agency, on the other hand, have not found serious changes in people’s work activity. Reports that companies have resorted to planning important meetings for later in the day as a result of employees’ struggle to get used to the time difference are untrue, according to the company. 
“Recently we have been scheduling meetings for 8:30 a.m. or 9 a.m. This doesn’t have anything to do with the season or clocks changing, it depends on people’s work schedule and employee motivation,” said Natalya Schegoleva, head of Ancor recruitment group in St. Petersburg.
According to HeadHunter research, the lack of light in the morning takes the heaviest toll on academic workers and marketing and human resources specialists, while those who work in extracting raw materials or in the production sphere have not noticed any negative changes in their work.
“Being on summertime in the winter is a big problem for me,” said Pavel Kondratiev, a computer specialist. “I’m kind of light dependent — I always need light. It’s so difficult to get up in the dark every morning — it’s like torture. Moreover, my office doesn’t have any windows, so I’m in the dark all day: I go to work and it’s dark, I go back home and it’s even darker.” 
Other city inhabitants affected by the resulting darkness are those with small kindergarten-aged children, psychologists say.
“These people have to deal with their own reaction and adapt to the reaction of children whose usual routine has been upset,” said psychologist Natalya Meleshkova. 
Schoolchildren, however, have benefitted from the constant summer time.
“In winter, the sun rises in our city late,” said Meleshkova. “Therefore it doesn’t matter how we change the time, because people who work and study have to wake up and leave home in the dark regardless. Since it gets light and dark an hour later, children see more daylight. Now pupils come back home while it’s still light out.” 
For most employees, the reasons cited as preventing them from working as usual are difficulties waking up in the morning, the constant wish to sleep and depression and a bad mood caused by the morning darkness. Respondents said the morning darkness was more conducive to resting and sleeping, not working.
“The absence of daylight leads to depression, apathy, sluggishness and laziness,” said Meleshkova. “This seasonal depression, however, also serves as a protective function to prevent the organism from overworking and helps to conserve energy under difficult natural conditions.”
“When people are seriously depressed as cold and darkness set in, it is more often connected not to the season, but to constant health problems and general dissatisfaction with life,” she said.
“We have such a specific regime of day and night in our city both in the summer and in the winter that we cannot talk about living depending on how our body’s biological processes react to light,” Meleshkova said. 
“If we wanted to live according to our biological hours, we would have to leave work, close down all production and eat only natural foods,” she said.
Most employees hope to get used to the new regime in the next one or two years, while 20 percent of those polled believe they will never adapt to it, according to HeadHunter data. Psychologists, however, see benefits in keeping the existing regime.
“People maintain their usual regime when it comes to sleeping and eating,” said Meleshnikova. “In previous years [when the clocks were changed], they had difficulties when they were already hungry and it wasn’t dinnertime yet, or they got tired in the evening, but it was too early to go to bed.” 
“When the time remains stable, people regard the change in light due to the season as more mild and gradual,” she said.
Nevertheless, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin promised last month during a meeting with football fans to talk to the president about the fans’ complaints concerning the decision to stop changing the clocks. He said that although Medvedev had signed the law, it hadn’t been prepared by the president himself and that it was possible that something had not been thought through completely. 
Putin added that he always finds it difficult to get up in the morning.

TITLE: Brodsky Museum on Cards
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The apartment-museum of Russian-born Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Joseph Brodsky may open in the city as a joint cultural project between Russia and the U.S., City Hall said.
Vasily Kichedzhi, deputy governor of St. Petersburg, said that City Hall was ready to take an active part in opening a museum devoted to the poet, who emigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s. However, the project could be too expensive for the city budget, he was quoted by Interfax as saying. 
Therefore, the city would welcome a joint Russian-American project, Kichedzhi said during a visit to Brodsky’s apartment together with American Consul General to St. Petersburg Bruce Turner on Tuesday.
Kichedzhi said the long period of time during which Brodsky lived in the U.S. had a significant influence on the poet’s creative works.
Currently, City Hall is considering two options for opening the museum: Either buy the last apartment room that it does not yet own from its occupant, a 74-year-old woman reportedly asking 17 million rubles ($562,000) for her 44-square-meter room — the most paid for any of the other four rooms was 10 million rubles ($330,000) — or make a separate entrance to Brodsky’s rooms in the apartment. 
The final occupant of the apartment and the city have reportedly been negotiating on the subject since 1999.
Before emigrating to the U.S. in the early 1970s, Brodsky lived in a communal apartment on Liteiny Prospekt. The communal apartment was a common theme of his work.
In 1964, the 23-year-old Brodsky was arrested and charged with “social parasitism.” He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 and settled in the U.S. where taught at various universities.
Brodsky was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature for an “all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity.” 
In an interview he was asked: “You are an American citizen who is receiving a prize for Russian-language poetry. Who are you, an American or a Russian?” He responded: “I am Jewish — a Russian poet and an English essayist.”
Brodsky died of a heart attack in New York City in 1996. He was 55 years old.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>You Eat, They Give</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — This month, the city’s Courtyard Marriott St. Petersburg Vasilyevsky and Renaissance St. Petersburg Baltic hotels are taking part in a charity event called “You Eat, We Give” in support of the SOS — Children’s Villages charity and its activities in the St. Petersburg suburb of Pushkin.
The main goal of the program is to give young people living in unfavorable social conditions the opportunity to reach their potential while developing their personal and professional skills.
As part of the program, the hotels will donate one euro from every lunch or dinner bought in their Pierro and Kanvas restaurants to the SOS — Children’s Villages foundation. 
The organization works to help orphaned children. At the SOS — Children’s Villages, children live in family-like communities.
More than 280 Marriott hotels in Europe will take part in the program, collecting money and belongings to help SOS — Children Villages in continental Europe and the Prince’s Trust Fairbridge Foundation in the U.K.

<b>Frosts to Continue</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Freezing temperatures are forecast to continue this week with temperatures reaching minus 17 to minus 19 degrees Celsius during the day and between minus 19 and minus 21 degrees at night. 
In the Leningrad Oblast, nighttime temperatures will go down to between minus 22 and minus 27 — in some places as low as minus 33 degrees Celsius, meteorologists said, Interfax reported.
The regional cold weather is being caused by an anticyclone that came to Russia’s northwest from Siberia. The anticyclone has caused an increase in atmospheric pressure.
The frosts will become milder after Feb. 5, experts said.

TITLE: City, Protesters Compromise
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: City Hall conceded to the organizers of the Feb. 4 anti-fraud march “For Honest Elections” during the course of lengthy talks on Monday, agreeing to the original gathering point near Oktyabrsky Concert Hall on Ligovsky Prospekt and to a downtown route. 
But the protesters had to agree to a different route, because City Hall was adamant in not allowing the marchers to walk along Nevsky Prospekt, St. Petersburg’s main street.
In the event, the marchers are due to gather by 2 p.m. and walk along Ulitsa Zhukovskogo, Liteiny Prospekt, Ulitsa Belinskogo and the Fontanka and Moika embankments. The march will end with a stationary meeting on Konyushennaya Ploshchad.
Previously, the organizers had insisted on marching along Nevsky Prospekt with a stationary rally either on St. Isaac’s Square or Palace Square. City Hall had suggested an alternative route from Yubileiny Sports Complex on the Petrograd side to Ploshchad Sakharova on Vasilyevsky Island, which the protesters rejected.
Originally, the opposition split and two applications for marches were submitted to City Hall, as the Yabloko Democratic Party and several smaller liberal and rights organizations opposed the participation of nationalists in the rally. 
But eventually, the sides reached a compromise and will have a united march, The United Civil Front’s Olga Kurnosova said Tuesday.
“Many people do strange things; instead of urging people to come to the rally, they endlessly discuss the issue of flags or somebody’s personal political views,” Kurnosova said.
“Either we really try to change the situation in the country, or we will just be constantly trying to sort things out; please take that to the kitchen, rather than into politics.”
She said party flags and political symbols would be “minimized” and positioned at the rear of the marching group as a compromise.
Kurnosova said that despite the failure to get a march on Nevsky Prospekt authorized, the organizers have managed to get City Hall to make several important concessions and have brokered agreement between two opposing groups of protesters.
“The most important, key issue is that there will be a united protest, with the time and the gathering point remaining unchanged, and it will be in the center,” she said.
“We didn’t manage to reclaim Nevsky and had to come to a compromise, but nevertheless, we’re getting a new location for the resulting meeting, which broadens our protest geography.”
The authorities have so far refused to fulfill any of the demands of the anti-fraud rallies held in December. Demands included the cancelation of the election results due to widely exposed fraud and violations, and the release of political prisons.
On Feb. 4, marches and protest events are planned in Moscow and many other Russian cities.

TITLE: Molchanov Steps Down From City Government
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Deputy city governor Yury Molchanov, who was in charge of St. Petersburg’s investment projects, resigned from his post last week, making him the latest in a growing list of senior administration officials who have resigned since new city governor Georgy Poltavchenko took office.
Molchanov, who under ex-city governor Valentina Matviyenko was considered one of the most influential people in the city, announced his decision to leave his post at a press conference last week.
Molchanov said that when Poltavchenko took office, they agreed that Molchanov would work until February, as had previously been decided.
“I’ve worked in Smolny for eight years, and it’s hard to work as an official,” Molchanov was quoted by Fontanka as saying.
Molchanov did not disclose where he plans to work next, saying however that he had received a number of offers.
City Hall does not plan to look for a replacement for Molchanov. His responsibilities will be divided between the other deputy governors, Fontanka reported.
Molchanov became a deputy governor in 2003. At that time he was chairman of the directory board of Business Link Group, which also included construction companies such as Stroimontazh. 
Not all the projects lobbied by Molchanov were successfully completed. The idea of launching an overland express train to run within the city with the participation of the Canadian firm Bombardier has been under discussion since 2003 but has not yet been realized.
The Orlov Tunnel underneath the Neva and Novo-Admiralteisky bridge projects, both of which were scrapped by Poltavchenko soon after assuming the position of governor, were also backed by Molchanov.
Molchanov also supported the construction of the Marine Facade passenger port complex, the large-scale reconstruction of the city’s Pulkovo Airport and the construction of Galeria shopping and entertainment complex on the long-abandoned plot of land next to the Moscow Railway Station.

TITLE: Pregnant Woman Arrested After Swallowing Heroin
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Pulkovo Airport customs officers detained a pregnant woman from Tajikistan who was smuggling heroin capsules in her stomach, Interfax reported last week.
The woman, who was almost nine months pregnant, arrived in St. Petersburg on a flight from Dushanbe, and was met by a man at the airport. They were both stopped in the arrivals hall.
Doctors said the woman’s baby was due on Jan. 28. Later, when the woman was taken to a medical center, they discovered that she had swallowed 80 capsules of heroine and another drug. The total weight of the “cargo” was 866 grams.
The prosecution has opened a criminal case against the woman for drug trafficking. The man who met the woman at the airport denied involvement in the case. He is currently being investigated.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Guide Dogs in Metro</b>
ST. PETERBURG (SPT) — Visually impaired people will soon be able to enter city metro stations with guide dogs.
A decree on the issue was signed by Stanislav Popov, head of the city’s Transport Committee, but it has not yet been put into effect, Interfax reported last week.
According to the document, visually impaired people will be allowed to bring one guide dog into the metro free of charge. The dog will be required to be wearing a muzzle, a leash and a sign identifying it as a guide dog. The owner must also have a document confirming that the dog has completed a course on guiding its owner in the metro.

<b>Car Owners Fined</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The owner of a Jaguar car paid a 100,000-ruble ($3,320) fine on the spot when city bailiffs came to collect an overdue transport tax, Interfax reported.
The owner of a Porsche Cayenne who was in 500,000 rubles ($16,600) worth of transport tax debt failed to pay as quickly, however, and his car was towed. The owner of the car had not paid tax on it since 2007.

<b>PM Visits Tikhvin Icon</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited the Tikhvin Monastery in the Leningrad Oblast after a business trip to Tikhvin and bowed to the Icon of the Holy Mother of Tikhvin. This was not his first visit.
All Russia’s tsars except for Nicholas II visited the icon to pray for it to bless their rule, Interfax reported.
According to legend, the icon was painted by Luke the Evangelist when the Virgin Mary was still alive. The icon was first located in Jerusalem, then in Constantinople. In the 14th century, it miraculously appeared above the waters of Lake Ladoga, the legend goes. On the bank of the Tikhvin River, a temple to the icon was built, which later became the Uspensky Monastery. In December 1941 during the Nazi occupation of the region, the icon was taken to the Latvian capital of Riga, and in 1949 it was taken to the U.S. Only in 2004 was it returned to Tikhvin.

