SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1703 (14), Wednesday, April 11, 2012
**************************************************************************


TITLE: Anti-Gay Law Used for 1st Time Against Protesters
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg’s notorious anti-gay law was put into practice for the first time last week, when two men arrested Saturday during a demo near Oktyabrsky Concert Hall were charged with “promoting sodomy, lesbianism, bisexuality and transgenderism among minors.” 
Out of eight protesters, two were detained because the policemen found their posters to be illegal under the new law, in force since March 17. They were also charged with failing to obey a police officer’s lawful orders — an offense punishable by up to 15 days in prison.
Igor Kochetkov, chair of the LGBT rights group Vykhod (Coming Out), held a poster reading “No to hushing up hate crimes against gays and lesbians,” while Sergei Kondrashov’s placard read “Our family friend is a lesbian, my wife and I love and respect her. Her way of life is normal, just like ours, and her family is socially equal to ours.”
(An official clarification of the law stated that “promoting sodomy” included claims that non-traditional marital relationships were socially equal to traditional marriages.)
Both Kochetkov and Kondrashov were detained and held at a police precinct for about five hours. On Monday, the first court hearing was held, with the next one scheduled for April 16. 
“The magistrate judge asked me whether I saw my actions as ‘promotion,’” Kochetkov said Tuesday.
“I said, yes, I see it as promotion of the social equality of homosexual and heterosexual relationships, but don’t consider myself guilty, because firstly, there were no minors around, and secondly, the law itself contradicts federal legislation, so I was not obliged to obey it.”
Kondrashov’s reasoning was that the law was “anti-constitutional and as such not applicable on the territory of Russia and St. Petersburg.”
Earlier, the authorities of four city districts refused to authorize the demo, which was part of the “Week against State Homophobia.” 
The Moskovsky district administration said the application submitted did not meet formal requirements for such documents, while the Petrogradsky district administration and City Hall said that other public events had been authorized to take place on the same sites at the same time or earlier, and suggested the remote Petrovsky and Polyustrovsky parks, respectively, as alternatives.
But the Central district based its refusal directly on the “gay promotion.” 
“We inform you that according to the law […], public actions aimed at promoting sodomy, lesbianism, transgenderism and pedophilia to form distorted views about the social equality of traditional and non-traditional marital relationships in society are forbidden,” Maria Shcherbakova, head of the district administration wrote. “In accordance with the above, authorization of the said public event is not possible.”
On April 2, Kochetkov filed a lawsuit with the City Court to declare the law null and void for contradicting federal legislation, promoting social inequality and being open to arbitrary interpretation and use. The court accepted the lawsuit but postponed the proceedings until April 27, Coming Out’s publicist Olga Lenkova said Tuesday.
In an interview with The St. Petersburg Times last month, Legislative Assembly deputy Vitaly Milonov, a United Russia party member who authored the law in November, denied that the law would be used against LGBT rights rallies, adding that freedom of assembly is guaranteed by the constitution and regulated by the law on public assemblies.
On Thursday, two other men, the Moscow gay pride activists Alexei Kiselyov and Kirill Nepomnyashchy were arrested for holding posters reading “Gay is normal” near the Anichkov Palace, home of the Palace of Youth Creativity, on Nevsky Prospekt.
The activists, who were held in a police precinct until a court hearing the next day, were released by the magistrate judge, who declined to hear the “promotion” charges due to a lack of evidence, and ordered police cases into violating the rules of holding public assemblies and disobeying police orders to be sent to the relevant courts in Moscow, where the activists live.
On April 4, the LGBT activists came under attack from what they described as nationalists and Orthodox radicals near the Oktyabrsky district court where the first hearing was held in a defamation lawsuit filed by Moscow activist Nikolai Alexeyev against Milonov.
Alexeyev, the founder of the Moscow gay pride movement and Gayrussia.ru LGBT rights project, is seeking 1 million rubles ($33,725) in damages to his reputation after Milonov called him a “girl” and suggested that Alexeyev’s activities were financed from abroad.
Milonov was not present, and was represented by Anatoly Artyukh, who introduced himself as Milonov’s assistant. Artyukh, the local leader of the People’s Assembly, a nationalist Orthodox organization, earlier called for the return of a Soviet law that punished gays with prison terms and was abolished in 1993.
As the activists were leaving the court after the hearing, several men in black hoods started throwing eggs at them and shouting homophobic slogans. Several eggs hit Ravnopraviye (Equality) LGBT rights group leader Yury Gavrikov, including one in the head.
A group of women stood near the court with a placard reading “Lechers, hands off of our children” and shouted threats at the activists.
The police and court bailiffs present at the scene did not make any attempt to stop or detain the attackers.
On Monday, Alexeyev filed a complaint with the St. Petersburg prosecutor, asking him to file a criminal case against the attackers. 
Alexeyev also called on the police to provide security to protect the activists during the next hearing, due April 19.

