SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1701 (12), Wednesday, March 28, 2012
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TITLE: Putin Praises Cellist Rostropovich at Monument Opening
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: President-elect Vladimir Putin on Thursday took part in the unveiling of a new monument to cellist and human rights advocate Mstislav Rostropovich, calling him an outstanding musician and humanist, Interfax reported.
Culture Minister Alexander Avdeyev, former President Boris Yeltsin's wife Naina and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin also took part in the ceremony. Putin recalled celebrating Rostropovich's 80th birthday with him in the Kremlin in 2007, the year the musician passed away.
"I'm proud that I knew Rostropovich," Putin said. "Such people, without a doubt, made up and make up the pride of our country."
The bronze and granite statue of Rostropovich with a cello in his hands is located at the intersection of Bryusov Pereulok and Yeliseyevsky Pereulok in central Moscow, near where Rostropovich lived with his wife, famous opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya, RIA-Novosti reported.
Rostropovich was born in Baku on March 27, 1927, and studied at the Moscow Conservatory from 1943 to 1948. He became a professor of cello at the conservatory in 1956. A vocal supporter of artistic freedom and democratic values, Rostropovich emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1974 under intense pressure from authorities. Three years later, he became music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington.
TITLE: 675 Fisherman Rescued From Drifting Ice
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A group of 675 fisherman stranded on a piece of ice that broke from the shore and began drifting out to sea Sunday has been rescued, Interfax reported.
Rescuers used boats and helicopters to reach the stranded fisherman in the Sakhalin region, just off the coast of the island in Russia's far-east.
Internet users on a local online forum shared details about the incident, estimating that the ice drifted as far as 2 kilometers from the shore, Interfax said.
"The women and children have already been taken away. I've just gotten in touch on the phone — now the men are fighting for places on the boats," one person wrote on the forum. Local residents said cracks in the ice were already visible the day before.
TITLE: Top Book Publisher AST Could Owe $228M in Back Taxes
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Five companies in the AST Group, which includes one of Russia's top book publishers, could be hit with a 6.7 billion ruble ($228 million) bill for back taxes on income hidden from authorities through shell companies, Vedomosti reported Thursday.
Last week, the Investigative Committee conducted a search of the offices of Polimiks-Tsentr, a logistics company that is part of the AST group, which includes more than 100 companies, including the AST publishing house, one of the two largest in Russia. Investigators suspect Polimiks-Tsentr of falsifying its tax returns.
Tax authorities are currently preparing an order for 6.7 billion rubles in back taxes and fines from four other AST group companies, which are suspected of using off-shore shell companies to conceal part of their income, an unnamed tax service source told Vedomosti.
AST's total earnings were 5.7 billion rubles over the period of June 2010 to June 2011, according to an estimate by AST competitor Eksmo. AST is majority-owned by Cyprus-registered company Advanced Achievement Books Publishers Ltd.
TITLE: Ousted Police Chief Faces State Scrutiny
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Investigators have searched the apartment and dacha of former St. Petersburg police chief Mikhail Sukhodolsky, Kommersant reported Wednesday.
The searches were part of an official inquiry into accusations of fraud and abuse of power against the management of an Interior Ministry branch providing security services.
Interior Ministry investigators also detained Andrei Komissarov, general director of Okhrana, Izvestia reported late Tuesday, though a court later decided not to arrest him.
Okhrana is part of the Interior Ministry. It was created and formerly overseen by Sukhodolsky before his dismissal by President Dmitry Medvedev in February.
Meanwhile, Sukhodolsky and his son Grigory are receiving medical treatment in Israel, Kommersant said.
The younger Sukhodolsky is co-owner of Okhrana supplier Tekhnologii Bezopasnosti CJSC and is a witness in the criminal case against Okhrana.
Mikhail Sukhodolsky will be on vacation till May, a source close to the former police official told RIA-Novosti on Wednesday.
Fontanka.ru on Wednesday published two photographs of Sukhodolsky eating at an Israeli restaurant last week.
The unidentified reader who provided the photos said he heard Sukhodolsky and his companions raising a toast to celebrate that all of them are "alive and in good health," Fontanka.ru reported.
In December, the Interior Ministry opened a criminal case against Okhrana director Komissarov and former Okhrana director Dmitry Lozhkin.
At issue was Okhrana's purchase of goods through intermediaries, which allegedly provided kickbacks to the participants in the deal, Izvestia reported.
Those purchases caused Okhrana to lose about 140 million rubles ($4.8 million) in five years, Izvestia said.
Sometime after Sukhodolsky's firing in February, investigators searched his apartment on Pervy Zavachatyevsky Pereulok in central Moscow and his dacha in the Noginsk district of the Moscow region, Izvestia said.
The newspaper added that Sukhodolsky was away at the time of both searches.
Sukhodolsky lost his job following the beating death of a 15-year-old boy in police custody.
He had been embroiled in a long-running power struggle with Interior Ministry head Rashid Nurgaliyev.
Sukhodolsky had reportedly plotted to replace Nurgaliyev, his direct superior, after the presidential election.
Observers speculated that the boy's beating had been used as an excuse to force him out.
Pavel Zaitsev, the lawyer for Sukhodolsky's son, said he had information showing that unidentified officials were "putting pressure on the suspects" in the Okhrana case to make them cooperate in "fabricating a sleazy tale" about his client.
Zaitsev compared the accusations to similar ones against Russia's top prison official, Alexander Reimer, which journalists linked to Reimer's decision to fire three dozen senior prison officials in 2010.
Both Reimer and Grigory Sukhodolsky were accused of sexually abusing female colleagues.
Earlier this month, investigators refused to open a criminal case against Reimer, saying he committed no crime.
Yevgeny Vyshenkov, a former police investigator and deputy head of the St. Petersburg Agency for Investigative Journalism, said the searches at Sukhodolsky's home and dacha were a sign that the former police chief and the suspects in the case against Okhrana would be brought to trial.
At the very least, Okhrana's management and Grigory Sukhodolsky will "find themselves in the dock," and Mikhail Sukhodolsky could conceivably join them there, Vyshenkov told The St. Petersburg Times.
The effort to discredit Sukhodolsky may have been masterminded by forces in the Interior Ministry and the Kremlin that "want to see [Nurgaliyev] in the top post forever," Vyshenkov said.
He said Sukhodolsky went to Israel because it is "where he can safely wait out the events," and he added that the former police chief has "an instinct for self-preservation."
Vyshenkov's take on the situation: "This is a clan fight inside the Garden Ring."
TITLE: Two Planes Forced to Land With Engine Failure
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Two separate passenger jets were grounded by engine failure Thursday morning, one of them a Soviet-designed plane that figured in a crash that killed an entire hockey team in September.
A Soviet-designed Yak-42 flying from Saratov was forced to make an emergency landing several minutes after takeoff Thursday morning when one of the plane's engines failed.
Moscow-bound flight 760, operated by Saratov Airlines, lasted 13 minutes, and no injuries were reported. There were 54 passengers on board, RBK reported.
In September a Yak-42 aircraft crashed near Yaroslavl, killing the entire Lokomotiv hockey team and leaving only one survivor. President Dmitry Medvedev ordered an overhaul of the airline system in the wake of the crash, acknowledging problems such as poor aircraft maintenance, a lack of pilots, poor flight training, aging production facilities and negligent state supervision.
A second domestic flight landed with a failed engine in St. Petersburg early Thursday. The Airbus A-319 aircraft operated by airline Rossiya arrived from Novosibirsk with 93 passengers, reaching its destination with no injuries reported, RIA-Novosti said.
Russia was the most dangerous country in which to fly in 2011, with nine crashes claiming 140 lives, surpassing even the Democratic Republic of Congo in aircraft-related fatalities.
TITLE: Law Attracts Mixed Reactions
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova and Jack Stubbs
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A new city law banning homosexual propaganda among minors has caused widespread criticism abroad and a divided response in Russia, with many petitioning for the city to be boycotted by tourists.
St. Petersburg is unlikely to suffer a decrease in the volume of tourists as a result of the petitions and negative response to the new law, St. Petersburg tourism officials said.
“I’m not worried about the new law affecting tourism volumes in St. Petersburg,” Sergei Korneyev, deputy head of the Russian Tourism Union told The St. Petersburg Times.
“It is normal to observe the laws of a country to which a person travels. For instance, in Muslim countries laws and traditions are quite strict, but tourists obey them,” Korneyev said.
In a blog post for the International Herald Tribune, Russian journalist Masha Gessen called for American pop-star Madonna, who is scheduled to give a concert in St. Petersburg on Aug. 9, to join the boycott of the city. Gessen encouraged Mercedes-Benz and PepsiCo, who both signed on as partners of the city’s annual International Economic Forum due to be held from June 21 to 23, as well as other people planning to visit the city, to cancel their trips.
“I think it’s one of the most beautiful cities on earth. I have many friends who live there. And I am asking you, please, do not visit it,” Gessen wrote.
“If you are an entrepreneur or an artist or an athlete who has been asked to participate in one of the many conferences and festivals that will take place there this summer, I am asking you to say no. And if you were just planning to visit the city as a tourist during the gorgeous White Nights season in May and June, I am asking you to take your vacation someplace else,” she said.
Gessen said “neither the Russian authorities nor the Russian public see that they stand to lose anything by passing blatantly discriminatory legislation.”
That is why she is attempting to show them that they do.
“This is why I am addressing Madonna and anyone else who was planning to go to St. Petersburg. Please help us show them that they do have something to lose. Tourism makes up an important part of the city’s income… Do not go to St. Petersburg,” she wrote.
Madonna responded by becoming one of the latest international figures to speak out against the controversial legislation.
“I will come to St. Petersburg to speak up for the gay community and to give strength and inspiration to anyone who is or feels oppressed,” the American singer was reported by Bloomberg as saying last Tuesday. “I am a freedom fighter,” she said.
“I don’t run away from controversy,” she added. “I will speak during my show about this ridiculous atrocity.”
Ironically, by doing this, the star has put herself between a rock and a hard place as gay activists in Russia expressed dissatisfaction with her decision, saying that they would protest “the hypocrisy of pop stars” at her show.
In his turn, Vitaly Milonov, a deputy in the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly and author of the new law, warned Madonna about “the administrative punishment” she or the organizers of the concert might receive if they violate the new law.
“The singer may be fined 5,000 rubles ($170) and the organizers may lose up to half a million rubles ($18,000),” Milonov was cited by Interfax as saying.
Meanwhile, numerous senior Russian politicians and officials have expressed support for the city’s new law.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Russia was “trying to defend society from homosexual propaganda.”
Former St. Petersburg governor Valentina Matviyenko, who is currently the speaker of Russia’s Federation Council, said last year that the law could be accepted on a federal level if “it didn’t contradict existing legislation,” Gazeta. Ru reported.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin — who will start his third term as president in May after having served four years as prime minister — has linked his position on gay rights to the birth rate in Russia, where the population shrank to 142.9 million in 2010 from 145.2 million in 2002, according to the Federal Statistics Service in Moscow.
“As for same-sex marriages, they do not produce offspring, as you know,” Putin told CNN’s Larry King in December 2010.
“We are fairly tolerant toward sexual minorities; however we think that the state should promote reproduction and support mothers and children.”
Homosexuality was decriminalized in Russia in 1993, although homophobia remains widespread. A 2010 survey by the independent pollster Levada Center showed that 74 percent of Russians thought gays and lesbians were “amoral” and “mentally defective.”
British actor and comedian Stephen Fry spoke out against the bill when it passed its first reading at the end of last year. Speaking on the micro-blogging site Twitter, he wrote: “Hell’s teeth! Something must be done to stop these fantastical monsters. Will even talk about Tchaikovsky be banned?”
An online petition by campaign group AllOut has received more than 270,000 signatures from people all over the world, many of whom left messages of support for those affected in Russia.
So far, both British and American authorities have spoken out against the law, as well as a number of other European countries.
The U.S. State Department issued a statement condemning the bill after the passing of its first reading in November last year. The department said: “We are deeply concerned by proposed local legislation in Russia that would severely restrict freedoms of expression and assembly for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals, and indeed all Russians.”
The Foreign Office in London also expressed concern, notably over aspects of the law which “appear to link issues of sexual orientation with pedophilia,” UK Gay News reported.
TITLE: comment: Expert: Perils of a Law That Lacks Definition
AUTHOR: By Dmitri Bartenev
TEXT: On March 30, 2012, the infamous amendments to the St. Petersburg Law on Administrative Offenses will come into force. The law stipulates fines for the public dissemination of propaganda of “homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexualism and transgenderness” among minors. The second part of the same law provides for increased liability for propaganda promoting pedophilia.
St. Petersburg followed the examples of the Ryazan and Arkhangelsk legislatures which passed similar laws, although the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly made an attempt to limit potentially broad and arbitrary interpretation of the prohibited propaganda.
“Propaganda” is defined in the footnote to the law and includes “deliberate and uncontrolled dissemination (in a generally accessible way) of information capable of harming the health, moral and spiritual development of minors, including information forming misrepresented conceptions of social equivalence of traditional and non-traditional marriage relations.”
It is worth noting that this definition was taken word for word from the 2010 decision of the Constitutional Court of Russia in a case concerning a review of the similar act in the Ryazan Oblast.
Will this particular definition of unlawful propaganda really help to protect St. Petersburg’s LGBT community from prosecution? Technically, the law bans dissemination of that information only where it is “capable of harming the health, moral and spiritual development of minors.” But who and on the basis of what kind of criteria can decide that the information is harming minors? The odd thing is that there has never been any case in Russia where it was ruled that a minor was harmed in any way by information about homosexuality. Of course we are not talking about sexually explicit information, the dissemination of which is already banned — be it heterosexual or homosexual. Why, then, is this law needed at all, and is it really about minors?
A gay activist is unlikely to go to a school to tell children how great it is to be gay with the aim of promoting homosexual behaviour or converting them from straight to gay. However, a teacher protecting a gay teenager from bullying in school could easily be punished under this law if he or she decides to address the issue publicly: For example by calling on the class to be tolerant and to respect diversity. The Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights in its report “Discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity” issued in 2011 recommended that states should promote “respect and inclusion of LGBT persons at school and foster objective knowledge on issues concerning sexual orientation and gender identity in schools and other educational settings.”