<b>Skolkovo’s New Partner</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — American pulp and paper company International Paper will invest one million U.S. dollars into a joint project with Moscow’s Skolkovo Management School, John Faraci, general director of International Paper said in St. Petersburg on Saturday.
Faraci said the joint program would help to attract “the smartest and most talented representatives of the new generation” to Skolkovo.
Andrei Rappoport, president of Skolkovo, said the partnership with International Paper would give the school the opportunity to apply the company’s practical experience in Skolkovo’s educational programs. 
Within the program, International Paper senior managers will give lectures and master classes at Skolkovo. The company plans to take some of its business school students under its patronage.
International Paper is the biggest producer of paper and packing with factories in North America, Europe, Latin America, Russia, Asia and North Africa. The company began its activities in Russia in 1998. Its head office here is located in St. Petersburg.

<b>Do As I Do, Not As I Say</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A social project to promote honest relationships between adults and children and to remind them both of how people should behave started in St. Petersburg in January.
The project, called “Attention, Children!” is aimed at stopping adults from behaving in front of children in a way that is contradictory and hypocritical — by telling kids what they should do while giving bad examples themselves in real life.
“We often tell children that it’s bad to smoke, but then we smoke ourselves in their presence, we say that we love nature and the environment but sometimes litter in the forest, we talk about respecting our elders, but neglect to give up our seat to the elderly,” the organizers of the project said.
Adults should watch their own behavior and follow the “rules” they teach children, they said.
In order to bring more attention to the subject of honest relationships between adults and children, organizers have made advertising inserts that depict several examples of interaction between them. Billboards have also been put up in the city’s streets and in the metro to show what kind of obvious contradictions occur in everyday life.
To increase awareness, organizers plan to launch a commercial on local TV channels, on the Internet and via other media willing to support the campaign.

TITLE: Anti-Putin Banner Appears on Billboard Overlooking Kremlin
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A banner with the words "Putin, leave" and an image of the prime minister's face with a black cross over it appeared Wednesday morning on a billboard above a building adjacent to the Kremlin.
Activists from the liberal political group Solidarnost were responsible for the stunt, the group said on its LiveJournal page.

Blogger Ilya Varlamov posted a picture of the banner at 12:30 p.m. on his LiveJournal page. One commenter to the post noted, "Do they know that Putin isn't in the Kremlin?", referring to the fact that the prime minister is based in the White House, located on Krasnopresnenskaya Naberezhnaya.

At 1 p.m. workers were in the process of taking the banner down, news website Ridus reported.

TITLE: Golos Declares PM Putin a Main Electoral Violator
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The country’s only independent elections watchdog said it has detected fewer violations in the run-up to the presidential election than the State Duma vote but that one of the main violators is Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Putin, who is widely expected to return to the Kremlin for a six-year term, has illegally started campaigning before the official opening of the campaign season and has used his official status to promote his bid, Golos officials said Monday, presenting their first report on the March 4 election.
Golos also spoke of unfair measures being used against opposition candidates, lambasting a requirement that independents must submit 2 million signatures, and noted that many United Russia candidates have distanced themselves from Putin’s ruling party and are running as independents in hope of winning local elections also scheduled for March 4.
Putin, therefore, broke electoral law by publishing his election platform in three articles this month, the first in Izvestia, the second in Nezavisimaya Gazeta and the third in Vedomosti, Golos official Arkady Lyubarev told Russian and foreign journalists at the Moscow Independent Press Center.
By law, presidential campaigning starts for each candidate after they have registered with the Central Elections Commission. But candidates cannot start campaigning in the mass media until Feb. 4.
Putin also has been promoting his bid through the All-Russia People’s Front movement, which was founded on the basis of his public offices, which amounts to the unfair use of his position, Golos officials said.
“The work of the leading mass media is directed at promoting one candidate under the guise of covering his professional activities,” Golos said in a 16-page booklet distributed at the news conference.
Although technically not breaking the law, Putin is also violating the spirit of the law by “refusing to lead political debates,” Golos head Lilia Shibanova said, referring to Putin’s recent declaration through his spokesman to skip debates.
A 2003 federal law regulating presidential elections allows candidates to choose their own form of campaigning, be it debates or something else.
Overall, however, fewer violations have been found than before the Duma elections on Dec. 4, perhaps because the authorities realized that they cracked down on opposition candidates and election observers too much last fall, provoking public discontent, Golos official Alexander Kynev said.
“We have the impression that lessons have been learned from last fall,” Kynev said.
So far, the main violations that Golos has registered are attempts to force people to get absentee ballots, Kynev said. Absentee ballots are often used in vote fraud.
Although on a smaller scale, “active steps are being taken to obstruct the activities of both the opposition and nongovernmental organizations,” in connection with the presidential and local elections, he said. These steps include bugging telephone conversations, cracking e-mail accounts, and the intimidation and eviction of people and organizations from offices, Kynev said.
“We have certain facts about pressure being placed on certain people,” Kynev said.
Golos is one of the organizations that has complained of pressure. Its landlord has asked it to vacate its Moscow offices.
A total of 4,092 local elections will take place on March 4, according to the Central Elections Commission. Among them are mayoral elections in five cities: Gorno-Altaisk, Yakutsk, Arkhangelsk, Yaroslavl and Naryan-Mar, and elections to five municipal legislatures: Gorno-Altaisk, Ufa, Nalchik, Kirov and Pskov.
The campaigns for local elections are distinguished by a new trend — many United Russia candidates are formally running as independents in an “attempt to distance themselves from the party, which has a negative image,” Kynev said.
Opinion polls for both the presidential and local campaigns show that people are ready to “vote for any candidate” as long as he or she is not a United Russia candidate, Kynev said.
Meanwhile, federal authorities “informally ask [local] administrations to secure a [certain] voter turnout and percentage for the ‘needed’ candidate” and fire heads of local administrations who secured an “insufficiently high result” for United Russia, the Golos booklet said.
The “activities of presidential candidates, compared to the Duma campaign, is much smaller, partially because candidates put forward by the political parties represented in the Duma didn’t have to collect signatures in support of their bids, Kynev said. Four of the five registered candidates are linked to parties in the Duma.
A Just Russia founder Sergei Mironov has not been campaigning and his popularity depends on the activities of his party in the regions, Kynev said.
The Communist Party, which has put forward its leader, Gennady Zyuganov, “traditionally has a large network” of activists and “always tries to hold protests,” regardless of whether it is in an election cycle, Kynev said.
The campaigns of Grigory Yavlinsky, founder of the liberal opposition Yabloko party, and billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, widely seen as a tame pro-Kremlin candidate, have been “noticeable” mostly because of people collecting signatures in support of their bids, Kynev said.
Yavlinsky and Irkutsk Governor Dmitry Mezentsev were denied registration after the Central Elections Commission declared a large part of their signatures to be invalid. By law, candidates put forward by political parties not represented in the Duma have to submit 2 million signatures in their support.
Kynev called the figure “excessive,” saying that candidates actually have to submit 3 million signatures because a large part will be declared invalid. But to collect the 3 million signatures, he said, activists have to visit 25 million to 30 million apartments while all of Russia only has about 40 million apartments.
“The principle in action here is: Everything for our friends, nothing for others,” Kynev said.
The Duma parties are widely seen as a puppet opposition.
Golos said in the booklet that Russian laws and election officials make the registration of independent and opposition candidates not “possible” because of “unfeasible” requirements and the granting of “unequal rights” to candidates.
Kynev also noted that by law, presidential candidates who were denied registration can’t field their election observers, in which case neither the web cameras now being installed at polling stations nor transparent ballot boxes would help. “There are attempts to reduce public discontent by these separate concessions,” he said.
But more stunts could lie ahead as the election nears, he said.
“The biggest publicity stunts often fall during the last two weeks of the campaign,” he said.
The Central Elections Commission has registered five presidential hopefuls, including United Russia leader Vladimir Putin, Mironov, Zyuganov and Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov is running as an independent.
The Central Elections Commission has denied registration to five independent or opposition candidates. Four other candidates have withdrawn their bids, including Eduard Limonov, leader of The Other Russia opposition movement.

TITLE: Radiation Is Blamed For Lost Probe
AUTHOR: By Jim Heintz
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — The head of Russia’s space agency, Vladimir Popovkin, said Tuesday that cosmic radiation was the most likely cause of the failure of a Mars moon probe that crashed to Earth this month, suggesting that a low-quality imported component may have been vulnerable to the radiation.
Popovkin initially suggested it could have been due to foreign sabotage, but Russian news agencies on Tuesday quoted him as saying an investigation showed the probable cause was “localized influence of heavily radiated space particles.”
Popovkin said the craft’s builder, Moscow-based NPO Lavochkin, should have taken into account the possibility of radiation interfering with the operation and said Lavochkin officials would face punishment for the oversight.

TITLE: Exiled Russians Compile List of 50 Most Corrupt
AUTHOR: By Ezekiel Pfeifer
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A group of Russian businessmen calling itself the International Anti-Corruption Committee is creating a list of 50 corrupt government officials and plans to present proof that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin stole hundreds of millions of dollars, London’s The Sunday Times reported Sunday.
The committee is composed of wealthy Russian businessmen who have fled to London after being pursued by Russian authorities, the newspaper wrote, Radio Liberty reported.
Former general manager of construction firm Moskonversprom Valery Morozov, who moved to London this month, is a leading member of the group, the newspaper wrote. Morozov told the newspaper that a bureaucrat from Putin’s inner circle attempted to blackmail him. 
Morozov keeps a blog on the website of Snob magazine, in which he writes about government corruption. In his most recent entry, published on the site Saturday, Morozov describes incidents of alleged embezzlement in construction projects financed by Olimpstroi, the federal corporation responsible for building facilities for the 2014 Olympics in Sochi.
Other Russian businessmen who have criticized authorities after fleeing to Britain in the face of criminal charges against them include tycoon Boris Berezovsky, former Yevroset co-owner Yevgeny Chichvarkin and former Bank of Moscow head Andrei Borodin.
Berezovsky, who has lived in exile in London since 2000 after a conflict with Putin, published an open letter Sunday in which he said Putin would be breaking with the Constitution by becoming president for a third term, citing a disputed clause that states one person cannot be president for more than two terms in a row. In the letter, Berezovsky argues that Putin’s participation in the upcoming presidential election makes the vote illegitimate and urges Putin’s opponents in the race not to participate.

TITLE: Putin Attempts to Realign Positions Through Writings
AUTHOR: By Howard Amos
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin laid out his economic vision in the third of a weekly series of articles titled “Ideas for Russia” on Monday and called for a smaller state presence in business, a fight against corruption, institutional reform and a drive to wean Russia off its oil dependency.
But, while economic experts said the piece’s candor was fresh, other commentators lambasted the 5,000-word article, which was published in business daily Vedomosti and on Putin’s election website, as being short on detail and little more than a rehash of old ideas.
Putin, who is expected to win Russia’s presidential election on March 4, appeared to distance himself from the outgoing president, Dmitry Medvedev.
“Over the last few years on the initiative of President Medvedev we began a whole series of reforms aimed at the improvement of the business climate,” Putin wrote, in what was his only mention of Medvedev. “But we have not yet seen any noticeable improvements.”
In previous articles published in Izvestia and Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Putin addressed the issue of ethnicity in modern Russia and political questions surrounding the December State Duma elections. Monday’s sweeping piece covered the principal financial, commercial and political contours of Russian economic life.
Putin did not shy away from criticizing the structure that he helped entrench during his 12 years at the top of Russian politics.
“The main problem is a lack of transparency and social accountability in the work of state representatives, from the customs and tax services to the judicial and law enforcement systems,” Putin wrote. “If you call a spade a spade, we are talking about systemic corruption.”
He also quoted a World Bank ranking of the countries with the best business environment that put Russia in 120th place and its neighbor, Kazakhstan, in 47th.
As well as a series of fiscal measures, including pension system reform, a reduction in the budget deficit and tax increases for the rich, Putin said he supported further rounds of privatizations and restrictions on the growth of state-owned companies. “It is essential to change the ideology of state control over business activity and limit its function,” he wrote.
The article also included a subsection on innovation — one of the catchwords associated with Medvedev. “The Russian economy is capable of not only buying, it can give birth to innovation.”
Speaking Monday at a session of the government commission on technology and innovation, Putin said state-owned companies will spend 950 billion rubles ($31.2 billion) on innovative programs this year, rising to 1.5 trillion in 2013, Interfax reported. He added that the top managers of state companies will have their salaries tied to indicators of innovative development.
Some analysts said Putin’s trenchant criticism of Russia’s business climate and use of the innovation tagline appeared to align him with some of Medvedev’s refrains.
“I am surprised that Vladimir Putin is so critical of the state of the economy and the investment climate in Russia,” Sergei Guriev, president of the New Economic School, told The St. Petersburg Times. There is truth in the idea that Putin’s economic article is actually very close to Medvedev — except that the word “modernization” has been omitted, Guriev said.
“I haven’t read anything new,” said Igor Yurgens, head of the Institute for Contemporary Development, a think tank closely associated with Medvedev, Gazeta.ru reported.
Other commentators said that while abstract goals were plentiful, there were few details on implementation. In a critical editorial accompanying Putin’s piece, Vedomosti noted the proliferation of words like “should,” “must” and “need” without any indication of responsibility.
The article on Vedomosti’s Facebook page received more than 85,000 “likes.” One of the most popular comments beneath the piece on the business daily’s website expressed disbelief that Putin could so lightly admit serious structural problems. “That’s enough of producing slogans,” wrote a user identified as AVTor, “Twelve years of autocratic management is more than enough to get some results.”
Guriev said Putin did not seem to be addressing his usual audience. “This is not a message for his electorate, it’s a message for liberal protesters in Moscow,” he said.
“The prime minister within the framework of his authorities is laying out his position on current and prospective issues,” elections commission member Maia Grishina said Tuesday, RIA-Novosti reported.
The fact that information from the prime minister is appearing in various publications is reasonable, as it allows him to reach a greater audience and give an equal amount of attention to different media outlets, Grishina said.

