SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1697 (8), Wednesday, February 29, 2012
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TITLE: A tearful Putin claims Russian election victory
AUTHOR: By LYNN BERRY and VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW (AP) -- Vladimir Putin scored a decisive victory in Russia's presidential election Sunday to return to the Kremlin and extend his hold on power for six more years. His eyes brimming with tears, he defiantly proclaimed to a sea of supporters that they had triumphed over opponents intent on "destroying Russia's statehood and usurping power."
Putin's win was never in doubt as many across the vast country still see him as a guarantor of stability and the defender of a strong Russia against a hostile world, an image he has carefully cultivated during 12 years in power.
Accounts by independent observers of extensive vote-rigging, however, looked set to strengthen the resolve of opposition forces whose unprecedented protests in recent months have posed the first serious challenge to Putin's heavy-handed rule. Another huge demonstration was set for Monday evening in central Moscow.
Putin claimed victory Sunday night when fewer than a quarter of the votes had been counted. He spoke to a rally just outside the Kremlin walls of tens of thousands of supporters, many of them government workers or employees of state-owned companies who had been ordered to attend.
"I promised that we would win and we have won!" Putin shouted to the flag-waving crowd. "We have won in an open and honest struggle."
Putin, 59, said the election showed that "our people can easily distinguish a desire for renewal and revival from political provocations aimed at destroying Russia's statehood and usurping power."
He ended his speech with the triumphant declaration: "Glory to Russia!"
The West can expect Putin to continue the tough policies he has pursued even as prime minister, including opposing U.S. plans to build a missile shield in Europe and resisting international military intervention in Syria.
With 99 percent of precincts counted nationwide, Putin was leading with more than 63 percent, the Central Election Commission said Monday; complete preliminary results were expected later in the day.
Communist Party candidate Gennady Zyuganov was a distant second, followed by Mikhail Prokhorov, the billionaire owner of the New Jersey Nets basketball team whose candidacy was approved by the Kremlin in what was seen as an effort to channel some of the protest sentiment. The clownish nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky and socialist Sergei Mironov trailed behind. The leader of the liberal opposition Yabloko party was barred from the race.
"These elections are not free. ... That's why we'll have protests tomorrow. We will not recognize the president as legitimate," said Mikhail Kasyanov, who was Putin's first prime minister before going into opposition.
The wave of protests began after a December parliamentary election in which observers produced evidence of widespread vote fraud. Protest rallies in Moscow drew tens of thousands in the largest outburst of public anger in post-Soviet Russia, demonstrating growing exasperation with the pervasive corruption and tight controls over political life under Putin, who was president from 2000 to 2008 before moving into the prime minister's office due to term limits.
Golos, Russia's leading independent elections watchdog, said it received numerous reports of "carousel voting," in which busloads of voters are driven around to cast ballots multiple times.
After the polls closed, Golos said the number of violations appeared just as high as in December.
"If during the parliamentary elections, we saw a great deal of ballot-box stuffing and carousel voting ... this time we saw the deployment of more subtle technologies," said Andrei Buzin, who heads the monitoring operations at Golos.
Alexei Navalny, one of the opposition's most charismatic leaders, said observers trained by his organization also reported seeing carousel voting and other violations.
A first-round victory was politically important for Putin, serving as proof that he retains majority support.
"They decided that a second round would be bad, unreliable and would show weakness," Navalny said. "That's why they ... falsified the elections."
There was no evidence that the scale of any election fraud was high enough to have pushed Putin over the 50 percent mark and saved him from a runoff.
Putin's campaign chief, Stanislav Govorukhin, rejected the claims of violations, calling them "ridiculous."
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, has become increasingly critical of Putin's rule. "These are not going to be honest elections, but we must not relent," he said after casting his ballot.
Putin has dismissed the protesters' demands, casting them as a coddled minority of urban elites manipulated by leaders working at the behest of the West. His claims that the United States was behind the protests spoke to his base of blue-collar workers, farmers and state employees, who are suspicious of Western intentions after years of state propaganda.
"Putin is a brave and persistent man who can resist the U.S. and EU pressure," said Anastasia Lushnikova, a 20-year-old student who voted for Putin in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don.
Putin played the same polarizing tune on Sunday, thanking the workers at a tank factory in Nizhny Tagil for their support, saying that "a man of labor is a head above any loafer or windbag."
He made generous social promises during his campaign and initiated limited political reforms to try to assuage public anger. His spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said Sunday that Putin will push ahead with the reforms, but he firmly ruled out any "Gorbachev-style liberal spasms."
Putin had promised that the vote would be fair, and election officials allowed more observers to monitor the vote. Tens of thousands of Russians, most of them politically active for the first time, volunteered to be election observers, receiving training on how to recognize vote-rigging and record and report violations.
Zyuganov, the Communist candidate, told reporters after the polls closed that he would not recognize the vote, calling it "illegitimate, unfair and non-transparent."
His campaign chief, Ivan Melnikov, claimed that election officials had set up numerous additional polling stations and alleged that hundreds of thousands of voters cast ballots at the ones in Moscow alone.
Prokhorov said on Channel One television after the vote that his observers had been kept away from some polling stations and were beaten on two occasions.
Oksana Dmitriyeva, a parliamentary deputy from Mironov's party, tweeted that they saw "numerous cases of observers being expelled from polling stations" across St. Petersburg just before the vote count.
Web cameras were installed in Russia's more than 90,000 polling stations, a move initiated by Putin in response to complaints of ballot stuffing and falsified vote counts in December's parliamentary elections.
It was unclear to what extent the cameras were effective. The election observation mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe noted skepticism in a report on election preparations.
The OSCE, which fielded about 220 observers, was to present its findings on Monday.
Unlike in Moscow and other big cities, where independent observers showed up en masse, in Russia's North Caucasus and some other regions election officials were largely left to their own devices.
A web camera at a polling station in Dagestan, a Caucasus province near Chechnya, registered unidentified people tossing ballot after ballot into boxes. The Central Election Commission quickly responded to the video, which was posted on the Internet, saying the results from the station will be invalidated.
Putin got more than 90 percent of the vote in several Caucasus provinces, including 99.8 percent in Chechnya.
The police presence was heavy throughout Moscow and other Russian cities Sunday. There were no immediate reports of trouble, although police arrested three young women who stripped to the waist at the polling station where Putin cast his ballot; one of them had the word "thief" written on her bare body.
In Dagestan, where attacks by Islamic militants occur on a daily basis, gunmen raided a polling station, killing three police officers. One of the assailants was also killed, according to police.
TITLE: Putin Says Opposition Planning to Stuff Ballot Boxes
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that the opposition was planning to commit falsifications during the presidential vote and then present them as proof that the election was rigged, RIA-Novosti reported.
Putin, the leading candidate to win the vote Sunday, was echoing accusations made by elections chief Vladimir Churov — among others — who has accused the opposition of seeking to present fraudulent evidence of violations to discredit the results.
"We have reason to believe that our opponents are preparing for these events. And I will say this publicly, and the criticism will start: 'Let's see the evidence.' In principle, we can show [evidence]," Putin said at a meeting of his supporters.
"[They] are preparing to use some kind of mechanisms that would confirm that the elections were falsified. They themselves will stuff [ballot boxes], themselves manipulate, then themselves present [it]. We already see this — we already know this," he said.
Churov made similar allegations after December's State Duma elections, which the opposition has said were illegitimate due to a huge number of violations committed in favor of ruling party United Russia. He said videos showing alleged falsifications were in fact dramatizations shot in foreign film studios.
Members of the opposition have ridiculed these claims, calling them absurd and lacking evidence.
A phony video emerged on YouTube over the weekend that depicts ballot falsifications in the upcoming presidential vote, stirring up controversy and allegations that it was intended to be used by the opposition to make bogus voting fraud claims.
TITLE: Student Caught Selling Absentee Ballots
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A student was arrested in St. Petersburg on Wednesday after selling 30 absentee ballots to an undercover police officer, RIA-Novosti reported.
Police made the purchase for 50,000 rubles ($1,700) and found that the student had another 300 ballots in his possession.
Central Election Commission head Vladimir Churov said steps will be taken to annul the ballots and their associated serial numbers, though he noted their authenticity had yet to be confirmed.
The student will be charged with selling official documents, with a maximum penalty of three months in prison, Rosbalt reported.
TITLE: Investigation Opened in Sham Vote-Fraud Videos on Internet
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Investigative Committee has opened an investigation into who is responsible for creating fake videos showing voting fraud during the upcoming presidential election and will check to see if a crime has been committed, RIA-Novosti reported Thursday.
The pre-filmed phony videos appeared online a week before the March 4 election, purporting to show violations being committed at polling stations.
“If signs of a crime are confirmed in the actions of those who created and posted the videos, it will be decided whether to open a criminal case,” committee head Sergei Markin said Thursday.
Central Elections Commission head Vladimir Churov made mention Tuesday of such bogus videos in a meeting of regional elections commission chairs.
He called on them to react calmly to such “provocations,” RIA-Novosti reported.
The move may be part of an attempt to accuse Kremlin critics of foul play ahead of Sunday’s vote which Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is widely expected to win.
Putin had earlier claimed that the opposition was preparing to fake evidence of vote-rigging to cast doubt on the vote.
Members of the opposition have said the fake videos are aimed at discrediting authentic footage of falsifications being committed.
After videos were posted online showing fraud in December’s State Duma elections, Churov dismissed them as phony, saying they were shot with actors in film studios.
Those videos helped fuel widespread protests against election fraud. Despite the rallies, authorities have stonewalled demands to punish those accused of vote-rigging.
TITLE: Updated 29 February
CONTROVERSIAL GAY BILL PASSED IN 3RD AND FINAL HEARING
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Despite international outcry from quarters ranging from Amnesty International to British author Stephen Fry, a controversial anti-gay bill was passed during a third and final reading at St. Petersburg's Legislative Assembly on Wednesday.
Twenty-nine deputies voted for the bill, five voted against and one abstained. The bill now needs to be signed by Governor Georgy Poltavchenko to become law.
The bill's passing was not unexpected, after gay rights activists reported that a hearing at the Legislative Assembly on Friday degraded into a farce. But the passing of the bill, which will outlaw “the promotion of sodomy, lesbianism, bisexuality and transgenderism” might have surprise negative effects for the authorities, they warn.
According to a press release issued by LGBT rights organization Coming Out, United Russia deputy Vitaly Milonov, the author of the bill, brought a group of aggressive supporters to Friday's hearing, who insulted and threatened gay rights activists and the experts they had brought with them.
Milonov himself sat next to a man who was wearing a T-shirt reading “Orthodoxy or Death,” while the crowd chanted “You are not people,” Coming Out said, describing the hearing as a “triumph of militant ignorance.”
Speaking on Tuesday, Coming Out chair Igor Kochetkov said that Milonov and his supporters showed no interest in any compromise.
“We share the view that young people’s minds should be protected, we just don’t understand why they should be protected from gays and lesbians,” Kochetkov said.
“The problem is that their goals are different from those that they declare; they say they are concerned about the morals of young people, but in reality they are trying to arouse homophobic sentiment and draw voters ahead of the elections.”
The bill was introduced and passed in a first reading in November, ahead of the Dec. 4 State Duma elections. It was examined again earlier this month, amid protests against electoral fraud, when it passed in a second reading on Feb. 8.
Kochetkov believes that the bill’s actual goal has been to draw conservatives first to Vladimir Putin’s party United Russia and then to Putin himself as a presidential candidate.
“It’s clear that it’s pure populism and an attempt to get votes from the most conservative voters,” he said.
“But it’s not just about the elections, it’s about the general situation in this country; it’s very important to distract the attention of this part of the population from the real issues, from the real protests that are happening now.
“Just look how much coverage this bill is getting in the media. Earlier we couldn’t get anything at all reported in the media. There was a policy of total suppression concerning the issue on television and via state-affiliated news agencies. Now every word said about the issue is published and broadly discussed. I don’t think this is by accident. It’s being used to distract attention from the complicated current political situation.”
Kochetkov said the bill had had an effect that the lawmakers did not expect by politicizing the previously politically indifferent LGBT community.
“I can see this from comments on gay web resources, from what people write to us; people, their friends and relatives are getting political,” he said. “I don’t think that it’s to the benefit of the ruling party.”
Another surprise effect if the law is adopted might be a blow to St. Petersburg’s tourist industry.
In yet another international online campaign launched last week, foreign tourists were being urged to boycott St. Petersburg in the event of the bill being signed into law.
As of Tuesday evening, more than 65,500 people had signed a petition on All Out, a leading LGBT rights petition web site, appealing to St. Petersburg Governor Georgy Poltavchenko, claiming that they will not visit the city as tourists if the bill becomes law.
“It’s legitimate and quite expectable,” Kochetkov said.
“It always happens in any country where human rights are clearly violated. It’s natural that it affects tourism, because people don’t want to go to a city or a country where they might face some outrageous charges.”
TITLE: Zhirinovsky Takes Heat After Prostitute Remark
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Nationalist firebrand and presidential candidate Vladimir Zhirinovsky caused controversy Tuesday by calling beloved singer Alla Pugachyova, and all other artists, "prostitutes" in a televised debate with billionaire candidate Mikhail Prokhorov.
The 62-year-old singer, appearing during the debate in her capacity as a Prokhorov supporter, asked the Liberal Democratic Party leader whether he would change his "indecent" behavior if he were to become president.
In response, Zhirinovsky told her to "be quiet and sit down," then proceeded to deliver a tirade about how he had never changed the way he acts to please any leader.
"I behave in the manner that I consider necessary. I don't need image-makers. No one gave me allowances to create a party, as they have done to Mikhail [Prokhorov] — I created one myself. I was the first to become a presidential candidate, when it was still the Soviet Union," he said.
He went on to attack those whose political and personal behavior he deemed more flexible than his.
"You artists, like prostitutes, lie underneath any leader for money! You all lay under Brezhnev, under Gorbachev, under Yeltsin, under Putin. Tomorrow, I will enter the Kremlin, you will all lie under me, and I will spit on you and wipe my feet on you," Zhirinovsky shouted.
He also made repeated jibes about the marital status of the singer, who wed five times.
"She only has one rule: to change husbands every five minutes," he said.
The debate's host Vladimir Solovyov eventually stopped the rant, telling Zhirinovsky that he was "burying himself" and would lose public support for insulting the music icon.