A commonly cited argument of the sponsors of the law is that it has nothing to do with banning homosexual relations as such because as long as they are kept private the state won’t intervene. Thus, the paradox is that homosexuality is normal and lawful but disseminating information about it is unlawful. Here comes the core question — is homosexuality only about sex or is it about human relations? Sexual orientation is a much broader concept than sexual relations; it refers to a capacity for profound emotional, affectionate and sexual attraction to individuals of a different gender or the same gender. In 2011, the European Court of Human Rights explicitly recognized that a same-sex relationship is a form of family life –— and not just private life — protected by the European Convention, which is binding in Russia.
It is unfortunate but clear that the concept that underlies this law is the immorality of homosexual (and other nonconventional) relations: The ban on propaganda of homosexuality is ranked alongside pedophilia. Thus, an awkward attempt to limit abusive application of the law by offering an elaborate definition of LGBT propaganda boils down to nothing but actually banning dissemination of any, including objective and neutral, information about homosexuality. If minors need to be protected from information forming “misrepresented conceptions of social equivalence of traditional and non-traditional marriage relations” does this really leave any space for LGBT organisations that protect the human rights of those people whose relations are socially less valuable than traditional heterosexual relations? This is the message the new law sends.
The Constitutional Court, having refused to find a violation of freedom of speech in the Ryazan law, made an important conclusion that seems to have been overlooked by the drafters of the St. Petersburg law: The court said that the challenged Ryazan law did not prohibit or disparage homosexuality as such. This, along with unequivocal international human rights standards, should be taken into account by those who will be fighting against “gay propaganda” in St. Petersburg.The European Court of Human Rights stated in 2010 that there is no ambiguity about “the right of individuals to openly identify themselves as gay, lesbian or any other sexual minority, and to promote their rights and freedoms, in particular by exercising their freedom of peaceful assembly.” In the same year Russia supported the recommendation of the Council of Europe to end discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity.
We can only theoretically speculate at this point how the law will be applied in practice, although in Arkhangelsk and Kostroma similar laws have recently been used for banning LGBT assemblies that had nothing to do with children. The unclear wording of the law makes it very easy, in the name of protecting children, to outlaw any visible actions by the gay community and legitimize discrimination against them. In 1993, criminal liability for homosexual relations was repealed in Russia and in 1996 Russia joined the Council of Europe — the organisation established to protect Europeans against a return of Nazi ideology. Now in 2012 this ideology of “natural inequality” still prevents Russia from escaping its totalitarian past and building a truly democratic state based on pluralism and respect for diversity.
Dmitri Bartenev is an attorney at law who litigated the case on the ban of Gay Pride in Moscow at the European Court of Human Rights. He is the head of the Expert Council for International Protection of Human Rights at the St. Petersburg Chamber of Attorneys.
TITLE: Milonov: ‘The Sin of Sodom Is Repellent To Me’
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Vitaly Milonov, the man behind the controversial bill against “promoting sodomy, lesbianism, bisexualism and transgenderism to minors,” fully intends to catch Madonna committing a possible offense when the pop diva visits St. Petersburg in August, as well as probe the German industrial rock band Rammstein for an alleged act of indecency during a recent local concert.
The gay community fears that the law’s ambiguous wording will allow it to be applied to every manifestation of homosexuality — from gay pride events to the arts and media, and that the law will be passed nationally, as figures such as Federation Council chair and former Petersburg governor Valentina Matviyenko have proposed.
Speaking by phone earlier this month, Milonov, a St. Petersburg deputy for Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party and an Orthodox religious activist, said the bill was inspired by society’s demands.
However, he did not mention any specific incidents of “promoting” homosexuality that might have taken place in St. Petersburg.
“Ours is not the precedent-based Anglo-Saxon legal system, we use the German system,” Milonov said. “That’s why it’s not a specific incident that has taken place that defines norms, it’s a certain set of generally accepted standards that establish the standards of social conduct in this country — including moral ones.
“If society believes that a model of behavior doesn’t correspond to society’s interests, then society reacts to it. I will be very happy if this bill isn’t applied even once, because it’s not directed against anybody specifically or in regard of a specific case, but it does outline certain additional rules of behavior toward minors.” He said his bill had been prompted by “certain European tendencies.”
“There are European tendencies that correspond to the traditional spirit of Europe, but there are infused, temporary trends that we find debatable,” Milonov said.
“For instance, in the pursuit of votes of citizens of non-traditional orientation, some politicians take the liberty of doing more than they are supposed to. In particular, I’d like to recall a recent conflict in England, where the state decided that it could define not only civilian and secular norms of conduct, but that it could also change human values.
“The state decided to make equal the natural, divine union of man and woman, and any other forms of sexual pleasures in the form of homosexuals, people with cut-off sexual parts or altered bodies — what’s the name for them? Transsexualists? I don’t remember. The bishops of Scotland were indignant about that!”
Milonov also cited a recent European Court of Human Rights’ case concerning a ban on wearing visible crosses in the workplace in the U.K.
“I can’t say for sure, but I saw information in the press that they fire people who refuse to take off crosses in the workplace,” he said.
“But people who openly demonstrate their sexual orientation in the workplace do not face any resistance. We see these tendencies, we see that certain radical groups dream of starting to distribute literature in schools, probably using foreign grants or their own funds, in which the idea of the social equality of traditional and non-traditional sexual relations would be driven home to children.”
In writing the bill, Milonov said he followed the Russian Constitutional Court’s 2010 ruling on the inequality of such relations, adding that his law is directed at the protection of motherhood and childhood, rather than at restricting human rights.
Answering criticism from the LGBT rights organization Coming Out’s chair Igor Kochetkov, Milonov argued that the law would not be used against the media, which, he said, is regulated by federal law.
“All mass media are subordinate to the law on the media,” he said. “That’s why if, roughly speaking, they put an erotic program alongside children’s programs on a Saturday morning, they will be brought to justice anyway.
“It has nothing to do with Kochetkov, either — if, of course, he doesn’t go to a school and start talking about how wonderful it is to be a homosexual,” he said.
“[The law] will only affect children’s environments.”
Milonov also confronted fears that his law could lead to a ban on gay pride events and public protests due to its vague nature.
“As a person, I am profoundly against gay parades, because I am an Orthodox Christian and the demonstration of the sin of Sodom is repellent to me. If, God forbid, I happened to see a crowd of those citizens — like they do in Berlin, I’ve seen photographs where men with all sorts of dildos are running around semi-naked — it’s natural that I’d try to take my children aside, so that they would not see this perversion,” he said.
“But I am a lawmaker, and I don’t try to impose my personal and religious beliefs onto anybody. That’s why I have no right to restrict the freedom of assembly, marches and demonstrations, because this freedom is guaranteed by Article 31 of the Constitution and I have no right to violate it, and am not going to.”
In reality, gay pride events are usually banned in St. Petersburg and across Russia under various pretexts. If the activists attempt to proceed with the rallies, they are arrested, charged both with violating the rules for holding public demonstrations and failure to obey a policeman’s orders, held at police precincts for hours and eventually fined.
Milonov is, however, planning to complain about the German industrial metal band Rammstein’s stadium concert that took place in St. Petersburg last month. Rammstein’s set includes a spoof anal dildo sex/ejaculation routine.
“I’ll ask prosecutors to give an evaluation of this and probably take prosecutor’s measures against the promoter,” he said.
“There was an imitation of a homosexual act on stage and a non-imitation of sexual exposure — with a demonstration of male sexual parts.
“Rammstein is a matter of taste — some like sodomites, some like Satanists, some like punks — it’s silly to give a legal assessment of tastes. But the problem is that children older than 14 were allowed in to the concert. The promoter should have warned people that the concert contained scenes of an erotic nature and restricted admission for children under 16 or maybe even 18, but it wasn’t done.”
“When singers show their sexual parts to children — excuse me but I believe it’s an insult to the children of St. Petersburg. At 14 they are not yet legally competent, and perhaps they will treat it as something positive. [Rammstein] are music idols for them, and they are ready to copy their ways and habits. But we don’t want our children to behave in such a manner.”
Milonov, who is a member of a parish council of a local Orthodox church, said he saw the video footage of the routine on a local news website.
“I couldn’t even watch it to the end,” he said.
“I am not allowed to see such things, I am a church man, but it was shown to 14-year-old teenagers!”
The St. Petersburg law has been criticized as violating Russia’s international human rights obligations. Milonov sees an international gay lobby as being behind this criticism.
“We know that the gay community is a very powerful lobbying structure. They have their office in Brussels, they are welcome at the United Nations, the European Council and so on, but this is Europe’s problem; why should we copy European laws? Not everything that they have in Europe is acceptable for Russia.
“There are a lot of good things in Europe. I am an extremely European man, I am fond of European culture. But I think that the new things that are emerging in Europe are negative, unlike the old things. European society emerged thanks to the Christians, to the Christian Democrats. Konrad Adenauer, Ludwig Erhard, Hanns Seidel — they would be horrified to see what values are presented now as the norm.”
TITLE: comment: Anti-Gay Law Traces Roots to Failed European, U.S. Legislation
AUTHOR: By Matthew Brown
TEXT: In comments published in The St. Petersburg Times, the sponsor of the city’s recently passed anti-gay law, Vitaly Milonov, said “why should we copy European laws?” in reference to protection-of-rights legislation passed in a few Western countries.
But a glance at the tactical intent and wording of the St. Petersburg law shows the extent to which it in fact borrows from statutes proposed, implemented and repealed in the United Kingdom and the United States in the last two decades or more. Although different in the method of their proposal and adoption, a line can be drawn between these precedents and the current St. Petersburg law. It is worth taking a moment to sketch out this context.
In legislatures where private sex between consenting adults of the same gender was decriminalized (as it was for men in Russia in 1993), new directions were taken by conservatives to reinstate certain criminal sanctions against homosexuals.
In the U.K. in 1988, in response to the apparent availability in a publicly funded library of a childrens’ book about a girl whose father has a male partner, the then-governing Conservative Party championed Section 28 of the Local Government Act, a central government reform of local administrative spending. The amendment stated that state bodies “shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” or “promote the teaching in any [state-funded] school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.”
The linking of tax-payers’ money with educational materials that might be interpreted as “promoting” homosexuality in schools neatly made the three points of a populist, if legally untestable, triangle: public money, children, homosexuality.
Both for its woolly logic and clear intent to enshrine discrimination, Section 28 rapidly became a rallying point for a progressive rights-based movement and lobby that helped to eventually shame the Conservative Party into apologizing for having introduced it. In the U.K.’s mild litigation climate, no one was ever prosecuted under the statute, although that may have also been due to its dubious applicability within a generally robust and independent legal system. As a symbol, and ultimately a stain, it stood for base homophobia, and was repealed quietly in 2003.
However, in the heat, if not the light, that it generated in the late 1980s, Section 28 served as a cypher for discontent in a society going through redefinition. With deadly consequences in an earlier era, Hitler showed that homosexuals can be easy scapegoats for nations going through insecure times.
Fast forward to 2012 and the pendulum of liberty has brained the U.K.’s current Conservative Party prime minister, David Cameron, into legislating for civil marriage to include couples of the same gender. The linguistic tweak of existing and widely understood civil partnership arrangements is perhaps among the scary “European laws” apparently menacing Russia and Vitaly Milonov in particular.
Significantly, Cameron’s minimal gesture has produced howls of irrelevant indignation from U.K. church leaders (although civil marriages have nothing to do with religion and churches in the U.K. are and will be free to make their own wedding policies).
Yet, as it happens, Christian conservatives in the West have always had a part in anti-gay legal maneuvers which have either directly lead to or influenced today’s St. Petersburg law. Milonov also leaned on religion in his motivation for its introduction.
Milonov, who represents Vladimir Putin’s United Russia, may well be sincere in his role as a lay preacher and self-styled “churchman.”
But Amy Stone, assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at Trinity University of San Antonio, Texas, and author of “Gay Rights at the Ballot Box” (2012) when contacted for this article traced the St. Petersburg law’s religio-legislative provenance more directly.
“The start of organized anti-gay activism that generated concerns about gays in schools was in 1977 with Anita Bryant in Dade-County, Florida,” she said, referring to a Christian fundamentalist firebrand who successfully linked schools, children and homosexuals in the legislative process with her “Save Our Children” campaign in the U.S. state. (All such ordinances have since been repealed in Florida.)
This tactic, Stone said, emboldened conservatives in the U.S. states of Oregon and Colorado to propose state-wide referenda in 1992 to outlaw “promotion” of homosexuality in language strikingly similar both to the U.K.’s Section 28 and St. Petersburg’s repressive new law.
Coming shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, some analyzed those moves in the U.S. as a search for new enemies as the specter of Communism faded in the American imagination. In Oregon, the statute that the voting public were asked to either pass into law or reject that year read:
“All governments in Oregon may not use their monies or properties to promote, encourage or facilitate homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism or masochism. All levels of government, including public education systems, must assist in setting a standard for Oregon’s youth which recognizes that these behaviors are abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse and they are to be discouraged and avoided.”
Ballot Measure 9, as it was known, was narrowly rejected. However, in that same election, Colorado passed Amendment 2, a legalistic removal of equal protection under the law for homosexuals. (The U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled it unconstitutional.)
In the process of these and other rights attacks in the U.S. and Europe in the 1990s, libertarian consciousness about how the individual relates to the state was meanwhile raised and mobilized.
“Extreme legal attacks on LGBT [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender] people can backfire in terms of strengthening movement tactics and resolve,” notes Stone.
In an ironic twist, the same fundamentalists behind such machinations in the U.S. could be behind developments in St. Petersburg.
Scott Lively, a prime mover in the Oregon case and a Christian extremist who has proselytized anti-gay hate speech leading to lawsuits in the U.S., has been active in the troubled African country of Uganda where a law to make homosexuality punishable by death is currently pending. Lively has also spoken to audiences in Russia, including in St. Petersburg.
As a useful distraction from actual problems, the triangulation of consensual bedroom behavior between adults, crimes such as pedophilia, and tax-payers’ money, into the criminalization of victimless difference clearly has an instructive track record in other countries too juicy for the likes of Milonov to resist.
Context shows that St. Petersburg’s new law is not new.
By the same measure, it is not workable, sustainable, or credible, unless it is used a tool for general fascist repression. In Putin’s Russia, this is all too probable.