TITLE: Twitter Announces Right to Censor
AUTHOR: By Jonathan Earle
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Twitter has announced that it now has the ability to censor content in specific countries, leading critics to fear it may cause increased collusion with governments looking to stop opposition groups — like those behind Russia’s recent election fraud protests – from using the site as an organizing tool.
The new capability, announced on Twitter’s blog last week, allows the company to censor content on a country-by-country basis, while leaving offending posts visible to users in other countries. Twitter previously was only able to remove content worldwide.
“As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression,” the company wrote on its blog post, sparking speculation that it is preparing to launch in China, where it has been banned since June 2009.
The announcement led to a wave of criticism across the Internet, with many human rights defenders denouncing the move as a devil’s bargain with repressive governments that would undermine Twitter’s commitment to free speech in an effort to open new markets.
They cited a January 2011 blog post in which Twitter wrote: “We keep the information flowing irrespective of any view we may have about the content.” The service was seen as instrumental in facilitating the Arab Spring uprisings that toppled three Middle Eastern governments in 2011.
In Russia, activists with the For Honest Elections movement — who have staged the largest anti-Kremlin protests of the Putin era in response to alleged voting fraud in the Dec. 4 State Duma elections — say they rely on the service as key means for communicating and organizing.
“Twitter is extremely important for us,” said Alyona Popova, a spokeswoman for the group. Among other things, activists use the service to gauge public opinion and solicit aid for arrested activists, she said.
A spokeswoman for Twitter said the new technological capability didn’t reflect a change in company policy.
“Our announcement is not at all about Twitter censoring tweets, or any kind of policy or philosophical change in how we feel about the importance of free expression,” Rachel Bremer, a Twitter representative, wrote in response to a question from The St. Petersburg Times.
Twitter’s removing content “will (and always has) only happen in reaction to valid legal process,” she wrote.
Some observers in Russia said they didn’t blame Twitter for wanting to expand into markets with more repressive censorship laws — something Google and other Internet companies have already done — and that Russian Internet users, even opposition-minded ones, had nothing to fear.
“I don’t think it will influence anything,” said Ilya Varlamov, a prominent blogger and a co-founder of the League of Voters, a newly formed grassroots group promoting free and fair elections. “Twitter is too fast. By the time the government would get around to blocking content, it would already be too old to matter.”
Anton Nosik, a journalist and electronic media entrepreneur, also said there was no reason to panic. “As long as Twitter doesn’t have an office in Russia, it’s not subject to Russian law.”
But others were less optimistic.
“I really regret Twitter’s mercantile decision to bow to local dictators,” wrote journalist Oleg Kozyrev on his LiveJournal blog.
In an exchange of Twitter messages with The St. Petersburg Times, Kozyrev wrote that Twitter’s decision could have negative consequences for the opposition.
Popova, of For Honest Elections, said she too was worried about the new rule, but she didn’t expect a crackdown on Twitter or the Russian Internet anytime soon.
“What we’re doing is completely legal. Plus, it’s in no one’s interest to crack down. The public backlash would be too strong,” she said.

TITLE: Customs Union Clashes Over Booze
AUTHOR: By Roland Oliphant
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Lawmakers in Moscow have expressed alarm at Customs Union rules that could lift a Russia-wide ban on reusing bottles for vodka and other drinks.
In the latest in an increasingly acrimonious deadlock between Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus over alcohol regulation, Alexander Torshin, first deputy speaker of the Federation Council, told Interfax on Friday that lifting the ban would mean a surge in contraband booze and threats to consumer safety.
“Used bottles are a key element in the production of illegal vodka and other drinks, where a bottle bought for a ruble brings tens of rubles of income in counterfeit alcohol,” he said. The senator said he had written to First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov outlining his concerns.
Reusing old bottles allows producers of illicit spirits to undercut legitimate brands of expensive spirits. The practice is legal for beer and other low-alcohol drinks.
Meanwhile, a dispute that will sound comically familiar to any citizen of the European Union is swirling around Kazakhstan’s demand to delete the term “wine drinks” — which refers to drinks where wine is diluted or mixed with additives — from draft regulations covering alcohol safety.
Kazakhstan argues that the term is misleading to consumers and breaks WTO rules. Critics in Belarus and Russia say the Kazakh proposals would make traditional favorites like mulled wine and sangria illegal.
Leonid Popovich, president of the Russian Union of Wine Growers and Winemakers, told the RBK daily on Friday that semi-sweet wines that account for about 80 percent of Russian production could also be affected because they will be reclassified as “wine drinks” under a new federal law on alcohol regulation that comes into force in July.
That, he warned, would mean the loss of 50 percent of Russia’s vineyards that are only capable of producing semi-sweet wines.
Nor have the sides been able to find a compromise over safety regulations that would ban plastic bottles for alcohol, which the Russian brewing industry maintains are perfectly suitable for its products.
As further proof of the turbulence in the industry, a 20 percent tax hike on beer introduced from Jan. 1 is believed to have sparked a pre-New Year buying spree by distributors.
Carlsberg, the world’s fourth-largest brewer and the dominant player in the Russian market through its control of Baltika Breweries, traded up in Copenhagen on Friday, on the back of speculation about an Eastern European sales spike, Bloomberg reported Friday.
Russian light-beer production rose 17.6 percent last month, according to the State Statistics Service.
That marks a recovery from a poor third quarter of 2011 as the disappointing summer weather held back sales.
Carlsberg said in October that it saw its Eastern European unit’s beer sales fall 9 percent compared with the same period in 2010.
SABMiller, which sells Miller, Grolsch, Pilsner and Kozel, said it saw its sales fall 6 percent in October to December, the AlcoNews web portal reported Friday.

TITLE: Hundreds of Drivers Call for Fair Elections
AUTHOR: By Andrei Bulay
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Thousands of cars flying white ribbons or balloons circled central Moscow on Sunday in a show of protest against Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
The cars — ranging from luxury sedans and sporty convertibles to old, exhaust-spewing Soviet models — jammed the inner lanes all along the 16-kilometer Garden Ring, which has as many as 16 lanes of traffic at its widest points.
More protesters stood along the side of the road waving white ribbons and flags as the vehicles passed, their horns blaring. White ribbons became an opposition symbol during protests that broke out after a fraud-tainted Dec. 4 parliamentary election won by Putin’s party.
Tens of thousands turned out for two protest rallies last month to demand free and fair elections, and protest organizers are now preparing for a third big demonstration Feb. 4.
Putin is running in a March 4 presidential election to reclaim the post he held from 2000 to 2008. He is expected to win, but is under pressure to show he can win fairly.
Sunday’s action was aimed at helping to build momentum for the protest movement and it provided another outlet for the creativity that has been a defining feature of the demonstrations.
While most drivers were content to tie white ribbons and balloons to their cars’ antennas, sideview mirrors and door handles, some decorated their vehicles with original signs and banners.
Opposition leader Alexei Navalny said the traveling protest action was a “wonderful advertisement” for the Feb. 4 rally.
The protest movement has been driven by young professionals, cultural figures and other members of the urban middle class, many of them connected through online social networks.
Kremlin supporters have begun to try to counter their activism by organizing rallies by blue-collar workers in support of Putin and the stability he promises. The first rally was held Saturday in Yekaterinburg, the capital of an industrial region in the Ural Mountains east of Moscow.
Videos of the rally posted online showed one speaker, a member of Russia’s parliament, trying to get the crowd of several thousand to shout “Ural, Russia, Putin!” The response was muted.

TITLE: Yavlinsky Protests Elimination
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky is accusing the Central Elections Commission of being overly harsh in its interpretation of the law when it removed him from the presidential race for having collected too many invalid signatures.
Yavlinsky admitted in a blog post late Sunday that more than 137,000 of the signatures presented on his behalf were scanned copies of actual signatures, but insisted that this was legal.
“There is no ban in the law, neither direct nor indirect, on presenting copied signatures,” he said. He stressed that all copied signatures were based on real ones and that campaign staff resorted to e-mailing scans only when it was impossible to get originals to Moscow in time.
The Central Elections Commission officially ended Yavlinsky’s bid last Friday, when it declared that 153,938 of 600,000 signatures it had inspected — or 25.66 percent — were invalid.
But Yavlinsky said that if you subtract the photocopied signatures, just 16,446 signatures — or 2.74 percent of those reviewed — were truly invalid.
Commission secretary Nikolai Konkin said in televised comments over the weekend that a candidate had never before presented photocopied signatures. Commission chairman Vladimir Churov said the number of red-flagged signatures surprised him.
But Yavlinsky said the outcome was a foregone conclusion because it was ordered from above: “The [Kremlin] forbade to register me … so that there won’t be an alternative [candidate]. The Central Elections Commission fulfilled its order,” he wrote.
The dispute highlights the difficulties presented by the rule that candidates without a parliamentary party must present signatures from 2 million supporters.
Adding to the challenge is the requirement that voters can only sign the lists in the region they are registered in and the fact that the signatures had to be collected over a relatively short time period, including the 10-day New Year’s holiday.
Those requirements regularly trigger accusations of selective enforcement under Kremlin orders.
In the 2008 presidential race, Andrei Bogdanov, leader of the obscure Democratic Party, had his 2 million signatures approved, but garnered less than half that in the actual election with 968,344 votes.
In the present campaign, the Central Elections Commission has only accepted the signatures for Mikhail Prokhorov as valid — prompting fresh allegations that the billionaire has made a deal with the Kremlin, a charge he has denied.
Yabloko activists said Monday that they doubt the quality of Prokhorov’s signatures was better than Yavlinsky’s.
“I have seen his people collect signatures at airports and train stations all on one list — while people must have been from different regions,” said Galina Mikhailyova, first deputy chairwoman of the party’s Moscow branch.
Her suspicion was echoed by Masha Lipman, an analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center, who argued that Prokhorov lacked Yabloko’s organizational resources.
“Yavlinsky has trusted people in many regions, Prokhorov has nothing like that,” she said by telephone.
However, others said the billionaire could easily compensate for this with cash.
“Prokhorov just has vast financial resources,” said Leonid Gozman, a co-founder of Right Cause who left the party when Prokhorov was ousted in a coup he blamed on conservative forces in the Kremlin.
Attempts to reach Prokhorov’s spokespeople for comment were unsuccessful Monday. The billionaire has said in the past that Yavlinsky’s removal would be a blow to the election’s legitimacy.

TITLE: 17 Oil Tanks Fly Off Train
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Side frames of freight cars on a train carrying oil through the Amur region in the Russian Far East broke Tuesday morning, causing 17 oil tanks to fly off the cars, RIA-Novosti reported.
Thirteen of the tanks caught fire and spread oil over an area of 600 square meters, Interfax reported. The fire was extinguished Tuesday morning.
No deaths or injuries were reported.
This was the fourth time in the past week that side frames of freight cars have broken off on Russian trains, RIA-Novosti reported. 
Transit safety watchdog Rostransnadzor appointed a special meeting for Tuesday to discuss measures for preventing such accidents in the future.