The clip of the Channel One debate has gone viral online, drawing largely negative criticism on blogs.
"It doesn't matter that Zhirinovsky has struck himself out of any circle of decent people, because he was never in it," Kommersant columnist Oleg Kashin wrote on Twitter.
TITLE: Opposition Leaders Join Local Protests
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Anti-Putin protests were held across Russia on Sunday, a week ahead of the March 4 presidential elections.
St. Petersburg held two rallies, on both Saturday and Sunday, where thousands came to protest large-scale violations that took place during the Dec. 4 State Duma elections and have continued to take place during the presidential campaign.
Opposition leaders from Moscow — Alexei Navalny, Garry Kasparov, Sergei Udaltsov and Ivan Mironov — came to join Saturday’s For Honest Elections march, which turned out to be the larger of the weekend’s two protests, drawing between 10,000 and 15,000, according to organizers’ estimates.
Navalny, an anti-corruption campaigner who has grown into a full-fledged popular protest leader during the past few months during the For Honest Elections campaign, stressed that the forthcoming presidential elections would be illegitimate, describing them as the “reappointment of Putin.”
“You are treating them as elections,” Navalny told reporters before the rally.
“They are not elections. This is a specific event. We should use this event to create additional stress for the authorities.”
Navalny urged voters to use the same strategy that he promoted during the Duma election campaign — to vote for anyone except the United Russia party and its candidate, Vladimir Putin, describing them as “crooks and thieves.”
Kasparov, former world chess champion and the leader of the United Civil Front and Solidarity liberal movements, added his support to the strategy of voting for any candidate besides Putin.
“Honest elections start with the adoption of legislation, the registration of candidates, the possibility of independent financing, with access to the media — there is none of this,” Kasparov said.
“This makes the elections illegitimate, and the leader who gets elected will be illegitimate.”
Kasparov said that anti-Putin citizens should go to the polls to try to prevent the authorities from rigging the elections and to work toward a run-off, which will take place if Putin does not get 50 percent of the vote on March 4.
“A run-off is already a defeat for Putin,” Kasparov said, adding that the authorities are set to announce the percentage of those who will vote for Putin in the upcoming elections at 60 percent.
“Most likely it [Putin’s rival in the run-off] will be Zyuganov,” he said. “I don’t have any problem voting for Zyuganov, because it’s a continuation of the same strategy. We should get Putin and this criminal group away from power.”
City Hall did not allow the marchers to walk along Nevsky Prospekt — St. Petersburg’s main street — in either group, sending Saturday’s march along the same route as the Feb. 4 demonstration — from Ligovsky Prospekt to Konyushennaya Ploshchad — while Sunday’s protesters were only allowed to march from Ligovsky Prospekt to Vladimirskaya Ploshchad.
Speaking at Saturday’s rally, Navalny said that those present were witnesses of the reported abuses of power committed by Putin and his cohorts when they were officials in St. Petersburg in the 1990s.
“I don’t want the entire world to know that our country is headed by a thief,” he shouted. “Putin is a thief!”
“Putin is a thief” was a popular slogan at the march — heard as a chant and seen on signs and even tattooed on one protester’s arm. Other signs and posters read “Russia without Putin,” “Putin, you’re fired,” “Putin, go away” and “Down with autocracy.”
“Today Moscow and St. Petersburg are united in their struggle against crooks and thieves,” said the Left Front’s Udaltsov, who then continued chanting “The third term is a prison one” with the crowd.
“We should observe the elections; we should vote following the principle ‘No votes for the candidate of the party of crooks and thieves. His real rating is no higher than 30 percent today. That’s why if we control the elections, there will be a run-off, we’ll engage them in a fight and win.”
Udaltsov said that in the event of fabricated results and no run-off, people should take to the streets March 5 and start an open-ended protest campaign demanding the annulment of the results.
The riot gear-clad OMON special task police had a heavy presence, blocking the streets along the route with trucks to prevent protesters from turning toward Nevsky Prospekt, while a police helicopter hovered overhead, but no arrests or incidents were reported.
Sunday’s march, organized by the 22 Legislative Assembly deputies who do not represent the United Russia party — from the Communist Party, A Just Russia and Yabloko Democratic Party — was smaller in size, drawing an estimated 8,000 at its peak, according to organizers’ estimates. The deputies themselves have been under criticism for agreeing to take their seats in the local parliament despite the violations and amid demands to annul the election results.
Presidential candidate Sergei Mironov of A Just Russia spoke at Sunday’s rally.
Opposition leaders urged city residents to come to St. Isaac’s Square, where the city’s elections committee is located, to protest on March 5. Protesters will start gathering at the site from 6 p.m.
TITLE: City Zoo Project Unclear
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A new zoo consisting of six islands to be inhabited by animals from different continents could be coming to the city.
It is possible however, that St. Petersburg’s new zoo could be built not in Yuntolovo Park as planned, but in Udelny Park, Dmitry Meskhiyev, head of the city’s Culture Committee, was quoted by Interfax as saying.
Deputy Governor Vasily Kichedzhi said the issue of the construction of the new zoo had not yet been completely decided.
“The construction of the zoo in Yuntolovo would cost the city tens of billions of rubles and we would need to ask city residents if it makes sense to spend so much budget money on a luxury zoo while the city’s municipal housing services [such as water and electricity] are in such bad shape,” Kichedzhi said, his press service reported.
“Maybe St. Petersburg residents will choose entertainment. In that case, we will build the zoo according to the design presented to us by the French company,” Kichedzhi said.
City authorities recently said that the new zoo project had a number of undeveloped elements. No plans have been presented to minimize the harmful effects of construction on the park’s water system, nor has a transportation system been devised.
Kichedzhi said that eliminating these negative factors would subsequently lead to a significant increase in the cost of the project.
The new zoo was expected to open in 2014.
In 2010, a new zoo project design by French company Beckmann-N’Thepe was chosen that would reportedly cost 11 billion rubles ($380 million).
TITLE: City Cuts Down On Outdoor Adverts
AUTHOR: By Yevgeny Fyodorov
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: The volume of advertising structures in the city center could decrease by 20 percent after City Hall revises the rules.
The Committee for Print and Cooperation with Media took down two advertising boards measuring 1.2 meters by 1.8 meters (a size known as “city format”) belonging to News Outdoor advertising operator last week. The boards were located at numbers 190 and 119 on Nevsky Prospekt. The advertisements were hindering the work of snowplows, according to the committee. Their removal was agreed with the committee, said Vladimir Ryabovol, general director of the St. Petersburg branch of News Outdoor.
According to the committee, 561 advertisement structures were taken down in St. Petersburg in January this year, and a further 273 in the first half of February.
As of December last year, there were 9,200 city-format advertising spaces in St. Petersburg. Of those, 3,500 belonged to News Outdoor, 2,500 to Poster, 1,500 to Volgobalt Media and 1,200 to Reklama Tsentr, according to Vera Dementyeva, head of the St. Petersburg office of Espar Analysis research company. She said that in the Central district of the city, there were 2,700 advertising spaces in this format.
The print committee is devising a new concept for the development of the outdoor advertising market, though officials have not given details. The requirements for constructions situated on narrow pedestrian sidewalks will be reassessed, said Ryabovol. The volume of advertising stands on sidewalks will decrease by 20 percent, said Sergei Kolesnikov, general director of Clear Channel Baltics and Russia.
In January, Volgobalt Media received orders to take down eight city-format advertising structures located on sidewalks in the center on the grounds that they hindered the removal of snow from streets, said Dmitry Ganibalov, the company’s director of sales and marketing. Poster did not receive orders to take any of its structures down, said a source close to the company. Vedomosti was unable to contact Reklama Tsentr.
Among outdoor advertising operators, 80 to 90 percent have contracts for the rental of advertising space that expire this year, said Igor Anansky, co-owner of Ruan. Outdoor advertising operators last extended their rental contracts for five years in 2007-2008, Dementyeva explained. According to Anansky, the market operators are concerned by the current uncertainty, as new tenders for the placement of advertisement constructions have not been held for more than four years.
St. Petersburg’s fixed outdoor advertising market grew last year by 28 percent in monetary value to 3.6 billion rubles ($124 million), said Dementyeva. The average cost of placing one city-format advertising structure, depending on its configuration, is from 100,000 rubles to 150,000 rubles ($3,500 to $5,000), said Ganibalov. The cost of renting one advertising surface ranges from 7,000 rubles to 12,000 rubles ($240 to $414) per month, he added.
Nevsky Prospekt remains a street with a heavy flow of consumers passing through; companies will change their advertising strategy and will start using other formats, said Irina Staroverova, PR manager for Melon Fashion Group.
In the event of the rules being changed, the volume of advertising inside shopping centers will increase, she said.
TITLE: Gay Bill Looks Set to Pass
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: An anti-gay bill looked likely to pass during its third reading in St. Petersburg on Wednesday, after Friday’s hearing at the Legislative Assembly degraded into a farce, gay rights activists say. But the passing of the bill, which will outlaw “the promotion of sodomy, lesbianism, bisexuality and transgenderism” might have surprise negative effects for the authorities, they warn.
According to a press release issued by LGBT rights organization Coming Out, United Russia deputy Vitaly Milonov, the author of the bill, brought a group of aggressive supporters to the hearing, who insulted and threatened gay rights activists and the experts they had brought with them.
Milonov himself sat next to a man who was wearing a T-shirt reading “Orthodoxy or Death,” while the crowd chanted “You are not people,” Coming Out said, describing the hearing as a “triumph of militant ignorance.”
Speaking on Tuesday, Coming Out chair Igor Kochetkov said that Milonov and his supporters showed no interest in any compromise.
“We share the view that young people’s minds should be protected, we just don’t understand why they should be protected from gays and lesbians,” Kochetkov said.
“The problem is that their goals are different from those that they declare; they say they are concerned about the morals of young people, but in reality they are trying to arouse homophobic sentiment and draw voters ahead of the elections.”
The bill was introduced and passed in a first reading in November, ahead of the Dec. 4 State Duma elections. It was examined again earlier this month, amid protests against electoral fraud, when it passed in a second reading on Feb. 8.
Kochetkov believes that the bill’s actual goal has been to draw conservatives first to Vladimir Putin’s party United Russia and then to Putin himself as a presidential candidate.
“It’s clear that it’s pure populism and an attempt to get votes from the most conservative voters,” he said.
“But it’s not just about the elections, it’s about the general situation in this country; it’s very important to distract the attention of this part of the population from the real issues, from the real protests that are happening now.
“Just look how much coverage this bill is getting in the media. Earlier we couldn’t get anything at all reported in the media. There was a policy of total suppression concerning the issue on television and via state-affiliated news agencies. Now every word said about the issue is published and broadly discussed. I don’t think this is by accident. It’s being used to distract attention from the complicated current political situation.”
Kochetkov said the bill had had an effect that the lawmakers did not expect by politicizing the previously politically indifferent LGBT community.
“I can see this from comments on gay web resources, from what people write to us; people, their friends and relatives are getting political,” he said. “I don’t think that it’s to the benefit of the ruling party.”
Another surprise effect if the law is adopted might be a blow to St. Petersburg’s tourist industry.
In yet another international online campaign launched last week, foreign tourists are being urged to boycott St. Petersburg if the law is adopted.
As of Tuesday evening, more than 65,500 people had signed a petition on All Out, a leading LGBT rights petition web site, appealing to St. Petersburg Governor Georgy Poltavchenko, claiming that they will not visit the city as tourists if the bill becomes law.
“It’s legitimate and quite expectable,” Kochetkov said.
“It always happens in any country where human rights are clearly violated. It’s natural that it affects tourism, because people don’t want to go to a city or a country where they might face some outrageous charges.”
TITLE: 18th-Century Palace Goes Up in Smoke
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg firefighters worked to save priceless historical architecture when a fire broke out at the Beloselsky-Belozersky Palace in the city center Tuesday.
Efforts by emergency services were praised by City Governor Georgy Poltavchenko, who said they had worked hard to prevent a dangerous situation getting out of control. “Their work today has saved one of the most unique buildings in the city,” he said.
The fire is believed to have started at about midday in a ventilation shaft and quickly spread to the palace’s attic and roof. The work of firefighters was significantly complicated by heavy smoke as well as the complex layout of the attic and old structure of the building, Interfax reported.
A towering plume of smoke above the Fontanka River quickly drew large crowds, eager to film the unfolding spectacle on their cell phones. As the number of onlookers grew, police were forced to hold up traffic along the embankment and parts of Nevsky Prospekt, and traffic jams rapidly formed.
By 2 p.m. the fire was under control. A preliminary assessment determined that no lasting damage had been done to the 18th-century landmark, officials said.
The pink rococo palace is located on the corner of Nevsky Prospekt and the Fontanka River. Built in 1747, it was originally designed to mirror the Stroganoff Palace on the corner of the Moika River and Nevsky Prospekt, and was used as a city retreat by members of the royal family for a number of years.
The historic building also went on to serve as a military hospital and district base for the Central Bolshevik Party before being officially presented to City Hall’s Culture Committee in 1991.
Its current occupants include the regional headquarters of Russian broadcaster Channel One and the Sobchak Museum of the Introduction of Democracy to Contemporary Russia.
TITLE: City’s SKA to Participate in Hockey Playoffs
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg’s local hockey team, SKA, finished the regular season with a 4-1 victory over Sibir Novosibirsk on Sunday night at the Ice Palace.
With the win, SKA ended the season with 113 points, enough to win the Western Division and a top seed in the playoffs. Traktor Chelyabinsk edged out the Petersburg team with 114 points, thus winning this year’s Continental Cup, awarded to the regular season champion.
SKA, one of the favorites to win this year’s Gagarin Cup — awarded to the playoff winner — will face off against Red Army rival CSKA Moscow in the first round of the best-of-seven game playoffs.
It’s no secret that SKA invested heavily this year in their ongoing quest to win their first ever national title. However the team will have to fight off the ghosts of last year’s playoff. Last year they fell to Moscow Oblast’s Atlant in the conference semifinal and in 2010 top seeded SKA was upset by 8th-seed Dinamo Riga in the first round.
SKA — as “the Best in the West” — will have home ice throughout the playoffs unless they face Traktor in the finals.