TITLE: City Parliament Elects Ombudsman
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Is Alexander Shishlov, St. Petersburg’s newly elected ombudsman, a dark horse? This question seems too difficult to answer for many players on the local political scene. 
The veteran Yabloko politician, who until recently served as an advisor for the Russian representative office to the OSCE and other international organizations in Vienna, was proposed for the job by City Governor Georgy Poltavchenko.
The St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly voted overwhelmingly for Shishlov in the second round of voting for a city ombudsman on April 4. Forty-five of the parliament’s 50 lawmakers voted for him. His rival in the finals was Alexander Ulanov, deputy head of the parliament’s legal department.
Eleven candidates took part in the elections for the ombudsman, including some of the city’s most respected human rights advocates such as Natalya Yevdokimova, head of the St. Petersburg Human Rights Council, and Rima Sharifullina, head of the non-governmental organization Egida.
It looked suspicious to some observers from the start that Shishlov, despite his Yabloko membership, had the support of Poltavchenko rather than of Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky. Furthermore, the local branch of Yabloko appeared to be supporting Shishlov’s rival, Yevdokimova. Yevdokimova, herself a member of the Yabloko party, had headed the Social Policy commission at the city parliament for eight years.
Maxim Reznik, head of the Yabloko faction in the city parliament, said he felt it would be unfair to give the job to Shishlov, who had been absent from St. Petersburg and Russia for the past seven years. Reznik argued that Shishlov’s grasp of the local political situation is not profound enough to be efficient in the job, and that he lacks what some of his rivals have in abundance: First-hand experience in defending human rights.  
Speaking nearly a week before the start of the ombudsman election campaign, Konstantin Smirnov, a lawmaker from the Communist Party faction, said that the vote itself in the current political situation is nothing more than a technicality. The candidate is de facto chosen before the start of the campaign, and therefore, if the campaign is officially announced, the deal has been done, he argued.
“I wouldn’t be revealing any great secret if I said that to announce the competition, the key factions need to already know who the main candidates will be and who they will support,” Smirnov said at the end of February.
And this is exactly the scenario that followed.
“Shishlov’s name was announced to us in a no-nonsense manner; I would say we were simply informed that, well, this is what is happening,” said Boris Vishnevsky, a member of the Yabloko faction in the city parliament.
One of the first signals that Shishlov gave after winning the election was that he is not going to be a very public person. “I need to call my wife,” was all he offered to a group of reporters who waited for him to talk after the results of the vote were announced. Whether this is evasiveness, lack of confidence or anything else is yet to be seen. What is certain is that the local press would like to hear more from Shishlov than when he was in Vienna about the many cases requiring his intervention. 
“You must avoid any political bias and please make sure that you maintain an equal distance from all political parties,” was the blessing-cum-warning that Shishlov received from Vyacheslav Makarov, the speaker of the city’s Legislative Assembly, a long-standing United Russia politician and one of the fiercest critics of the liberal camp.
“Everyone knew that Natalya Yevdokimova and other, openly anti-Smolny [City Hall] candidates did not stand a chance in these elections,” Smirnov said. “The authorities are allergic to their very names.  However much experience a human rights advocate may have in defending people’s rights, if this person is seen as a marginal politician by the authorities, the ombudsman has zero chance of being heard.”
Yabloko’s Vishnevsky is convinced that Shishlov will be a huge step forward from the previous two local ombudsmen, United Russia politician Igor Mikhailov, who was fired from the job amid a scandal, and Alexei Kozyrev, head of the St. Petersburg Public Council, who was nicknamed “placebo” for his lack of action.
“I do not think that the fact that the governor recommended Shishlov makes him less of a decent person,” said Vishnevsky. “I have known him for decades and he is someone who would not compromise his dignity.”

TITLE: Swiss Hospitality Academy Aims to Improve Standards
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A new business school is set to open in the city on April 11 with the goal of bringing the best of European hospitality to Russia. 
The man behind the SwissAm Hospitality Business School is Walter Spaltenstein, the owner of a hospitality school in Lucerne, Switzerland.
During a visit to St. Petersburg last year, Spaltenstein recognized the city’s potential for tourism. He was however disappointed by the quality of service provided by waiters, hotel clerks and hotel and restaurant managers. 
“St. Petersburg is ... a city rich in history and tourism and therefore a perfect place to teach hospitality,” Spaltenstein said.
 “There has been a lot of improvement in hospitality over the past few years here. However, with many new international hotel chains moving into the market, there will be a demand for educated and qualified people in all areas of this industry. The program offered, with its European and American structure, will influence and increase the level of services offered,” he said.
The school promises to introduce Western technology and educational standards into its local program. Those who complete the program will receive a foreign diploma that will enable them to work in both Europe and the U.S. All courses will be taught in English.
Graduates of the program will receive diplomas in International Hospitality Management and in Hospitality Management for Professionals.  
The school’s partners include the Swiss School of Tourism and Hospitality and the Institute of Culinary Education in the U.S. These partnerships will allow the school to invite foreign tutors and promote internship programs.
“We will have regular career fairs so that local hotel and restaurant chains can interview and hire our students, and we will invite representatives from international hotels and other hospitality-related industries so that we can provide opportunities to students who would like to work in other countries,” Spaltenstein said.
The school is planning to enroll between 200 and 300 students. The Culinary Arts program costs $4,000 per semester and the International Hospitality Management program $7,850.
Sergei Korneyev, deputy head of the Russian Tourism Industry Union, said the school would see high demand.
“Today, employers in the hospitality industry usually need people with work experience, and this new school will not only give its students a good education but also good practical opportunities,” Korneyev said.
“At the same time, while the city has managed to bring most of the world’s best known brands in hospitality, trade and air travel to St. Petersburg, there is still a trend among those brands to prefer foreign management in their institutions. Then the management also wants to hire people who were educated at schools known to them. Therefore this new school will provide more opportunities for its local graduates to find jobs at these known brands,” he said.