TITLE: Freezing to Death in Ukraine
AUTHOR: By Maria Danilova
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KIEV, Ukraine — Thirty people, most of them homeless, have died of hypothermia in recent days in Ukraine as the region experiences a severe cold spell.
Of the victims in Ukraine, 21 were found frozen on the streets, five died in hospitals and four in their own homes, said Emergency Situations Ministry spokeswoman Yulia Yershova.
Temperatures plunged to minus 23 C in Kiev and elsewhere in Ukraine. 
Kiev city administration head Oleksandr Popov ordered city schools and colleges closed through the end of the week, as temperatures are expected to drop to minus 28 degrees C.

TITLE: Universal Card Postponed Another Year
AUTHOR: By Olga Solovyova and Natascha Kearsey
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The universal electronic card demonstrated by President Dmitry Medvedev in the spring of last year is facing delays, with the rollout that was scheduled for this January being pushed to January of 2013.
The card, which is supposed to serve as a combination of an electronic ID, driver’s license, car insurance certificate, ATM card and migration document, among other possible functions, is the expected result of a project the government estimates will cost as much as 150 billion rubles to 170 billion rubles ($5.2 billion to $5.6 billion) to put in the hands of every citizen.
The Communications and Press Ministry set up the Universal Electronic Cards company, or UEC, to run the card program. A spokesman for UEC told The St. Petersburg Times that the program will begin to function next year and that this year will be spent organizing the places that will receive applications for the card. Application sites are expected to be set up at post offices, banks, commercial centers and other locations.
A ministry spokesman confirmed that infrastructure for the project is just beginning to be created, and only four out of 83 regions having begun work on it.
“The delay in starting the project is related to issues around interagency cooperation and underdeveloped infrastructure in some regions,” said Yulia Kuchkina, a spokeswoman for UEC. “Pilot cards are being issued — with employees of government agencies and ministries becoming the first users. 
The current card distribution plan foresees them being given out in the course of 2013 to those who apply for them. The following year they will be issued to all citizens, unless a person makes a written statement of refusal.
There are concerns about the public’s willingness to adopt the card. Medvedev said last year that the risk of identity theft was an issue for the universal smart card.
Boris Volpe, Sitronics’ vice president for marketing and development, said Sitronics’ (the high-tech arm of billionaire Vladimir Yevtushenkov’s AFK Sistema, which is involved in designing and making the cards) unique cryptography would protect people from the risk of identity theft. “All data used in transactions will be strongly encrypted, so that even if personal information was intercepted it would be completely useless.”
This is scant reassurance in a country where classified government databases can be freely purchased online or at electronics markets. Sberbank, who own a 34 percent share in Universal Electronic Cards, says the smart card itself poses no security risk.
“The universal electronic card does not add additional security risks to people who use it. The smart card is not only a convenient and secure way of protecting personal data, but is certified to securely encrypt information,” a Sberbank spokesperson said.
While the issue of identity theft may be regarded as the project’s main technical challenge, there is, according to Volpe, a more fundamental hurdle to overcome — persuading the general population to adopt the card. “Russia is a huge country,” Volpe said. “It won’t be easy teaching people how to use the universal electronic card, since there has never been anything like it before.”

TITLE: Tatarstan To Invest In Clean Systems
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medtsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A fund that will rely heavily on Russian money to invest in clean technology has raised the planned 110 million euros ($145.3 million) in capital from its two founders as it prepares to announce its first deal later this year, German co-founder Wermuth Asset Management announced Monday.
With 100 million euros from a Tatarstan government company, the fund will invest globally, but focus on companies that could benefit by selling their products — or initiating production — in Tatarstan.
“The biggest bang for the buck in clean energy is in Russia,” said Jochen Wermuth, the chief investment officer at the asset management company.
By going clean, companies here could reduce costs more drastically than their Western peers because equipment in Russia is much more outdated, which is driving up demand for new equipment, he said.
Tatarstan is considered the best region for business, should clean technology providers set up manufacturing in the country, according to Ernst & Young and Forbes magazine, Wermuth said.
The Tatarstan Cleantech Fund expects to generate overall returns of 30 percent per annum. Its potential areas for investment include energy efficiency, waste management, electric buses, lithium-ion batteries and even food. The fund, which aims to raise another 90 million euros from outside investors by mid-summer, will seek to buy equity in small and medium-sized companies chiefly in Western Europe and the United States.
Under the fund’s terms, if a company that agrees to take investment from the fund goes on to build a plant in Tatarstan, the regional government will allow its partners in the fund to be the first to receive return on their investment.
There will be no hard pressure to choose Tatarstan, although for concrete deals it can compete with the world’s low-cost manufacturing area, China, said Daniel Colbert, lead partner at the fund.
Confirming demand for clean technology in Russia, consulting company Frost & Sullivan said in November that the market for water and wastewater treatment was on the rise. It reached about $918 million in 2010.
Anton Lipatov, chief of the Cleandex analytical portal on clean technology, highlighted industrial energy efficiency, energy storage, biofuel or electric cars and water management as generating the most demand worldwide. In Russia, it is also waste management, he said.

TITLE: Head Steals $50M From City
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The former head of the Moscow- based Unique Objects Development and Reconstruction Administration has been arrested for stealing 1.5 billion rubles ($49.8 million) from the city budget, Interfax reported Monday.
Andrei Barkanov is suspected of having “allotted subsidies to a target inappropriate to the conditions of their issuance, thereby improving the financial condition of his own organization,” an unnamed police source told Interfax.
Barkanov’s agency was responsible for financing the construction of building projects uncompleted by developers in South Tushino. 
The Moscow mayor’s office was approached by cheated apartment buyers last month who demanded that the buildings in which they had bought property be completed, the source told Interfax.

TITLE: Political Plurality Spotted at Davos
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, who led the Russian delegation at a global economic forum in Davos, condemned his country’s political system, but said any changes should be moderate.
Shuvalov’s criticism may have been the first time a ranking government official took the floor outside Russia — and before international investors and economists — to assail the legacy of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
The way the state functions in Russia is “backward” and “one-dimensional,” Shuvalov said at a business breakfast hosted by Russia’s biggest lender, state-controlled Sberbank, at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.
“Russia deserves a different political system,” he told the audience that included Societe Generale chief executive Frederic Oudea.
Shuvalov’s comments came after two public rallies in Moscow last month, the biggest in about two decades, which prompted President Dmitry Medvedev to introduce bills in a bid to loosen the Kremlin’s grip on the political opposition. Some protesters, however, demanded more, including new elections to the State Duma.
“What is happening in Russia now is very positive,” Shuvalov said, apparently referring to the protests. “We have a chance to hear perfectly distinctive voices, harsh voices that say this status can no longer be tolerated.”
He was cautious to avoid specifics about what he didn’t like about the political landscape, but said it produced a “monopolized” economy.
In proposing changes, he only said they must not tighten the screws or wreak havoc. If Putin abruptly loses power like Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, it wouldn’t serve the best interests of the country, Shuvalov warned.
Another ranking member of the Russian delegation, Kremlin economic aide Arkady Dvorkovich, also took issue with the political system, but spared it disparaging remarks. He called for reasonable opposition to the government, such as a liberal party and reiterated that the state played an excessively large role in the economy.
Despite all the talk against a state-dominated economy, Shuvalov indicated again, on the forum’s sidelines, that the government was in no hurry to pull out of its prize assets. Privatizations scheduled for this year may move back if the price is not right, he said.
Former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin mentioned a one-year or two-year delay in privatization plans.
State pressure on business also has a political dimension, Kudrin said. He said at the Sberbank breakfast that there had been “numerous” cases when companies came under pressure for financing opposition parties.
“We aim for tolerance in society regardless of political views,” Kudrin said. “That includes the right of businesses to finance political ... parties. Only then there will be competition.”
Dismissed in September for public disagreement with the president over swelling defense spending, Kudrin reiterated that he thought the State Duma elections were rigged.
One of Russia’s former top investors, Bill Browder, who accuses the authorities of stealing his firms and killing his lawyer, said he did not believe Kudrin could become a true opposition figure and would instead be used by the Kremlin to take the steam out of the opposition movement.
“Putin has a big problem. He cannot put the genie back in the bottle. Fear evaporated in December,” Browder said, Reuters reported.

TITLE: British Spy Story Tailor-Made for an Election Year
AUTHOR: By Victor Davidoff
TEXT: In 2006, an expos&#233; about British “spy stones” in a film by pro-Kremlin television journalist Arkady Mamontov set off a media storm. The story was so advantageous for the Kremlin that many commentators suspected that the device was not real and that the whole story was a fabrication created to justify a government attack on nongovernmental organizations that were active in Russia. At the time, dozens of NGOs were barred from receiving foreign grants and simply disappeared. Several major foreign foundations were also forced to stop their activities in Russia.
Five years later, the notorious spy stones completed a complicated trajectory to return in the film “Putin, Russia and the West,” shot for the BBC. In the film, Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff, indirectly admits that the devices were used by British intelligence services for contact with their agents.
On Jan. 19, the film was announced on the BBC’s official site. In less than 72 hours, its footage became a part of a new Mamontov documentary, once again directed against Russia’s political opposition. As in 2006, the timing and message were suspiciously good for Putin. On his blog on Ekho Moskvy, well-known Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky wrote: “I don’t have any doubt that this is an FSB operation. They deftly used the BBC film ‘Putin, Russia and the West’ to resurrect old propaganda just when mass demonstrations are going on in Moscow before the presidential election.”
Bukovsky isn’t the only one with doubts. Andrei Illarionov, Putin’s former economic adviser and now his political opponent, wrote on his LiveJournal blog: “This whole story is like a game in which the public only knows part of the information. And it looks like a game with players other than the Russian authorities.”
Popular LiveJournal blogger Anton Nosik even accuses the filmmakers of taking Russian state money through the PR agency Ketchum, which has a contract to “improve the image of Russia in the West.” But he doesn’t provide any evidence for this.
The film certainly does raise a number of questions. Its pro-Putin bias is clear. For example, in describing Putin’s rise to power, the filmmakers make no mention of perhaps the most mysterious and important events that contributed to his consolidation of power — the bombing of apartment buildings in Moscow and other cities in 1999.
The film is also filled with factual errors. For example, it referred to a war waged against “Chechen rebel separatists,” when in fact it was being carried out against the legitimate government of then-President Aslan Maskhadov, which was recognized by Moscow. Overall, the film buys into the Kremlin version of history: Putin came to power, put an end to the “chaos of the 1990s,” took the country back from the oligarchs and gave Russians prosperity.
But you don’t need conspiracy theories to explain this particular version of events. In the democratic West, there have always been people who have defended dictators, from Fidel Castro to Saddam Hussein. They didn’t get paid from foreign bank accounts. They were simply left wing and anti-American.
The dominant theory among the left in the West is that Putin’s anti-democratic crusade is a largely legitimate reaction to the hostile policies of the West, especially the United States. The BBC film follows this general guideline.
In Moscow, these theories are retranslated as official propaganda. The spy-stone episode takes up more than half of Mamontov’s film, but the emphasis is on new accusations against the country’s political opposition and human rights activists. The film shows the U.S. passport of veteran human rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva, which she was granted in 1981 after being stripped of Soviet citizenship. It also shows footage of a group of opposition leaders leaving the U.S. Embassy in Moscow after attending a meeting with U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns. (In an interview with Kommersant last week, U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul said he co-hosted the meeting as a matter of protocol only and hardly said a word.)
Putin’s propaganda machine is generating a wide variety of accusations against his political opponents. For example, Lifenews.ru claimed that opposition leader Boris Nemtsov allegedly spent the New Year’s holidays in Dubai with a call girl. Nemtsov was furious: The “call girl” turned out to be his companion of three years. “When someone calls my girlfriend ‘a prostitute,’ to be honest, I want to bash him in the face,” he wrote on his LiveJournal blog. He plans to sue the online tabloid for slander.
The new smear campaign against opposition leaders hints at the answer to the question most hotly debated these days: Will Putin 2.0 be more liberal than Putin 1.0? People who believe he will cite the clear signs of liberalization after the recent protests. Those who don’t believe it — including Bukovsky and Illarionov — think that this is just a tactical and very temporary maneuver, which will be followed by election fraud, crackdown and a longer-term policy of autocratic rule.
But signs point to a Putin 1.5. For a while, the Kremlin will be tightening some screws while loosening others. But that can’t go on forever. How long it will go on and what will come afterward remain to be seen.