Home games at the Ice Palace are scheduled for Feb. 29 and March 1 with 7 p.m. start times. Games 3 and 4 will be in Moscow on the weekend with Saturday’s game starting at 1 p.m. and Sunday’s game at 3 p.m.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Arshavin Returns
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Andrei Arshavin, captain of the Russian national soccer team, will arrive in St. Petersburg after the Russian team’s match in Copenhagen on Feb. 29, Interfax reported. He will be on loan to St. Petersburg’s FC Zenit from London’s Arsenal for six months.
Arshavin is expected to return to St. Petersburg with his wife and children.
Zenit did not disclose how much Arshavin’s lease cost the team, but Interfax cited reports that it had totaled one million pounds.
Arshavin, who is one of the city’s most popular soccer players, will stay with Zenit until July.
Arshavin transferred from Zenit to Arsenal in 2009. Since then he has taken part in 133 matches for the English team, scoring 30 goals and making 34 assists.
While playing for Zenit, where Arshavin started playing in 2000, the team won the Russian Premier League, the Russian Premier League Cup, The Russian Super Cup, the UEFA Cup and the UEFA Super Cup.
Berries Grown in Attic
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Two local residents have opened a strawberry farm on the territory of one of the city’s empty plants, Interfax reported, citing Metro newspaper.
“There is so much vacant space in St. Petersburg, and we don’t use it. That’s why we decided to grow strawberries in the city,” one of the farmers said.
The farmers planted 1,000 strawberry bushes in the attic of one of the empty departments back in January, after installing automatic lighting and an irrigation system. Instead of soil they have used hydroponics.
They also bought bees to pollinate the plants.
The growing period is estimated to take two months, so the farmers plan to pick the first berries in early March.
Russians Give Up Lent
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Only one percent of Russians are planning to strictly observe Lent, Interfax reported Tuesday.
For most of Orthodox Lent, believers are supposed to abstain from consuming meat, fish, animal products, wine and oil.
Sociologists found that 74 percent of Russians keep their regular eating habits during the Lent period. Among this group are those younger than 25 years old (84 percent), non-manual workers (83 percent), blue-collar workers (81 percent), entrepreneurs (79 percent) and men in general (81 percent), the Levada Center reported.
Seventeen percent of Russians plan to partially observe Lent — for example by giving up meat, but still consuming alcohol; 4 percent will fast only during the last week of Lent and only one percent plan to observe Lent during the full seven weeks, according to Levada Center research.
Orthodox Lent began Feb. 27 and ends seven weeks later with the celebration of Easter, the Orthodox Church’s most important holiday, which falls this year on April 15.
Cash for Children
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Under St. Petersburg law, families will now receive local stipends upon the birth of a third child (born after Jan. 1, 2012) in addition to federal funds, Fontanka reported this week. Money from the local budget will be awarded immediately after the birth.
Under federal law, families currently receive so-called “maternity capital” for having two or more children, but get the bonus only three years after the child is born.
The head of the city’s Social Defense Committee, Alexander Rzhanenkov, said that in 2012 the city’s maternity capital payout would be set at 100,000 rubles ($3,450), and that it would increase with inflation every year.
TITLE: Opposition Join Hands Against Putin
AUTHOR: By Kevin O-Flynn and Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Thousands of people formed a human chain around the center of Moscow on Sunday as the opposition upped its campaign for honest elections just a week before the presidential vote.
Despite light snow and slush and some skepticism among supporters, the “White Circle” — as the unsanctioned rally was called — saw people stand side-by-side and hand-in-hand all the way round the 16-kilometer-long Garden Ring.
“It is a new kind of protest. We have never had such a kind in this country, in Moscow. It is one of solidarity — a friendly, well-intentioned event,” said one of the opposition leaders, Boris Nemtsov as he stood outside Mayakovskaya metro station.
With the clock just a few minutes before 2 p.m., the start time for the demonstration, only a few dozen people could be seen on the Garden Ring near Ulitsa Pokrovka, but quickly more arrived and stood at the edge of the sidewalk.
Some held hands, others waved white ribbons and balloons and the inner side of the road was soon filled with people. There were the odd gaps and places where people were thinly spread, but a drive from Pokrovka to Triumfalnaya Ploshchad saw an impressive line of people all along it. Reporters for The St. Petersburg Times witnessed similar scenes on other parts of the Garden Ring.
“At ten to two, it seemed the circle wouldn’t close but then between 2 and 3 there was nowhere to stand,” opposition figure Alexei Navalny wrote on Twitter.
The opposition estimated before the event that 34,000 people were needed to complete the chain and claimed 40,000 came on Sunday. With the chain not always complete around the Garden Ring a lower figure was likely more realistic. Police — who routinely offer lowball estimates for opposition rallies — put the figure at 11,000.
It was a festive atmosphere and its success may provide a boost for the opposition’s plans for further demonstrations after the March 4 election.
People smiled and spoke with strangers or wore homemade costumes, like pensioner Tatyana Kulyagina, 59, who came in a hat she had made herself with models of a riot policeman and Vladimir Putin and others perched on top.
“It has been much more successful than I expected,” said Alexander, a member of the Solidarity opposition movement as he handed out white ribbons near Tsvetnoi Bulvar. “I expected far fewer people. It is a wonderful atmosphere.”
Attendees stood for more than an hour at the protest as passing motorists honked their horns, slowed down to pick up white ribbons or shouted encouragement.
Many of the cars had white ribbons attached or something white lodged in a window — in one case, a nappy, unused, was placed to signal support. In another car, a female passenger opened her window to show a white lap dog to the participants.
People started coming out into the streets to protest after disputed parliamentary elections in December amid accusations of mass fraud. They have also tapped into growing discontent with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin who will likely return as president after the election.
“I see how the government treats us. You can’t forgive that. We shouldn’t have to humiliate ourselves and ask the government to talk to us,” said Maxim Bilyak, 17, a student who attended the protest.
At Triumfalnaya Ploshchad — the site of often violent protests in recent years with police quelling unsanctioned rallies — hundreds packed the sidewalk while police held back.
“The police are very discreet, which is inspiring. I think they want to join us. I hope so,” Nemtsov said.
Despite the protests, few are in doubt that Putin is heading for victory and a new poll by the independent Levada Center gave the prime minister 66 percent, indicating a first round victory.
The opposition says the election is rigged and is in talks with City Hall for a protest the day after the vote. Negotiations are still ongoing, but Nemtsov said that if a rally is refused, protesters will go ahead anyway.
“There will be a protest meeting on March 5 and 10 and then onwards until we win,” he said.
Sunday’s event came in answer to a large-scale pro-Putin rally held at Luzhniki Stadium just three days before, which saw more than 100,000 people attend. Many were workers from state-run industries and some said they had been pressured to go by their employers. A large number of banners at the rally also appeared mass produced.
Alexei, 17, who stood outside the foreign ministry building near Smolenskaya metro station, said he was partly spurred to take part Sunday after his university pressured him and his classmates to attend the pro-Putin event.
Kremlin youth groups faced off with some protesters at the event, Russian media reported, carrying Valentine-style hearts with the words “Putin Loves Everyone” written on them and tearing posters and shouting at people.
A few hundred people gathered near Ploshchad Revolyutsii metro station for a protest organized by Sergei Udaltsov, the leader of the opposition group Left Front later in the afternoon, which saw tussles between pro-Putin supporters and the opposition. Police said 10 people were arrested in the altercation, Interfax reported.
The protest was meant to finish with the burning of a straw effigy of Putin in an aping of a Russian pagan tradition in which a doll is burnt to symbolize the end of winter.
Udaltsov and a few dozen supporters, however, were cordoned off by police outside the station and joined hands and spun in circles while shouting “Leave, winter, leave,” and “Leave Putin, leave.”
No doll was produced or burned.
Dozens of police trucks were in force nearby and a policeman shouted into a microphone by Red Square telling people that it was closed for “technical reasons.”
TITLE: Putin’s Newest Text On Foreign Policy
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin offered a blueprint of his foreign policy priorities in a 6,060-word article published Monday, but analysts said it contained little new thinking.
Putin, who is expected to win the presidential election this weekend, made some trademark attacks on Western policies over Syria and the Arab Spring and insisted that Moscow would remain a decisive global player.
He also promised that the country won’t detach itself from the outside world. “Russia is an integral part of the world. … We cannot and we do not want to isolate ourselves,” Putin said.
He said openness would allow citizens to experience more welfare, culture and trust.
The article, published in the Moskovskiye Novosti daily and on Putin’s campaign web site, is the seventh in a string of publications by Putin, who has been criticized by the opposition for shunning public debate during the presidential campaign. Polls predict that he will win Sunday’s election by a large margin.
Foreign policy hasn’t played a big role in the campaign, which has been dominated by opposition protests against election fraud and Putin.
But Putin has lashed out against the United States, accusing it of meddling in Russia’s internal affairs by supporting some of the protest leaders.
In Monday’s article, he does not mention the “reset” with the United States, saying merely that while much has been done to develop ties in recent years, attempts to fundamentally change them have failed partly because of “persisting stereotypes and phobias.”
He explains that increasing trade and investment between both countries is the obvious way to improve political ties but complains that “regular U.S. attempts of political engineering,” including the election campaigns, counter such policies.
Putin then reiterates his criticism of U.S.-led plans to establish a European missile defense shield, which he says would reduce the country’s nuclear deterrent. He said a compromise was still possible. He also says the West backed the Arab Spring to advance its interests in the region, and that instead of promoting democracy, the revolts gave rise to religious extremism.
The reset between Washington and Moscow is widely perceived as a personal achievement of Presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama. Medvedev has also championed a friendlier foreign policy, telling an interviewer in 2010 that Russia should display a smiling face instead of gnashing teeth that frighten others.
Recent anti-American calls by Putin and commentators on state television have heightened fears that those policies will not survive the leadership change in the Kremlin.
But analysts expressed caution over this view, saying Putin and Medvedev had coordinated much of the country’s foreign policy in the past and that Monday’s article showed more restraint than anti-Western zeal.
“On the whole, this is quite balanced,” said Nikolai Zlobin, a fellow of the World Security Institute, based in Washington.
Zlobin said the anti-Western reflex was important only for election campaigning.
Zlobin said the most striking aspect of the article was that it doesn’t mention Russia’s policies with other former Soviet states. “This is a huge omission because it has been the single biggest aspect of Moscow’s foreign policy,” he said.
Vladislav Belov, an analyst with the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, noted that relations with the United States and Europe only surfaced in the second half of the article, while the first talks at length about the “Eurasian dimension.” “For me this means that the West no longer has priority,” he said.
Belov also said Putin dwelt on economic interests shaping foreign policy. In a passage on “economic diplomacy,” Putin complains about prejudice against Russian businesses abroad. He recalls national companies aborting foreign investments, arguing that more effective government support and the country’s pending WTO entry would help. He also mentions “outrageous” cases when Russian businesses ran into trouble trying to exercise their shareholders’ rights — a reference to Hungarian oil company MOL that defied Surgutneftegaz after it purchased shares in March 2009, forcing Surgut to sell in May.
TITLE: Adoptive American Mother May Face Contempt Charge
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SHELBYVILLE, Tennessee — An American woman who sent her seven-year-old adopted Russian son back to Moscow has been ordered by a judge to appear in court to face a possible motion for contempt.
Attorney Larry Crain — who represents the adoption agency and the boy, Artyom Savelyev — said the mother, Torry Hansen, has not appeared for three depositions.
A Tennessee judge ordered Hansen to appear on March 7, when it will be decided whether to hold her in contempt of court.
The adoption agency, World Association for Children and Parents, is suing Hansen for breach of contract and for child support for the boy. Artyom now lives in Russia, but Crain says he still is an American citizen and that Hansen still is legally his mother under U.S. law, although the adoption was revoked in Russia.
Hansen has moved to California, although her exact whereabouts are unknown, Crain said.
She has refused to talk to investigators since April 2010 when she sent the boy, then known as Justin Hansen, alone on a plane to Moscow with a note saying he had psychological problems. No criminal charges were ever filed.
The case drew international attention with Russian officials threatening to suspend adoptions to the United States, though negotiators have been conducting talks since on reaching a new adoption accord.
The child has been living for the past few months at SOS Village in Tomilino outside Moscow, according to SOS Village director Anatoly Vasilyev.
Vasilyev said Artyom “is trying to forget about his life in the States,” and that’s why the children’s home does not allow media to see him.
TITLE: Foiled Plot to Kill Putin Is Revealed
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Ukrainian and Russian security officials announced Monday that they had uncovered a plot by a Chechen-connected terrorist group to assassinate Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
News of the plot was broken by the state-owned Channel One television station, whose report said people connected with Chechen terrorist leader Doku Umarov had been arrested in Odessa, Ukraine.
A Federal Security Service representative said terrorists working under Umarov were planning to kill Putin using a mine after the March 4 presidential election.
Although the existence of the plot was indirectly confirmed by Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, analysts said the news, which broke just days before the election, is intended to boost Putin’s popularity.
Putin is considered a shoo-in to win the election and return to the presidency.
The Channel One report shows police interrogating a person identified as Ilya Pyanzin, 28.
Pyanzin said he was instructed to carry out a terrorist act by representatives of Umarov, a notorious Chechen terrorist who has claimed responsibility for several bombings in Moscow.
“They told us to go to Odessa first, learn how to make a bomb and then in Moscow to conduct diversions on economic targets,” said Pyanzin, adding that his group’s final plan was to assassinate Putin.
Pyanzin was reported to be a citizen of Kazakhstan after his arrest in January.
He was arrested as a suspect in the Jan. 4 blast at an Odessa apartment building. He was wounded during the incident, which Ukrainian police said was an explosion of propane.
Explosives were later found inside the apartment, Ukrainian police said.
Another suspect, Ruslan Madayev, 26, was killed in the blast.
Channel One reported that Ukrainian security services also detained the third member of the group, Adam Osmayev, who started to cooperate with investigators out of fear of being extradited to Russia.
The report said a video showing Putin’s motorcade shot from various distances was found on Osmayev’s laptop.
A Federal Security Service official said Osmayev showed authorities the ammunition storage area near Kutuzovsky Bridge that was intended to be used in the plot.
Channel One reported that Russian security officials have cleared the storage site. Kutuzovsky Bridge connects with the major highways and is used extensively by governmental officials.
Osmayev told Channel One in an interview from his cell that he became interested in terrorist activity while studying economics at England’s University of Buckingham and coming in contact with rebel leaders living in exile in Britain.