But even on its own terms it is likely to be counterproductive. The record shows that people everywhere eventually see that a legal attack on somebody is a legal attack on everybody.
Matthew Brown is a former deputy editor of The St. Petersburg Times.
“Gay Rights at the Ballot Box” by Amy Stone is available now.
TITLE: Back to 1992, When Being Gay Was Still a Crime
AUTHOR: By Alexander Belenky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: It was a long time ago, at the beginning of the 1990s. It was a wild, difficult time, but a time that was of great interest to photographic journalists because entirely new, incredible subjects, previously banned and impossible to cover, were opening up.
I worked back then in a youth newspaper, Smena, and I was always on the lookout for interesting subjects for photo reports. My colleagues Felix Titov and Alexei Danichev and I had found out that the club Mayak, on Krasnaya Ulitsa (now Galernaya Ulitsa), would be holding something of a closed evening that would be, we were told, “not for everyone.” There was to be a “pink and blue” festival (the Russian word for blue, goluboi, also translates as gay), a gay pride event.
In recent years we’ve heard a lot about the holding of gay parades, although at present it seems we’re unlikely to see one in the near future. But back in 1992, when homosexual acts were still crimes, just such a parade was held in St. Petersburg. I’d like to leave aside the debates about the rights and wrongs of this — here we’re talking about photography.
And so, on a warm June evening in 1992, on the eve of the event, we were in Felix Titov’s photography studio drinking beer. Through the window the White Nights were in full swing, and I was already in a hurry to go and photograph the festival: “Guys, come on, it’s time! Let’s go! It’s already 8 p.m.! We’ll be late…”
“No,” replied the experienced Titov, refilling our beer glasses. “It’s still early. Things will really get started after midnight…”
And he was right — arriving at the club on Galernaya Ulitsa around midnight, we saw that the fun was only just beginning. There were lots of people, they were all a little tipsy, but they were all smiling and happy. We met many foreign tourists who’d come to St. Petersburg to have some fun during the White Nights. Everyone was being friendly and they were very relaxed about us taking photographs. First there was a concert, then a disco, and toward morning everyone spilled out onto the street and set off on a walk through the city by night.
We spent half the night looking through our viewfinders recording all this for the press — the festival, the gays and lesbians dancing at the disco, people hanging out in the corridors, in the street. I took a lot of shots — three whole rolls! And remember, this was in the pre-digital age, an era where you couldn’t afford to shoot from the hip and be trigger happy. You couldn’t afford to leave a single shot to chance — I pored over each and every one of them, waiting for events to develop, for the moment, the right spot … So throughout three rolls — which adds up to 108 shots — every single one was a masterpiece, or at worst a really great shot.
Back then, photo journalists had to develop their black-and-white film themselves. In little, cramped editorial lab-cages we’d feed our exposed films into tanks and pour a developing solution over them. Each photographer had his own secret recipe. I was using a new concentrated developer that I’d made myself. I would dilute the solution — one part water, one part developing solution — and do a very subtle job developing the film, greatly increasing its sensitivity.
Arriving at the editorial offices that morning without having slept, I went into the cage-like lab, poured the concentrate into two tanks so that they were both half full, and prepared to dilute the developing solution by adding in water, before loading in the films. The shoot at the gay parade had been a dream, the shots were guaranteed to make waves when published, I was relishing the prospect of some great shots.
I was briefly distracted by a phone call. Some chance, unimportant call…
Having spoken for a minute, I turned off the light, loaded the films, in the darkness immersed them in the tanks and sealed the lids. The timer eventually went off, and I transferred the films into water, then into a fixing agent, then through a washer. Finally, impatiently, I unrolled the still wet films.
I broke out in a cold sweat — the films with the wonderful, scandalous shots had developed brilliantly, every detail in the shadows and light could be made out … but only half of the shot.
I’d simply forgotten to pour water into the tanks of concentrate, so only half the film had developed — across its entire length.
Only what remained on the third film was fit to print.
Alexander Belenky is the author of Digital Photography and a lecturer in photography at the journalism department of St. Petersburg State University.
TITLE: A History of Homophobia
AUTHOR: By Dan Healey
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Russian laws against homosexuality have a long history. Orthodox clerics condemned sex between men and youths. They also condemned men who shaved, used make-up, or wore gaudy clothing as devotees of the “sodomitical sin.”
It was only with Peter the Great in the late 17th and early 18th centuries that Russia’s first secular law against sex between men was adopted, in his Military Code of 1716. Relations between men in the army and navy were punished by flogging, and male rape, by penal servitude in the galleys.
Later in the 18th century it was proposed that this law be extended to civilians. This was not done, but new research by St. Petersburg historian Marianna Muraveva shows that church and military courts actively prosecuted sodomy cases.
In 1835, Tsar Nicholas I formally extended the ban on male same-sex relations to wider society in a new criminal code. He was supposedly motivated by reports of vice in the Empire’s boarding schools. Men who engaged in voluntary “sodomy” (muzhelozhstvo) were exiled to Siberia; sodomy with minors or the use of force netted exile with hard labor. This law remained in force until 1917. There was no law against lesbian relations.
The authorities in tsarist Russia avoided enforcing the law against upper-class homosexuals. There was no major homosexual scandal in pre-1917 Russia to match those of Britain’s Oscar Wilde, Austria-Hungary’s Colonel Alfred Redl, or the German Prince Eulenberg. Powerful supporters of the Romanov dynasty, and members of the tsar’s family, were flagrantly gay, and received patronage and immunity from the throne. Yet when the government drafted a new criminal code — never to be adopted — in 1903, it continued to criminalize male homosexuality.
When revolution came in 1917, the Provisional Government wanted to enact the 1903 criminal code, but lost power to the Bolsheviks, who abrogated all tsarist law in November 1917. Until 1922 there was no written criminal law.
During this interval successive codes were drafted and discarded. All of these drafts, beginning with the first written in early 1918 by the Bolsheviks’ coalition partners, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, and continuing with versions drafted in 1920-21 by Bolshevik jurists and a consultant from the Cheka, decriminalized homosexuality. The first Soviet criminal code of 1922 and the revision of this code in 1926 both confirmed the legality of voluntary same-sex relations.
Modern Russia’s homophobia can trace its roots from the rise of Stalin and his henchmen. In September 1933, deputy chief of the secret police Genrikh Yagoda proposed to Stalin that a law against “pederasty” was needed urgently.
Police raids had been conducted on circles of “pederasts” in Moscow and Leningrad. They were supposed to be guilty of spying; they had also “politically demoralized various social layers of young men, including young workers, and even attempted to penetrate the army and navy.”
Stalin forwarded Yagoda’s letter to Lazar Kaganovich, noting “these scoundrels must receive exemplary punishment” and directing that a law against “pederasty” be adopted. The new law was adopted for all the Soviet republics in March 1934, with a minimum sentence of three to five years for consenting male homosexuality.
Harry Whyte, a British Communist working for the English-language Moscow Daily News wrote to Stalin in May 1934, asking him to justify the new law. He boldly explained why it violated Marxist principles. He asked Stalin, “Can a homosexual be considered a person fit to become a member of the Communist Party?” Stalin scrawled across the letter, “An idiot and a degenerate. To the archives.”
The anti-homosexual law remained in place until 1993 in Russia. Without access to FSB and presidential archives we have only a rough idea of how many men were prosecuted under it; at minimum, tens of thousands suffered.
De-Stalinization under Nikita Khrushchev actually cemented the law in place. In 1958 the Interior Ministry issued a secret decree “on the strengthening of the struggle against sodomy,” telling police to enforce the law with renewed vigor. From this date about 1,000 men were imprisoned annually in the Soviet Union for their homosexuality. Soviet authorities worried that the millions of men released from the single-sex Gulag camps were a source of “sexual perversion” dangerous to Soviet society.
Discussions during the Perestroika years seemed to point toward reform, but the Interior Ministry fought vigorously against any relaxation. In April 1993, as part of a package to bring Russian legislation in line with Council of Europe standards, the Yeltsin administration decriminalized male homosexuality, but there was no amnesty for the hundreds of men still in prison under the law at that time.
In 2002, during a Duma debate about changes to sex-crime legislation, nationalist-conservative deputies called for the re-criminalization of voluntary sodomy and for the first time in a millennium of Russian legal history, the criminalization of lesbian acts. The Kremlin ignored these calls, but the status of Russia’s lesbians and gays remains an open question. Like Harry Whyte in 1934, we might well ask, “Can a homosexual be considered a person fit to be a citizen of the Russian Federation?”
Dan Healey is a professor of modern history at Reading University and author of Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2001). A revised and expanded Russian edition is available: Gomoseksual’noe vlechenie v revoliutsionnoi Rossii (Moscow: Ladomir, 2008).
TITLE: St. Petersburg’s Gay Nightlife Is Alive and Kicking
AUTHOR: By Tom Masters
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Perhaps what’s most surprising amid the homophobic rhetoric and the new law targeting the “promotion” of gay lifestyles is the fact that St. Petersburg’s gay scene has never been more visible or felt less threatened than it does today.
Like many aspects of Russian civil society that tentatively grew up in the early 1990s, the gay and lesbian movement characterized itself by keeping its head down, not upsetting the authorities and trying hard to avoid creating trouble, a strategy most unlike that used by other, more provocative European gay rights movements. Many gay people in Russia still consider the mere existence of a gay rights movement a nuisance that will simply serve to turn an intolerant society’s attention toward a group of people that the average Russian rarely sees or even thinks about.
While gay rights groups have become far more vocal in recent years, it’s still no exaggeration to say that the political side of the gay scene remains small and rarely visible, even as political protest seems to be returning to St. Petersburg.
Nevertheless, the city’s gay scene is surprisingly busy and accessible to all, with four well-established clubs and a smattering of bars and saunas — it differs little from the scene to be found in any other European city. While visibility is increasing, nearly all establishments remain somewhat discreet about their nature, so you can still expect good old-fashioned videophone entries and unsigned venues, which just adds to the sense of adventure.
The biggest and most European-style gay club in town is Central Station, at the end of Dumskaya Ulitsa, a multi-floor fun house of Russian estrada, mainstream pop and house, which is busy nightly throughout the week. In the summer months crowds of clubbers mill about outside, rubbing shoulders with the largely straight overspill from nearby bars such as Dacha. Inside, there are two crowded bars, a big dancefloor, a VIP room and a dark room. The club is very much the center of the St. Petersburg gay scene and is mainly popular with gay men, though it does have a girls’ night (Female Station, on Thursdays), where guys are still welcome, though they have to pay twice as much to get in. More typically, the menu features dance shows compered by drag queens, club nights with international DJs and karaoke competitions.
Next door, a short distance down Ulitsa Lomonosova, is the self-styled “trash bar” the Blue Oyster (Golubaya Ustritsa), its name both a pun on the Russian word for gay (goluboi) and a reference to the notorious leather bar that is the butt of constant jokes in the now rather dated Police Academy movies of the ’80s. Inside you’ll find few leather daddies though — the bar is actually the favored hang out of a young, slightly more alternative mixed-sex crowd that knocks back the cheap drinks and then throws itself into the sweaty scrum on the dancefloor; the most egregious-cum-suicidal of them also climb over the rails of the balcony above the dance floor and hang off it above the crowd, somehow still managing to smoke and drink, while the bouncers look on unperturbed. The Oyster is also free to get in to at any time (though security is tight and face control is still exercised), which ensures a young and more mixed bunch of people than at Central Station next door.
A St. Petersburg gay scene highlight by any standards is the fantastic, fun and silly Cabaret club, now in its umpteenth incarnation and venue, but having been on the go in one largely unchanged form since the late 1990s. Now housed in a new venue just off Ligovsky Prospekt, the focus of any evening at Cabaret is the 2.30 a.m. weekend show. Be prepared for a staggeringly campy, heavily Soviet performing style from ageing drag queens, lots of Alla Pugacheva and plenty of sharp, old-school tranny humor (your Russian will be severely tested). Before and after the lip synching activities, the club plays a mix of Russian and international pop, the bar is crowded and the older and richer clientele enjoy table service around the stage. Cabaret is also popular with and welcoming to curious straight people wanting to enjoy some camp performances, and it’s not unusual to see Russian theatrical celebrities rubbing shoulders with the decidedly relaxed and unusually friendly crowd.
The third large gay club in the city is the inventively titled The Club, which used to be a straight venue, but has been totally overhauled and is now marketed to the more elitny sections of the gay world. It’s a slick place, with table service (though you’re not allowed to sit down unless you’ve reserved ahead), friendly bar staff, Moscow DJs and nightly shows with dancers and drag queens. In the summer it has a great outdoor area in the building’s courtyard where you can enjoy cocktails under the stars and mix with the “in-crowd” tusovka gays in their shiny clothes. As with any such club, you can expect your face to be controlled quite thoroughly, although they mainly seem to be keen to check that people know they’re entering a gay club.
Russia’s first lesbian club, Triel, keeps itself to itself, and its location in the south of the city in a warehouse just by Moskovskiye Vorota helps it do just that. This is a friendly space for lesbians and their friends (there’s still a relatively small cross over between gay male and lesbian nightlife in St. Petersburg), but men as guests of girls are welcome at weekends, although the entry prices for them are high (600 rubles). Inside, it’s a modern space with a busy dancefloor and parties that go on all night.
Across the way from Triel is another queer hangout, Malevich, which refreshingly welcomes everyone on equal terms and with equal entry prices (elsewhere they tend to be stacked in favor of men, just as entry to straight clubs in St. Petersburg is nearly always stacked in favor of women). With a focus on community, LGBT activism and fostering an environment for creative self-realization, this place is very different to other venues on the scene and hosts various groups and classes (including queer tango, film screenings, singing lessons, games nights and concerts). However, on the weekends there’s always lots of dancing and drinking and a pleasantly mixed and “non-scene” crowd.
Finally, if you want to get down and dirty, the bar you’re looking for is Bunker, the kind of place that probably keeps Milonov up at night. Just finding this men-only place is a challenge enough, hidden away as it is in an enormous courtyard on the Fontanka (enter through the archway on Ulitsa Borodinskaya, and it’s in the second courtyard on the right). Inside there’s a small bar and social area and a maze of dark rooms where guys wander from encounter to encounter. The same management also runs Fitness Sauna, a small male sauna just off the Fontanka, which serves the same purpose as Bunker, only you’re able to use a small gym as well. Girls don’t need to feel left out either — yes, St Petersburg has a private club for lesbian encounters too, although of course it’s far classier than the male equivalent, and also far more discreet. But if you ever needed a reason to go to Prospekt Prosveshcheniya, then Raduzhny Zamok (“the Rainbow Castle”) is it. Looking like the spiritual successor to long-dead 90s gay club Greshniki with its hilarious mock-medieval interior complete with cats in chainmail, this place boasts numerous “thematic parties” (a Russian euphemism for gay), has a sauna, mini-hotel and restaurant on the premises and is a favourite with discreet ladies.