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

TITLE: FROM A SAFE DISTANCE: Less May Be More for Protesters
AUTHOR: By Alexei Bayer
TEXT: Pro-democracy protests in Russia are being organized by writers, journalists, artists and other cultural figures. There are few businesspeople among them who understand the concept of risk-adjusted returns.
In any investment, the greater the risk of losing money, the higher the profit that investors demand. For example, Greek and Portuguese bonds offer high yields precisely because there is a high probability that their governments will default on their debt.
Similarly, if real estate prices double in a year, it is less likely that they will go on climbing and more likely that a speculative bubble will develop. If prices continue to rise, every new real estate deal will have a lower upside potential and a larger downside risk, meaning that investors will face larger losses when the bubble eventually bursts.
Such risk-return calculations can be applied to the Feb. 4 rally to be held in Moscow in support of free and fair elections. Its organizers are clearly taking a major risk. If the weather stays cold, if the sense of euphoria engendered by the earlier protests wears out — or if Muscovites, who have children, families and jobs, and face all the usual pressures of middle-class life, suffer a bout of protest fatigue — the number of participants may fall short of the rally on Prospekt Sakharova on Dec. 24, or even the smaller demonstration on Bolotnaya Ploshchad on Dec. 10. That would be a defeat, corroborating the Kremlin’s claim that the protest movement doesn’t represent the country.
The risks are huge, while likely benefits are small. If some 120,000 people march on Feb. 4, it will be considered a major success. Yet, this number represents just 1 percent of Moscow’s population. Such a rally will add little to what was demonstrated in December — that Russia has shaken off its political apathy, that its citizens demand a voice in how their country is run and are willing to raise their voice to be heard by their government.
After December, the government has clearly become apprehensive. It is unsure how to react to the largest street protests since 1993. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin remains defiant, but his entourage has been sending conflicting signals, one day offering to negotiate with protesters and then ignoring their demands. There seems to be members of the political and business elite who are preparing to detach themselves from the unpopular regime. They don’t want to do it too early, but they don’t want to stay too long either.
In this environment, a strategy of lower risk and higher reward for the opposition would be to bide its time and do nothing else. It has already shown the government how strong it is by producing a mass protest movement. It should quietly solidify its gains by building political parties and a broad alliance of opponents to the regime. It should draft a set of demands, develop a strategy for the March 4 election and beyond, and build a network of political organizers and election monitors around the country.
This would leave the ball in the government’s court, forcing it to make a difficult choice: whether to have an honest election and risk revealing Putin’s shrinking base of support, while also caving in to protesters’ demands, or else rig the vote once again, as it did during the voting to the State Duma on Dec. 4. Of course, if Russians feel that their votes were stolen once more, it will be easier to lead hundreds of thousands of them in an angry protest.

<i>Alexei Bayer, a native Muscovite, is a New York-based economist.</i>

TITLE: CHERNOV’S CHOICE
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: It is perhaps unsurprising that Putin — under heavy criticism for electoral fraud in favor of his United Russia party at the Dec. 4 State Duma Election and for violations recorded during the ongoing campaign for the presidential elections due on March 4 — should be attacked in a song by the feminist punk band <b>Pussy Riot</b> (see interview, this page).
But surprisingly, some harsh criticism has come from a very different source: A band of paratrooper veterans, who are largely considered to be one of the conservative groups upon which the Kremlin relies. Veteran bands frequently feature at pro-Kremlin rallies.
The music video attributed to the <b>Admiralteisky District’s Committee of Airborne Troops (VDV) Veterans</b> in Moscow shows two tattooed macho singers dressed in the VDV’s distinctive blue striped shirts and blue berets, singing strikingly intelligible lyrics that effectively pull apart Putin’s propagandist image as the savior of Russia.
“The president for eight years and again a candidate / Look in our eyes and cancel your mandate / You were trusted, but you lied for many years / Using your KGB tricks everywhere,” the band sings.
“We’re sick of seeing the entire country’s shame / Next to the poverty of villages, your castles rise.”
In the chorus, the band refers to Putin’s dismissal of anti-fraud protesters as “Banderlogs” (Rudyard Kipling’s “monkey people” mostly known in Russia from popular Soviet cartoons) and their white ribbons (that stand for honest elections) as “birth-control devices” soon after the Dec. 10 rally that drew more than 100,000 in Moscow.
“You’re an ordinary bureaucrat — not a Tsar, not a God / Man is a dumb Banderlog for you / The ribbon of freedom’s color is positive for everyone / And it’s a condom only for you,” it goes.
All the due references to World War II, the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the Motherland are in place too, in a nod to the tradition of the Russian military song.
Putin is known to be a fan of macho, faux patriotic songs, such as those played by bands like Lyube, which infamously performed on Red Square on the 2008 presidential election day, when Putin installed Medvedev as his successor.
Released on Thursday, the video had racked up 789,990 views by Tuesday on YouTube alone.
What’s significant is that the band is fighting on Putin’s own turf. 
The song is, no doubt, patriotic, but patriotism seems to be turning against Putin right now. When paratrooper veterans sing songs like this, it must be a bad sign for him, despite his intention to return to the Kremlin for what might be another 12 years, due to a change in the constitution made by Medvedev soon after he took office in 2008.

TITLE: Female fury
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Pussy Riot, a feminist punk collective from Moscow whose members hide their faces behind colored balaclavas, creates waves of protest through its dissident songs and unsanctioned performances — which culminated late last month in a brief unauthorized concert on Moscow’s strictly guarded Red Square. 
The group, which performed a freshly penned anti-Kremlin song called “Putin Got Scared” (Putin Zassal) — complete with colored smoke bombs and a purple feminist flag — was arrested and, after being held for about five hours in a police precinct, two members were fined 500 rubles (around $17) each. The members were charged with holding an unauthorized rally.
“Red Square is symbolically the main place of the country; we believe that it is the place that should be occupied to achieve a real political change, it’s the equivalent of Tahrir for Russia,” Pussy Riot said in an email interview this week.
In an email, a member who calls herself Garadzha Matveyeva said that the group answered the questions collectively — just as it writes its songs.
For the Red Square performance, the group chose as its stage Lobnoye Mesto — a 13-meter-long stone platform previously used for announcing the tsar’s ukases — as a reference to the historic demonstration of seven Soviet dissidents who came to the site with the slogan “For our freedom and yours” to protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia on August 25, 1968. The dissidents subsequently spent years in prisons, psychiatric asylums and in exile.
“We believe that the Soviet Union’s aggressive imperial politics are similar in many ways to Putin’s course,” Pussy Riot said.
“The way the state treats its citizens hasn’t changed much since the times of the U.S.S.R.; there is still paternalist supervision and police control over people. Secondly, we always try to choose elevated platforms — similar to a concert stage — so Lobnoye Mesto met our needs in this sense.”
 “Putin Got Scared” was inspired by the spontaneous, unsanctioned protests against the rigged State Duma elections in December.
“The song was written in the aftermath of the Dec. 5 events and is permeated with the radical mood of protest of that day, when after a 10,000-strong rally on Chistiye Prudy a number of protesters managed to break through the OMON police cordons and around 1,000 marched almost to the Kremlin itself,” the group said.
“The police were at a loss, they didn’t know what to do; they were waiting for orders in astonishment and didn’t dare touch the protesters. The orders to detain the demonstrators didn’t come until the people had already reached the Kremlin, half an hour after the march had begun. The authorities were frightened.
“The orders to bring armed troops to Moscow came immediately. Special detachments were put on alert. It was clear that Putin had got scared.”
Although the two authorized anti-fraud rallies that followed in December drew more than 100,000 each, Pussy Riot believes that they did not have as much of an effect as the unsanctioned protests.
“All the troops were taken out of Moscow on Dec. 10; when it became clear that the opposition had made large concessions, Putin calmed down, unfortunately,” the group said.
“As far as we can see, Putin is scared only of unsanctioned rallies. That’s why we promote holding unauthorized protests in our songs. We are not happy about what happens in the sphere of civic protests, which have now turned into sanctioned rallies. 
“The authorities will not get scared and make concessions because they are rallies that they sanctioned themselves. On the contrary, such rallies show that the authorities are allegedly tolerant toward people, that they are ready to listen to them and provide them with public platforms. But in reality, the authorities turn a deaf ear to all the protesters’ demands and none of the claims set up at the rallies have been fulfilled.”
Pussy Riot believes that more unsanctioned rallies will follow in view of the upcoming presidential elections.
“It’s very likely that most radically-minded people will be isolated (arrested, put in prison) — such as the Natsbols [members of the oppositional Other Russia party] or [left-wing activist] Sergei Udaltsov,” the group said.
“What happens after the elections depends on those tens of thousands of people who come to sanctioned rallies and marches now; we hope that the violations, fraud and falsifications that follow will force people to take action not sanctioned by the authorities.”
According to the group, the song “Putin Got Scared” celebrates the feminist capture of the Kremlin.
“It was cold on that day, it was a real Russian winter, and we and our equipment got really cold,” Pussy Riot said.
“But this angered us even more, so the girls screamed so furiously that the policemen were scared to come up to us at first.”
The video of the performance became an instant YouTube hit, while the blog entry containing photos and links to the videos, lyrics and the group’s commentary received more than 1,100 comments.
“As we saw from the responses to our video, many Russian citizens want Putin to get scared once again and for a long time,” Pussy Riot said.
“The grassroots protest force is more radically-minded than official rally organizers imagine. We believe that a large number of people are ready to demonstrate without a sanction. People were happy to share the quotes from our songs: ‘The time for a subversive clash has come,’ ‘Live on Red Square / Show the freedom of civil anger.’”
The group — which features from three to eight performers — sees itself as being “on the border between punk rock and contemporary art.”
“Contemporary culture is characterized by diffusivity, mutual influence and the interaction of different directions, the intersection that leads to transgression,” Pussy Riot says.
“It’s possible to find features of 1990s Actionism in our performances, while the motif of the closed face of the performer — which has been used by many music bands such as Slipknot, Daft Punk or Asian Women on the Telephone, for instance, is borrowed from conceptual art where the tradition of not showing one’s face is present.”
Pussy Riot officially formed in autumn 2011 when it played its first gig in Otradnoye metro, performing the song “Clear Up the Pavement” (Osvobodi Bruschatku). Complete with footage from performances at other metro stations as well as on bus roofs and trolleybuses, the video was released on Nov. 7, the anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution.
According to the group, one of the events that led them to form Pussy Riot was Putin and Medvedev’s announcement made to the United Russia party congress on Sept. 25 that they would change posts in the upcoming presidential elections due on March 4. The move has been compared to castling in chess, when a rook and a king swap places. “We don’t like this kind of chess,” Pussy Riot said.
Since then, Pussy Riot has held unsanctioned performances in boutiques and at a fashion show as well as on the roof of a garage next to the detention center where the imprisoned participants of anti-fraud rallies were held. They unveiled a banner, lit flares and performed a song called “Death to Prison, Freedom to Protest” and escaped without being arrested.
The group cites American punk rock band Bikini Kill and its Riot Grrrl movement as an inspiration, but says there are plenty of differences between them and Bikini Kill.
“What we have in common is impudence, politically loaded lyrics, the importance of feminist discourse, non-standard female image,” Pussy Riot said.
“The difference is that Bikini Kill performed at specific music venues, while we hold unsanctioned concerts. On the whole, Riot Grrrl was closely linked to Western cultural institutions, whose equivalents don’t exist in Russia.
Pussy Riot’s unsanctioned concerts are reminiscent of The Sex Pistols’ infamous boat concert, when the band rented a boat to premiere “God Save the Queen” to spoof the Queen’s Silver Jubiliee in 1977, by playing live on the Thames, passing Westminster Pier and the Houses of Parliament. 
“In this story with the Sex Pistols we find it odd that the boat was rented by the band itself,” Pussy Riot said.
“It’s difficult to find an element of protest when you perform on a boat that you have paid for; on the contrary, it’s a type of commercial performance. There’s no connection to Pussy Riot in this, because we didn’t rent and are not going to rent anything; we come and take over platforms that don’t belong to us and use them for free.”
Although Pussy Riot conceals its faces and identities, the group revealed that the members’ average age is 25 and they have a background in music, theater, art — and mountain climbing. One member works in the electronics industry.
“We are united by feminism, opposition to Putin’s regime and his vertical of power, antiauthoritarianism and leftist ideas,” Pussy Riot said.
“Some of us are anarchists, some have leftist liberal positions. We would like horizontal political activity, self-organization and the capability to be aware of oneself as an equal participant in civil politics, to understand one’s rights and fight for them to develop. Russian society lacks tolerance and lenience.
“We are concerned about the centralization of political life and all the problems that stem from it. It’s obvious that a single center can’t take the specifics of every region into consideration, that’s why it’s important to develop regional self-governance. 
“We are concerned about the educational reform that would make even high school education a partly paid service, and health reform that promotes such dubious things as an anti-abortion law. We don’t like the lack of cultural institutions, and the fact that no conditions for their development have been created. We are concerned about widespread sexist thinking, which reduces the diversity of people’s lives to sexual roles.”
According to the group, it would like to influence the cultural situation that forms public consciousness.
“We alter the approach to specific particular subjects such as LGBT, feminism and civic protest activity,” Pussy Riot said.
“Our motivation is ethical; we see that entire strata of population find themselves under unjustified discriminatory pressure. For instance, conservativeness dictates a definite role for a woman, which is guaranteed by social mechanisms of encouragement and punishment. This role doesn’t allow her to fulfill herself in another, alternative way that doesn’t correspond to the ideals of classic femininity.”
Although Pussy Riot’s performances have been classified by the police as “unsanctioned rallies,” the group said it was the counter-extremism Center E, described as “Putin’s political police” that harasses it most.
“Ordinary policemen are not as annoying and bothersome as Center E,” the group said.
“Center E taps our telephones, breaks into our email and tries its best to prevent our concerts.”