Ukrainian Security Service spokeswoman Marina Ostapenko confirmed that Russian citizens detained by Ukrainian security services intended to assassinate Putin, Interfax reported.
Her statement was confirmed by the Federal Guard Service, the agency that protects high-ranking officials.
Nikolai Kovalyov, a former head of the Federal Security Service, described the plot as an “overt terrorist act” and called the suspects’ level of preparedness “high.”
Experts familiar with presidential security told The St. Petersburg Times that it is hard to identify the car in which the prime minister is traveling because his entourage often consists of similar-looking cars.
Kovalyov said the suspects intended to destabilize the situation in the country on the eve of the presidential election.
He referred to an earlier statement by Umarov in which the terrorist leader urged his followers not to attack Russian citizens because they were waging large-scale protests against Putin.
“He is satisfied with the mass protest actions, but he is not satisfied with the [likely outcome of the] presidential election and the choice for stability,” Kovalyov said, Itar-Tass reported Monday.
A Just Russia leader Sergei Mironov told reporters Monday that he believes that the government was prepared for such a terrorist act.
Mironov added that he based his opinion on his experience as a former Security Council member. He said information might have been saved by security officials for use during the campaign.
But Pavel Salin, a senior expert at the Center for Current Politics, a Kremlin-leaning think tank, said an attempt to make Putin a terrorist target was possibly an invention of his campaign team.
“During the election month, Putin’s spin doctors do almost anything to boost his rating,” Salin said. “Of course, terrorists from the Caucasus might nurse plans to kill Putin or Medvedev, but it is one thing to have desires, another to actually be able to achieve it.”
Andrei Soldatov, a security expert at the Agentura.ru think tank, said the news was not first announced by the Federal Security Service but by Putin’s spokesman and reported by Channel One.
“For me, that is an indication that a decision to announce it was made on a political level,” Soldatov said.
Channel One deputy head Kirill Kleimenov said Monday that his channel stands by the authenticity of its report and that reporters were provided with the information by security officials 10 days ago.
Interestingly, the plot was not mentioned on the 7 p.m. newscast on Gazprom-controlled channel NTV.
Reports of the latest plot recall similar stories of an attempt on Putin’s life in March 2008, when his protege Dmitry Medvedev was running for president with his blessing.
Those allegations, first reported by sensationalist tabloid Tvoi Dyen, indicated that a Tajik citizen planned to kill Putin during a post-election concert on Red Square.
Security officials, however, denied the existence of that plot, saying the detainees belonged to a criminal gang.
Various Soviet leaders, including Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhail Gorbachev, survived assassination attempts.
The attempt to kill Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin by radical Socialist Fanni Caplan in 1918 was partly successful, since Lenin was wounded and died six years later.
TITLE: Sign-Up for Prokhorov Party Begins
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Billionaire-turned-presidential candidate Mikhail Prokhorov invited supporters to join his own political party over the weekend, which he has promised to found after the March 4 election.
Prokhorov said nothing about the party’s ideology, but it will face numerous competitors if it follows his liberal, pro-business stance.
One of them, Right Cause, the party Prokhorov briefly headed last year, announced Friday that it supports Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s bid to return to the Kremlin.
Prokhorov said in a statement on his campaign website Saturday that the party, which has no name yet, should be built by its members who would decide its political direction.
“You will make this party yourself. You will define its program, its aims and its actions,” he wrote.
By late Sunday, more than 21,500 users had registered on the site .
When he first announced his party plans earlier this month, Prokhorov predicted that it would soon have millions of supporters nationwide.
Prokhorov also said the party would be built by his supporters in the regions.
The tycoon bitterly complained in September about the Kremlin’s policy of interfering in party politics when he was ousted as leader of Right Cause in a coup led by pro-Kremlin activists.
On Friday, Right Cause elected acting party chairman Andrei Dunayev as its leader.
A party convention in Moscow also adopted a resolution saying Right Cause hopes that “the liberalization course will continue and that voters will support Putin in the presidential election,” Interfax reported.
But rightist liberal convictions are widely seen as no more than a niche in the country’s politics.
Right Cause finished last in the December Duma elections, winning just 0.6 percent of the vote.
A Levada poll published Friday predicted just 6 percent for Prokhorov, the second-lowest total in the field of five candidates running in Sunday’s election. Putin is widely expected to win.
What’s more, there is no shortage of parties or party projects with a similar ideology.
Former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin is said to be working on his own liberal party together with Igor Yurgens, a prominent adviser to President Dmitry Medvedev, who made headlines last week by saying he would prefer to see Kudrin rather than Medvedev as prime minister after the election.
Last fall’s shake-up in Right Cause also made prominent liberals led by Leonid Gozman leave and resurrect the Union of Right Forces, the country’s main pro-business party in the 1990s.
Other Union of Right Forces leaders had refused to join Right Cause when it was first set up in 2008, saying it was a Kremlin project.
The most prominent of them is Boris Nemtsov, who became a co-founder of the Solidarity movement and later the unregistered Party of People’s Freedom, or Parnas.
Hopes by Nemtsov and his partners to overturn the Justice Ministry’s refusal to register their party received a boost after they were invited for talks with Medvedev last week.
Another rightist force could reappear soon. The European Court of Human Rights ruled last month that the refusal to register Vladimir Ryzhkov’s Republican Party was wrong. Ryzhkov has joined Parnas in the meantime.
Yet another competing party project is Right Turn, a movement created by Boris Titov, head of the Delovaya Rossia business group.
Titov co-founded Right Cause in 2008 but has gradually turned toward openly supporting Putin. In May 2011, he became a founding member of Putin’s All-Russia People’s Front.
TITLE: Peter the Great Voted Leader
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Peter the Great outstripped the competition in a bid to become Russia’s next president in a rehearsal vote held in 12 voting stations in Moscow on Saturday.
His opponents were Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, Winston Churchill, and Genghis Khan, the Moscow election committee said, RIA-Novosti reported.
The voting followed the procedures to be used in the presidential election on March 4. The rehearsal was also an opportunity to test the video cameras installed at each location.
The ballots included information about each candidate, including date of birth, nominating party, marital status and a summary of achievements.
At one voting station, twenty-six voted for Peter the Great, six for Genghis Khan, and four for Alexander the Great, while Napoleon Bonaparte and Winston Churchill each received two votes.
City-wide, Peter the Great won by a large margin.
TITLE: Finns Mull Property Sale Restrictions
AUTHOR: By Rachel Nielsen
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — As a political bloc in Finland pushes for a federal bill to limit the purchase of real estate to Finns and other European Union citizens, Russians wanting to buy property in their northern neighbor are facing a cold gust of Nordic air.
Though both precedent and political sentiment in Finland give the bill little chance of becoming law, the proposal suggests mixed feelings about Russians, who in 2010 bought more than 400 properties in Finland for a total of 56 million euros ($75 million).
The bill, spearheaded by the Center Party, a bloc that makes up about 18 percent of Finland’s parliament, makes the case for EU-only real estate ownership by citing national security and heritage. It was drafted in November and introduced to parliament this month.
There is little doubt that it’s targeted at Russians, as Norway, Switzerland and Iceland, which aren’t EU nations, are exempted, while Russia, other CIS countries and the countries of the former Yugoslavia would be affected.
Pertti Salolainen, vice chairman of the Finnish parliament’s foreign affairs committee and a member of the National Coalition Party, told The St. Petersburg Times that his party isn’t backing the proposed legislation. The country’s new president, to be sworn in March 1, is a National Coalition member.
“We think that it’s a good thing that there are more Russians buying in Finland,” he said in a telephone interview Friday.
News articles in Helsingin Sanomat, a Finnish publication owned by the same company as The St. Petersburg Times, have commented on Russians who “bring revenue to eastern Finland but also arouse suspicions,” as one headline read. According to Salolainen, Russian purchases of homes have raised speculation about money laundering, while at the same time improved the economics of Finland’s east, which had experienced an exodus of Finns.
According to 2010 figures from Finland’s National Land Survey, Russians bought 413 properties in Finland that year, with more than 300 of those purchases concentrated in two regions. There were about 400 properties picked up by Russians in 2009 and 780 properties in 2008, the Land Survey’s Mervi Laitinen said by e-mail.
Though Salolainen’s National Coalition Party doesn’t like the anti-foreigner sentiment in the bill, it does have its own concerns with Russian-Finnish real estate: It wants the Russian government to give Finland “reciprocity” by allowing Finns to buy property close to home.
Since January 2011, when President Dmitry Medvedev banned foreigners from acquiring land in the republic of Karelia and other northwest border areas, Finns have been prohibited from owning property in some of the territories nearest to them.
“We don’t think that [such] large border zones are necessary,” Salolainen said, referring to the buffer that Russia has effectively established between it and Finland.
Finland’s dominant party also wants Russia to make its land registry more transparent, so that it will be easier to determine if Finns can acquire a given property, Salolainen said.
TITLE: Putin’s Promises May Total $161 Bln
AUTHOR: By Howard Amos
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is on course to win this weekend’s presidential election, but at what cost?
About $161 billion, according to some estimates.
Some observers see government spending rocketing by as much as $161 billion through 2018 on the back of popular pledges designed to guarantee Putin’s return to the Kremlin and shore up support that has wobbled amid large street demonstrations.
Putin’s government has postponed utility tariff price rises, hiked pensions and frozen gasoline prices, while more colorful moments of largesse have included proposals to buy back 16 billion rubles ($550 million) of VTB shares and give fans free flights to the Euro 2012 football tournament.
Rising expenditures could push the break-even oil price for Russia’s budget to $150 a barrel over the next few years, Citibank said last week. The government needed $115 a barrel to cover spending in 2011 and just $23 a barrel in 2007 on the eve of the financial crisis.
Such a drain on the nation’s finances would be disastrous, said Sergei Guriev, rector of the New Economic School. “If the oil price is where it is now and if Putin wins in the first round, he will mostly implement his promises, which will have serious negative implications for long-term macroeconomic stability,” he told The St. Petersburg Times.
Oil hit record levels last week, with its price in rubles now at its highest point since record keeping began. On the back of rising tensions between the United States and Iran, Russian benchmark Urals crude was flirting with the $125 mark Friday, closing at $124.99 a barrel.
Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said Monday that Putin’s pre-election commitments will cost up to 2 percent of GDP — about $34 billion. He said the break-even oil price for the budget should be $90 by 2016 for fiscal stability, Reuters reported.
But in a sign that even the Finance Ministry is concerned about the risk of rapid increases in expenditure, Siluanov warned of the threats linked to irresponsible spending.
“It’s a choice either of stability or of decisions that are not secured by real financing,” he said.
Putin’s campaign trail pledges have included promises to raise the salaries of teachers, doctors and university staff, additional allowances to families with three children, more scholarships and expanding the provision of living accommodations for military personnel.
In a Feb. 20 newspaper commentary on defense, Putin said he would increase military spending by $768 billion more than was earmarked in a 2008 modernization program. Military wages were doubled in January. Police officers’ salaries were more than doubled the same month.
Former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin left the government last year after publicly criticizing unsustainable levels of military expenditures.
Pensions were boosted by 7 percent in January and will go up again — by 2.4 percent — in April. On Feb. 13, Putin proposed that a strategy be developed to reduce the cost of housing by up to 30 percent. Social outlays have risen to 27 percent of GDP, up from 21 percent over the last four years, Siluanov said Monday.
Like in any country, there is an understanding that pre-election commitments are often reneged on, said Yulia Tseplyayeva, chief economist at BNP Paribas in Moscow. But “you have to take the promises seriously because they show the trajectory of development,” she said.
Some investors are taking Putin seriously. VTB stock jumped 4 percent within minutes after Putin announced plans earlier this month to buy small investors out of their shares, which have plummeted in value since a 2007 initial public offering.
The prime minister said Jan. 19 that Russian fans deserved to fly for free to football matches in Ukraine and Poland later this year. He said Aeroflot and Transaero should donate planes and suggested that they could recoup losses through publicity.
Putin’s campaign has not just been predicated on promises. Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko announced in January that informal agreements with energy companies would ensure a freeze on fuel and electricity prices until after the election. Rises in gas prices and building services payments have also been delayed to the second half of the year.
Price freezes have helped reduce inflation to a record low of 4.2 percent in January, but analysts are almost universally predicting a sharp uptick as they are reversed later in the year.
Even Putin himself admitted last week that he “wasn’t sure” inflation this year could be held at a level lower than last year’s 6.1 percent.
Freezes also hit businesses. In one example, TNK-BP said Monday that it was halting operations at its Ukrainian Lisichansk refinery. “The tolling scheme that TNK-BP uses at the refinery has become unprofitable since the government ‘froze’ fuel prices,” VTB Capital analysts said in a research note.
“Artificial restraints on prices work on the spring principle,” business daily Vedemosti wrote in a January editorial. “The harder you lean on them, the more they bounce back.”
Boris Titov, chairman of Delovaya Rossia, the pro-Putin business-lobbying group, said companies would use the freeing of prices to raise them more than they would otherwise have grown. “After you remove the barrier the inflow will be significantly bigger and might destroy the economy,” he said in an interview.
While some see high oil prices tempting Putin to delay reforms, others hope that his expected return will usher in a period of change. Titov said Putin could only fulfill his obligations if he pushed ahead with fundamental economic restructuring.
“Putin is going in the right direction judging by his rhetoric,” he said. “We’ll wait and see what he’ll actually do.”
TITLE: Severstal to Spend $1.7 Bln on Upgrades
AUTHOR: By Irina Filatova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Severstal said Monday that it plans to spend a total of $1.7 billion this year to modernize its facilities and carry out new projects in Russia and abroad as part of its development strategy until 2015.
The steel giant intends to “invest significantly” in its local assets, which is the major focus of Severstal’s investment program for 2012, and it plans to complete the modernization of its North American facilities, the company’s chief financial officer Alexei Kulichenko said in a statement.
Severstal plans to spend about $905 million on renovating its facilities in Russia and building a long product mill in Balakovo, in the Saratov region, according to the statement posted on the company’s web site.
The new generation mini-mill, which will produce steel for construction needs, is slated to become operational in the second quarter of next year. The company valued the overall investment in the project at $700 million.
The steel giant’s mining division will also spend approximately $659 million to modernize mines and facilities in Russia and the United States and develop existing greenfield projects in the republic of Tuva, Libya and Brazil.
The third portion of Severstal’s capital expenditures, about $104 million, will go to the maintenance of its two plants in North America.