So despite the current legal climate, there’s plenty of choice and variety for gay and lesbian life in the northern capital, and for the most part no climate of fear exists for the men and women who lead their lives openly. Travelers shouldn’t feel scared of joining in the fun either, most clubs are totally accessible to non-Russian speakers and you’ll usually find locals more than happy to meet foreigners. Just don’t expect to get to bed before sunrise.
Tom Masters is the author of the Lonely Planet St. Petersburg and Eastern Europe guides.
Locations
Central Station
www.centralstation.ru
Ulitsa Lomonosova 1, metro Gostiny Dvor
open 10 p.m.-6 a.m. Sun-Thu,
until 11 a.m. Fri & Sat.
Cabaret
www.cabaretspb.ru
Ulitsa Razyezzhaya 43,
metro Ligovsky Prospekt
open 11 p.m.-6 a.m. Thu, Fri & Sat.
The Club
www.vk.com/the_club_spb
Shcherbakov Pereulok 17,
metro Dostoevskaya
open 11 p.m.-6.30 a.m. Thu, Fri & Sat
Triel
www.vk.com/club1905880
Moskovsky Prospekt 109,
metro Moskovskiye Vorota
Open 8 p.m.-6 a.m.
Malevich
www.malevich-club.ru
Moskovsky Prospekt 109/3,
metro Moskovskiye Vorota
6 p.m.-11 p.m. Wed, until 6 a.m. Thu-Sun
Blue Oyster
www.boyster.ru
Ulitsa Lomonosova 1,
metro Gostiny Dvor
open 7 p.m.-6 a.m. daily
Bunker
www.bunkerspb.ru
Naberezhnaya Reki Fontanky 90,
korpus 7, metro Pushkinskaya
open 4 p.m.-6 a.m. daily
Fitness Sauna
www.bunkerspb.ru/ru/sauna
Ulitsa Mokhovaya 47, metro Gostiny Dvor
open 2 p.m.-6 a.m. daily
Raduzhny Zamok
www.radujniy-zamok.ru
Vyborgskoye Shosse 27,
korpus 3, 2nd Floor,
metro Prospekt Prosveshcheniya
TITLE: Opposition Protests Showing Dwindling Support
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The first authorized protest rallies against electoral fraud since the March 4 presidential vote were held in St. Petersburg on the weekend.
Saturday’s march from the Petrograd Side across the Neva River to the Field of Mars drew more than 3,000 and went smoothly, but Sunday’s 1,000-strong stationary meeting on Konyushennaya Ploshchad was marked by arrests.
Alexander Rastorguyev, the leader of the automobile owners association TIGR, was detained just after he left the stage after reading a poem to protesters gathered on the square in downtown St. Petersburg.
Minutes later, Colonel Alexei Smyatsky, who was in command of the police at the rally, told organizer Olga Kurnosova and concerned protesters that Rastorguyev had been taken to a police precinct because the poem — which featured the lines “Let’s meet the Russian Spring / And drive Satan Away” — would be investigated to determine whether it contained “public calls for the violent seizure of power.”
Such calls constitute an offense titled “public calls for violent change in the constitutional system,” which is punishable by up to three years in prison (or up to five years in prison if committed with the use of the media).
After the rally, Kurnosova and several dozen protesters headed toward Nevsky Prospekt shouting “Freedom to Rastorguyev” and anti-Putin slogans.
The police did not prevent them from reaching Nevsky Prospekt, but as the group attempted to cross the Moika River, it was stopped by officers who attempted to arrest a man for carrying a Russian national flag. The OMON riot police promptly arrived and surrounded the group, arresting about 20 people, according to Kurnosova.
Speaking Tuesday, she said every protester was later charged with violating the rules on holding public assemblies and failure to obey a police officer’s orders. Most of the cases will be heard in court on April 11.
Rastorguyev, who can be seen on photos getting into a police van voluntarily and with a smile, was also charged with failure to obey a police officer’s orders, an offense punishable with up to 15 days in custody. He was not, however, charged with “public calls for violent change in the constitutional system.”
“Those who believe that the ‘new’ Putin will be a liberal one are wrong,” Kurnosova said Tuesday.
“What’s happening reminds me of 2007,” she said, referring to the Dissenters’ Marches brutally dispersed by the OMON riot police in St. Petersburg that year.
Sunday’s rally — featuring maverick communist Viktor Anpilov and nationalist leaders Sergei Baburin and Nikolai Kuryanovich as guest speakers from Moscow — saw a large-scale presence of nationalists, though a number of left-wing and democratic activists were also present.
The march and stationary rally held on Saturday were larger in size and more diverse, including groups from The Other Russia, Solidarity Democratic Movement, Yabloko Democratic Party, the National Democrats, anarchists, LGBT activists and groups of election observers. The parliamentary opposition parties — the Communist Party (KPRF) and A Just Russia — abstained from participating.
Organizers estimated the number of participants at between 3,000 and 5,000.
A number of protesters held posters in defense of Pussy Riot, the feminist punk group whose alleged members are in custody after being arrested early this month. They face seven years in prison on charges of promoting religious hatred after performing an anti-Putin song in a Moscow church.
In addition to demands to annul the results of State Duma and presidential elections as illegitimate due to multiple violations in favor of Vladimir Putin and his United Russia party, the protesters demanded the dismissal of the non-elected St. Petersburg Governor Georgy Poltavchenko and the holding of free and fair gubernatorial elections within the next 12 months. Gubernatorial elections were abolished by Putin in 2005.
“We have a new agenda: We are saying that we should put pressure on the authorities over issues on which they said they were ready to make concessions after protests were held from December to March. [These issues are] the return of gubernatorial elections, the release of political prisoners and the registration of all oppositional parties,” said The Other Russia’s Andrei Dmitriyev on Tuesday.
The weekend’s protests drew fewer people than two rallies in December that drew unprecedented numbers of more than 30,000 each.
“It’s only natural; the wave emerged from discontent about the State Duma elections and carried on to the presidential elections,” Dmitriyev said.
“Now it has subsided because we didn’t manage to remove United Russia from power, and Putin has stayed as well, and people feel a certain disappointment. It will subside even more in the near future, but in the long run it will become greater. The angry citizens who came to rallies in December have not disappeared, and they’ll protest again when there is cause to do so.”
The next protest will be a Strategy 31 demo, due on Saturday, March 31 near Gostiny Dvor on Nevsky Prospekt. The protest traditionally calls on the authorities to obey Article 31 of the Constitution that guarantees the right to assembly, but Dmitriyev said the next rally would also repeat the demand that the city governor be an elected position.
As always, City Hall refused Monday to authorize the rally on the grounds that the protesters would hinder pedestrians, but Dmitriyev said the protest would go ahead despite the ban.
TITLE: Law Makes Finns Return Land On Border Territory
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Finnish citizens and companies that own real estate on Russian territory near the border will have to give up their land under a new Russian law.
According to Russia’s land law, which has been in effect since 2001 and has recently returned to the spotlight, foreigners cannot own real estate on Russian border territories. For more than a decade, however, Russia did not provide a list of specific areas that fall under this category, and a list was only signed by President Dmitry Medvedev on Jan. 9, 2011.
Included on the list are municipal districts in the Leningrad Oblast such as the Vyborgsky, Kingisepsky, Lomonosovsky, Slantsevsky and Sosnovoborsky municipal districts.
The law applies to foreign citizens, companies and anyone without Russian citizenship.
The Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent an inquiry to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to clarify what would happen to real estate on the lands in question bought by Finnish citizens before 2011.
Mikko Kivikoski, a counselor at the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told Fontanka that those citizens would have to give back the land within a year.
Niko Nurminen, spokesman for the Consulate General of Finland in St. Petersburg, said that during the last year a list of the territories in question was compiled and announced. The situation has not been developing rapidly, however, and the consulate has not heard of any actual cases of Finnish citizens rushing to sell their properties on those territories, he said.
“In any case, we are probably only speaking about dozens of Finnish citizens who have real estate on those territories, not about hundreds,” Nurminen said, adding that the consulate has not received any complaints from Finnish citizens regarding the matter.
According to research done by Finland’s Eastern University last year, most Finns would like to limit the right of Russian citizens to buy real estate in Finland, Vyborgskiye Vedomosti newspaper reported.
Last month, a group of 20 Finnish deputies came up with an initiative to ban the sale of real estate to foreigners.
Nurminen said deputies gathered only 21 signatures for the initiative, while proceeding to the next stage would require about a hundred signatures.
Nurminen said it would be “clearer” if both countries had laws that allowed the reciprocal buying of property on each other’s territory, therefore promoting investment.
In 2011 alone, Russian citizens made 459 real estate deals in Finland, while in 2008 800 deals were closed.
Finnish officials said earlier that even if Finland introduces limits on the sale of real estate to foreigners, it would not concern those who had bought real estate before the law was passed, Fontanka reported.
According to 47News portal, foreign citizens own 317 plots of land on the border territories listed by Russia, totaling 80 hectares. The majority of them are from Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Estonia. Legal bodies own 22 hectares of land, including the Finnish company Neste, whose director and founder are Finns. The owner of the land is, however, Russian.
TITLE: Nurse Says Sacking Was Result Of Politics
AUTHOR: By Olga Khrustaleva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The head nurse at a state dental clinic in the Kirovsky district of St. Petersburg has been fired in what some say was a politically motivated decision.
Liliya Serebryakova was fired on the grounds of “loss of trust” when new management took over her clinic after she had worked there for almost ten years.
“[The firing] was obviously planned,” Serebryakova told The St. Petersburg Times. She said that she was first asked to resign, but having refused to do so, she was made to take stock control, after which she was accused of embezzlement.
“I noticed that something was going on,” she said. Even before she was asked to leave, “some of my subordinates told me they had already been offered my position,” she said.
During the December state duma elections, Serebryakova, a member of the unregistered Russian United Labor Front (ROT Front) party, was appointed a member of the district election commission for the Communist Party, and reported incidents of fraud at her polling station.
Her fellow party members see a political subtext in the story.
“The head doctor [at the clinic] is a United Russia party functionary with high-up connections,” said Stepan Malentsov, a ROT Front leader and deputy candidate in the December elections. “So they are two political opposites.”
According to Malentsov, the conflict began when the newly appointed head doctor began hiring those who had proven themselves to be loyal to him. The clinic’s management could not be reached for comment on Monday or Tuesday.
According to Serebryakova’s lawyer Andrei Kutsobin, the fact that his client was accountable for assets presents a serious challenge. In order to compensate for the slow state-funded procurement system, Serebryakova said she often ordered things that the clinic needed, or would need in the near future, which did not always correspond with the numbers on the list. The final sum of the order, however, was left unchanged.
“Sometimes you need three bandages instead of five, but eight syringes instead of five,” Kutsobin explained. Serebryakova’s defense is dependent on the supplier providing the documents attesting to the actual order submitted.
The court hearing into the re-hiring of Serebryakova has been postponed several times and the decision, according to her lawyer, depends on whether or not the evidence is deemed sufficient. Kutsobin said that it seems the court is loyal to the head doctor.
“It is possible that the decision will be negative,” he told The St. Petersburg Times on Monday, a day before the hearing. “But this is my personal feeling, which may be proved wrong.”
On Tuesday, the hearing was postponed again until April 10 because the court has decided to send a formal request to the medical supplies company.
Both Serebryakova and Kutsobin said they plan to take the case further if the eventual ruling is not in their favor.
TITLE: SKA Defeats Atlant MO to Enter Finals
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: SKA St. Petersburg marches on to the KHL Western Conference finals after a convincing 4-0 win Friday night over Atlant Moscow Oblast in game 6 of conference semi-finals at the Mytishchi Arena in Mytishchi in the Moscow Oblast.
With the win, SKA wrapped up the series 4-2 and advanced to face perennial powerhouse Dinamo Moscow in the conference finals. This is the first time the Petersburg team has reached the league semi-finals since the 1993-1994 season.
SKA bounced back and dominated game 6 after being shocked at home, suffering a 3-1 loss last Wednesday in game 5. It was their first home loss in the playoffs in a lackluster performance that was reminiscent of last year’s playoff collapse.
After a tense, scoreless first period, Dmitry Vorobyov and Maxim Rybin gave SKA a 2-0 lead in the second period. Maxim Afinogenov effectively killed off Atlant’s hopes when he scored a third at 46:11, while Ivan Nepryayev rounded out the scoring with an empty-netter at the end of the game.
SKA netminder Jakub Stepanek was named best goaltender of the series, posting a goals against average of 0.99 and a 0.953 save percentage.
The Western Conference Finals start in St. Petersburg with games at the Ice Palace on Wednesday and Friday nights at 7 p.m., and continue in Moscow on April 1 and 3.
The Eastern Conference Finals feature this year’s regular season champion, Traktor Chelyabinsk, against powerhouse Avangard Omsk.
TITLE: Mariinsky II Investigated
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The city’s Audit Chamber has found massive violations in the construction of the Mariinsky Theater’s second stage.
The company responsible for building the theater is the North-West Construction, Reconstruction and Restoration Directorate.
The auditors said that budget money has been spent ineffectively on the construction during the last three years. The inspection also revealed that at least 290 million rubles ($10 million) had been misspent.
Ten years after the government decided to construct a second stage for St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater, a project allotted more than 22 billion rubles ($760 million), 16 billion rubles ($550 million) has already been spent.
Experts said that construction of the theater is progressing very slowly, while contractors receive huge advance payments that then sit in their accounts for long periods of time.
The results of the inspection have prompted the Audit Chamber to appeal to the Prosecutor’s Office.
A 2009 inspection showed that the initial project estimate had already more than doubled from its initial 9.5 billion rubles ($327.5 million).
The project completion date has also been pushed back. It was initially scheduled for the end of 2010, and is now scheduled for the end of 2012.