TITLE: A devil’s bargain
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Pure evil reigns in Alexander Sokurov’s new film “Faust,” which won the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival and starts screening in Russian movie theaters on Feb. 9. The director plunges audiences into a unipolar world in which all things cruel, brutal and despicable flourish — and have long combated all things positive. The effects of this experience were described by director Darren Aronofsky, head of the jury in Venice, as “a life-changing experience,” a strong compliment that very few works in the history of cinema have been awarded.
As its name suggests, the film was inspired by Goethe’s interpretation of the legend. Sokurov’s take on it, however, makes a striking departure from that of the German poet. In Goethe’s work, the story revolves around the fight between good and evil.
Sokurov, by contrast, creates a reality from which good is exempt in the first place. 
In a way, Sokurov’s film resembles a painting, or rather a shadowy ancient print that has lost a bit of color over the years. Visually, it is very dense and detailed. The main two themes of the paintings are landscape and anatomy. The film opens with a divine landscape of a small German town, which is followed by the sight of the main character, Dr. Faust (Johannes Zeiler) examining the insides of a rotting corpse. Faust is looking for a human soul, but in vain.
“Faust” is highly physiological, in the less pleasant senses of the word. Images of pigs, rats, insects, decay and piles of garbage create an intoxicating fusion that viewers can almost smell.
Like in Goethe’s work, Faust falls victim to his curiosity and craving for knowledge. He seeks to establish the borders of the human soul, and sells his soul to Mephisto for the love of Margarete (Isolda Dychauk). 
“Faust” is the fourth, final part in Sokurov’s tetralogy about the corrupting nature of power. As with Hitler in 1999’s “Moloch,” Lenin in 2001’s “Taurus,” and Hirohito in “The Sun” (2004), Sokurov portrays the main character during a time of crisis. 
It is the process of a human being stiking a deal with the devil that interests Sokurov. “It is at this very moment of accepting the conditions of the deal that a person betrays themself,” the director said.
In the film, the moment when Faust gets what he wanted — to make love to Margarete — is shown metaphorically. The couple falls into dark water, literally falling below. Sokurov treats the literary element of the story liberally, changing the sequence of events, inventing new characters, such as Faust’s father, and altering parts. The action takes place in the 19th century.
We first see Faust as poverty-stricken and starving. But soon his basest instincts — greed and then lust — kick in, and events escalate, pulling the doctor into the abyss.
What is supposed to be a love story between Faust and Margarete is rendered a loveless experience. What fuels Faust is a concoction of his most unscrupulous thoughts and most despicable motives.
“It is remarkable how difficult it is to impress or surprise people by doing good things; at the same time every day we are shocked by the scale, the depth and the range of damage that one human being can do to another one,” Sokurov told audiences before the St. Petersburg premiere of the film on Thursday. 
It is no coincidence that Sokurov turned Mephisto (Anton Adasinsky) into a revolting-looking old pawnbroker, who looks like a hybrid between man and goat. 
“We deliberately made a direct, in your face connection between Mephisto and money,” Sokurov said. “It makes the story resonant with modern Russia, with so many empty hearts and full pockets. People wanting to strike a deal with Mephisto could form a huge line. And Mephisto would not have to court potential clients here.” 
The film essentially explores the dark side of human nature, almost as though the director is trying to measure the depth of it, just like one would try and establish the depth of a lake. The journey that audiences embark on when watching Sokurov’s “Faust” is a most sobering trip. The viewer follows the main characters hitting new and ever more shocking lows.
The director, admittedly, has always regarded Faust as a human being. 
“Faust is as real as Hitler, Lenin and Hirohito in the sense that the story that we tell in the film is a very human story that could happen in real life,” Sokurov said. “You can watch the series in any sequence — it’s a bit like going around in a circle — and it will come down to Faust in the end.”

TITLE: Return to the classics
AUTHOR: By Tatyana Sochiva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg director Vitaly Melnikov presented the premiere of his new film, “The Admirer” (“Poklonnitsa”), at the city’s Dom Kino movie theater last week. 
The film is loosely based on a true story, and focuses on 19th-century literary giant Anton Chekhov, one of Russia’s greatest dramatists. Melnikov, an esteemed veteran of the city’s Lenfilm studios, picked a little known episode from the writer’s biography as the basis for his new film. 
Chekhov, played by Kirill Pirogov, arrives in St. Petersburg already reputed as a literary figure, and meets Lydia Avilova (Svetlana Ivanova), a young writer and an admirer of his work. The two quickly fall in love, but the story cannot be a happy one: He is terminally ill with tuberculosis, and she is married with children. In contrast with modern cinema, their love affair consists of a few meetings, a few exchanged letters and not much else. But a shared understanding of literature and their affection for each other unites the characters until the final frame of the movie. 
It is no accident that the film was originally planned to be titled “Lions, Eagles and Partridges”  — a quote from Chekhov’s play “The Seagull,” devoted to love and art, which in the film are the opposing forces to mediocrity and banality.
Melnikov has created a heartwarming story that includes both sad moments and comic episodes. Avilova’ s brother, carried away by the philosophy of Leo Tolstoy, is a source of humor, as is her narrow-minded husband and the insolent circle of literary ladies. The highlight of “The Admirer” is undoubtedly the film’s talented actors, the most famous among whom is Oleg Tabakov, who plays Chekhov’s friend Nikolai Leikin. Tabakov is known for his roles in many classic Russian films, including “War and Peace” (1968), “Seventeen Moments of Spring” (1973) and “Oblomov” (1981). 
“The Admirer” is the 23rd movie of the 83-year-old director, who rose to fame after his first serious work, “The Boss of Chukotka,” in 1966. His best-known works also include “The Tsar’s Hunt” (1989), “Prince Alexei” (1997) and “Poor, Poor Paul” (2003), which comprise a trilogy of historical films depicting court intrigue and tragedy in the Russian Empire in the 18th century.
The fact that a classic filmmaker was attracted to the subject of a classic writer is significant, especially today when, as a rule, only commercial blockbusters catering to modern trends hit the screens. “The Admirer” is in sharp contrast to such films, following instead the style of Soviet cinema, with its deep and nuanced depiction of human relationships. 
Despite documented financial difficulties faced by the film crew, the visual reconstruction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries is impressively atmospheric. 
“The Admirer” is a simple, positive film that doesn’t shock, reveal secrets or raise social issues, but its unforgettable depiction of human relationships is certainly a cut above the generic action movies offered by the rest of the contemporary Russian film industry. 

<i>“The Admirer” is due out on general release later this month.</i>

TITLE: the word’s worth: A Guide To Laying Low
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: Ëåæàòü: to lie

Stand, sit, lie … sit, lie, stand …
I know I sound like a dog trainer on drugs, but bear with me just a little bit longer. You’ll thank me some day. If you use the wrong stance verb in Russian, it’s as if you were saying in English: My keys are standing on the counter. The response is likely to be: Âû îòêóäà? (What country are you from?)
Today’s stance verb is ëåæàòü (to lie). Some things always lie. Hair, for example, lies on your head — that is, êîãäà íå ñòîÿò äûáîì (when it’s not standing on end). Êàê çàñòàâèòü âîëîñû ëåæàòü àêêóðàòíî? (How do you make your hair stay neatly in place?)
Money, when not changing hands or working for you, also lies. Äåíüãè ëåæàò â áàíêå, íà ñ÷åòó, â êîøåëüêå, â ÿùèêå íà êóõíå (The money is in the bank, in an account, in my wallet, in a drawer in the kitchen).
Most food that is not in packages lies. That is, you might say ñîëü ñòîèò íà ïîëêå (the salt is on the shelf) because it’s in a package or saltcellar. Or: êåò÷óï ñòîèò îêîëî ïëèòû (the ketchup is by the stove) because it’s in a container. But õëåá, îâîùè è ôðóêòû ëåæàò íà ñòîëå (bread, vegetables and fruit are on the table).
So it seems that if something doesn’t have a base or an obvious top and bottom, it lies. Äåòñêèå ìÿ÷èêè ëåæàò â óãëó (The kids’ balls are in the corner).
Therefore, shadows also lie, even if they are on the ceiling. Or perhaps like balls, they lie because they are thrown (îòáðîøåíû)? In any case:  ñàäó áûëî òèõî, ïðîõëàäíî, è ò¸ìíûå òåíè ëåæàëè íà çåìëå (It was quiet and cool in the garden, and dark shadows lay on the ground).
People who are sick or injured lie in hospitals or at home, even if they are not bedridden. Îí ëåæèò â áîëüíèöå ñî ñëîìàííîé ðóêîé (He’s in the hospital with a broken arm). Ìóæ ïðîñòóäèëñÿ, ëåæèò äîìà (My husband caught a cold and is taking a sick day at home).
When viewed from above or afar, elements of a landscape — however massive — often lie. Ïåðåä íàìè ëåæàëî ìîðå (The sea lay below us). Even some tall structures on a high hill might lie in Russian, although in English they would stand: Íåáîëüøàÿ êðåïîñòü ëåæàëà íà âûñîêîì è êðóòîì áåðåãó ðåêè (A small fort stood — literally “lay” — on a high and steep river bank).
And if something isn’t being used, isn’t working or is in storage — it lies. It doesn’t matter if the thing is placed horizontally, vertically or any which way. Ëåæàò äîìà êîñìåòè÷åñêèå ñïîíæèêè, íî ïîëüçîâàòüñÿ èìè ìíå íåóäîáíî (I’ve got cosmetic sponges lying around at home, but I find them hard to use). Çèìîé íàøè âåëîñèïåäû ëåæàò â ñàðàå (In the winter, we put away our bicycles in the shed).
Boxes (êîðîáêè) are tricky. Most of the time they seem to lie: Êîðîáêà ñïè÷åê ëåæèò íà ñòîëå (The matchbox is on the table).
But when they are placed upright (on the short side) or on top of one another, Russian speakers say that they stand: Êîðîáêè ñòîÿëè ïî÷òè äî ïîòîëêà (The boxes were piled up nearly to the ceiling).
See how important this is?
Or are you thinking: Why can’t we just let sleeping dogs lie?