The large portion of investment in the mining sector is justified in light of high prices for raw material, while building the mini-mill will help the company increase output, said Dmitry Smolin, an analyst at UralSib Capital.
Severstal targets boosting steel output to 19.6 million tons by 2020 from 14.7 million in 2010, and coking coal output to 17.9 million tons compared with 7.3 million tons in 2010.
In addition, Kulichenko said the steel company will “continue to search for and analyze new investment opportunities.”
Among possible investment options, Severstal is considering acquiring coal mining assets in Russia, the United States and Mozambique.
“They are all greenfield projects, which require [developing] infrastructure and significant investment,” the company said in e-mailed comments.
The company also said it is eyeing new steelmaking projects in Russia, Brazil, the United States and India.
Severstal plans to build a steel production plant with annual output of 3 million tons in India jointly with state-run miner NMDC. But the project has stalled because of the sides’ disagreement over the size of stakes in the joint venture and delays in mining linkages, Reuters reported earlier this month, citing a senior official in the Indian company.
Kulichenko said investing in new projects would help Severstal achieve its goal of becoming one of the world’s five largest steelmakers by EBITDA by 2015.
With EBITDA of $3.3 billion, Severstal was ranked eighth in 2010 in the list of global steelmakers, according to a presentation it released late last year.
Severstal’s EBITDA in 2011 is expected to reach $3.8 billion before declining to $3.6 billion this year, UralSib’s Smolin said.
TITLE: The Kremlin’s Swingers Club
AUTHOR: By Victor Davidoff
TEXT: The latest joke about the presidential election campaign in Russia comes from comic Mikhail Zadornov. “The recent electoral debates remind me of a swingers club. Everyone knows how the evening will end, but beforehand you have to introduce yourself and make small talk.”
Not everyone has such erotic associations. For most people in Russia, until recently the campaign just produced a constant sense of deja vu. Voters had seen it all dozens of times before: the same frontrunner, the same “opposition” candidates who didn’t look like they had a hope of victory — nor did they look like they even wanted to win. And, of course, everyone knows how the performance ends.
And then in mid-December, a new actor appeared on the stage when billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov announced that he would run for president.
This was Prokhorov’s second foray into politics. Last spring, he headed the Right Cause party, only to quit a few months later after a series of scandals. At the time, it appeared that Prokhorov had left politics and gone back to his more successful hobbies, such as basketball. Few people took his bid for president seriously.
In fact, most people thought Prokhorov’s presidential bid was just another Kremlin project. The skeptical view was that the Kremlin, rattled by protests, was using Prokhorov as a kind of tame opposition.
But this version stopped being plausible after Prokhorov made several bold moves. He attended the opposition rallies and even inserted their demands into his electoral platform. These included radical measures such as annulling the results of the Dec. 4 State Duma elections, introducing elections of governors and judges, limiting presidential powers and cutting the presidential term to four years. To underline the seriousness of his intentions, Prokhorov has already begun to establish a new party based on liberal political values and oriented toward the European Union as Russia’s main partner in foreign relations.
Prokhorov even telephoned Soviet-era dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, whose name still makes people in the Kremlin break out in hives. After their conversation, Bukovsky wrote on the Ekho Moskvy blog: “Is Prokhorov capable of dismantling the Putin regime? I think so.”
At this point, it was difficult to believe that Prokhorov was a Kremlin project.
It didn’t take long for the Kremlin’s true attitude toward the candidate to appear. In many cities, as soon as Prokhorov’s campaign billboards went up, they were torn down. In Novosibirsk, he wasn’t able to meet with voters after the hall he rented was abruptly closed. And then, in the best traditions of pro-Kremlin movements, a smear campaign was initiated against him, including a mock gay calendar for the candidate from the so-called “boys of Leningrad region.”
Despite these efforts, Prokhorov’s rating has gone up. By the end of January, he was in second place behind Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The blogger Nikitskij wrote in his LiveJournal blog: “Yesterday I was in the Caffeine cafe on Sretenka. They were doing some marketing event and asking people who they were going to vote for. And they posted the results, which really surprised me: 40 percent for Prokhorov, 24 percent for Putin, 10 percent for Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, 9 percent for Just Russia leader Sergei Mironov, and 7 percent for Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov. That was the vote of the ‘caffeine electorate.’”
Prokhorov also has supporters among the more conservative voters. A straw vote on the site Voensud.ru for members of the armed forces gave Zyuganov a strong lead, but Prokhorov got a respectable 17 percent. But nationwide polls give Prokhorov only 6 percent to 8 percent of the vote, which rules out victory or even participation in an unlikely second round of voting.
That said, in Russia, politics don’t happen at the polling stations or on the streets but rather on the rugs in Kremlin offices. The Prokhorov phenomenon shows that there is a fierce battle among the ruling elites raging on — or perhaps under — those plush rugs.
In Russian history, this kind of battle has almost always led to a regime change. Only leaders who were supremely talented diplomats and strategic thinkers — and with a strong dose of brutality to boot — were able to hold on to power.
No one who has observed Putin doubts that he is brutal enough, but it’s not clear if he has everything that it takes to hold on to power.
Victor Davidoff is a Moscow-based writer and journalist whose blog is chaadaev56.livejournal.com.
TITLE: comment: Coming Out for Human Rights
AUTHOR: By Ciara Bartlam
TEXT: When I came out two years ago to my mother, the first response I got was the question, “Sounds good honey, but just one thing: Are you a political lesbian?” Bewildered, I asked, “What is that supposed to mean?” After a moment’s pause, she replied, “Well… Have you cut your hair?” Apparently the two go hand-in-hand.
I dare say that I have never been a political lesbian: I have never proclaimed my sexuality from the rooftops, nor ever intended to. Until, that is, the local government of St. Petersburg planned to take away my right to even consider offloading my sexual preferences onto the general public. Only then did there seem cause.
According to research conducted by the Moscow-based Levada Center in 2010, 74 percent of the Russian population believes that homosexuality is a depraved perversion of human nature. Surely that fact alone would stop any sane person from going out in public waving a rainbow flag and singing Boy George while mincing their way down Nevsky Prospekt — why do we need a law against it too?
Queen Elizabeth I, on the topic of enforced Protestantism in England, once said that she did not want “a window into men’s souls,” she only wanted them to turn up at church on a Sunday. In a country that is already rife with homophobia, and in a country where homosexuality remains a strict taboo, why is there a need to make so much fuss? The most remarkable aspect of this bill is that, on the one hand, it stands firmly against the promotion of homosexuality yet, on the other hand, only serves to attract attention to it.
Historically, laws that prohibit certain aspects of human behaviour have failed, for example the Prohibition laws in America against the consumption of alcohol during the 1920s. Taking an example more relevant to Russia: Did the Soviets actually stop people from having a belief in Orthodoxy when they banned religious practice, or did they make it stronger? The fact of the matter here is that this bill only makes people more inclined to show their sexuality than to hide it. Here, I am a case in point: Far from being overtly and openly homosexual, I am in fact completely sexually introverted. Any mention of the topic and I blush. In fact, up until the age of 15 there was a 50-percent possibility of my becoming a nun in an attempt to avoid the subject altogether. And yet, I am outing myself to the readership of The St Petersburg Times. Why? Because I would rather lose my head than lose my voice. It’s a case of human beings being provoked into proving their own right to live.
This comment is a call for other people to make a choice and to use their voice. Regardless of whether you’re gay or straight, we have an obligation to protect the interests of all people. If we don’t and a different bill is passed that affects us directly, we run the very serious risk of there being “no one left to speak out,” as Martin Niemöller wrote. This is just an indication of what is to come.
In arguments supporting the bill, there has been talk of protecting children from pedophilia and the perversion of homosexuality. But what about sexual perversion in general? Not love, but an aggressive power-play in which domination is ever-present: In pornography, in literature, on the TV. This is certainly far more prevalent and far more dangerous to young minds. Look at the four “minigarchs” from Russia who gang-raped a teenage girl while studying in the U.K. last year. Of course this is horrific, but what is even worse is that it is characteristic of a mind-set seen all across Russia. Granted it doesn’t only happen here, but would they have been sentenced to 36 years between them had it happened in Russia? Given the fact that an estimated 14,000 women die annually in Russia from domestic violence, perhaps more of the Duma’s precious time should be spent dealing with this.
If we were to look at a photograph of gay rights protesters and the nationalists and others who turn out to oppose them, I’m sure many readers would agree that the latter are far scarier. An aggressive attitude toward other people is far more damaging to society than a show of love. By repressing people and identifying them as abnormal, this bill does not solve any problems, it only adds to them.
Ciara Bartlam is a British woman living and working in St. Petersburg.
TITLE: The man who was there
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Peter Hook, a founding member and the bassist with the British post-punk legends Joy Division, is bringing music to St. Petersburg that has not been heard live for decades since the untimely death of vocalist Ian Curtis in 1980.
The 56-year-old Hook has since played with bands such as New Order, Revenge, Monaco and Freebass, and co-owned Manchester’s infamous Hacienda (he went on to write a book called “The Hacienda – How Not To Run A Club” about his experience) and now runs a new club called The Factory.
On May 18, 2010, Hook commemorated the 30th anniversary of Ian Curtis’ death by performing “Unknown Pleasures,” Joy Division’s debut album, live with his band The Light at his club The Factory. Since then he has taken the album on tour across the globe, alternating it since May last year with live performances of Joy Division’s second album “Closer.”
In St. Petersburg, Peter Hook & The Light will perform “Unknown Pleasures” live and in its entirety, alongside many other classic tracks spanning the entire back catalogue of the iconic band.
How did you start performing Joy Division material?
Once New Order split up, I was very disappointed that we never celebrated anything to do with Joy Division. We were offered to do a memorabilia exhibition and a live gig by Macclesfield Borough Council, which is where Ian was born and lived. I got involved in the planning for that, which I was very happy about — to celebrate what would have been Ian Curtis’ 30th birthday.
What happened was that the whole thing fell through, and I was very disappointed and so decided to celebrate it myself. I have my own club in Manchester called The Factory and I just decided to do it myself. I got some friends involved who became The Light.
I must admit that playing the music didn’t really turn me on, and then I read an interview with [Primal Scream’s] Bobby Gillespie, where he was talking about playing the entire album “Screamadelica,” and I thought, that sounds like a good idea! So I decided to play the album. It’s actually much more interesting for me to do that rather than just to play a set, because when you play a set and pretend to be a group, it strikes me that it’s a bit like a tribute band.
You once said you “hated” the album “Unknown Pleasures” — why did you choose to start with it?
I didn’t like the production when I was young, and it was only when I came back to it recently for the purpose of this celebration that I realized what a fantastic job [producer] Martin Hannett in particular had done. I will hold my hands up and say that I was completely and utterly wrong. Martin did a wonderful production and enabled the music to last for 30 years, and hopefully for another 30 years.
So you didn’t want to change anything in it?
No, the thing is that when I was young, I wanted to be like the Sex Pistols, and I didn’t see any further than that. Now that I am older, I realized that Martin gave the music the ability to last for years and years. It’s a weird position to be in. I’ve grown into the production, if you like.
Still, if you compare the two versions, yours sounds different.
Yeah, I am a musician, I love Joy Division, I love what we achieved and the music and I’m going for it. I really am enjoying it, and I think that as a musician I’ve always given my all. I have a great respect for and great pride in this music and I really, really do want it to be well received.
How was it learning to play these songs again after so many years? What was difficult?
The interesting thing that I came to realize was that Joy Division had actually been heard [live] by very few people. And the strange thing is that most people have heard Joy Division via the record. So what I did was I transcribed the record.
Joy Division [live] were a lot more stripped down, a lot edgier than they were on record. So I must admit that I am leaning toward a combination of Martin Hannett’s production and Joy Division’s music.
Do you hear the influence of Joy Division in many bands of today?
Yeah, it’s a strange thing but I find it hard to judge, really, because I’m in the group. So when people tell me that, I’m like “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah,” it’s not something that I concentrate on or look to be justified, if you like. I take it as a compliment and get on with doing what I’m doing. These plaudits are very nice. But you do have to bear in mind that it doesn’t make life easier. It’s very nice to get a compliment and a pat on the back, but you have to get on with the sticky business of life, don’t you?
How do you think this music fits into the current music scene?
I think it stands up very well. When you look at a young group, as in White Lies or even Editors, or Cradle of Filth or Cradle Club, for that matter, a lot of people still use Joy Division as a yardstick, as an influence, an inspiration. So I am not going to stop them. I am very happy and proud. And the same with New Order; New Order are very much used as an inspiration in many ways.
After doing “Unknown Pleasures” you went on to perform “Closer,” the band’s second album. What was the difference for you?
The two albums are very, very different. “Unknown Pleasures” is very aggressive and rocky, “Closer” is much more melancholic and intense, and you need to listen to “Closer.” You can’t go with the flow or ignore it and just have a good time.
So “Closer” has been good, because we ignored it so much as a group. It’s been great to get that back. Hopefully, if we do well this time, we will come back to you and play “Closer”! That would be nice, nice for me.
What about your book about Joy Division?
I’ve just finished the book, actually. I finished it last week. It’s called “Inside Joy Division” and it comes out on Sept. 27 in England. So I’m immersed totally in all things Joy Division.
What kind of book is it?
Well, I sat down and tried to remember every single thing I could, what happened to us, and I think I’ve done a pretty good job; there isn’t much I don’t remember. It’s interesting to immerse yourself so much in it. It’s quite strange. I have been living it body and soul and I think I’ve remembered most of it. This is my version, you must remember that this is how I remember it.
Joy Division has been the subject of a few books and two major films recently. Do they tell the story well?
The reason I did the Joy Division book was because I was sick of reading books written by people who weren’t there. This book is written by somebody who was there. And I think from my point of view it shows that we’re actually quite normal people. We do an extraordinary job and did that extraordinary job very well, because the chemistry between the four musicians in Joy Division was wonderful, exemplary, and that was the reason behind it.
Could you tell us about your club, The Factory?
My club is in the old Factory [record label] offices. When Factory Records bought the property in Manchester, they didn’t last long in it, but they spent a lot of money and made a fantastic building. It was great to be able to save it and form a new club.
The new club is full of very young people, they are very difficult to please and you really have to be on your toes.
What is your group, The Light, like?