After the 2009 inspection, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin promised to personally control construction spending during the second stage. Special bank accounts were opened in Sberbank for that purpose. Nevertheless, not all the information concerning the project is available, the Audit Chamber said in its 2009-2011 report.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Hamburg Comes Closer
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — German airline Lufthansa launched a new flight Sunday from St. Petersburg to Hamburg, Germany.
The 2.5-hour flight will operate twice a week, on Wednesdays and Sundays.
“Hamburg is popular both among business travelers and among tourists. We have been planning to launch the route for a long time,” said Ronald Schulz, Lufthansa’s regional director in Russia and CIS countries.
Vilnius Flight Launched
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Russian airline Ak Bars Aero launched a direct flight to Vilnius, Lithuania on Monday.
The flight will operate twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, Interfax reported.
Yaroslav Zubilov, a representative of Northern Capital Gateway, the consortium that operates the city’s Pulkovo airport, said the new flight would “strengthen cultural and business ties between the two European cities.”
Ruling in Ice Death
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A St. Petersburg man was sentenced to 18 months of correctional labor and a fine in the wrongful death of a woman who was killed last year by a block of ice that fell from the man’s balcony, Interfax reported Monday.
On March 11 of last year, a chunk of ice plummeted from the balcony of Sergei Kuzmin, landing on the head of 18-year-old Yelizaveta Latychevskaya, who died at the scene of the accident. A court said Kuzmin was guilty of failing to clean ice from his balcony.
TITLE: Journalists Toe Fine Line With Opposition Politics
AUTHOR: By Jonathan Earle
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Oleg Kashin lit another cigarette. His iPhone beeped, as it does every few minutes.
“They probably could have fired me for participating in the opposition rallies,” he said, flicking aside the background image on his phone, Kazimir Malevich’s “Reaper on a Red Background.”
The stub where his left pinkie used to be wiggles like a pig’s tail as he taps out a text message.
A political reporter for Kommersant, Kashin’s work on pro-Kremlin youth groups and Khimki forest defenders likely led to the savage beating that almost killed him in 2010, leaving him in a medically induced coma with a broken leg, a fractured jaw and a pinkie that had to be amputated.
Given his knowledge of the system and the dangerous conditions under which he works, it’s perhaps no surprise that Kashin greeted the resurgent opposition with enthusiasm.
But his participation in organizing protests hasn’t made his bosses very happy.
“I even asked them once, ‘Does this bother you?’ They said, ‘Yes, it does …’” he said recently over coffee at a cafe in the hip Red October region, which has become a mecca for Moscow’s so-called “creative class” of young media professionals and artists.
Since allegations of fraud in the Dec. 4 State Duma elections sparked unprecedented street protests, Kashin and other journalists have helped organize opposition rallies, found civil groups, and, of course, spread the word.
To an extent not seen since the early 1990s, journalists are using their deep awareness of the country’s ills, sharp pens and, in some cases, their star power to promote a political cause.
But it has also forced them into an uncomfortable balancing act between participation and observation — between their personal desires as citizens and their professional responsibilities as journalists.
“It’s like we’re at war. We have the government on the one side with its gigantic administrative resources, including state-controlled TV. On the other side we have the ‘Moscow media,’” said Andrei Loshak, editor-in-chief of Esquire Russia and a former reporter on state-controlled NTV.
Media outlets seen as opposition-friendly — in that they feature interviews with opposition leaders — include newspapers Kommersant and Vedomosti, Ekho Mosvky radio, culture magazines Afisha and Bolshoi Gorod, and TV channel Dozhd.
“It has become important to declare your politics. Anybody who doesn’t looks like a traitor, like they agree with the ugliness of the system,” Loshak said.
At a Dec. 23 meeting for the committee organizing the following day’s protest on Prospekt Akademika Sakharova, four journalists — Kashin, Sergei Parkhomenko, Yury Saprykin and Olga Romanova — sat beside veteran opposition politicians Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Ryzhkov and civil activists like Lev Ponomaryov.
Saprykin, Parkhomenko and Nemtsov discussed preparations, while Romanova — a former financial journalist and TV host who serves as the group’s treasurer — reported on the committee’s finances.
For the active journalists — Kashin and Saprykin, editorial director of Rambler-Afisha — the decision to serve on the committee raised the question of the appropriate line between covering a cause one sympathizes with and participating in it.
“It’s not a natural situation, it’s not a normal situation when journalists sit on the organizing committee. … It would be like if a boxer called his own fight,” Kashin said.
Saprykin later admitted to being torn between his professional impulses and his commitment to the cause.
“There have been moments over the last three months when, as a journalist located inside the process, I probably should have quickly run to the neighboring office of Lenta.ru and written a news article or a column,” he said.
“I don’t do it because, as a member of the organizing committee, I have to maintain silence and follow rules of a different cooperative etiquette. This is a problem,” he said.
Prior to the disputed State Duma elections, Saprykin’s Afisha was a hipster rag, covering pop culture and the arts. Kashin now describes it as “the most radical opposition journal.”
Saprykin’s own transition from a “good-humored, aging hipster” into a “thundering revolutionary,” — as Loshak described him — speaks to a political awakening in Afisha’s yuppie readership.
“At some point, the wealthy, well-traveled, cultured crowd realized that building one’s comfortable, beautiful world is impossible without participating in the running of the country,” Loshak said.
Afisha’s February 27 edition carried the cover “What’s Happening? The New Politics …” featuring a conversation with opposition leader Alexei Navalny, in which he urged protesters to join rallies and refuse to disperse.
Saprykin says he ended up on the organizing committee almost by accident.
After the first major rally on Bolotnaya Ploshchad on Dec. 10, he wrote an article for Lenta.ru, which is owned by ProfMedia, the same company that owns Afisha, criticizing organizers for, among other things, failing to provide an adequate speaker system for the event.
“The next day, my colleague, Sergei Parkhomenko … called and said, ‘If you’re so smart, why don’t you come and tell us how it’s done,’” Saprykin recalled.
He admits that he has probably crossed the line but says it could be worse.
“It’s one thing when you write an article and then go and agree with City Hall on the location of the next rally. That’s a problem, but we can live with that. It’s quite another when you write an article in the morning, and in the evening you write propaganda pamphlets,” he said.
Besides, he insists that he has no control over the editorial content of the culture magazine, which is published only every other week.
“I don’t do daily information journalism. … News isn’t my profession, at least now,” he said.
Parkhomenko — the former editor of Itogi and Vokrug Sveta — has been perhaps the most active journalist in the opposition, although he is currently on professional hiatus.
He’s been a member of the organizing committee and has participated in negotiations with City Hall. His Facebook page is effectively an opposition newsfeed.
But Parkhomenko says he sees no contradiction in a journalist becoming an activist.
“Don’t mix up strictly political activity with the creation of a party or a movement and the organizing committee for rallies. … The organizing committee organizes rallies. The opposition organizes opposition,” he said.
The opposition has largely organized through Facebook, and Ivan Zassoursky, a journalism professor at Moscow State University, points out that blogs and social media have become an increasingly popular outlet for journalists.
“Many journalists have discovered that aside from articles, where they appear quite dull, there are other platforms where they can write what they really think,” he said.
If journalists have been among the first to throw their support behind the opposition, it might be because they’ve suffered uniquely in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Loshak said.
“Nobody’s going to bother a designer who’s sitting there doing Photoshop. … The government doesn’t directly affect you like it affects a journalist,” Loshak said.
Dozens of journalists have been beaten and several killed since 2000. No one has been brought to justice for the attacks, which has been interpreted as a sign of tacit consent from the government. The country is consistently ranked among the world’s most dangerous places to be a journalist.
“A political journalist in Russia writes from his knees,” Parkhomenko said. “If he’s part of the Kremlin pool, he tiptoes around, trying not to make too much noise, writes what they dictate and, not rising from his knees, runs the material off to his editors.”
Romanova and Leonid Parfyonov lost their jobs on television after the state gobbled up private TV in the early 2000s and started enforcing a strongly pro-Kremlin line.
But for Romanova, her trauma goes far beyond journalism.
In 2008 her husband, businessman Alexei Kozlov, was sentenced to seven years in prison for fraud and embezzlement charges they say were fabricated by his former business partner, then-Federation Council Senator Vladimir Slutsker.
Romanova has led a highly public fight to free her husband, partly through Russia Behind Bars, a support and advocacy group she founded for the wrongfully imprisoned and their families.
Kozlov’s sentence was later reduced to five years, and he was freed in September after the Supreme Court overturned the initial verdict and ordered a retrial. On March 15, his initial conviction was upheld by a lower court.
Opposition activity seemed to her like a natural extension of this fight.
“If you have a civil position, you can’t help but be oppositional,” she said after a recent meeting of Russia Behind Bars.
In mid-January, she and 15 other outspoken opposition figures — including four journalists — established the League of Voters, an umbrella organization designed to coordinate grassroots civil activists.
Kashin says the fact that journalists took a leading role from the start was an indication of the failure of veteran opposition leaders — including Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Ryzhkov — to inspire the tens of thousands who showed up at Bolotnaya Ploshchad on Dec. 10.
“There wasn’t anybody else to do it. Alexei Navalny was sitting in prison at the time, so he couldn’t participate. … Journalists were literally forced to go,” he said.
According to a Levada Center poll of participants at the Dec. 24 rally, Parfyonov was ranked as the most trusted opposition figure, followed by Navalny. Nemtsov tied with former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin for ninth place out of 19, with only 13 percent of respondents saying they trusted him most.
It is important to note that some journalists have come out in support of Putin, including Pavel Gusev, editor-in-chief of Moskovsky Komsomolets, and Valery Fadeyev, editor-in-chief of Expert magazine.
“I don’t like what’s going on at Bolotnaya,” Fadeyev told journalists in February.
“Not because people can’t express their opinions. It’s normal to hold rallies. But when the destruction of state institutions begins, when they demand that the Duma be declared illegitimate and they say the elections are illegitimate ahead of time, … it’s undoubtedly the path to 1917 and an Orange Revolution.”
Mikhail Leontyev, a well-known television journalist, told Putin supporters at a Feb. 23 rally at Luzhniki stadium that Putin was responsible for saving Russia and accused “our enemies” of wanting to turn the clock back 20 years so that the country “attempted suicide again.”
Zassoursky, the journalism professor, said it was not uncommon for journalists to venture into politics during times of political uncertainty. He compared the current situation to the United States during the anti-war movement of the 1960s and ‘70s and the Soviet Union during perestroika.
“Journalists formed a substitute political system. They doubled as people’s representatives, speaking out on the people’s behalf. In a way, we’ve returned to that,” he said.
Several popular journalists, including Alexander Nevzorov and Alexander Krutov, even became Duma deputies, and pro-perestroika periodicals Ogonyok and Moskovskiye Novosti served as “stand-in” parties, Kashin said.
The current crop of politically active journalists say they’d rather go back to journalism than become politicians, and some have already started to take a back seat to professional politicians.
“The last time I went to an organizing-committee meeting was before the second Bolotnaya protest,” Kashin said, adding that he believed journalists would increasingly resume their natural role as observers and leave politics to the professional politicians.
Saprykin also describes himself as something of a dilettante and said the Afisha edition devoted to politics was a one-off event.
He also believes journalists exert a stronger influence on the opposition through their articles than they do by personal contacts with opposition leaders.
“It’s a collective, invisible brain trust. … Journalists are very good at forming program goals and identifying problems that the opposition has to solve,” he said.
Parkhomenko says his future plans aren’t connected to politics at all. “If an appropriate and correct reason for another rally arrives, I will probably take part in it, if not, then I won’t,” he said.
Seven years after he left national television, Parfyonov recently found himself back on the airwaves with a series of interviews on Kommersant TV with political figures in the run-up to the March election.
In a recent interview on Afisha.ru, he reiterated his desire to stay in journalism. “My place is on the sidewalk, while people march down the road. … I want to remain a journalist. Besides, I’m too old to learn another profession.”
TITLE: Pundits Stand Divided on the Success of ‘Reset’
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev said Monday that the relationship between Russia and the United States was at its best during his term in office.
Medvedev was attending a nuclear summit in Seoul, which is his last opportunity to meet counterpart Barack Obama before he yields the presidency in May to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
“I view everything that we have done over the three-year period as being absolutely useful, and I think that it was probably the three best years for the U.S. and Russian relationship over a 10-year period,” Medvedev told reporters soon after meeting with Obama.
Although the Russian-American relationship suffered a huge blow near the start of Medvedev’s presidency because of the Russia-Georgia military conflict, Medvedev established a good personal relationship with Obama.
Ambassador Richard Burt, a former U.S. chief negotiator with the Soviet Union on nuclear arms, said Medvedev was among the few senior statesmen who had a “productive relationship” with Obama, whom he described as a “cold fish.”
The two presidents are of a similar age and share a law background, and the chemistry between them seemed to be genuine.
But foreign policy experts have a mixed reaction of Medvedev’s four years.
“If we understand that everything began from not quite a cold war but rather a cold relationship, we could say the relationship has changed for the better,” said Alexei Makarkin, deputy head of the Center for Political Technologies.
He singled out the signing of the New START nuclear treaty and Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization as Medvedev’s foreign policy achievements.
The Russian president also hit it off with Obama thanks to his efforts in fostering the “reset” policy with the United States.
That started in March 2009 with the symbolic pressing of a reset button presented by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
However, the word was incorrectly translated and ended up as “overload” in Russian.
That was fitting, some experts said, because the Obama administration’s reset policy became overloaded with various obstacles.
Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global affairs, described it as “generally successful.”
“Except for the first period, when the Georgian war happened, Medvedev played the role of stabilizer,” Lukyanov said. “He was able to get the relationship out of a dead end and turn it into a normal working relationship.”
“Putin knowingly gave him the post, and he hasn’t regretted it. While Medvedev was not doing anything contradictory to Putin in foreign policy, he became more visible,” Lukyanov said, referring to the fact that Medvedev took a leading role in trying to normalize the relationship with the United States.
But Putin, who stated early on that he wouldn’t interfere in foreign policy matters, appointed former Ambassador to the United States Yury Ushakov as an adviser, a move some experts said was made with the intention of having a U.S. policy expert close at hand.
Putin’s hand-picked successor, Medvedev had limited domestic power, so he was trying to play a more independent role in foreign policy, which he did with limited success.