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

TITLE: People change, and so does Russia
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: David Remnick says he has been lucky — “preposterously lucky” — twice in his professional life: Once when he was posted to Moscow in 1988 as a correspondent for The Washington Post and once when he was made editor of The New Yorker magazine. But luck alone doesn’t explain Remnick’s professional success. This prolific writer and Russia-watcher has written thousands of articles, won dozens of awards, and is the author of six books, including “Lenin’s Tomb,” which received both the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and a George Polk Award for excellence in journalism. His most recent book, “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,” has just come out in Russian translation. He was recently in Moscow to present his book, immerse himself again in the Russian language, and return to a stint of reporting. Before he wrote up his impressions for The New Yorker, he found time to talk with The St. Petersburg Times columnist Michele A. Berdy about Moscow “then” and “now,” the disparate joys of reporting and editing and the yin and yang of Russian politics.
<i><b>Q: Are you used to the changes in Moscow or is it still a shock when you arrive?</b></i>
<i><b>A:</b></i> The commercial stuff I’m used to. That’s been around for a long time now. But there’s always someone to visit, someone to see, something to hear about that really is mind-altering on the cultural or political level. I had never been to the Red October Chocolate Factory, which was kind of a breakthrough place — it had a political meaning even in the 1990s when it was one of the first privatized companies. Now there’s Dozhd (an Internet TV station), Bolshoi Gorod — young people running around with great energy and doing their thing.
<i><b>Q: When you were reporting here the Soviet Union was breaking up, and now …</b></i>
<i><b>A:</b></i> It’s hard not to be crushed when you think about the overall shape of the political system. It’s hardly what anyone imagined in 1990-91. But that was a very long time ago. … Today people talk about it being a kind of analog to the Brezhnev era, which is to say stagnant, repressive politics, an oil rich mono-economy. … But it’s not the Soviet system. The Soviet system was absolutely comprehensive and absolutely repressive. The key word was “absolute.” This is a much cleverer system. It allows much more to happen. It allows steam to be let off. The question is how much steam…
It’s clear — and not just in Moscow circles; you can sense it in the regions, in corners of the Internet — there is a lot of dissatisfaction with the recent ðîêèðîâêà (job swap). It was a quantum leap in cynical just to casually say, “We thought of this years ago and it was all decided.”
But I think circumstances are so radically different now. There were signs of civic life before 1985 — mainly the dissident movement — but they were really isolated and really repressed. And then there was a revolution that had to be initiated from above by an extremely daring reformer and eventually by his even more radical antagonist. Gorbachev and Yeltsin were a kind of yin and yang. That’s clearly not the case now. The yin and the yang at the top of the system now are not antagonistic — they lead the same system. And the key word of the system today is ïðîäîëæåíèå (continuation). Gorbachev’s line was òàê æèòü íåëüçÿ (we can’t live like this) but now it’s the opposite: íàäî æèòü òàê äàëüøå (we have to continue to live like this in the future, too).
<i><b>Q: Do you think that coverage of Russia in the United States is too much, not enough, about right?</b></i>
<i><b>A:</b></i> I couldn’t do a Three Bears thing on it. The amount of it is never going to be as much as when I was here because then it was just event after event after event. … One could have written three or four articles a day, and sometimes I did. Yes, there’s less of it in the mainstream media. There’s no question about that. And interest is lower. But we’re obsessed with other things.
<i><b>Q: Do you miss being a reporter on the ground?</b></i>
<i><b>A:</b></i> Sure, but I can only live one life. Which is why — I hope not to the despair of my wife — my version of going to the beach is to go some place for a couple of weeks with a notebook. I get more out of it. If you go to the beach, you get a sunburn that begins to peel. If you report, you learn something. Although an editor and a reporter seem to be joined at the hip, they are very different. As editor of The New Yorker, I’m largely enabling other people’s creative and journalistic work in order to get it to where they want it to be. But being a writer or reporter — it’s your thing entirely. It’s much more focused. We do have some great writers and with them my sole function is to say “thank you.” I mean what would I say to John Updike when he sent me an essay other than “Thank you, this is even more amazing than the last one”?
<i><b>Q: Do you like being an editor?</b></i>
<i><b>A:</b></i> I do! I bet I’d like playing second base for the Yankees and being the China correspondent for The New York Times, too, but you have to choose.

TITLE: in the spotlight: Putin vs. Prokhorov
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
TEXT: Last week, billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin lined up their teams of celebrity supporters for the presidential race, with pop star Alla Pugachyova still staunchly behind Prokhorov, even if she called him a “wimp” in his love life.
Prokhorov announced his “public council” on Monday, listing a celebrity contingent including Pugachyova, who came second in a recent rating of the most influential women in Russia. “Whatever the prima donna does, she remains a herald of personal freedom, above any political barriers,” Ogonyok magazine wrote.
Perhaps the second-biggest star is quirky actor Konstantin Khabensky who starred in the hugely popular “Night Watch” films. Prokhorov also bagged film director Valery Todorovsky who made “Stilyagi,” a catchy musical about Soviet hipsters, and Leonid Yarmolnik, an actor and judge on the long-running comedy show “KVN.” The first meeting on Tuesday was also attended by rock star Andrei Makarevich, the frontman of Mashina Vremeni, and novelist Viktor Yerofeyev, RBK daily wrote.
Meanwhile, Putin introduced his rival “people’s staff” headed by film director Stanislav Govorukhin, who apparently writes regular posts on Twitter (@SGovoruhin) in an enjoyably grumpy old man tone, criticizing immoral television shows such as “Dom-2,” Ekho Moskvy radio station and actresses with fake breasts.
Govorukhin, a United Russia deputy, is best known for making the cult detective series “The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed” starring singer and actor Vladimir Vysotsky. Controversially, Govorukhin claimed that Vysotsky, who died in 1980 and whose songs are all about a search for personal freedom, would have supported his position.
“I don’t think Vysotsky would have followed those who want misfortune and collapse for Russia. I’m sure Volodya would have supported my choice today,” he told Komsomolskaya Pravda radio station.
Putin’s local Moscow list includes the host of a television health show, Yelena Malysheva, who once visually demonstrated circumcision by chopping off an audience member’s polo neck. Perhaps the most high-profile figure is Tatyana Tarasova, the legendary skating coach and now also a demanding judge on celebrity ice-skating shows.
Prokhorov’s people are already up and running. He published a bizarre photograph on Twitter of Yerofeyev looking over draft versions of his advertising posters with Pugachyova, who doesn’t look too impressed.
The pop star gave a characteristically forthright interview to Dozhd Internet television channel. Wearing a string of pearls, she confessed that she doesn’t like rallies and thinks that protest leader Alexei Navalny is “phony” about helping people and is just in it to gain power.
She praised Prokhorov as an “independent and honest man.” Rather sweetly, she said he seemed to have a “shy nobility” about him, adding that maybe that is because he is still young (at 46).
But with a sparkle in her eyes and a vast rock on her ring finger after her recent marriage to television presenter Maxim Galkin, she launched into Prokhorov’s lack of a love life. Regularly listed as Russia’s most eligible bachelor, he has talked of believing in love at first sight. Although the Courchevel incident with an entourage of young nubile girls who reportedly hadn’t bothered packing any ski suits was somewhat less romantic. As is the prospect of a permanent crick in the neck.
“I know him. He’s a wimp, to be honest,” Pugachyova said, using the funny-sounding words myamlik and myamlya. “He’s so strong, organized, original, determined and very energetic in business, and such a doormat in his personal life.”
“Girls, grab him with your bare hands,” she urged Russian womanhood. “You’ll get a brilliant catch.”

TITLE: THE DISH: Dom 7
AUTHOR: By Ronan Loughney
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: <b>Stuck in the middle</b>
Conveniently situated right in the city center across the canal from the Church of the Spilled Blood, the laconically named Dom 7 (House No. 7) inevitably arouses expectations of certain standards. The overall impression, however, is one of compromise and caution.
The interior boasts a vaguely homely atmosphere created by low-lit wicker lamps, smudged oil paintings and family-sized coat racks scattered around the room. The restaurant’s desire to appeal to a larger demographic, however (a symptom, surely, of the high-rent location), sees these features awkwardly juxtaposed with a giant plasma screen TV showing round-the-clock sports, and an incongruous disco ball hanging forlornly from the ceiling.
These features spoil what is otherwise a charming set-up: A large wooden staircase leading up to a cozy upstairs area that hangs over the lower hall and exposes a high-ceilinged bar area, which gives the restaurant a pleasant open-plan feel. Perhaps the TV and disco ball make more sense in light of the fact that Dom 7 doubles as a club / live-music bar, though this is still no excuse for the gaudy twinkling menace. Fortunately, a stage for gigs remains unobtrusively tucked away in a corner, ensuring that the restaurant just about gets away with its double identity.
While the service was cordial and friendly, it was also inattentive, and at times unhelpful: The starter came after the main courses (or rather while they were still being eaten), in a glaring example of the Russian “bring-it-when-it’s-ready” mentality. The Monteferre wine, which came recommended, was as unremarkable as dry whites come for 1,300 rubles ($42.19) per bottle. This was the cheapest bottle available, with the most expensive priced at 1,800 rubles, ($58.14). The wine list is limited to say the least, with only six wines (three white, three red) available. All of them are dry, leaving little choice for the sweet-toothed Soviet palate.
The food menu, on the other hand, has a very wide selection, which could prove even a little daunting for the indecisive, with a wide variety of pastas, meat, poultry, fish and shashlik dishes, taken from Italian, French and Russian cuisine. As happens so frequently in St. Petersburg restaurants, this attempt to have a wide appeal sacrifices achieving any particular specialty. That is not to say, however, that the food was poor. 
To start — unlike our waitress — with the appetizer, the chicken Julienne (230 rubles, $7.64) was insubstantial for the price, but the delectably juicy mushrooms, fluffy, slow-melting goat’s cheese and piping-hot temperature made up for this.
The shrimp risotto (250 rubles, $8.11) arrived lukewarm however, with shell still remaining on the tails of the shrimps, whose crunchy texture was all the more unpleasant in contrast with the bland, soggy rice. 
Pasta with tomato and basil was simple but well made, exuding a powerful but alluring aroma of garlic, offset cleverly by a generous sprinkling of fresh black pepper, and at 190 rubles ($6.17), more than fairly priced.
The meal and experience as a whole was summed up by the apple Charlotte (150 rubles, $4.93). While not unpleasant and complemented well by a scoop of lush vanilla ice-cream on the side, it was overall rather bland, with the dough overly thick and stodgy.
Perhaps it is unfair to judge Dom 7 without also experiencing its other identity — its nightclub underbelly. The establishment’s web site promises “unusual surprises and interesting concerts and events” every Friday and Saturday night, running in contrast to the please-all approach on display throughout the week. If the music playing throughout the meal was anything to go by however, more compromise lies in store: Teeth-grindingly awkward funk-blues covers of James Brown classics chugged out of the speakers, but not so loud as to really impose on the mood. For a music venue, this approach again smacks of compromise, a lack of daring that ultimately ends up detracting from the experience, or at least not enhancing it.
Despite being easy to find, Dom 7 itself seems lost, and while not a bad restaurant, it is certainly hard to love. It seems that in taking such pride in its position in “the very heart of St. Petersburg,” it forgot to find its own.

TITLE: High City Prices Cause Building Boom in LenOblast
AUTHOR: By Yelena Minenko
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The expanding population of St. Petersburg means that the issue of housing remains one of the city’s key concerns, particularly in light of the fact that the main contributor to the population growth is migration. According to a census conducted in 2010, the population of the northwest federal district decreased by 2.8 percent from 2002, while the population of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast increased by 4 and 2.6 percent respectively, which is explained by migratory flows, including within the northwest region itself. 
The lack of affordable housing inside the city for much of the working population has led to recent growth in the out-of-town residential market on the city’s outskirts and in the Leningrad Oblast, where the main trend can be described as “the further from the city, the lower the price.” 
“The national project [for the improvement of housing conditions launched in 2005 by then-President Vladimir Putin] is called ‘Affordable and comfortable housing for citizens of Russia,’ but affordable houses are not usually comfortable — a barn in a field is affordable, but not so comfortable,” Dmitry Speransky, an analyst from the St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast Realtors Association, said at a roundtable discussion of affordable housing in the Leningrad Oblast on Thursday. 
“Reasonably priced country houses can be found, for example, in Volkhov, Tikhvin and Murino, at a cost of 40,000 rubles ($1,314) per square meter. But if Murino village can at least be considered a place to which residents of St. Petersburg would like to move, Tikhvin and Volkhov are towns where nobody will go,” said Speransky. 
The current out-of-town real estate market in the Leningrad Oblast consists of three types of objects: Country houses with plots of land attached, land sites that are ready for development and dachas intended for recreation rather than for habitation. 
“The majority of property deals [in the Leningrad Oblast] last year were purchases of land plots covering 1,700-2,000 square meters each. After those were dacha sales. There were no sales at all of large land plots with country houses already built on them in Vsevolozhsk,” said Andrei Bochkov, CEO of PulExpress Group, one of the biggest companies developing cottage villages in the Leningrad Oblast.
Many companies operating on the real estate market in the Leningrad Oblast only offer pieces of land that are ready for exploitation, while there are only a handful of developers that specialize in the production of ready-built country houses and cottages. The market is full of companies that offer less expensive schemes that enable people to first buy a piece of land and then build a house on it in their own timeframe. 
“Such an active development of land sales is wrong, because this way, the client will never get what they essentially wanted,” said Konstantin Kryukov, chairman of the board of directors of Constanta investment and development company. 
“Cases in which construction work starts right after the purchase of land make up just 20 percent, 30 to 40 percent of purchasers make it a protracted construction, and the rest postpone their plans for the future or don’t build a house at all. As a result, those 20 percent live in a field or on a construction site with migrant workers living in trailers next door,” he said. 
Another problem is that mortgages for apartment purchases in the city are not available for those willing to buy an out-of-town house. 
“There is absolutely no mortgage lending in the sphere of low-rise houses,” said Kryukov. “Although there are some agreements with banks, they are not classical mortgage schemes; in most cases they are simply consumer loans.” 
Proposed solutions to the current housing problem are diverse. Some advocate the development of rental housing, which could be a new vector in government policy, while others support the idea of townhouses — two or three-story buildings in the suburbs containing several apartments. 
“The prices for apartments in a townhouse start at 1.5 million rubles ($49,300), which is much cheaper than in the city,” said Sergei Budko, commercial director of Kivennapa development company, which specializes in cottages and townhouses. “For that price, people get their own apartment, their own parking spot and their own piece of country life.” 
The third way is the development of multistoried apartment buildings in the suburbs, like the ones built in Kudrovo village, located about 15 kilometers from the city. 
“Even for townhouses, it is hard to compete with one-room apartments and studios in apartment buildings,” said Kryukov. “In 2013, there will be a boom of apartment buildings spreading on the territory east of St. Petersburg. Kudrovo and the surrounding areas are fully-fledged rivals of urban housing. Even the construction of a metro station in Kudrovo has already been announced,” he added. 
Back in the present, however, “there is no affordable housing and there won’t be any,” according to analyst Speransky. 
“The average salary in St. Petersburg is 30,000 rubles ($986). When we are offered 15,000 rubles ($493) per square meter, then we will have affordable housing. But that will be possible only when the country overcomes corruption.”