My son Jack, who is the same age as I was when I was in Joy Division, plays bass. The guitarist, Nat Wason, is from Freebass, the band we had last year, and the drummer and keyboard player are from [Hook’s former band] Monaco.
It’s an interesting mix of people, very old friends, and it’s nice to be with them; they’re very passionate and show great respect to the music, and they really do try hard.
It’s your first visit to Russia; have you already had any feedback from here?
Not yet, I am looking forward to it. It’s going to be very interesting, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that we have a great time!
Peter Hook & The Light will perform at 8 p.m. on Saturday, March 3
at Kosmonavt, 24 Bronnitskaya Ulitsa.
M: Tekhnologichesky Institut.
Tel. 922 1300.
TITLE: CHERNOV’S CHOICE
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Members of Pussy Riot, a Moscow feminist punk band known for their unsanctioned public protest performances held in unlikely places from the metro and boutiques to Red Square, have found themselves the subject of a criminal investigation.
On Feb. 21, the group, which is seen as a music band and contemporary art collective crossover, entered the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow to hold what it described as a “punk service.”
A video of the performance that Pussy Riot posted on its Facebook page shows a group of several women wearing their trademark colored balaclavas performing a song called “Madonna, Drive Putin Away.” While playing musical instruments and singing, they try to get away from the cathedral’s female employees and male guards, who are attempting to catch them and eject them.
In the song they urge the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, to believe in God, rather than in Putin, and refer to his alleged links with the Soviet KGB and financial greed.
For this, they may face up to seven years in prison, as the Moscow police have filed a criminal mischief, or “hooliganism” case. Luckily, so far the band’s members have not been identified.
The church, which is separate from the state under the constitution, has largely substituted Soviet-era communist ideology in Putin’s Russia, gaining more and more ground as time passes.
Russian leaders, who swore an oath to “scientific atheism” in the Soviet era, became die-hard Orthodox believers as soon as Soviet Communism was abolished.
Leaders of the state are shown on television praying in churches at Orthodox Christian celebrations, although the sincerity of their beliefs is highly questionable.
“We have respect for religion as an inseparable part of culture,” Pussy Riot told Gazeta.ru.
“There are Orthodox Christians in Pussy Riot. That’s why it’s so painful for us to see what Patriarch Kirill is doing to the church.”
During a meeting between Putin and religious leaders earlier this month, Kirill spared no words in praising Putin, presenting him as the presidential candidate most likely to win. The meeting was one of the highly publicized events of Putin’s election campaign.
“The holiest shepherd is not ashamed to wear a $40,000 watch openly, which is unacceptable when so many families of his flock live on the brink of poverty,” Pussy Riot said in the same interview.
“We are attentive to the feelings of believers and sincerely don’t understand why they don’t object when their shepherd shows such greed for money and aggressively promotes a candidate, who — like no other — is far from the observance of Christian commandments.”
The bands to watch this week in St. Petersburg include The Subways, The Tunics and Peter Hook and The Light. See gigs for dates and locations.
TITLE: Singing for freedom
AUTHOR: By Ronan Loughney
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: As for so many of her heroes, for jazz singer Olesya Yalunina, jazz is freedom: A means of expressing emotions and ideas, as well as a means of freeing oneself from the homogeneity of daily life. This is apparent not only in her music and her singularly expressive voice, but in her personality as well. Yalunina flits between multifarious topics with ease, always with a smile framed by her trademark scarlet lipstick, clearly at ease with herself and eager to imbue similar feelings among those around her.
Yalunina is, unsurprisingly, most animated when talking about jazz, her job and her lifeblood. She talks lovingly about its ability to inspire and indeed, a look into her past explains why. Born in Irkutsk to a conventional working family, her mother and father encouraged her to become an economist. Although she played the piano at music school for eight years, the rigid structure of such an education, limited as it was to the classical styles of Rachmaninov and Shostakovich, nearly extinguished Yalunina’s passion for music. Having moved to St. Petersburg at 17 to begin studying economics, it quickly became apparent that “office stuff was not for me,” she says. During this time, at about the age of 19, she began listening to jazz artists, notably Diana Krall and Tierney Sutton.
“I don’t know why I started … it was intuition,” Yalunina says. Before long, she had fallen in love with all things jazz, broadening her musical repertoire whilst surrounding herself with musicians in the field. It was then that she decided to embark on a second degree, this time in jazz.
Music — in particular, jazz — was what freed Yalunina, and she remains confident in its ability to help people.
“Music can be different for different people — for some people it can be useful and helpful. Now there is more commerciality … but music always has power. If you want to hear it, it always has power.”
While some artists set themselves the mission of bringing about political change or doing something on a grand scale, Yalunina feels there are other equally important ways in which to help through music.
“It’s a big responsibility, but I want to help people,” she said. “To encourage people to change their job, to break routine, to look at things with a fresh perspective. When we perform it’s a great happiness, when you think people might listen to your music and go home and get on the Internet and listen to more jazz. You know, just so they don’t switch on the TV! I want to give people good, positive emotions.”
At the same time, Yalunina concedes that jazz music is not for everyone.
“When you play your music I think you must remember that it can’t be loved by everyone. Jazz is for smart, free people; for people who are free in their thoughts, who try to develop themselves, who have a sense of humor... It’s adult music.”
While strikingly modest, Yalunina admits that she must have some distinguishing feature that brought her success, as she believes any artist must differentiate themselves from the rest.
“First of all, my timbre [sets me apart]. We’ve started to record the first album and I’ve put a lot of thought into it — I try to do special arrangements, to scat… it sounds banal but it’s true. I try to do it sincerely, not for fame or money, but to make people happy.”
Yalunina has advice for aspiring singers.
“You should try not to listen to other vocalists, so that you don’t copy them,” she said.
“Instead, listen to instrumental music — not only the melodies, but also the way it is structured can help you to build musical phrases. The voice is an instrument, like the guitar or anything else, and all great singers use it this way. The vocalist is a musician, they must understand musical laws, they must live in the groove, they must understand how the bass line works, how their band works.
“Ideally this is the case for any kind of music, but especially jazz as it’s complex music,” she added.
Olesya Yalunina will perform at 8 p.m. on Friday, March 2 with guitarist Alex Degusarov as part of the Jazz-Petersburg Jazz Dance and Music festival at Erarta Museum and Galleries of Contemporary Art, 2 29th Line of Vasilyevsky Island. Tel. 324 0809. www.erarta.com.
TITLE: TALK OF THE TOWN
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Big, red, sweet and juicy strawberries, homegrown in St. Petersburg — and ready to eat in the first days of March! This may sound near impossible, but it is not a fantasy. At the end of last year, a group of local enthusiasts turned an industrial loft into a greenhouse with an eye to growing strawberries all year round using electric daylight lamps.
The company should be praised for its courage. Agro Park Media has the ambition to follow in the footsteps of European megalopolises that have woken up to the idea of urban farming. Paris, for example, is abundant with private beehives.
The first — experimental — strawberry crop was planted in December and is being harvested now, and its growers promise the fruits will taste as if your grandma grew them, and nothing like the imported huge and improbably perfect-shaped fruit to be found in local stores.
On March 3, from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m., everyone is welcome to the loft at 49 Kurlyandskaya Ulitsa to taste the first local spring fruit and take some home. If the experiment proves a success, more strawberry fields are going to follow, along with other fruit and berry plantations.
More fruit, berries and flowers have arrived in town with the opening of a new boutique of the Greek cosmetic brand Korres at the Sennoi mall. The outlet is the brand’s second store in Russia, both of which are located in St. Petersburg. The history of Korres dates back to 1996, when it emerged from Athens’ first ever homeopathic pharmacy, with a single product in its portfolio. The company now boasts more than 400 natural or certified organic products and is present in over 30 markets.
The company has created an independent scientific board consisting of top-flight scientists in the fields of biochemistry, pharmacognosy and clinical dermatology, who investigate the clinical benefits of natural ingredients in relation to skin biochemistry and employs Nobel-awarded scientists to make anti-ageing products.
March 1 will see the presentation of a new collection of fine porcelain by St. Petersburg fashion queen Tatyana Parfyonova at the Astoria hotel as part of Mezzanine magazine’s Table Décor project. Inspired by luxurious ermine mantles, it is titled “Tsar’s Collection,” and marks Parfyonova’s third experiment with porcelain. The two previous collections were titled “Pajamas” and “Fortune-Telling in a Tea Cup.”
Parfyonova, with an arts degree under her belt, is not the only Russian artist trying their hand at porcelain. Following the huge success of the Mariinsky Theater’s production of “The Nutcracker” in 2001 with designs by émigré artist Mikhail Shemyakin, the artist created a porcelain collection based on his theatrical sketches that became a huge hit.
The presentation at Astoria will incorporate a 3D video-art and fashion show of Parfyonova’s latest collection “Maid of Honors’ Garden.”
TITLE: the word’s worth: A real rat race
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: Îôèñíûé ïëàíêòîí: “office plankton,” aka cubicle rats, office monkeys, desk jockeys
Every once in a while I fall in love at first sight with a Russian slang expression. Such was the case with îôèñíûé ïëàíêòîí (literally, “office plankton”). As soon as you hear it, you envision the workplace as a big aquarium with its big and little fish, a few sharks, several crabs and a whale or two — all chewing up the plankton, that mass of indistinguishable workers that keeps the system functioning. Brilliant!
Îôèñíûé ïëàíêòîí has a bad rep with people outside the workplace or at the top of the corporate food chain. The phrase is sometimes used as a synonym for îôèñíîå áûäëî (office rabble) and means low-level white-collar workers who spend most of their time at work drinking coffee, chatting with their co-plankton, texting and bungling the few mindless tasks they are assigned.
When the boss wanders by, they do ÈÁÄ (èìèòàöèÿ áóðíîé äåÿòåëüíîñòè — an imitation of frenetic activity). But people who self-identify with îôèñíûé ïëàíêòîí don’t think of themselves as slackers or bottom feeders. They see themselves as the helpless prey of the office sharks (aka top management) who are overloading them with busy-work without even ensuring that they have a functioning copier.
The folks who make up the plankton are different from another form of office life — êàíöåëÿðñêàÿ êðûñà (paper pusher; literally, “office rat”). These are the people who produce reams of paperwork and are constantly scurrying around getting it signed, registered or couriered to another rat in another office. Often officious, pedantic and humorless, this kind of rodent will make you redo a 12-page document at 6:05 p.m. over a barely visible smudge on page four.
The ñåòåâîé õîìÿ÷îê (Internet hamster) is another creature altogether. Õîìÿêè have long been part of Russian computer slang, based on similarities of sound with various non-Russian words. For example, õîìÿê was first slang for a home page on a site and then became a term for a personal home page on a blog. It also seems to have been provider-slang for a home user and programmer slang for a variety of software. And then õîìÿê has always been used to describe a hoarder — think hamster cheeks full of food.
Somewhere along the way the diminutive õîìÿ÷îê began to be used with the adjective ñåòåâîé (network, Internet) to describe a pale-faced, obsessive blogger and social network user — the kind of person who spends all of his or her time under artificial light, dashing off blog posts and scurrying from one virtual acquaintance to another.
This little hamster became very famous on Dec. 5, when opposition leader Alexei Navalny shouted from the stage at the demonstration for fair elections: “ß ñåòåâîé õîìÿ÷îê, è ÿ ïåðåãðûçó ãëîòêó ýòèì ñêîòàì!” (I’m an Internet hamster and I’ll chew through the throats of those swine!)
But Prime Minister Vladimir Putin saw the demonstrators as animals of a different sort. In December of last year, he jokingly addressed them this way: Èäèòå êî ìíå, áàíäåðëîãè! (Come to me, Bandar-log!). If you haven’t read any children’s lit lately, the Bandar-log is a tribe of scatterbrained and unruly monkeys in Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book.” At the next demonstration, Navalny greeted the crowd with: “Ïðèâåò áàíäåðëîãàì îò ñåòåâûõ õîìÿ÷êîâ!” (Greetings to the Bandar-log from the Internet hamsters!)
Hamsters, monkeys, rats, plankton … Is that any way to talk about human beings?
Michele A. Berdy, a Moscow-based translator and interpreter, is author of “The Russian Word’s Worth” (Glas), a collection of her columns.
TITLE: Star vote
AUTHOR: By Tatyana Sochiva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Emir Kusturica would vote for Vladimir Putin in Russia’s upcoming presidential elections, the Serbian filmmaker and musician said during a visit to St. Petersburg last week.
The director, who is known for films including “Arizona Dream” (1993) and “Black Cat, White Cat” (1998) was in the city to perform with his band, The No Smoking Orchestra, on Wednesday. He spoke about his creative plans and the political situation in Russia at a press conference before his concert at the Lensoviet House of Culture.
On the eve of presidential elections in Russia, many of the questions Kusturica was asked concerned the director’s political views. Kusturica said he believes that Russia must go peacefully into the future without revolution, and that if he were Russian, he would vote for Vladimir Putin.
“It is very simple. If you ask a friend who comes to Russia very often, ‘Which do you prefer, a stable or an unstable Russia?,’ if he is a normal person, he will always answer, ‘I want a stable Russia.’”
Kusturica denied, however, that he was working as a “propaganda man.”
“I am a very free person and I just express myself — sometimes too freely. But my vision of the world is quite different from what people might expect from me,” he added.
The Serb said he is a great supporter of Russian culture, as he feels that his people come from the same place as Russians. He named Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexander Dovzhenko, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Nikita Mikhalkov as Soviet and Russian directors who have had an influence on his own work.
Kusturica, 57, said that he is still “young, fresh and ready to make many more films.” The director, who is currently working on a film about the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, believes that he will one day return to St. Petersburg to make a movie about one of his favorite authors, Fyodor Dostoevsky. He is currently writing a script titled “My Dear Fyodor” dedicated to the author of “Crime and Punishment.”
Directing is by no means Kusturica’s only talent: He is an actor, musician, scriptwriter and has also created a traditional village, Drvengrad, for one of his films — he now resides in the village — but draws little difference between his activities.
“Writing, playing music, making movies, creating cities, doing architecture — they are the same perception of life,” he said.
Kusturica and his Serbian folk-rock band The No Smoking Orchestra have managed to attract a large fan base, even without constantly recording new music. Kusturica puts the ensemble’s success down to the concept of the band, comparing its performances to the circus. The band’s plans for the future include the creation of an opera based on the novel “The Bridge on the Drina” by Yugoslavian writer Ivo Andric.