Last year, he even got into an indirect argument with Putin about Libya after the prime minister called the NATO operation against Moammar Gadhafi a “crusade.”
“The idea was to show a more liberal and nice-to-deal-with face, and he was good at doing that,” said Carnegie Moscow Center analyst Masha Lipman.
She added that she saw no policy differences overall between Putin and Medvedev.
Lipman also recalled some harsh rhetoric by Medvedev toward Obama. Shortly after Obama’s inauguration, Medvedev threatened to put Iskander missiles in the Kaliningrad region if the United States built its missile defense system in Europe.
“He was doing that when everyone else was congratulating Obama,” Lipman said.
The argument over U.S. plans to put a missile defense shield in Europe, which Russia believes would threaten the country’s nuclear deterrent, will soon pass from Medvedev to Putin.
“The problem of an antiballistic missile shield will remain the major issue,” Makarkin said. “While there will be no new Cold War, there will be more realpolitik.”
Putin has committed to a more aggressive foreign policy, saying the country “would act in its own interests and aims and not take decisions imposed on it.”
Nikolai Borduzha, secretary general of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, interpreted Putin’s words broadly.
“I think Putin as the future president is aiming to increase all of the security structures,” Bordyuzha told The St. Petersburg Times last week.
But prominent analyst and author Igor Zevelyov said Russian foreign policy will continue as it is under “old-new president” Putin.
“One shouldn’t judge by election rhetoric,” he said.
Most experts seem to agree that rhetoric aside, U.S.-Russian cooperation will remain limited and focused on familiar topics, such as Iran’s nuclear ambitions, missile defense and Afghanistan.
TITLE: Criminal Case Opened Into Edited Video of Putin
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A Leningrad Oblast journalist has been accused of fomenting extremism by editing an address by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to make him sound critical of the government.
The journalist, Andrei Kolomoisky, posted a video to his blog on the website of the Vyborgskiye Vedomosti newspaper of Putin speaking to the camera while sitting in front of the Russian flag on the eve of the Dec. 4 parliamentary elections.
“Our country is already now entering a period of empty promises. … Poverty, although moving slowly, is nonetheless experiencing stable growth, and in this case it is very important to guarantee we continue this course. That is why I decided to return to the times of humiliation, dependence and destruction to redraw plans for the development of Russia,” Putin appears to say in the video titled, “Putin’s Address Regarding the State Duma Elections, Dec. 1, 2011.”
The video, which has been removed from Kolomoisky’s blog but is available on YouTube, has been viewed more than 600,000 times.
The Vyborg prosecutor’s office concluded that by posting the video, Kolomoisky violated laws on “public calls to extremist activity using mass media” and “inciting hatred or enmity, and humiliation of human dignity,” local news portal Lenizdat.ru said, which published the scanned response to an information request about the criminal case when it broke the story Thursday. If charged, Kolomoisky would face a maximum punishment of five years in prison for the first charge and two years for the second.
Kolomoisky criticized the decision to open the case, saying the video that he posted did not break any laws.
“The paper, so as not to put up a fuss, agreed to take down the clip. And it did,” Kolomoisky said on his blog in February.
He said investigators essentially told his newspaper that the basis of the case was that they “watched it many times and did not like it much!”
TITLE: Duma Passes Bill on Parties
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The State Duma on Friday unanimously approved in the third and final reading a Kremlin-sponsored bill reducing the minimum required national party membership from 40,000 to 500, Interfax reported.
Political observers have said the bill may be a Kremlin attempt to fracture political opposition, enabling the founding of a multitude of minor parties.
Criticism of the bill by non-systemic opposition leaders invited to the Duma’s Friday session didn’t alter the vote.
Opposition leaders had hoped for an amendment allowing blocks of parties and other groups to participate in elections but Deputy Speaker and United Russia faction head Andrei Vorobyov said Friday that he saw “no necessity” in changing the bill.
Vorobyov argued instead that such blocks would lead to “a threat of feud and tension,” Interfax reported. He said that if parties had no disagreements, they should be merged. Sergei Mitrokhin, leader of the liberal opposition Yabloko party, who was invited to the session to speak about the bill said the law “cannot be called a victory for common sense,” Interfax reported.
Andrei Dunayev, chairman of the Right Cause liberal party told the Duma Friday that the bill would not be “effective,” and “Dozens of parties will emerge,” creating “a very serious threat,” according to Interfax.
Even Anatoly Lokot of the Communist Party, which voted for the bill, said it could lead to emergence of “parties for solving commercial issues” and “phantom parties.”
Sergei Glotov of the Moscow branch of the Patriots of Russia, was the only representative of a non-parliamentary party to praise the bill before the Duma.
The Federation Council is expected to approve the bill Wednesday. After being signed by Medvedev, it is to take effect by April.
TITLE: Desire to Emigrate Decreases
AUTHOR: By Jonathan Earle
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The percentage of Russians who say they want to leave the country has dropped by half since last summer and is now lower than it was in the final days of the Soviet Union, according to a new poll.
Eleven percent of all respondents told the state-run VTsIOM pollster that they would probably want to emigrate, a significant drop since June, when 22 percent said they would like to move abroad.
In 1991, with the Soviet Union on its deathbed, 16 percent said they wanted to emigrate.
Prior to the March 4 presidential election, some speculated that a victory by Vladimir Putin would cause a spike in emigration. But Svetlana Gannushkina, of Memorial’s migrant rights division, said the findings cut to the core of what drove anti-Putin street protests, with those in the opposition now seeing themselves as empowered stakeholders in the country’s future who have a reason to stay.
“People began to feel that they’re not alone, that something can and must be done. … Regardless of Putin’s return to the presidency, this is our country, and we can be responsible for it,” she told Kommersant.
VTsIOM found that the most likely emigrants are young people, with 25 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds saying they want to leave Russia, down from 39 percent in the June poll.
Additionally, the new poll found that 19 percent of active Internet users and 25 percent of supporters of former presidential hopeful Mikhail Prokhorov say they want to leave.
“These are precisely the people who would like change,” Yury Dzhinbladze, president of the Center for the Development of Democracy and Human Rights, told Kommersant.
TITLE: Belarus Protests Against Gov’t
AUTHOR: By Yuras Karmanau
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MINSK, Belarus — Thousands turned out for an anti-government rally in Belarus Sunday to call for the freeing of political prisoners and for their country to become a European-style democracy.
The protest rally was the largest since authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko won a fourth term in 2010 , intensifying his crackdown on the opposition.
The opposition has traditionally held rallies on March 25 to mark the anniversary of Belarus’ short-lived declaration of independence from Russia in 1918. Lukashenko’s government usually bans the rallies, sending police to break them up.
This year 3,000 to 5,000 protesters took part. They were allowed to gather peacefully with everyone passing through security controls and being photographed.
“I want my children to live in a European, free Belarus. And that is stronger than the fear that paralyzes society,” said 32-year-old Irina Lemesheva.
“My husband is in prison on a hunger strike against the arbitrary rule and dictatorship in Belarus,” said Alyona Kovalenko. Her husband, Sergei Kovalenko, was sentenced to two years in prison for displaying the opposition flag.
Twelve political prisoners remain in prison, including two candidates who ran against Lukashenko.
TITLE: U.S. Protects Russians With Jackson-Vanik
AUTHOR: By Victor Davidoff
TEXT: Is the Cold War over? Textbooks say yes and even cite the date that hostilities ended: Dec. 3, 1989, during the Malta Summit of Mikhail Gorbachev and President George H.W. Bush. But some doubts still remain — or have reappeared.
Today, leaders in Russia are playing their cards exactly by the Leonid Brezhnev playbook. Domestically they are whipping up anti-Western hysteria, accusing the West and its allies of various forms of “interference in Russia’s domestic affairs” — mostly when voices in the West protest the repression of Russian opposition activists. The country continues to support an enormous army, and the defense budget is growing by leaps and bounds (its projected growth is 35 percent over the next three years). In foreign affairs, Russia, like the Soviet Union before it, is always ready to lend a hand to any rogue state on any continent. The fruits of its “cooperation” with Iran, Syria and North Korea are a diplomatic headache for the rest of the world.
The spirit of the Cold War doesn’t only permeate the tough talk of President-elect Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. It is also reflected in the heated debates about a relic of the Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan years — the Jackson-Vanik amendment. Passed by the U.S. Congress in 1974, it forced Soviet leaders to undertake a minimal liberalization of the regime. The amendment opened the door to mass emigration from the Soviet Union and helped hundreds of thousands of people escape repression, join their relatives abroad or simply leave behind inhuman living conditions.
The Kremlin hated the Jackson-Vanik amendment because it prevented the Soviet Union from receiving American loans and the technology needed for the defense industry. But there were also critics of the amendment in the United States. In the mid-1980s, after Gorbachev came to power, the amendment was discussed on Capitol Hill. Opponents argued for the law’s repeal on the basis that it did not facilitate greater democracy and hampered trade relations. The campaign continued until Soviet dissident Nathan Sharansky was released from prison and arrived in the United States. Sharansky argued strongly against repealing the amendment, insisting that it would put the nascent Soviet reforms at risk.
Since 1989, there has been a moratorium on the amendment’s provisions, which makes the Kremlin’s fury over a purely symbolic act all the more puzzling. And then, politics makes for strange bedfellows. Suddenly the Kremlin found allies in its own opposition. On March 12, The New York Times published a report about a letter by seven people named “leaders of the opposition” in Russia — although only four of them are activists — calling for a repeal of the amendment since “Jackson-Vanik is also a very useful tool for Mr. Putin’s anti-American propaganda machine: It helps him to depict the United States as hostile to Russia.”
Alexander Podrabinek, a veteran human rights activist, responded ironically on his blog, saying, “The mutual understanding between two governments and some Russian oppositional ‘figures’ is so touching!” Former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, who signed the letter, quickly explained that he doesn’t support the repeal of Jackson-Vanik. He wants to replace it with the Magnitsky act, which would introduce sanctions against individuals involved in human rights violations and corruption.
But the historian Alexander Goldfarb thought that the opposition leaders made a mistake and had let themselves become pawns in someone else’s political game. On his blog, he wrote: “The Senate is slated to discuss the Jackson-Vanik amendment, not the ‘Magnitsky list.’ Even if someone brings it up, it doesn’t make any difference. They are discussing only a repeal of the amendment.” Fortunately, nothing changed. A Senate Finance Committee hearing on March 15 left the status quo.
Why the Kremlin needs the repeal of Jackson-Vanik is obvious to anyone. As blogger Arifg wrote, “As long as it is not repealed, it hangs like Damocles’ sword over the heads of the crooks in power, since the moratorium might be lifted at any moment if the human rights situation in Russia gets worse.”
But it’s harder to understand why Washington officialdom is lobbying so hard for the repeal. It may be a futile attempt to resuscitate the political reset from a permanent coma, or there may be some other realpolitik considerations hidden from view. One can only speculate.
History has shown that Nathan Sharansky was right. As Goldfarb writes, “You can only talk with the Kremlin in the language of sanctions.” Today when Russian citizens are once again compelled to go out onto the square and defend their rights, keeping the Jackson-Vanik amendment is the best way the United States can support them.
Victor Davidoff is a Moscow-based writer and journalist whose blog is chaadaev56.livejournal.com
TITLE: FROM A SAFE DISTANCE: Putin Showed His Weakness With Poland
AUTHOR: By Alexei Bayer
TEXT: The citizens’ awakening in Russia dates from the disputed State Duma elections on Dec. 4 and the first protest held on the following day on Chistiye Prudy. But to my mind, the first sign that Vladimir Putin’s regime is tottering emerged 20 months earlier, on the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre. The ceremony commemorating the 22,000 Polish officers and intellectuals murdered by Stalin’s security forces and the 2010 plane crash that killed the Polish president and a number of government and military officials marked a rapprochement between Moscow and Warsaw. The Russian government went so far as to finally take responsibility for the Stalin-era crime, which it had previously tried to explain away or justify. For an oppressive Russian government to express anything but hostility toward Poland is a sure sign of weakness — most importantly, as it concerns confronting the democratic opposition at home.
Back in the 1960s, poet Bulat Okudzhava wrote a song about the bond between Russia and Poland. Titled “Farewell to Poland,” it talks tenderly and evocatively of “our common destiny,” a history of false hopes and the duty (or the curse) of every new generation to leave home to fight for freedom. To many people in Russia, Poland represents the West, but it also symbolizes grim, relentless resistance. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the Poles never accepted the loss of nationhood and kept rebelling against Russian rule. Poland was, in a way, Russia’s Ireland.
Nor did Poland ever acquiesce to its colonial status in the Soviet Empire. It was always restive, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution actually began with strikes in Poznan, Poland. The Poles taught pro-democracy Russians that Russia could never be free as long as it kept oppressing other nations and depriving them of freedom. Soviet dissidents adopted a Polish slogan — “For Freedom, Yours and Ours!” — when a small group came out to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
The Polish film “Ashes and Diamonds” by director Andrzej Wajda, who also made the 2007 epic “Katyn,” sympathetically portrayed Polish fighters who fought the Nazis and then turned their guns on the Soviet occupiers. It was almost as influential among Soviet intelligentsia in the 1960s as Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novella “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”
The weakness of Soviet communism was exposed in its death-throe years of the 1980s, when it failed to crush the independent Solidarity trade union and tolerated dissent in Poland for a full year. And even when martial law was finally declared in 1981, the regime no longer had the guts to mete out severe punishment to the movement’s leaders.
The realization that Putin’s Russia was nondemocratic and anti-Western was made clear in Putin’s 2004 decision to replace the Nov. 7 national holiday, marking the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, with National Unity Day, celebrating the expulsion of Poles from Moscow in 1612. Sure, the holiday marks a national rising against a foreign invader, but the decision to drag out a forgotten conflict with Poland is highly symbolic.
Vladimir Lenin once said a revolutionary situation consists of two components. It is not enough for the people to be unwilling to live in the old way, but the ruling elite must also be unable to govern in the old way. Although the people in Russia began to stir late last year, the ruling elite showed that it no longer had the stomach to crush the demonstrators much earlier when it began its rapprochement with Poland.
Alexei Bayer, a native Muscovite, is a New York-based economist.
TITLE: A lesson in tolerance
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Open Your Eyes, a film festival focusing on human rights and directed against xenophobia and fascism, opens this week.