TITLE: Puzzling UFO-Like Lights Over City Confuse Residents
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg residents were scratching their heads about the existence of UFOs on Tuesday after seeing mysterious lights hover over their city overnight. 
At least four people in the north of the city captured the unidentified lights on video on Monday night and posted them on YouTube. 
“I filmed this out of the window in the evening,” wrote one person, who identified himself only as Newnarva. “There were two objects. After I ran for my camera, only one was left.” 
The 27-second video, titled “UFO or What Is It?” shows four bright lights hovering in the pale evening sky to the side of a tall building before disappearing behind it. 
One viewer wrote under the video that he also had seen the lights but had not managed to film them. 
Similar videos of unidentified lights were uploaded by YouTube users stepacademymail, monplezirvideo and Marina Muskina. Voices can be heard in the videos trying to make sense of the lights. 
The BaltInfo news agency said the whole city was discussing the sightings and that its offices had received phone calls from worried residents. 
“My daughter who lives over on Grazhdanke told me about a UFO,” one caller said. “I live on Komendantsky Prospekt. I looked out the window and also clearly saw an orange spot. Then one spot separated and plummeted downward. The spot flickered, disappeared and reappeared. It is visible in various neighborhoods.” 
At least one Leningrad region resident also claimed to have seen a UFO on Monday night. The person, ckvizecrew, wrote that the lights appeared over the Leningrad region around 6 and 7 p.m. and, after hovering for a while, sank toward the Earth for a possible landing. 
Little can be seen in the 13-minute video other than bright orange points of light floating in pitch blackness. Male and female voices can be heard excitedly talking about what they are seeing. 
While the authorities have not weighed in on the sightings, a St. Petersburg scientist said last month that aliens probably keep their distance from humans. 
“Aliens look at us as if we are idiots, undeveloped people,” said Sergei Smirnov of the prestigious Pulkovo Observatory outside St. Petersburg. “Perhaps they have fenced us in with their own sort of screen for the whole galaxy and are sending warnings to hundreds of billions of stars that the civilization near the Dwarf star, which we call the Sun, is dangerous.”

TITLE: Green Experiment Kicks Off
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A journalist and two volunteers will start living a Greenpeace-approved ecological way of life in St. Petersburg this week.
For two weeks from April 9 to April 23, Anna Ivanova, PR director of Metro newspaper, and two other volunteers will follow Greenpeace recommendations in their daily lives and write online about their achievements and difficulties, Greenpeace said.
The participants will abstain from using disposable plastic bags, opt to buy products with less packaging, separate and recycle their garbage and do more to help protect the environment.
Maria Musatova, a spokeswoman for the Greenpeace office in St. Petersburg, said that by doing this the organization hopes to show people that “an ecologically-minded life is possible not only once a year, but all year round.”
The experiment is a part of a national event called “Green Weekend,” organized by Greenpeace to encourage people to protect the environment.
Participants in the event, which runs from April 1 to May 20, are being asked to do things such as separate and recycle their garbage, hang up posters about conserving resources at home and at the office, or organize a park, forest or coastal clean-up day.
There are many other ways in which participants can do their part in saving the environment, Greenpeace said.
People can use energy-saving light bulbs that require three to five times less electrical energy than regular light bulbs. Greenpeace reminds people however, that energy saving bulbs should not be thrown away with regular garbage as they are considered to be dangerous waste.
The environmental organization recommends switching off computers and other electric devices completely at night as they use energy even when in sleep mode.
“Over a year the cost of energy used by devices in sleep mode can reach up to several thousand rubles. Unplug those devices when you aren’t using them,” Greenpeace recommends.  
The organization also recommends that cell phone chargers be unplugged when not in use.
Greenpeace provides information on its website about where recyclable materials can be deposited in an attempt to encourage people to recycle and make it easier to do so.  
“Garbage dumps continue to pollute the environment for more than 100 years after they are closed. Waste burning plants turn some of the burnt waste into more toxic substances than the garbage that it once was, and release it into the environment,” Greenpeace said.
In order to decrease the volume of waste, Greenpeace recommends using reusable bags when shopping, and buying goods made of recyclable materials.
When buying home appliances, energy saving models, marked with A, A+ or A++, are an earth-friendly choice and can make a big difference. A standard refrigerator made 15 to 20 years ago uses twice as much energy as modern models.
The regular defrosting of refrigerators also enables them to use much less energy, because when they are filled with ice, they use far more, Greenpeace said.
Other ways to conserve energy include covering pans while cooking, selecting a lower temperature setting on the washing machine, washing only full loads of clothes and leaving clothes to dry naturally instead of using an electric dryer.
“If a family of four stops using a dryer it will save up to 480 kilowatts and prevent the emission of 300 kilograms of CO2,” Greenpeace said.
Taking a shower instead of a bath, using toilet paper made of recycled materials and buying high-quality clothes that last longer can also help to save the environment.
“Using toilet paper made primarily of cellulose sends more than 10,000 hectares of Russian forests to the sewers every year,” Greenpeace said.
The use of rechargeable batteries instead of disposable ones can help save the environment from massive pollution. Every year Moscow alone throws away up to 15 million batteries, and the chemicals in one battery can intoxicate one meter of soil.
Eating less meat also helps to decrease energy consumption, as 18 percent of greenhouse gases are produced as a result of animal husbandry. Both the production of manure and animal feed requires high volumes of energy. Buying locally grown products reduces the necessity of long-distance cargo transportation of food made in other regions and countries.
Transportation can also play a large role in harming the environment. Greenpeace recommends walking more, riding bikes, using public transport or at least choosing energy saving cars to decrease human impact. The organization also advises taking vacations near home instead of flying to exotic regions as planes emit large volumes of greenhouse gases.