TITLE: Experts Say Subsidized Housing Sector Is Weak
AUTHOR: By Howard Amos
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The World Bank, the United Nations and the Economic Development Ministry emphasized the potential for developing state subsidized home construction, also known as “social housing,” in Russia at a round table.
The quantity and scope of state provided housing in Russia is very limited compared with many other countries, particularly in Europe, and families in Moscow can wait up to 10 years for apartments, according to city officials.
There are 414 apartments per 1,000 people in Russia, which is significantly below the European Union figure of 450 per 1,000, said Wolfgang Amann, member of the Real Estate Market Advisory Group of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, at the round table last week. On average, Russians have 22.4 square meters of living space versus 38 square meters in the EU.
Although incomes tripled between 2004 and 2010, the development of mortgage financing in Russia has been slow. Outstanding housing loans are only 2.7 percent of GDP, compared with 52.4 percent in the European Union.
State subsidized housing can’t only address poverty and be a shock absorber for the construction industry in times of crisis, but also a social engineering tool by fostering growth of the middle class, Amann said. 
Currently about 86 percent of housing in Russia is privately owned, said Nadezhda Kosareva, president of the Institute for Urban Economics. Of the remaining 14 percent, about 4 percent is held directly by the state and 10 percent by municipal authorities.
One of the main problems in stimulating investment in social housing is the shadow economy that the property market often falls prey to, Kosareva said. Tax avoidance means purely commercial development is more lucrative.  
The World Bank is supporting the real estate market in Russia as a key catalyst of economic development, according to Anna Georgieva, the World Bank’s Russia Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Sector coordinator. In developed economies the real estate sector accounts for 20 percent of GDP, she said.

TITLE: ‘Prince’ on the Prowl
AUTHOR: By Maria Danilova 
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KIEV, Ukraine — He is a descendant of Russia’s last tsar — and has lived in the jungle, starred in Bollywood movies and trained as a stuntman.
Now Scottish photographer Francis Mathew is on a new adventure: finding a bride on a reality TV show in Ukraine.
Mathew, the great-great-nephew of Nicholas II, is the star of the second season of Ukraine’s version of the popular U.S. show “The Bachelor” — in which an unmarried man picks a fianc&#233;e through a series of dates and romantic getaways.
“I’ve been very lucky in life, but very unlucky in love,” the 33-year-old, who comes across as a romantic behind bad-boy looks, told The Associated Press.
“I am actually ready for a proper relationship, I have been for a couple of years,” he said. “I am pretty fussy when it comes to choosing a long-term girlfriend, it’s very difficult to find someone to be compatible with.”
As many as 16,000 young women from across Ukraine and beyond auditioned to compete for the heart of “a prince” — as Mathew is billed by the show’s producers, even though he has no royal title.
Twenty-five contestants were selected for the show, also called “The Bachelor” in Ukrainian, and some have gotten into shouting matches and even fights over who gets to spend more time with him, according to the STB Channel, which is set to air the show in March.
The 12 episodes, which are currently being filmed in Ukraine, Finland, Sri Lanka and elsewhere, entail romantic dinners, a helicopter ride and Mathew taking on a 350-kilogram bull as a matador. Mathew speaks little Ukrainian or Russian, so both he and the contestants wear earpieces and rely on simultaneous translation. He hopes the project will help him reconnect with his Slavic roots.
Mathew admits that the show, in which he eliminates women one by one based on their date performance until he proposes to one of the two finalists, may be provocative.
“Honestly, the concept is crazy, absolutely crazy,” Mathew said. “You have to be of a certain mindset to enter a contest like that, I think it takes courage.”
But he says he has met attractive and interesting women on the show and hopes to fall in love.
“Love works in very mysterious ways,” Mathew said. “It does come from the most random places sometimes, the most unexpected places, so why not TV?”
The odds of finding true love, however, appear to be against Mathew. His predecessor on the show, a Ukrainian-American ballroom dancer, split with his newfound fianc&#233;e shortly after it ended last summer. Only one of the 15 seasons of “The Bachelor” in the United States resulted in marriage.
Mathew is the son of Princess Olga Andreevna Romanov, 61, whose father, Prince Andrei Alexandrovich, was the nephew of Nicholas II, Russia’s last tsar. Nicholas II was assassinated by the Bolsheviks shortly after the 1917 Revolution together with his wife and children. Mathew’s grandfather was able to escape and settled in Britain.
Born in London and raised in Scotland, Mathew decided against going to university and chose to become a stuntman instead. He spent more than five years studying martial arts and other sports, while working in landscape gardening to pay for his living.
Stunt acting “was my childhood dream,” Mathew said. “I was always a very adventurous child. … I climbed every building I could jump off. I used to do crazy things.”
But the training ended after he badly injured his ankle on a trampoline and Mathew found a new passion in photography. He photographed jungle animals while living in a mud hut in Cameroon and spent more than three years in India working as a fashion photographer. While in India he also played villains in Bollywood movies and starred in commercials, including for chewing gum and an airline company.
Mathew says he has been in love before, but his lifestyle prevented him from settling down. His most romantic relationship, incidentally, was with a Ukrainian girl.
“Whenever I’ve met somebody who I either fall in love with or have a great connection with, either she is leaving or I am leaving,” he said.
This time he is hoping for a happy ending.

TITLE: Greek Pharmacist Sets Example of CSR for Russia
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Ask Russian top managers and company owners what it takes to succeed in business, and the stories they tell you will generally have little to do with being humane, helping others and caring for the environment. However, this is exactly what George Korres, one of Greece’s leading businessmen and the founder of the internationally recognized Korres cosmetics brand, is most proud of when he talks about his company’s achievements.
The history of Korres dates back to 1996, when it emerged from Athens’ first ever homeopathic pharmacy — with one single product in its portfolio. Some 15 years on, the company boasts more than 400 natural or certified organic products and is present in over 30 markets. 
Korres stores can be found in New York, Paris, Madrid, Beijing and Dubai. Its products are also for sale in Tokyo, Los Angeles, Milan, Berlin, Sydney, Hong Kong and, of course, in more than 5,500 pharmacies in Greece. 
In August last year, St. Petersburg welcomed Korres’s first store in Russia. This year will see further expansion, with at least two more stores slated to open in town. 
“When we first started, we didn’t have an international customer in mind,” Korres told The St. Petersburg Times in an interview this month. “However, eventually we felt that our core principles, which remain the same as they did in our pharmacy days, have a global appeal. The brand’s simple philosophy is rooted in the use of natural and certified organic ingredients and an attitude that aims to inspire people and make them happy.”
Korres is a company that is quintessentially Greek. 
“Greece is one of the most biologically diverse countries on the planet; Greek flora has an immense variety with more than 6,500 plants, growing on the Aegean islands, on the country’s high mountains like Olympus, Parnassus and Taeyetos, the drought-prone southern land and including over 1,200 plants that cannot be found anywhere else in the world, “ Korres said. 
“Having finished my studies in pharmacology, I started working at Athens’ first ever homeopathic pharmacy, where I was exposed to the power and appeal of herbs. At the beginning, I was quite skeptical about homeopathic remedies and the medical use of herbs. However, day after day, I witnessed the efficacy of herbal preparations and developed both a respect and a passion for them. Now we work with over 3,000 herbal remedies to create our products.”
The company created an independent scientific board, consisting of top-flight scientists in the fields of biochemistry, pharmacognosy, and clinical dermatology. The researchers investigate the clinical benefits of natural ingredients in relation to skin biochemistry. For Quercetin & Oak, the brand’s latest anti-ageing line launched in 2009, the Korres Lab in cooperation with the National Hellenic Research Foundation has studied anti-ageing at a cellular level through proteasome and natural means of boosting age-defense mechanisms — a five year primary research program following the Nobel-awarded discovery of the ubiquitin-proteasome system in 2004. The results of the study underwent high-scrutiny, independent testing including blind trials and crash-tests against the market’s best anti-ageing products. 
In Greece, Korres has earned a reputation for its support of socially vulnerable groups through providing jobs for them. In some jobs, Korres employs mentally handicapped employees and prisoners. 
At present, the company works closely with three social institutions, including Tyrintha & Agia prison farms and the Kethea-Ithaki non-governmental organization in Thessaloniki that helps rehabilitate people with mental disorders.
“We teach inmates the essentials of organic farming and how to cultivate herbs, which apart from being a future professional development opportunity, also supports them financially during their detention period,” Korres said.
Kethea is a non-profit organization that has been operating since 1983, when Ithaki, the first Greek therapeutic community for substance-dependent patients was established. It offers alternative educational and training programs through its various production units, with one of them being a farm of over a hundred acres of fully certified organic field crops. As part of the NGO’s cooperation with Korres, the patients are involved in the cultivation of the Achillea plant.
Korres works with micro-farmers and agricultural unions, as well as educational and social institutions. The company teaches its partners the art of organic farming and sustainable agricultural systems, helping them throughout all stages of cultivation and harvesting in association with the Agricultural University of Athens, and supporting them financially through purchasing their produce to be used in making Korres cosmetics. This scheme extends to prisoners and many other socially sensitive groups including people going through rehabilitation. 
Korres demonstrates an attitude that is more or less unheard of in Russia, where employers tend to promptly get rid of those who suffer from depression or any other mental illnesses. When a Russian attempts suicide, one of the first things they usually learn when they regain consciousness is that they have been fired from their job.
Likewise, former prisoners have virtually no chance of getting a job unless they personally know an employer. 
The incomes of Russia’s richest 10 percent are nearly 18 times those of its poorest 10 percent. As many as 20 million people live below the poverty line, and there is little political will among the country’s richest to change that. 
The Kremlin believes that the problem is a lack of corporate social responsibility. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin first voiced this thought in early 2004 in a speech urging major Russian businesses to open their eyes to the needs of the rest of society. The companies have shown no great rush to do so.
Korres, by contrast, developed his company’s ethical code without having to receive a hint from the Greek government. Instead, the businessman himself created a model that others can follow. 
“This continuous effort is part of an overall ethical focus that also includes a network of suppliers consisting of people with special needs,” Korres explained. “This network caters for a percentage of our promotional materials including printing and sewing productions. We all ought to be giving back to the community to the extent that we can.” 
Korres does not limit itself to ingredients grown exclusively in Greece. George Korres admits he is thinking of expanding the brand’s range of products by perhaps adding a line made with herbs or plants grown in Russia. 
“Our greatest company mission is the ongoing investment in research regarding new technologies and ingredients, and world ingredients have always been an inspiration to the brand,” Korres said. “A great example of this is the extract of the desert plant Imperata cylindrical, contained in Korres Wild Rose 24-hour moisturizing cream. Imperata cylindrical extract ensures 24-hour moisturizing by continually regulating the cellular water equilibrium. We are currently leading a study in over 3,600 herbs along with eight other research partners as part of the AGROCOS project (From Biodiversity to Chemodiversity: Novel Plant Produced Compounds with Agrochemical and Cosmetic Interest). I very much hope that some Russian plants will make this list!”