The city of St. Petersburg proudly boasts of its UNESCO-awarded official tolerance program, yet it has just passed an infamous “anti-gay” law, which indicates that the city authorities’ idea of tolerance is somewhat radical.
Last year, the Open Your Eyes festival was shut down dramatically four hours before its scheduled opening at the Mikhail Shemyakin Foundation, which canceled the event after its director was summoned to the prosecutor’s office. Prior to its cancellation, it had been rejected by two state-owned movie theaters, Dom Kino and Rodina.
The official explanation was that there were no available slots in their programs for the events, but Dom Kino’s administrator was recorded on tape as saying that the anti-fascist festival “contradicts the ideology” of the city’s Culture Committee. The Culture Committee denied any involvement.
The festival was to open with “Russia 88,” Pavel Bardin’s mockumentary about a group of neo-Nazi skinheads in Moscow, a film that annoyed the Russian authorities so much that several attempts to screen it in Russia were dealt with by the OMON riot police.
But Maxim Ivantsov, the Youth Human Rights Committee chair and one of the festival’s organizers, alleged that it was the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual and Transgenderism) program that City Hall was especially opposed to.
“Previously, the Open Your Eyes festival was held at Dom Kino and Rodina, but then we got kicked out from there, and were hinted to all the time that we would not be allowed to hold the festival there,” Ivantsov said.
Eventually, it was held quietly two months later at the Angleterre hotel.
This year, Open Your Eyes — launched as a festival against racism and xenophobia — is joined by the May 32 human rights film festival. Hence, its program will be divided in two parts, devoted respectively to anti-fascist and human rights.
Coming after the March 4 presidential election criticized as rigged in favor of Vladimir Putin, this year’s event will concentrate on politics.
“A powerful movement of election observers has emerged, and we’ll be holding a competition of videos documenting violations that they made at polling stations,” Ivantsov said.
“They went to great difficulty to make these videos, but sadly it led to no result; no criminal cases were filed, and all the complaints have been left unanswered.”
The video competition will be judged in cooperation with Golos, a non-profit association that defends voters’ rights.
The festival’s main venue will be the ON Theater, described by Ivantsov as a “youth-oriented place frequented by an advanced, intelligent public.”
The festival is timed to roughly coincide with the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, designated by the United Nations General Assembly to be commemorated on March 21. That day in 1960 saw the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa, when police shot at a crowd of black people protesting against racial discrimination. About 70 people were killed.
With the Social-Democratic Union of Youth of St. Petersburg as its main organizer, the Open Your Eyes film festival has been held since 2005.
Program
Vol.1.
Film and Human Rights
Wednesday, March 28, 6 p.m.,
Black Room
Opening. The Green Wave
(2010, Germany)
Germany-based Iranian filmmaker Ali Samadi Ahadi’s documentary chronicles Iran’s 2010 Green Revolution, the mass protests against falsified elections that reestablished Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the president.
9:30 p.m. Discussion: Film and 1960s/80s Youth Movements.
Host: Andrei Soshnikov. With the participation of the Oborona Youth Movement and Polit-Gramota youth media project.
Friday, March 30, 7 p.m. White Room
Justice for Sergei
(2010, The Netherlands)
Hans Hermans and Martin Maat’s documentary about Sergei Magnitsky, a Moscow lawyer who died in November 2009 at the age of 37 in a Moscow detention center, still awaiting trial, after allegedly being tortured and denied medical treatment. His death fuelled international outrage, but inside Russia the government officials responsible for his death have not been brought to justice.
8 p.m. Discussion: The Problem of Corruption in Russia.
Saturday, March 31, 3 p.m.,
White Room
Full Metal Jacket (1987, U.S.)
Stanley Kubrick’s anti-war classic starring Matthew Modine and R. Lee Ermey.
5 p.m. White Room. Discussion: Strawberry Fields: Film Against Militarism. Hosts: Lena Popova, Konstantin Mustafin and Maxim Ivantsov. With the participation of the Soldiers’ Mothers nongovernmental organization.
7 p.m. White Room.
A Bitter Taste of Freedom
(2011, U.S.-Sweden-Russia)
Marina Goldovskaya’s documentary about the slain journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
8:30 p.m. Conversation: Who Gives His or Her Life for Truth?
Host: Yevgeny Konovalov.
Sunday, April 1, 8:30 p.m.
Black Room
A Camera as a Rights Activist’s Weapon. A selection of video footage documenting violations during the March 4 Russian presidential election. Hosts: Maxim Ivantsov and Nadezhda Mukhina. Guest: Anton Veryovkin of the Golos Association election watchdog.
Belarusian Dream (2011, Russia)
Belarusian-born, Moscow-based Yekaterina Kibalchich’s documentary focuses on events after Alexander Lukashenko’s falsified presidential elections in Minsk in 2010, when many protesters and six presidential candidates were imprisoned.
Vol. 2.
Films Against Fascism
and Xenophobia
Thursday, April 12, 7 p.m. Black Room
The Last Supper (1995, U.S.)
Stacy Title’s comedy-drama about liberals succumbing to the temptation of murdering rightwing pundits for their political beliefs. Cameron Diaz, Ron Eldard and Annabeth Gish star.
8:30 p.m. Discussion: Clash of Ideologies. Host: Anatoly Kanyukov.
Friday, April 13, 7 p.m. Black Room
Difficult Love (2010, South Africa)
Photographer Zanele Muholi’s personal account of the life of black lesbian women in post-Apartheid South Africa.
8 p.m. Discussion: Mechanisms of Stirring up Xenophobic Sentiment in Society: Racism, Nazism, Homophobia. How to Recognize and Confront Them.
Host: Arkady Gutnikov.
Saturday, April 14, 7 p.m. Black Room
Together (2000, Sweden-Denmark-Italy)
Lukas Moodysson’s comedy-drama set in a commune in 1975. Lisa Lindgren and Michael Nyqvist star.
8:15 p.m. Conversation: The Total Disconnection of People: Is it Possible to Overcome It?
Sunday, April 15, 7 p.m. Black Room
The White Ribbon (Das weibe Band) (2009, Germany-Austria-France-Italy)
Michael Haneke’s drama about society and family in a northern German village on the eve of World War I. According to Haneke, the film is about “the origin of every type of terrorism, be it of a political or religious nature.”
8:30 p.m. Discussion: Mechanisms to Prevent Domestic Hatred. Host: Yury Ioffe.
Check www.openeyes.spb.ru for updates.
All events are held at ON Theater,
18 Ulitsa Zhukovskogo. M. Mayakovskaya. Tel: 929 6692. Free entrance.
TITLE: CHERNOV’S CHOICE
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A gay group will picket Russian concerts by Madonna, who declined an invitation to participate in the boycott of St. Petersburg announced as a result of a notorious anti-gay law signed into law in the city earlier this month.
The appeal to Madonna was made by journalist Masha Gessen, who asked international artists and companies to join the boycott on the New York Times Latitude blog website. Gessen hopes that economic pressure on the popular tourist center might have the effect that protests failed to.
“I am especially asking you not to go [to St. Petersburg] if you are the singer Madonna, who is scheduled to play a concert there on Aug. 9,” she wrote.
The pop diva reacted promptly, but chose rhetoric rather than taking real action (and losing the fees for her performance).
“I’m a freedom fighter,” Madonna wrote on Facebook last week.
“I will come to St. Petersburg to speak up for the gay community, to support the gay community and to give strength and inspiration to anyone who is or feels opressed (sic).
“I don’t run away from adversity. I will speak during my show about this ridiculous atrocity.”
She did not mention the boycott in her statement.
The next day, a Russian-Belarusian gay rights group accused Madonna of hypocrisy and said they would picket her shows.
The group, which has been holding gay pride events in Moscow and St. Petersburg since 2009, said it would hold its next Slavic Gay Pride in the form of two public protests during Madonna’s concerts in Moscow and St. Petersburg — on Aug. 7 and Aug. 9, respectively.
According to activist Nikolai Alexeyev, Madonna’s refusal to join the boycott came as no surprise.
“In the wake of ex-Mayor [Yury] Luzhkov’s bans on gay pride events in Moscow, Madonna thanked him from the stage […] for a chance to perform in the Russian capital.”
Even if Madonna does address the issue as promised, her words “will drown in the crowd,” Alexeyev said.
“The law will remain in effect, Madonna will go home, and the Russian LGBT community will continue to be harassed even more strongly. City homophobes will not feel any economic effect from such statements.”
Alexeyev said that international stars come to stuff their pockets with millions of dollars, thus backing the “policy of sheer homophobia promoted by the current authorities.”
“In the West, they can’t even dream of the kind of fees they get in Russia,” he added.
But Madonna has a vested interest in Russia, apart from the fees.
According to Bloomberg Business, these include Hard Candy, a Madonna-themed upscale fitness center that she opened in Moscow last year near the Kremlin, and plans to open another in St. Petersburg.
No, Madonna, you are not a freedom fighter. You are a material girl.
TITLE: The art of revival
AUTHOR: By Shura Collinson
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A century after the most daring artistic minds of Russia joined forces under the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and took Europe by storm with the arts extravaganza that came to be known collectively as the Russian Seasons, the ballets are returning to the city of their birth.
As part of the 21st-Century Russian Seasons in Honor of Maris Liepa ballet festival, sets, costumes and decorations designed by artists such as Alexandre Benois, Leon Bakst and Nikolai Roerich for the original stagings have been painstakingly recreated.
The festival is dedicated to what would have been the 75th birthday of the award-winning Soviet-Latvian dancer and choreographer Maris Liepa.
“The Russian Seasons were born here,” said Liepa’s son Andris, himself a former star dancer at both the Mariinsky and Bolshoi theaters, at a press conference devoted to the festival being held in his father’s honor. Andris Liepa has devoted a large part of his career to resurrecting the Russian Seasons ballets in their original form, together with the Kremlin Ballet troupe and other international ballet stars.
“Everything Diaghilev took to Paris, everything that later came to be considered as French, was created here: The costumes, the sets, even the rehearsals were held here. So St. Petersburg should see what we are doing,” said Liepa.
“After the revolution, virtually all the works went to the West, and the best representatives of Russian culture — all the artists, composers, choreographers — all went to the West. Very few remained, and those who did couldn’t officially say they were the heirs to [choreographer Mikhail] Fokin.
“Only in 1992, thanks to the Lunacharsky Library [now the St. Petersburg State Theater Library], was I able to see things that Mikhail Fokin had had sent to Leningrad. They hadn’t been seen by anyone since 1957. When Perestroika happened, I was the first person allowed to see these unique things,” he said.
The festival opens on April 2 with a gala concert at Oktyabrsky Concert Hall featuring one-act ballets that Maris Liepa danced in during his career. The concert will begin with “Chopiniana,” a one-act ballet choreographed by Fokin to music by Frederic Chopin for Diaghilev’s Russian Seasons. The lead role will be danced by Bolshoi Ballet star Nikolai Tsiskaridze.
“The gala evening is a choreographic homage to my father,” said Liepa. “‘Chopiniana’ was his favorite ballet. Our version recreates the decorations designed by Alexandre Benois.”
Andris’ sister Ilze will also take part in the tribute to her father, dancing the leading role in the ballet suite “Polovtsian Dances” on the same evening, in a staging that uses replicas of the costumes designed by Roerich.
The gala concert will also include a duet from “The Firebird” and the showing of a 10-minute excerpt from Nikita Tikhonov’s film dedicated to Maris Liepa, enabling audiences to see Liepa himself dance.
For the three remaining evenings of the festival — April 3, 4 and 5 — the action moves to the scene of the Mikhailovsky Theater, where the ballets “Le Pavillon d’Armide,” which opened Diaghilev’s Russian Season in 1909 at Paris’ Theatre du Chatelet, and “Scheherazade” will be performed on three consecutive nights.
“Scheherazade,” based on the story of “One Thousand and One Nights” and choreographed by Fokin to music by Rimsky-Korsakov, was one of the first Russian Seasons ballets to be recreated by Andris Liepa. His staging uses decorations based on those designed by Bakst, and once again stars Tsiskaridze and Ilze Liepa.
“Le Pavillon d’Armide,” in which a young man dreams that he enters a tapestry hanging on his wall, was also shown at the first Diaghilev. PS. festival held in the city in 2009. But while that staging was a brand new version choreographed by the U.S. choreographer John Neumeier, for the production to be shown in the city next week, costumes and decorations have been painstakingly recreated from the original show, working from sketches by Benois and from photographs. The original choreography was lost years ago, but Lithuanian choreographer Jurijus Smoriginas has created new moves to the original music by Nikolai Tcherepnin.
“When we called Nikolai Tcherepnin’s grandson in the U.S., he said, ‘In 25 years, you’re the first people to get in contact and ask us for material from that ballet.’ That’s a real shame,” said Liepa.
The names of Diaghilev, Fokin, Nijinsky and many other leading lights of Russian ballet were dimmed in their native country for decades after they chose to stay in the West following the revolution. But now, with the Diaghilev. P.S. festival set to become a regular event and projects such as Liepa’s, Russian audiences are getting more and more opportunities to see what their country gave the world a century ago. The ballets are, however, not only interesting from a historical point of view.
“It’s hard to believe that “The Firebird” and “Scheherazade” are a hundred years old,” said Liepa. “Diaghilev was several generations ahead. No one who sees them now says they’re not modern.”
The 21st-Century Russian Seasons in Honor of Maris Liepa ballet festival runs from April 2 to April 5 at the
Oktyabrsky Concert Hall and Mikhailovsky Theater. For more information, see www.mikhailovsky.ru and www.bkz.ru.
TITLE: the word’s worth: A phenomenon missing from the dictionary
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: Commuter: æèòåëü ïðèãîðîäà, åæåäíåâíî åçäÿùèé íà ðàáîòó â ãîðîä
Common wisdom has it that when a new object or concept appears in a language milieu, the speakers of that language get cracking and come up with a name for it.
Sometimes in Russia, people take the easy route — they just Russify the foreign name. So that electric box on your kitchen counter is called òîñòåð (toaster).
Sometimes they come up with a homegrown name — or several. Garlic presses are called ÷åñíîêîäàâèëêà, ÷åñíîêîäàâêà (both derived from the word for garlic — ÷åñíîê — and the verb äàâèòü — to press), ïðåññ äëÿ ÷åñíîêà (literally “press for garlic”), or even ÷åñíîêîâûæèìàëêà (literally “garlic juicer”). At some point in the future, the vast Russian nation will, in some mysterious unspoken way, come to an agreement, and one of those names will stick.