<i>Online reports from the environmental ‘test drive’ will be available on Greenpeace’s website at http://gp-russia.livejournal.com.</i>

TITLE: Scouts Seek Young Talent At International Hockey Grand Prix
AUTHOR: By Christopher Hamilton
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Future hockey stars will take the ice at the Yubilieny Sports Palace from Wednesday through Saturday, when junior teams from Russia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Slovakia and Sweden will join Team St. Petersburg to compete in the 34th annual St. Petersburg Grand Prix (Bolshoi Prix).
It’s no secret that the tournament attracts NHL scouts and specialists hoping to evaluate young players before the NHL draft, which takes place in June. This year, Scotty Bowmen, Barry Smith and Lou Vairo, who are currently in St. Petersburg attending a forum on “innovative technology in the field of specialist hockey equipment, modern training methods, functional diagnostics and recuperation processes for athletes,” are expected to attend some of the games. 
Some of the tournament’s more prominent previous participants include Sergei Federov, Dominik Hasek, Vladimir Konstantinov, Darius Kasparaitis, Maxim Sushinsky and Sandis Ozolinsh.
Weekdays see two games daily, at 4:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday will feature three games to determine the final standings, at 12 p.m., 3.30 p.m. and 7 p.m. 
This is the first time the Bolshoi Priz has been held since 2008, when the organizers failed to find a main sponsor. The first Bolshoi Priz, then known as the Four Nations Tournament, was held in Riga in 1975 and moved to St. Petersburg the next year. It is the third oldest annual hockey competition and was originally conceived as a testing ground for national B teams of Europe’s leading ice-hockey powers. Players proving themselves at the tournament were often subsequently called up to fill the rosters of the national A teams, which were preparing for the World Championships. In the 1990s and 2000s the tournament evolved into a junior hockey competition, and this year teams will primarily be comprised of players born in or after 1993.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Killer Stucco</b> 
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A piece of stucco molding fell from the fa&#231;ade of a building at 141 Nevsky Prospekt, killing a man last week.
An investigation is underway.

<b>Diplomats Attacked</b> 
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — An Italian diplomat was beaten up and robbed of 20,000 rubles ($680) in central St. Petersburg last Wednesday, a police source told Interfax. 
Giorgio Mattioli, the director of the Italian Institute of Culture, part of the Italian foreign mission, was attacked by multiple assailants near the Griboyedov Canal, a few blocks southwest of the Hermitage Museum. The robbers stole cash, documents, car keys, Mattioli’s diplomatic passport and a watch. 
Mattioli sustained a head injury and was sent to the hospital, RIA-Novosti reported.
It was the second attack on a foreign diplomat in the city last week. On Saturday evening, Belgian diplomat Guillaume Albert Nestor Gislam Shokye was robbed of a coat, documents, his mobile phone and a watch on Nevsky Prospekt, Moi Raion newspaper reported. 

<b>Pipe Victim Wins Case</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A St. Petersburg woman injured when a water pipe containing boiling water burst open was awarded 800,000 rubles ($27,000) in compensation from Teploset (Heat Distribution Network), Fontanka reported.
In December of 2010 Elvira Panicheva was scolded by boiling water from a burst pipe on the intersection of Dimitrova and Budapeshtskaya streets. Several of her toes had to be amputated and she is still receiving medical care.
The company initially offered her compensation of 100,000 rubles ($3,400) but Panicheva appealed and won her case last week.

TITLE: Stalin Museum To Focus on Atrocities
AUTHOR: By Misha Dzhindzhikhashvili
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: GORI, Georgia — A museum that has honored Josef Stalin in Georgia since 1937 is being remodeled to exhibit the atrocities that were committed during the Soviet dictator’s rule.
Georgian Culture Minister Nika Rurua said Monday that his nation, which became independent in 1991, can no longer host a museum “glorifying the Soviet dictator.”
Stalin was born Josef Dzhugashvili in the central Georgian town of Gori in 1879, and the museum opened here in 1937, at the height of purges that were later dubbed the Great Terror.
The gigantic museum includes the house where Stalin was born and some 47,000 exhibits, including his personal belongings and death masks.
It remained open despite the de-Stalinization campaign and denunciation of his personality cult declared by Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev in 1956.
But in post-Soviet Georgia, whose pro-Western government has been actively removing traces of Soviet past, the museum seemed like an anachronism that mostly attracted foreign tourists and a few die-hard Communists.
Stalin, who died in 1953, remains a divisive issue in the former Soviet Union.
He is still revered by many who say he led the Soviet Union to victory in World War II and turned a struggling nation into a superpower. Some of his most ardent supporters are still found in Gori.
“Stalin was a great man. He defeated Nazism,” said Gori native Archil Dzhikvaishvili, 65. “As to the purges, they did take place, but there were significantly fewer victims than the number we hear today.”
According to the prominent Russian rights group Memorial, Stalin ordered the deaths of at least 724,000 people, while millions died as a result of the forced labor system in Gulags, the Soviet prison system.
Millions of others, including entire ethnic groups such as Chechens and Volga Germans, were forcibly resettled, mostly to Soviet Central Asia.
Many of Stalin’s victims were ethnic Georgians, including his former Bolshevik Party comrades who witnessed his rise to power in the 1920s.