At the closing of the press conference in St. Petersburg, Kusturica, who was due to travel to Moscow the next day, said with a smile, “When I go to Moscow and meet people, I say, ‘You know, Moscow is a good city, but St. Petersburg, it’s a city of culture.’”
TITLE: Ex-Nashi activists on film
AUTHOR: By Max Seddon
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: NEW YORK — “Putin’s Kiss,” a new documentary by Danish director Lisa Birk Pedersen, will disappoint those hoping to see the softer side of Russia’s once and future president: Putin only appears briefly at the film’s outset to receive a bashful peck on the cheek from Maria Drokova, then a star of the pro-Kremlin youth movement Nashi.
Instead, the film aims to portray Russia’s first post-Soviet generation through the meteoric rise and eventual disillusionment of Drokova, born in 1989. Her story, however, is hardly typical. After joining Nashi as a doe-eyed, buxom 15-year-old from Tambov, Drokova quickly sets her sights on the elite: She studies public policy at Russia’s most prestigious university and is appointed Nashi’s head of PR, which sees her rewarded with her own car, apartment and TV show.
Years of denouncing the West and westernizers alike eventually take their toll. Shortly after losing an election for one of Nashi’s five federal leadership positions in 2009, Drokova falls in with a group of opposition-minded journalists headed by Kommersant columnist Oleg Kashin — themselves the targets of numerous Nashi campaigns. When one of her new friends burns a book by Kremlin ideologue Vladislav Surkov after a birthday party she attended, Drokova’s Nashi superiors give her an “us or them” ultimatum. She chooses neither, leaving the movement to become a public relations professional.
Drokova’s story is a classic tale of the naive provincial girl who comes to the big city and is seduced — intellectually or otherwise — by a series of charismatic and powerful older men. Putin, she says, is “the model for the person I’d like to spend my life with” after he awards her a medal. Her desktop background is a picture of them deep in conversation. Much of her relationship with Vasily Yakemenko, then Nashi’s leader, is portrayed in staged scenes of Drokova complaining to friends about their minor squabbles, as if she were his demanding mistress.
Though she contrasts the open-minded liberal journalists favorably with the controlling Yakemenko, politics seems not to have been the deciding factor in her change of scene, since her views hardly change at all. Many of them suspect she is a Nashi honey trap set to distract them with her formidable breasts — the film’s most enduring shot shows Kashin staring straight down Drokova’s top as she bends forward to argue a point.
Far more interesting are glimpses of life inside Nashi, sometimes compared to the Hitler Youth, but here more akin to a religious cult. Yakemenko opens Nashi’s annual summer camp by telling attendees their lives are about to change. Nashi members speak of their mission to rid Russia of “enemies” like liberals or corrupt politicians with devotional zeal.
These moments, however, are all too few and not particularly revealing. Sometimes this is because Pedersen fails to clue the viewer in on several key political points; at other junctures, the menace of Nashi is not effectively conveyed. Though Pedersen shows us CCTV footage of Kashin being brutally beaten by two men he claims were hired by Yakemenko, Nashi members are not shown doing anything more untoward than defecating on opposition politician Ilya Yashin’s car.
Without a significant personal transformation from Drokova or a fuller appreciation of the machinations behind Nashi, the film works best as a piece of Russian history, frozen in time — but it won’t be long remembered.
Nashi was already widely thought to be finished as a movement when “Putin’s Kiss” was filmed; recent revelations of payoffs to activists and bloggers after Drokova’s successor’s inbox was hacked suggest that the group struggles to inculcate genuine enthusiasm. Back then, the anti-Putin opposition, for its part, could only attract a few hundred protesters to hear the likes of Ilya Yashin. How things have changed.
TITLE: in the spotlight: Leningrad dad
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
TEXT: Last week, rock musician Sergei Shnurov, whose band Leningrad was once banned in Moscow for its lyrics littered with swearwords, took on a very different role — playing a dad in a sitcom.
The show on CTC called “Baby” (Detka) stars Shnurov as a washed-up rock musician living in Moscow who finds himself responsible for his rebellious teenage daughter, after her mother decides to swan off to Goa, India.
Like his character, Shnurov in real life also has a teenage daughter, although his bands Leningrad and Ruble have had plenty of success.
Leningrad even offended former Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov so much with its foul-mouthed lyrics that he initiated a ban on the band from playing in Moscow, although this is ancient history now.
Shnurov plays up his own hard-living rocker image for this role. His character is thrilled to be booked for a long-awaited gig, only for it to turn out to be a glum office disco. He performs an actual Leningrad song called “Our People Love All Kinds of Rubbish,” which goes down like a lead balloon, while his 15-year-old daughter saves the day by running on stage and performing an upbeat number with colorful foam strips bouncing in her hair.
“Since I’m not a master of transformation, I mainly just play myself,” Shnurov frankly told Komsomolskaya Pravda.
He has done television before, including a travel series on NTV, and his scruffy laid-back image works well on screen. He also played a rock musician in “Election Day,” a film about 1990s vote manipulation, where he sang a song with the lyrics “Elections, elections, all the candidates are …” with a rhyming obscenity in Russian.
His co-star in the sitcom, Valentina Lukashchuk, previously starred in “School,” a far more hard-hitting teenage drama that made waves when it came out on Channel One in 2010, directed by Valeria Gai Germanika.
The director’s latest work, a series called “A Short Course in Happy Living” is mysteriously taking a very long time to reach the schedules.
The schoolchildren in “Baby” are far more straitlaced. One girl shudders when Shnurov stops her in the corridor, looking for his daughter. “If you’re trying to sell drugs, I’ll call the guards,” she threatens.
“Baby” looks to be a fairly conventional show. Shnurov’s cuddly character learns life lessons and even falls for his daughter’s attractive PE teacher. She lectures him on how he is failing his daughter while he gazes in admiration at her low-cut tank top. “Nice top,” he concludes as she blushes.
Meanwhile, a heartthrob to a younger generation, British actor Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry Potter, appeared on Channel One’s “ProjectorParisHilton” show earlier this month to promote his new film “The Woman in Black,” to screams of joy in the audience.
Prompted by host Ivan Urgant, he gamely tried to explain the rules of cricket, looking as baffled as foreign celebrities usually do on the show, where the translation struggles to keep up with the jokes.
“This is a rare case when television is showing something more interesting on [Moscow government-owned] TV Center,” Sergei Svetlakov joked.
The hosts usually end with a sing-along and as his party piece, Rad-cliffe sang the song “Elements” by Tom Lehrer.
“If you want to know the meaning of the song that Daniel Radcliffe just sang, analyze a sample of the water from Moscow River,” said Urgant, the pianist.
The presenters also gave Radcliffe what they promised was the Russian equivalent of a magic wand — one of the striped batons used by traffic policemen.
TITLE: THE DISH: Luxury Cafe
AUTHOR: By Ronan Loughney
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Under neon lights
Stepping into Luxury Café feels like stumbling into a Ray Bradbury nightmare: Light pulsates from neon walls onto black polyethylene tables and shiny, lacquered seats, reflecting painfully into one’s eyes, and ornately framed TVs deck the walls like production-line Picassos, blaring out VH1 on loop.
If this is luxury, it is 1980s Miami cocktail bar, rather than Ritz Hotel, inspired. Bottles of Hennessey and Courvoisier leer out from behind the bar like in some off-the-shelf rap video. 2012 has arrived, and it’s just like your grandmother dreaded it would be.
The choice of the word café then, seems a strange one, since everything about this venue points toward a club format: Giant speakers hang low from the ceilings, while a projector lurks expectantly in the corner, begging for the karaoke to start (every Friday and Saturday from 11 p.m. till the last customer leaves). A dating evening is held on Sundays from 7 p.m. (1,500 rubles or $51 for initial registration, but free thereafter), the perfect place to meet that special spray-tanned someone.
The only option in these surroundings is to order overpriced, luminous cocktails — if not here, then where else? The tequila sunrise (250 rubles, $8.60) was expertly made, resembling a drinkable lava lamp amid the barrage of light hitting it from all sides, and mixed perfectly.
Luxury has by no means forgotten its culinary obligations, perhaps solving the mystery of why it doesn’t position itself as a club. The menu is extremely user friendly, with each dish accompanied by a picture, and there is even a contents page, ensuring optimum efficiency for those 30-minute lunch breaks away from the office. The menu is divided into various kinds of cuisine: Italian, Japanese, meat and fish dishes, with a surprisingly low average price of around 350 rubles ($11.50). As far as the food is concerned, it is only the fresh berry dessert at 1,000 rubles ($33) that conjures up an image of decadence rather than luxury.
The café’s one concession to traditionalism is its extensive tea section, featuring puer chai to “help you to lose weight.”
On top of this, the wide range of low-fat salads will certainly please those who have a personal trainer, and, more importantly, the taste buds too. The roast vegetable and mozzarella salad (320 rubles, $11) was distinguished by a subtle tomato sauce, while the chicken Caesar salad (350 rubles, $12) was textbook: Lean chargrilled chicken perched on a salad bed taut with freshness. Inevitably, there was the habitual disregard for Western restaurant etiquette, with the mains shipped out before the mozzarella had a chance to get cold, but then, this isn’t the West.
The steak (800 rubles, $27.40) came medium-well done (the waitress had not expressed an interest as to how we would like it done), but still retained a tender texture. The side of mash (120 rubles, $4.10) was distinctly cold, though deliciously buttery. The tomato and cucumber garnish was also an odd accompaniment for the red meat, while the peculiar sauce — half hoisin, half hickory — went more with the décor than the steak, tasting decidedly new age and leaving a lingering impression of plastic.
The tuna and salmon steak with spinach puree (590 rubles, $20.20) on the other hand was excellent: The tuna was merely seared to leave its center bloody pink, so that the fish retained all of its natural oils, resulting in a succulent, meaty texture. The salmon steak was fresh, flaky and — miraculously for Russia — served without dill. This was topped off by the creamy spinach puree, which provided a welcome variation from potato mash.
Ultimately, though the relatively normal, wholesome food stands at odds to the artificial setting in which it is served, it is impossible at any point to unplug oneself from Luxury’s robot soul. To enjoy your meal even remotely, do not visit Luxury on Fridays or Saturdays, where at 9 p.m. the lights dim, the music is turned up, and the strobe light starts to flash — a truly absurd accompaniment to a meal for two.
Matters of personal taste aside, Luxury Café knows what it wants to be and it has been constructed so that every bit of hardware works toward this ideal. While its function as a restaurant may seem superfluous, it fulfills this function at least adequately, and sometimes admirably. If this is what the end of the world looks like, at least it’s efficient.
TITLE: ‘The Devil Created Samotlor’
AUTHOR: By Howard Amos
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: NIZHNEVARTOVSK, Khanty-Mansiisk Autonomous District — If St. Petersburg was built on a swamp to open a window onto Europe, Nizhnevartovsk arose from the bogs of western Siberia as a tribute to crude oil and human greed.
Celebrating 40 years since it became a city on March 9, this young and vibrant settlement on the mighty Ob River is populated by people looking to make quick money from the black gold nearby.
Many, if not most, of those you meet in Nizhnevartovsk do not plan to spend the rest of their days there. As well as the large contingent of domestic and international oil workers who rotate through the city on tours of duty, there are continuous residents who plan to earn and save — and then move away for an easier life.
Nizhnevartovsk owes its existence and wealth to Russia’s biggest oil field, the gigantic Samotlor, located to the northeast of town. Though the volume of crude pumped today is a fraction of peak production, during its heyday in the 1980s Samotlor accounted for one-third of the Soviet Union’s petroleum output.
In World War II, there were only about 500 residents in Nizhnevartovsk — fishermen, hunters and timber merchants. But after 1965 — when the crude oil was flowing and construction brigades from the Komsomol youth league started arriving — the small village began to grow into the city of a quarter of a million permanent residents it is today.
The surrounding environment was also transformed. The bogs above the Samotlor field’s oil deposits are now covered with a network of roadsand artificial sand “pads” necessary to provide stable drilling platforms and gas flares. The unique man-made landscape is even visible on satellite maps where the three-meter-deep Lake Samotlor, the heart of the field, can be seen crisscrossed by dirt tracks and dotted with drilling “pads.”
So far more than 2.6 billion tons of crude have been pumped from Samotlor, enough to fully meet the oil needs of the United States at today’s consumption levels for more than three years. There are currently more than 9,000 active wells.
Those who live nearby, including the native Khanty and Mansi peoples, are only too aware of what the discovery of oil brought in its wake. “God created the earth and the devil created Samotlor,” a local saying goes. In the Khanty language, Samotlor literally means “the dead lake.”
But the building of Nizhnevartovsk and the infrastructure required to service Samotlor by Soviet pioneers was achieved against tremendous odds. The surrounding marshes were a particularly enormous hurdle to the oilmen: while the lake ices over in winter, some of the swamps — which can be insulated by a heavy blanket of snow — do not freeze, making access a nightmare.
The average annual temperature is minus 1 degree Celsius, but even the summer respite is tempered by swarms of mosquitoes that appear when the mercury rises. About 90 percent of the city was constructed on sand-filled swampland.
But whatever the rigors of the environment — and unlike many other Russian cities — the population of Nizhnevartovsk is growing. With about 80 percent of local industrial production linked to energy, the economic pull is the still-dynamic oil sector.
The licenses for Samotlor, which expire in 2038, are held by TNK-BP, Russia’s third-largest oil company jointly controlled by oligarch holding Alfa, Access and Renova Group and multinational giant BP. Battling depleted reserves and a Soviet legacy of uncontrolled exploitation, TNK-BP is looking to use technological innovation to slow the inexorable production decline.
Not all the oil, however, gets pumped out of the ground and sent on its long journey to consumers. Greenpeace alleges that Samotlor records more than 1,000 ruptures from corroded and aging infrastructure every year.
“I don’t see any differences between the companies that have foreign investments and those that don’t,” Moscow Greenpeace director Ivan Blokov said. “They all behave the same.”
Some of the spilled oil lies in surrounding swamps and some of it makes its way into the sediment, Blokov said. About 200,000 tons are carried away by the Ob every year and discharged into the Arctic Ocean.
What to do if you have two hours
If you work efficiently, you will be able to see all of Nizhnevartovsk’s few sites in less than half a day. A stroll by — or, in winter, on — the Ob River is essential to grasp some of the majesty of the Siberian waterway and see the port’s rusting cranes. Entirely orientated toward the oil to its north, there are no bridges across the river in the city and the wilderness begins on the Ob’s southern bank.