But sometimes there is a time lag between the appearance of a phenomenon and a word for it.
Take commuting, commuters and commutes. Every morning and evening, the roads leading in and out of every major Russian city are packed bumper to bumper with commuters who live outside the city limits and commute every day to and from work. The phenomenon definitely exists. And yet speakers of Russian apparently don’t feel the need to come up with a way to describe it in a word or two.
In Russian, a commuter is ÷åëîâåê, êîòîðûé êàæäûé äåíü åçäèò èç ïðèãîðîäà â ãîðîä íà ðàáîòó (someone who travels to work from a suburb to the city every day). The question “How long is your commute?” might be Ñêîëüêî âðåìåíè âû òðàòèòå íà äîðîãó íà ðàáîòó? (How much time do you spend getting to work?). Or the more informal: Ñêîëüêî âðåìåíè äîáèðàòüñÿ èç äîìà äî ðàáîòû? (How long does it take to get from home to work?)
That said, there are ways to describe various means of commuting in Russian. A commuter train is ýëåêòðè÷êà. A commuter bus is ðåéñîâûé àâòîáóñ. A commuter parking lot is ïåðåõâàòûâàþùèé ïàðêèíã (literally “intercept parking”).
But what do you call the person using these services? Ïðèåçæèé (new arrival) doesn’t work — that’s someone who moves to the city. ×åëíîê means a shuttle trader, not an oil company exec with a suburban mansion. Right now you call this person: æèòåëü ïðèãîðîäà, ðàáîòàþùèé â ãîðîäå (a suburbanite working in the city).
Another area in which the Russian language hasn’t caught up with reality is personal relations. What do you call your significant other — that is, the person with whom you share a serious, committed, long-term relationship without marriage? Russians scratch their heads. Ëþáîâíèê/ëþáîâíèöà (lover)? Sounds like a fling. Ïàðòí¸ð (partner)? That’s a business associate. Êîìïàíüîí/êà (companion)? Sounds like either a 19th-century spinster hired to keep the lady of the house company or the guy you work with. Ñîæèòåëü/íèöà (co-inhabitant)? Sounds like you’re in a police lineup. Áîéôðåíä/ã¸ðëôðåíä (boyfriend/girlfriend)? Okay if you’re 14; ridiculous when you’re 50. Äðóã/ïîäðóãà (friend)? Needs to be said with mock solemnity and doesn’t necessarily mean live-in relations.
The Russians I know who have long-term, live-in partners simply call themselves ìóæ è æåíà (husband and wife), and only clarify if it’s necessary: íî ìû íå ðàñïèñàëèñü (but we haven’t registered). Or they just refer to each other as ìîé and ìîÿ (my) — and let someone else worry about the noun.
How will this all play out? Check back in 50 years.
Michele A. Berdy, a Moscow-based translator and interpreter, is author of “The Russian Word’s Worth” (Glas), a collection of her columns.
TITLE: Dance of the robots
AUTHOR: By Tatyana Sochiva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: After conquering Moscow, the Aluminum Show will be performed for the first time in St. Petersburg at the Lensoviet House of Culture on March 28.
Combining visual theater with modern dance, acrobatics, special effects and puppetry, the Aluminum Show is often compared to Blue Man Group, Stomp and Cirque du Soleil.
The avant-garde performance tells the futuristic tale of a young machine looking for its parents. During its travel adventures through a surreal and fascinating world of aluminum, the machine meets a human friend, who helps it to get back home.
The performance is geared toward both children and adults thanks to its striking visuals, humorous scenes and an interactive aspect that allows the audience to touch unusual aluminum objects during the performance. It is no coincidence that the show is named after this metal; all of the costumes and set were made from a great variety of aluminum items.
The Aluminum Show was created in 2003 by Israeli dancer Ilan Azriel. The spectacle gained fame around the world after its premiere at the Israel Festival in Jerusalem. The show credits its success to the combined efforts of composer Ivri Lider, costume designer Yaron Zino, choreographer Una Holbrook and many others.
The Aluminum Show runs from March 28 through April. 1 at Lensoviet House of Culture at 42 Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt. Tel. 346 0438. M. Petrogradskaya. www.lensoveta.ru.
TITLE: Life through a lens
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Kravtsova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: While contemporary life in its entirety can’t be packaged into just 350 photos, the State Russian Museum has managed to capture a decent glimpse of modern Russia with the Second Photobiennale of Modern Photography.
For the second time, the Russian Museum is showcasing the richness of contemporary photography in Russia. The Second Photobiennale of Modern Photography is an exhibit without limitations: It shows the work of photographers of many different ages and levels of experience, who touch upon various themes in their images and use a variety of techniques. There are both black and white photos and color images, posing subjects and spur-of-the-moment shots.
“The format of a photo biennale allows people to reflect on the full variety of techniques, genres and styles of modern photo art,” the exhibit’s organizers said.
The photo biennale aims not to set photographers apart from one another, but rather to highlight the overall state of Russian photographic art today. Therefore, the only requirement for participating in the exhibit was that the photographer be a Russian citizen. The Russian Museum received about 2,000 electronic images from photographers from across the country. One thousand of them made it through to the second round, and 760 of those 1,000 were printed and included in the biennale catalogue. Only 350 of the submitted photographs are on display at the Russian Museum’s Marble Palace.
The exhibition itself is broken down into nine separate themes: Faces, Landscapes, Still-Life, The Beauty of the Body, the City, Believers, Everyday Life, the Stage and the Imaginary.
As part of the “Faces” collection, photo portraits focusing on the human face are presented in a variety of ways. The shots range from older-looking portraits to those that have been digitally enhanced to give them more complex backgrounds. Young and old, smiling and gloomy, tender and embittered — these are the faces of contemporary Russia.
After the biennale finishes at the end of May, some of the pieces will become part of the museum’s permanent collection. Organizers also plan to incorporate some of the photos in other projects. It has already been decided that the photographs from the Faces section will help to comprise “Faces of Russia,” a permanent exhibition of the Russian Museum that will be on display at the Mikhailovsky Castle.
The “Landscape” section of the exhibit captures the urban beauty of nature found in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris and the Summer Gardens in St. Petersburg, as well as the simple beauty of the Russian provinces.
The “Still-Life” section showcases photographs that resemble oil paintings as well as more psychedelic-looking pieces. In “the City,” urban landscapes are paired with snapshots of different aspects of city life, streets and embankments.
“Believers” is dedicated to Orthodox Russia and contains portraits of regular church-goers, church employees and those who attend church more rarely. One such portrait is that of a child holding a church candle for what appears to be the first time in his life.
“Everyday Life” is the section full of the most contradictions, as it shows the contrast between the lives of different people in various places around the world: Here both the dispirited life of a Russian province can be seen alongside a gay parade in London.
The most experimental photographs, often heavily edited, are exhibited in “the Imaginary.”
According to Maria Panova, a research assistant in the modern photography department of the Russian Museum, the Second Photo Biennale is a parade of photography whose main goal is to show interesting and diverse images.
The exhibit organizers emphasized that photography is important not only for its artistic value, but also as a unique tool in capturing moments in history.
“It is a Russian Museum tradition to select not only masterpieces, but works that will have historic value in the future,” said Yevgenia Petrova, assistant director of research at the Russian Museum.
Visitors to the show can vote for their favorite image, and the author of the winning photograph will be awarded a prize.
“The Second Photobiennale of Modern Photography” runs through the end of May at the State Russian Museum’s Marble Palace, 5/1 Millionnaya Ulitsa M. Admiralteiskaya. Tel. 595 4248. www.rusmuseum.ru.
TITLE: in the spotlight: When migration laws meet music
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
TEXT: When British boy band of the 1990s East 17, and euro pop acts Snap, La Bouche and Culture Beat walked off after a nostalgic disco night at Moscow’s Olimpiisky Sports Complex this month, they had a very unpleasant surprise. The Federal Migration Service locked them in their dressing rooms and fined them for working on tourist visas.
It was an eye-opening story, not just to find out what East 17 are up to these days. People in the music business came out to say this was common practice, despite the reported million-dollar fees for top stars who perform at private parties.
The promoters, Rosdance, swore blind that the groups were performing for free for publicity, Channel One television reported. But the migration service did not really buy this version since the concert had tickets on sale.
“They could just as easily walk into the dressing room of Madonna or Paul McCartney. Such methods have a negative effect on the country’s image,” organizer Alexander Uneshkin complained to Kommersant.
Russian media joked about the fact that touring musicians were in a similar position to Central Asian laborers on building sites.
Channel One showed Jacky Sangster from German dance act Culture Beat, which had a hit back in the 1990s with “Mr. Vain,” indignantly explaining that her passport was at her hotel. With admirable chutzpah, she apparently told the channel that it would have to pay to film her. An organizer told Kommersant that she burst into tears from stress, however.
In the end, the musicians were fined just 3,000 rubles ($100) each, while the migration service could fine the organizers up to 800,000 rubles per musician, Channel One reported.
People in the music industry said the raid had exposed a dirty little secret, but others said the paperwork and fees for issuing the proper papers would swallow up the profits from all but the biggest stars.
“The vast majority of musicians come to Russia not as professionals but as tourists. Possibly this does not affect big stars and stadium concerts … but it directly affects practically all of those who perform in clubs,” Afisha magazine wrote.
To do things properly, Kommersant wrote, the organizers would have to get a permit to hire foreigners and then send in copies of the musicians’ exam certificates and test results for HIV, syphilis and tuberculosis. Of course these procedures are just as unpleasant for all the other foreigners who go through them, but somehow Russia worries more about Madonna.
Stars such as Madonna, who is set to tour Russia in August, contribute huge sums to the budget because they are paying the nonresident tax rate of 30 percent, Komsomolskaya Pravda wrote. But it warned that Madonna might have a sense of “shop floor solidarity” with her fellow musicians and pull out after the scandal.
Meanwhile, Madonna found herself caught up in another Russian scandal. Journalist Masha Gessen in a New York Times blog Monday urged her to cancel a concert in Saint Petersburg because of the city’s new law fining people for propaganda of homosexuality to minors, a vague concept that could be used to outlaw any public gay rights event.
But Madonna responded on Facebook, saying she wanted to support the gay community and would raise the “ridiculous” law during her concert. Gay rights campaigner Nikolai Alexeyev dismissed this, saying her words on stage would mean nothing while the economic effect of canceling the concert would be felt by the authorities. But in a country where no celebrity with a fraction of Madonna’s following ever backs gay rights, I think whatever she says will get through.
TITLE: THE DISH: Belinskogo 6
AUTHOR: By Shura Collinson
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Tapas tavern
The creative minds behind a cozy little tapas bar on Ulitsa Belinskogo near the circus have opted to forego the quest for an original or witty name in favor of a cunningly laconic approach: By making the restaurant’s name — Belinskogo 6 — the same as its address, they have succeeded in making it both memorable and easy to locate.
In the same no-frills approach, the menu is displayed on a giant board on the outside wall for all to see, allowing potential diners to see what exactly their options are before setting foot inside. If the prospect of tapas priced from 50 to 130 rubles and equally reasonably priced wok and pasta dishes is enough to get your stomach growling in anticipation, then this is the place for you.
With its low ceiling, arches and curtains dividing sections of the interior, Belinskogo 6, which opened at the end of last year, could be a real-life basement tapas bar in Barcelona. Large decorative paper stars suspended in the windows enable diners to see out onto Ulitsa Belinskogo without feeling like they are exposed for all to see, while the cozy effect is completed by the sanded wooden floor, flickering candles, ashtrays made out of warped wine bottles, and box-style shelves holding books, wine and knick-knacks. The only jarring elements are the unfortunate black wallpaper, mirrors in tacky white frames and beaded wall lights inexplicably beloved by restaurants around the city, and in this case, almost certainly the legacy of the premises’ previous occupant, the Japanese restaurant Shabu-Shabu.
The Oriental flavor also lives on in the compact menu, which alongside hot and cold tapas, salads, pasta and meat and fish dishes — all very reasonably priced — features a wok section, with a choice of noodles. Buckwheat noodles with chicken and cep mushrooms (290 rubles, $10) hit the spot with a mixture of sesame seeds, cherry tomatoes, carrots, bell pepper and celery, though they might be a little too salty for some tastes, seemingly as a result of having been fried in soy sauce.
The slightly smoky, homely feel to Belinskogo 6 makes it hard to resist ordering a bottle of wine and some tapas to go with it, in true Spanish style. From the cold tapas dishes, sun-dried tomatoes with cheese (90 rubles, $3) were two tiny circles of bread spread with cream cheese and topped with tomatoes. They were delightfully piquant, but on the miniature side, even by tapas standards, and would need to be ordered by the dozen to even begin to mop up a glass of wine. The wine itself, a bottle of Pinot Grigiot priced at 1,200 rubles ($42), was brought out together with a wine cooler that niftily attaches to the side of the table. This turned out to be of crucial importance, since the wine was mystifyingly served at room temperature.
From the hot tapas range, eggplant with garlic and cheese (90 rubles, $3) was slightly more substantial. The delicately folded piece of eggplant was firm and well cooked, stuffed with a cheese and garlic sauce that was thankfully not too overwhelming, and topped with tomato sauce and Parmesan, making it resemble a miniature eggplant Parmigiana. Continuing the Italian — and eggplant — theme, pasta alla Norma (230 rubles, $8), was another success, with the sauce pleasantly offset by some bitter fresh basil. Sicilian tomato soup with seafood (290 rubles, $10), the waiter promised, could be served spicy or not spicy, but despite a request for the former, was lacking in punch, though this did not really detract from its overall quality.
In keeping with another great Spanish tradition, Belinskogo 6 offers a variety of lunch deals, ranging from salad plus drink for 150 rubles ($5.20), to salad, soup and main course for 310 rubles ($10.70).
With its cozy interior, genuinely pleasant and welcoming staff, and the soothing sound of old crooners from the 1940s serenading diners gently over the speakers, the restaurant makes a great place to hide away from the world. Belinskogo 6 in fact shares its address with another restaurant — the recently opened but already popular Georgian eatery Azhab Sandal — and is flanked on its other side by Novaya Istoriya. It seems that Ulitsa Belinskogo is rapidly becoming a culinary hotspot of the city.