TITLE: Russia Intends to Intercede for Bout
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Russian arms dealer sentenced to 25 years in an American prison will be on the agenda for upcoming talks between the two countries.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will bring up the Viktor Bout case with counterpart Hillary Clinton during his visit to Washington, which starts Wednesday.
“For sure, Bout is a topic that is regularly addressed in our contacts with the Americans,” Lavrov said Friday while answering reporters’ questions.
“Bout was presented to the judge and jury like a person who was already a criminal,” Lavrov said. “It was described in a way that made it seem like a done deal, and that, of course, influenced the trial.”
The foreign minister is the first senior government official to speak about the case since Bout’s sentencing Thursday in New York.
Lavrov said the Russian government would actively support Bout’s appeal.
An analyst at the IMEMO Institute of World Economy and International  Relations, a government think tank, said Bout’s case put Russia in a “U.S. trap.”
The analyst spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.
“If Russia works to find ways to release Bout, [those efforts] would underscore how important he is. If it does not, it would lose face because everyone everywhere understands that this business remains under state protection, and the country shows its inability” if it doesn’t stand up for Bout. 
Following Lavrov’s statement, senior foreign policy officials said the Russian government will try hard to negotiate Bout’s release and seek to extradite him so he can serve his sentence in his home country. 
One analyst said Bout would not serve many years behind bars if he were transferred to Russian custody.
“The Bout sentencing is causing friction. The U.S. knows that holding Bout is akin to holding a cat by its tail, but this cat knows too much to be traded away easily,” said Theodor Karasik, a senior expert with the INEGMA think tank in Dubai. 
“A key question is what could Moscow offer to the U.S. in exchange for Bout serving his sentence out in Russia. I don’t think there is a clear answer, because if Bout were sent back to Russia he would be in prison for very little time,” Karasik said. 
A former military translator who operated a fleet of Soviet-made planes, Bout was sentenced for convictions on four conspiracy charges relating to his support of a Colombian terrorist organization.
Bout was arrested in Thailand by U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents posing as members of a terrorist group. He was then extradited to the United States for trial in 2010.
Prosecutors requested a life sentence, saying Bout was ready to sell the agents up to $25 millions in weapons, including surface-to-air missiles to shoot U.S. helicopters fighting the drug-trading rebels.
But U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled that a 25-year sentence was sufficient because she saw no evidence that Bout intended to harm Americans.
Bout will serve 21 years of his sentence, since he has already spent four years in U.S. custody. All his property, valued at about $15 million, will be confiscated.
From his prison cell, Bout called the case against him a “lie.”
He also invoked a line from a patriotic song about the Varyag, a cruiser destroyed by the Japanese navy in 1905.
“The proud Varyag is not surrendering to the enemies,” Bout said, Russian media reported.
Russian media outlets have speculated that Bout might have been involved in the arms trade with the blessing of senior officials.
Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin has been mentioned as one of the government officials acquainted with Bout.
Bout has denied ties to Sechin but said he “would be glad to meet with him.”
“I would be glad to get support from any Russian politician who would be interested in the fate of a Russian citizen,” Bout said in one of his earlier interviews.
Speaking to state-owned Voice of Russia radio station, Bout’s wife, Alla, called the sentence a “small victory” for her husband.
“The sentence of 25 years allows the possibility for [early] release,” said Sergei Markov, a professor and vice president of the Plekhanov Institute of Economics.
Russian officials said they would seek legal ways to extradite Bout. The Justice Ministry said Friday that Bout might be released to Russian custody using a convention signed by both the United States and Russia.
Although that document was signed in 1983, it has been used only once. In 2008, U.S. authorities released a former senior UN official and Russian citizen, Vladimir Kuznetsov, who had been convicted of money laundering and spent one year of his four-year prison term in the United States.
The case of Bout creates a negative background for the Russian-American relationship, said Alexei Pushkov, head of the State Duma’s International Affairs Committee.
“The relationship-improvement ball is in the United States’ court,” Pushkov said, RIA-Novosti reported.
Pushkov sees parallels between Bout’s prosecution and the case of Edmond Pope, an American businessman and former intelligence officer accused of trying to purchase classified technical documents regarding a Russian torpedo.
Pope received a 20-year prison sentence but was released by then-President Vladimir Putin in December 2000.
Pope spent several months in pretrial detention after his arrest in April 2000.
“Now we have the possibility to see how President Obama’s administration will act in this case,” Pushkov said.
Alexei Mukhin, an analyst at the Center for Political Information, said Russia’s extradition request could be granted, since public interest in the “Hollywood movie” aspect of the case has subsided.
Markov said it is hard to tell whether Bout’s sentence will be raised during the presidential meeting at Camp David, scheduled for May.
But he said the topic might be broached by security agencies of both countries.
“All countries use arms traders,” Markov said. “But there are silent rules of the game, and Americans have violated those rules to show that they are the only ones who can do it.”

TITLE: Racism Won’t Break Samba
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON — Congolese defender Chris Samba insists that he remains committed to Dagestani club Anzhi Makhachkala despite his anger at being the target of racism in the country that will host the 2018 World Cup.
A banana was thrown at Samba, who is black, after a match at Lokomotiv Moscow last month, the third such incident against an Anzhi player in the past year.
“I feel extremely passionately about racism in football and will never let the small community of racists break me,” Samba said in a statement. “I’m a strong character and will keep fighting for my team.”
Samba left English Premier League club Blackburn in February to join Guus Hiddink’s Anzhi for a reported &#163;12 million (then $19 million).
“I am thoroughly enjoying my time in Russia, and although I was of course angry at the racism incident along with the rest of the football world, racist issues here are no different to what I have experienced in other countries,” Samba said.
But the incident prompted World Cup organizers to pledge to step up action to curb racism in Russian football.
Racism has become entrenched in some of the country’s fan clubs, which often include ultranationalists and neo-Nazis.
Samba’s Anzhi teammate Roberto Carlos had bananas thrown at him twice last year. In 2010, Lokomotiv Moscow fans unfurled a banner showing a banana in a display directed at Nigerian striker Peter Odemwingie.