Visitors should also wander around the central square — decorated by ice sculptures that glitter in the winter sun and life-size statues of musicians and street cleaners — and can pop into the local history museum (9 Ulitsa Lenina, bldg 1; +7 3466-24-53-20; nkm-shuvaev.ru). It is named after Timofei Shuvayev, a Nizhnevartovsk pioneer, historian, teacher and journalist.
Of the city’s monuments, the one that locals consider of paramount importance is the landmark tribute to the “Conquerors of Samotlor.” Erected in the 1970s, the giant bronze figure of an oil prospector is known affectionately as “Lyosha.” With a flaming torch in one hand and an ice pick in the other he stands on a mound encircled by traffic growling along the road to the oil wells of Lake Samotlor.
What to do if you have two days
For those with time on their hands, there are a couple of other spots of interest in Nizhnevartovsk that might occupy a few more hours. There is the Nativity Church (+7 3466-47-95-80; hram-rozhdestva-nv.ru) built in the 1990s that stands incongruously against the backdrop of high-rise apartment blocks with six golden domes — an unusual number in Orthodoxy.
And there are various other monuments including an eternal flame to the memory of the soldiers who died in World War II — though Nizhnevartovsk barely existed at the time — and an open-air exhibition of Soviet aircraft just outside the airport. You can also visit a nondescript memorial with a suspended bell that commemorates the Soviet Union’s losses in the Afghanistan War. It was here that about 75 people gathered to protest against Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and in favor of honest elections on Feb. 4.
But if you are based in Nizhnevartovsk for any length of time it is worth making a visit to the Samotlor oil field that is emblematic of the Russian energy industry and a paean to human endeavor in a pitiless climate. As a strategic asset, the field itself is closed to casual visitors — SamotlorNefteGaz even employs pilotless drones to catch intruders — but tours can be arranged through the local history museum.
As well as being awed by the sheer size of Samotlor, visitors can stop at a small memorial 25 kilometers outside of Nizhnevartovsk to the first well drilled on the site in 1965. As a key reserve of the Soviet Union when oil exports were a vital means of earning foreign currency, Samotlor was formerly strictly off-limits to non-Russians. Even in the mid-2000s foreign oil workers were still given local maps with altered coordinates. Mountain skiing can also be done near Nizhnevartovsk. One option is the Three Mountains resort (+7 3466-6-01-85; 3gorki.ru) to the south of the city, which has eight different runs. It also offers the opportunity to be rolled down a hill in transparent plastic spheres — a sport with Olympic aspirations known as zorbing.
Where to stay
With a constant stream of managers and engineers from Moscow and further afield arriving in Nizhnevartovsk, there are plenty of hotels for visitors. With guests that include pop legend Filipp Kirkorov, one of the most reliable is the Ob Hotel (2G Ulitsa 60 Let Oktyabrya; +7 3466-64-40-75; obnvhotel.ru) a short walk from the famous river. A standard room will cost you 4,500 rubles ($150) and the presidential suite 15,000 rubles.
Other options are the Venetsia (39 Internatsionalnaya Ulitsa; +7 3466-65-39-86; hotelvenecia.ru) with rooms from 2,500 rubles ($83) a night and the Hope Hotel (39 Severnaya Ulitsa; +7 3466 29-34-78; nv-nadezhda.ru). Located right next to the railway station, the Hope has a swimming pool and 3D cinema.
Where to eat
For quality food in the city, oil executives recommend top-price restaurants the Golden Bear (6 Prospekt Pobedy; +7 3466-61-53-77) and Aquarium (17 Ulitsa 60 Let Oktyabrya; +7 3466-61-54-54). Many of the main hotels also have reliable eating places — although seafood in Siberia is never a good idea.
If you are hankering after Teutonic cuisine, you could do worse than the Köln Restaurant (17a Ulitsa Lenina; +7 3466-49-18-49; trk-kosmos.ru) that serves a range of German beers — including Liebenweiss and Grotwerg — and a variety of dishes focusing on meat and fish. If your preferences lie to the east, then the Tokyo Restaurant is in the same complex as Köln.
Conversation starters
Among macho oil workers a hobby that many would be willing to talk about is fishing: The greater Tyumen Region has about 400,000 lakes. Ice fishing is even possible on Lake Samotlor, surrounded by drilling rigs and gas flares. Hunting is another local pastime.
How to get there
There are no direct flights to Nizhnevartovsk’s airport, Nizhnevartovskavia (+7 3466- 49-21-75; nvavia.ru), from St. Petersburg. With one connection, however, one can reach the city in about 13 hours. A roundtrip ticket with Aeroflot, UTair or S7 Airlines costs about 16,000 rubles ($550).
Although there are also no direct trains from St. Petersburg, Nizhnevartovsk can be reached by railway. A ride from the Ladozhsky Railway Station with a change in Tyumen will take 2 days and 17 hours and cost from about 4,300 rubles ($150). The journey from Tyumen, the regional capital, takes just under 24 hours.
Short-haul passenger ferries run along the Ob between Nizhnevartovsk and cities including Khanti-Mansiinsk, Tomsk and Surgut during the summer months.
Nizhnevartovsk
Population: 245,900
Main industries: Oil, gas and transportation
Mayor: Alla Badina
Founded in 1972
Interesting fact: Winter lasts for nine months and the lowest recorded temperature is minus
62 degrees Celsius
Sister cities: Marseille, France; Shanghai, China.
Helpful contacts: • Mayor Alla Badina
(+7 3466-24-18-81; n-vartovsk.ru)
• Sergei Zemlyankin, President of the Nizhnevartovsk Chamber of Commerce
(+7 3466-65-11-57/65-11-85;
e-mail: tpp1-nv@rambler.ru; tppnv.ru)
Major Businesses
SamotlorNefteGaz (4 Ulitsa Lenina;
+7 3466-62-20-24; tnk-bp.ru) A TNK-BP subsidiary and the biggest employer in town, SamotlorNefteGaz works the majority of the Samotlor field with over 6,500 wells.
It produced 17.76 million tons of oil in 2011 —
24 percent of its parent company’s total output.
TNK-Nizhnevartovsk (67 Industrialnaya Ulitsa; +7 3466-61-48-15; tnk-bp.ru) The other TNK-BP subsidiary in town, TNK-Nizhnevartovsk works the northern part of Samotlor and five other fields to produce about 8 million tons of crude annually.
Nizhnevartovsk River Port (1 Ulitsa 60 Let Oktyabrya; +7 3466-41-57-62) The city’s port on the Ob River handles passengers as well as cargo. If it cannot be transported by train, bulky equipment for the oil industry is sometimes delivered here via the Arctic Ocean.
Vyacheslav Nikonov,
Set up a seven-man company making children’s furniture from Siberian pinewood last December.
Q: Do you sell your products in Nizhnevartovsk?
A: Our market is the Khanty-Mansiisk autonomous district, but we soon intend to enter the Russian market as a whole. Generally speaking, this sort of furniture comes from Belarus and practically nobody in Russia produces it. That’s why we decided to start our business.
Q: Is it easy to build a small business in Nizhnevartovsk?
A: It’s not easy and it’s not hard to build a small business — what’s hard is to turn a small business into a medium-sized one. Our problem is that we are located in the far north and the transportation situation is very complicated, particularly with deliveries of raw materials and finished products.
Q: Nizhnevartovsk is heavily associated with oil — is there more to business life in the city?
A: I wouldn’t say everything in Nizhnevartovsk is oil-dependent. We do food processing and have other light industrial outfits. Nizhnevartovsk is developing.
Q: What should a visitor see?
A: You have to go to the oil fields because a person should see with their own eyes how difficult it is to extract oil. And you must visit the taiga, which is very beautiful.
Mikhail Kholodov,
Deputy director of SamotlorNefteGaz, a subsidiary of TNK-BP.
Joined TNK-BP from oil services firm Schlumberger in 2005 and has been based in Nizhnevartovsk since 2010, although he returns to his family in Moscow every weekend.
Q: What is the business environment like in Nizhnevartovsk?
A: It’s a very simple fact that we are the business in Nizhnevartovsk. It’s a mono-industry town and it’s pretty much a mono-company town — 80 percent of the industrial throughput belongs to TNK-BP or TNK-BP subsidiaries.
We don’t see negative influence or pressure in doing business here. There is a very constructive interaction with the local government. We pay their taxes, and they are interested in us being as successful as possible. Any sort of gray area is resolved in a professional and timely manner.
Q: Who do you employ?
A: The vast majority are locals. People here are different from those in Moscow. They are more open, they are friendlier and they like what they are doing for the company. They are proud of their town — despite the fact that it sits in the middle of probably the biggest swamp in the world.
There are 250,000 permanent residents and probably half as many people who rotate through working here every day — 350,000 people plus. They are mostly the field crews who fly in here and work four weeks and then fly out.
Q: What happens when the oil runs out?
A: Although Samotlor’s production is going down, there are 720 million tons left to recover, and there are smaller fields that haven’t been developed yet — you do the best ones first, of course. We are looking forward to another 100 years of production. Nizhnevartovsk has also become a big transportation hub. The city will decline, but who really knows what will happen?
Q: What sites would you recommend for a visitor?
A: As far as sightseeing is concerned Nizhnevartovsk is quite a challenging place. If you go to Moscow you’ll see a city that dates back to the 12th century, but obviously that’s not the case here. All of its sights of interest are related to the [oil] business. At night Nizhnevartovsk is like any other big city. There are cinemas, restaurants, clubs and shopping.
TITLE: Ulaanbaatar Makes Unlikely Magnet for Expats
AUTHOR: By Jessica King
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Mongolia is a country of extremes. From the climate to the economy to the landscape — it is dramatic and unpredictable. Ulaanbaatar, the capital city, is even labeled “the coldest capital on earth.”
Despite the terrifying-sounding statistics, a rapidly growing number of foreigners are permanently settling in Mongolia, particularly in Ulaanbaatar (dubbed “UB”).
A third of the country’s population of about three million people live in UB. Of them, approximately four to five thousand are expatriates.
There are few concrete studies on the future demography of the country, but many current expats believe the number of foreign residents could rise significantly in the next five years, with some predicting the figures will reach as many as 50,000 by 2017.
But what attracts foreigners to Mongolia?
There are many factors that draw adventurous souls to Mongolia, a country rich in culture and history, sandwiched between two geographic giants — Russia and China — but one of the main attractions lies in the prospects of the country’s rapidly developing economy, more specifically in mining.
Plentiful resources of sought-after minerals such as copper, tin and gold are driving large-scale industrial development, which is set to make Mongolia increasingly rich in the coming years.
Skilled workforces of foreign engineers, miners and mine managers are needed to run multiple massive projects such as the “Oyu Tolgoi” or “Turquoise Hill” mine in the south of the Gobi Desert, which is the largest mining project to have been undertaken in Mongolia’s history.
With such vast quantities of valued natural minerals lying deep below the Mongolian soil, there has naturally been an influx of interest and investment in the country.
Foreign banks are setting up offices in the city center, high-end luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton and Armani have stores on the main avenue and up-market Western-style restaurants are popping up all over the city.
The IMF has predicted growth in Mongolia’s economy to average 14 percent a year between 2012 and 2016, and the wealth is beginning to show.
Hummers with blacked-out windows careen down the wide avenues, designer-clad youths drink and smoke in the many token Irish bars and the number of chic hotels is on the up.
However, as well as foreigners who work in the banking, retail and mining industries, there are many who reside in Mongolia to teach English at schools and universities, to work in environmental research companies or to volunteer with organizations such as the Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development (AYAD), the British Volunteer Service Overseas (VSO) and the American Peace Corp.
Despite the new-found wealth, Mongolia is still one of the poorest countries in Asia; one third of the population lives below the poverty line and there are many social problems, particularly with rising unemployment levels among city dwellers.
The Hummers are juxtaposed with old Ladas, and the swanky hotels and shopping malls with crumbling and decaying buildings. Poverty and the divide between rich and poor is unmistakable, with foreign aid and volunteers being heavily relied upon in sectors such as employment, education and health.
Ulaanbaatar and Mongolia offer more than employment opportunities for foreigners and the potential to make a fortune, however.
In the city, cafes, restaurants, bars and karaoke clubs are thriving, and new venues are opening daily for locals and expats alike to enjoy.
Retail therapy can be enjoyed at the State Department Store, while a variety of international films (shown in both English and Mongolian) can be seen at one of the mammoth cinema complexes. As in practically any capital city, there are ice-skating rinks, bowling alleys, and a number of excellent theaters, museums, art galleries and old monasteries to visit.
But the real entertainment lies beyond the city. Mongolia is renowned for its breathtaking natural beauty, and when it all gets too much in the busy metropolis, weary city-dwellers can head to the vast steppes of the countryside, stay in a traditional nomad yurt, or ger, and marvel at the clear skies and abundant wildlife.
The expat community is tight-knit. Everyone knows each other and newcomers are welcomed into the fold. Group outings, cinema trips, excursions to the countryside and the weekly trivia night at Hennessey’s Pub are not to be missed.
One AYAD volunteer from Sydney described living in UB as “fantastic,” while another English Teaching Assistant (ETA) from Texas said he much preferred Mongolia to other parts of Asia.
While there are inevitably also those expats who have negative comments — common complaints concern pollution and the crushing volume of traffic in the city center — there seems to be something about the place that draws people in, and most expats positively preach about it, from the cheap cost of living (a survey compiled by ECA International found UB to be the least expensive city in Asia for expats) to the vibrant nightlife, and of course the endless list of activities that can be pursued outside of the city, from wolf hunting to ice-fishing to hiking to skiing to horse riding: The possibilities are endless.
What exactly is the special something about the place that elicits such enthusiasm among visitors? Perhaps it’s that despite the heavily polluted city air, the sun is always shining. Maybe it’s the Mongolian dry sense of humor or tremendous hospitality, or even the aroma of freshly steamed mutton dumplings, called buuz.
Whatever the reason, a distinct sense of fondness for this fascinating country is palpable. Miners, investment bankers and volunteers alike seem to share a common appreciation.
For a country that was relatively cut-off from the world for most of the 20th century, Mongolia is enjoying a new era of prosperity and it seems that is could see many more foreigners relocating to the aptly named “land of blue skies.”