TITLE: Astrakhan Hunger Strike Electrifies Opposition
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Astrakhan became a new rallying cry for the country’s fledgling protest movement Monday when key opposition figures called for support of a 25-day hunger strike of mayoral candidate Oleg Shein in the southern city.
Left Front leader Sergei Udaltsov and Solidarity leader Boris Nemtsov joined more than 100 protesters in the capital, while anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny and two State Duma deputies, Dmitry Gudkov and Ilya Ponomaryov of A Just Russia, announced that they would travel to Astrakhan on Tuesday.
Pro-Kremlin lawmakers denounced the protest as a political provocation and blackmail.
Shein, a former Duma deputy for A Just Russia, refuses to recognize the official outcome of the mayoral vote, which was held parallel to the March 4 presidential election and gave him 30 percent. United Russia candidate Mikhail Stolyarov was declared the winner with 60 percent.
Shein went on hunger strike on March 16 together with some 20 people, who have since refused to eat solid food. Despite losing 9 kilograms of weight, he says he is feeling fine. “We are controlling our blood sugar levels and taking showers,” he told Interfax on Sunday.
In a video posted on YouTube, a markedly thinner Shein explains that he decided to go on hunger strike to prevent the city from “falling into the hands of the mafia.”
But supporters call his physical condition worrying. His former wife, who joined the Moscow protesters on Monday, expressed her own fears and noted that Shein was prepared to fight to the end.
“He will be the last to end the hunger strike,” his former wife, Carine Clement, said in an interview on the sidelines of the protest outside the Astrakhan region’s representation office.
Clement, a French sociologist who was married to Shein for seven years until they split up in 2009, said her former husband took his fight seriously. “For him, this is a matter of honor,” she said.
Opposition leader Udaltsov announced that he and five activists would start a solidarity hunger strike in the capital.
He also said he would return to Astrakhan’s office near the Sukharevskaya metro station daily after the region’s representative, Nikolai Korolyov, failed to speak to him as promised on Monday. “I will be here Tuesday at 2 p.m.,” he said, standing outside the office with a large white poster reading, “People are dying in Astrakhan! Putin and Zhilkin: You are responsible!” Alexander Zhilkin is the governor of the Astrakhan region.
Udaltsov did return Tuesday, as promised, and was detained outside the office where he was participating in an unsanctioned rally.
Udaltsov told Interfax that around 30 people participated in Tuesday’s rally.
Udaltsov himself has staged a series of hunger strikes to protest being arrested, the last in December when he had to be hospitalized in serious condition.
Navalny, the anti-corruption blogger, announced his backing of Shein on Twitter and called on other supporters to travel with him to Astrakhan, sending the city’s name up into the Russian-language top trends on the popular microblogging site Monday.
Shein said on his LiveJournal blog that he would meet with Navalny in Astrakhan on Tuesday morning. 
This is the second time that a hunger strike is electrifying the country’s opposition. A similar rush erupted in February, when activists in the Stavropol region town of Lermontov stormed the local administration building and went on hunger strike to protest their exclusion from municipal elections. The conflict was defused after weeks of negotiations.
But the stakes in Astrakhan, which has a population of more than 500,000 and is dubbed the country’s capital of the Caspian Sea, are bigger.
A Just Russia leader Sergei Mironov reiterated on Monday that his party wants President Dmitry Medvedev and his elected successor, Vladimir Putin, to defuse the situation. “We will definitely ask Putin about the situation in Astrakhan,” Mironov told reporters, Interfax reported.
Duma Deputies Gudkov and Ponomaryov sent a letter to Medvedev in which they called on the president “to cancel the result of the dirty Astrakhan elections, restore justice and save the lives” of their hunger-striking comrades. 
Neither Medvedev nor Putin reacted publicly Monday. But members of United Russia’s Duma faction made it clear that they had little respect for Shein and his supporters.
Vyacheslav Lysakov, first deputy chairman of the Duma’s Constitution and State Affairs Committee and a member of a Duma fact-finding mission that visited the Astrakhan protesters in late March, said their refusal to end their hunger strike was utterly irresponsible. “What they are doing now is already political provocation and blackmail,” he told The Moscow Times.
Lysakov said Shein could not expect that his demands for a recount or a repeat of the mayoral election would be met anytime soon because a thorough investigation of the vote, as recommended by the four-member mission, would take weeks to complete.
“When his aim was to draw attention on the federal level, the reason for the hunger strike absolutely vanished,” he said.
Lysakov’s comments echoed those of actress Maria Maksakova, who represents Astrakhan in the Duma for United Russia. In a statement last month, Maksakova called Shein a “scandalous” politician whose past record of hunger strikes only showed that he suffered from a lack of weight “both physically and politically.” 
Sergei Markov, a former United Russia deputy who now serves as vice president of the Plekhanov Institute of Economics, said the staging of hunger strikes was a sign of the political system’s deficiencies. “If this is the only way to solve a political impasse, then this shows how little developed the political competition is,” he said.

TITLE: New Survivor of Siberia Airplane Crash ‘Found’
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A passenger listed among the deceased was discovered alive in a Tyumen region hospital a week after a deadly plane crash that killed 31.
Hospital officials said DNA testing confirmed that Dmitry Ivanyuta, 25, was actually in the hospital’s intensive care unit under the name of a passenger who perished in the crash.
Sergei Tsarik, deputy chief of surgery at Tyumen Region Hospital No. 2, said Ivanyuta was checked in under the name of Konstantin Peil, and hospital staff had been too busy treating him to verify his identity.
“Most likely the mistake occurred during the transportation,” he said, Interfax reported.
He said Ivanyuta’s injuries rendered his face unrecognizable at the time of admission.
Ivanyuta’s sister later recognized him, and Peil’s parents immediately requested the DNA test that revealed the mix-up.
Denis Trushnikov, a former professor and teacher of Ivanyuta, first broke the news on the social-networking site Vkontakte.
“Everybody! Dima Ivanyuta survived! So many days in the intensive care unit under a different name and now the news! He’s alive! Pray for him! God willing, everything will be fine!” he wrote.
Peil’s family held a funeral for him Monday, Interfax said.
The 12 people who survived the crash are recovering slowly.
Tsarik said that only three of them have been removed from intensive care a week after the accident.
A UTair-operated ATR 72 crashed just minutes after takeoff from the city of Tyumen on April 2, killing 31 of the 43 on board. Ice is considered a possible reason for the crash.
Authorities have ordered that all ATR 72 aircraft still in use by UTair be grounded until the exact cause of the crash is determined.

TITLE: Yakunin Wants Bering Decision by 2017
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A decision on building a tunnel under the Bering Strait to connect the railway infrastructures of Russia and North America should be made before 2017, Russian Railways president Vladimir Yakunin told journalists Saturday, Interfax reported.
“I am sure that Russia needs to develop railway services in the Far East and Kamchatka, and I believe a decision on building [a tunnel under the Bering Strait] should be made within the next three to five years. I mean a decision should be made that this should be done in principle,” Yakunin said.
“These are not just dreams. I talked about this when I first took this office,” he said.
Yakunin said that five years after he became the Russian Railways president, he was approached by some U.S. business people who suggested that research should be done on building such a link.
“As a matter of fact, a design of this project is being worked on now,” he said. “I think it should take 10 to 15 years [to implement].”
The project can be done only based on multilateral cooperation between various countries, Yakunin said. “America should be on the one side and Russia on the other. China is interested as well, and so multilateral cooperation is inevitable,” he said.
According to InterBering, an Alaska-based company promoting the project, the proposed 103-kilometer tunnel would cost up to $30 billion to construct and would be part of a total rail infrastructure project on both sides that could cost $100 billion and create up to 50,000 jobs.

TITLE: Minsk-Moscow Air Route Battle Ends
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian and Belarusian air authorities have settled their dispute over flights, in a move that may see Belarusian companies providing internal flights in Russia and vice versa.
“We’ve agreed to do our homework on the idea of liberalization of air travel with the goal of providing flights on internal routes in Russia and Belarus,” said Russian Deputy Transportation Minister Valery Okulov. 
The two countries had been quarreling since March 27 over the number of daily flights each country could undertake on the route after the Russian Transport Ministry said it intended to ban Belarus’s national airline Belavia from flying to Russia’s regions, Gazeta.ru reported Friday.
In response Belavia threatened to stop Aeroflot’s flights between Moscow and Minsk all together. Belavia spokesman Igor Cherginyets told Gazeta.ru that if Belavia — Belarus’s largest airline by number of routes — was not allowed to fly to Russia’s regions, then the number of flights between Minsk and Moscow was likely to decrease and Aeroflot would not be undertaking them.
Under the previous agreement, there were five flights by Russia and four by Belarus. This will continue until April 27, when the number of flights will be shared equally, Belarusian Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Kalinin told journalists on Monday, Kommersant reported.
“In summer we will have five flights each,” he said.
But Belavia is now unsure as to whether it will use the extra available journey, general director Anatoly Gusarov told Interfax.
“We are studying the situation and are going to determine whether it is worth undertaking this flight or not,” he said Tuesday.
Experts are seeing the agreement  as a coup for Belarusian companies but believe that Russian ones will not be interested in the opportunity to fly within Belarus.
“Russian air companies are hardly going to want to develop flights in Belarus and fly, for example, from Minsk to Gomel,” said Alexei Sinitsky, editor of Airtransport Review magazine.
Aeroflot seems to have lost out in the deal. The scandal was believed to have started because the Russian state carrier wanted more than its three scheduled flights to Minsk per day. But they may now lose one of their flights to S7 or UTair, Kommersant reported. Aeroflot declined to comment on the decision.
Before the companies came to an agreement Belavia said it intended to take the issue to court, since under Russia and Belarus’s current aviation agreement, authorities must provide clear and serious justification for revoking permission from an airline to fly certain routes, RIA-Novosti reported Friday.
“There are no such grounds,” the company said in a statement. “We insist on full compliance with all points of the intergovernmental agreement, just as we are doing.”

TITLE: Skolkovo ‘to Join Moscow in July’
AUTHOR: By Rachel Nielsen
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Just days after Sergei Shoigu, the next governor of the Moscow region, said in a radio interview that he wasn’t sold on the idea of expanding Moscow’s boundaries, President Dmitry Medvedev and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin sat a chair away from him at a government meeting on Monday and detailed the city’s expansion plans.
As Monday’s meeting suggested, the plans to take land from the Moscow region and add it to the capital — and use the additional area to build a global financial center and ease the capital’s choking traffic and exploding population — appear firmly in the hands of top federal planners and those who support the expansion.
Medvedev used Monday’s meeting to confirm that the nascent Skolkovo innovation hub to the city’s west should be included in the redrawn capital; to proclaim that housing in the new parts of the capital should consist “for the most part” of low-rise buildings; and to lay out timelines for road construction and the transfer of government institutions to the new area.
Moscow’s territory will officially increase on July 1, when it will grow by about 2 1/2 times, Medvedev said Monday. That change will happen less than two months after Shoigu assumes his new role.
Shoigu was tapped last week to become governor of the populous area that rings the capital after Vladimir Putin’s presidential inauguration in May.
Medvedev announced his plan to create a Capital Federal District and enlarge Moscow at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June. Since then government officials have proposed stretching the southwest boundaries of the capital, as well as including other spots of land west of Moscow.
In December the Federation Council approved the plan to change the capital’s and the region’s borders, adding close to 150 hectares to Moscow from the region, RIA-Novosti reported.
The suggested addition of the Skolkovo innovation center, in the Moscow region town of the same name, to the capital is part of an effort to increase Moscow’s role in high-tech industries. In a similar vein, Troitsk, the suburban home to many scientists and academics about 20 kilometers southwest of the city, should also become part of the capital, Medvedev confirmed.
“We are expecting from Moscow a substantial increase in its contribution to the innovation development of our country,” he said, according to a transcript on the Kremlin website.
Speaking in Troitsk, the president said most of the housing constructed in the new area should be low-rise apartment buildings. That would be a substantial change from the high-rises ringing the city’s southern outskirts.
“I am proposing that we examine several ideas, including the possibility of a complete ban on constructing housing with old techniques in the merged areas,” he said.
Improving living conditions for Muscovites is one of the priorities the Kremlin is laying out in the plans. “By many measures of quality of life, Moscow — to put it mildly — isn’t a leader,” Medvedev said. “Some measures of development even have begun to decline.”
The president, whose term expires in May, said reconstruction of Kaluzhskoye Shosse, which extends from the city’s southwest, will begin this year as should development of “traffic light-free” traffic to the center of Moscow.
In addition, “all of the key decisions” for relocating government offices to the southwestern addition to the capital should be made in this fiscal year, he said.
Presidential economic aide Arkady Dvorkovich told NTV reporters on the sidelines of the meeting that actually moving government offices won’t happen before the end of 2013.
In his speech, Sobyanin said the plans to redraft Moscow’s borders will not involve merging the entire Moscow region into the capital. The mayor also proposed a “unified fare system” for all forms of mass transit in the city and said the government plans to “give priority development” to a commuter rail system.
Funding is a sticky issue in the expansion plans. Boris Gromov, the outgoing Moscow region governor, told RIA-Novosti that he has asked the Kremlin to consider how revenue will be collected from the Moscow region in light of the proposed changes.
Meanwhile, Shoigu said over the weekend that tax revenue from Moscow region residents who work in Moscow should go to the region, Ekho Moskvy reported Monday.
Shoigu, who has held his cabinet position since 1994 and is the longest-serving cabinet member, suggested Friday during a radio interview with Russian News Service radio that the country’s capital should be relocated to Siberia.

TITLE: Open Government Instructs Medvedev to Pick Protector
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev on Tuesday reiterated a call for extensive privatization and proposed naming a federal prosecutor for business rights.
He made the statements as he held an informal exchange of opinions with Cabinet members and the experts that make up his Open Government group.
At the meeting that was dedicated to developing market competition, Medvedev spoke in favor of leaving the initial privatization plan intact.
“The Cabinet needs to have the heart to conduct the privatization in full,” Medvedev said. “We’re conducting it as we approved.”
Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin has been one of the strongest opponents of the sell-offs.
Medvedev’s statement on privatizations followed a speech by Ruben Aganbegyan, president of the united MICEX-RTS stock exchange, who lamented the high state involvement in the economy.
Medvedev proposed appointing a special federal prosecutor who would protect businesses from unfair official hurdles in doing business.
This could also change the mindset of law enforcement agencies, Medvedev said. Business associations have accused police and prosecutors of harassing companies and entrepreneurs for bribes.
In making the proposal, Medvedev was reacting to the idea, voiced at the meeting, of establishing the position of a business ombudsman who could influence official decisions. He said that would be legally unrealistic.
Yana Yakovleva, a business rights activist, took the floor to say prosecutors had always been on the side of complainants against businesspeople in trials.
Medvedev insisted, “I don’t think it’s beyond the pale to make it a prosecutor.”
He also promised to think about talking to the State Duma about an amnesty for incarcerated businesspeople.
Medvedev got a cold shower about some of his policy goals.
“You announced a course toward modernization,” said Leonid Melamed, chief executive of a company called Komposit. “Honestly, experts don’t sense any modernization.”
Medvedev did not react to that statement.
The recent merger of the country’s two bourses came under fire from some businesses as limiting competition. Tuesday’s meeting took place at the RTS stock exchange near the Kremlin.
One participant rolled out what he said was a length of 137 meters of permits for the opening of a store in Moscow, which took 28 months to obtain.
A PricewaterhouseCoopers managing director, Yekaterina Shapochka, thanked Medvedev for “doing a lot to raise the efficiency of the judiciary.”
“Believe me, the business community values it very highly,” she said.
Shapochka, however, went on to say that some judges remain influenced by outside forces in passing their rulings, and proposed obliging judges to report persons contacting them about their cases.
Medvedev said, “In principle, it wouldn’t be bad.”

TITLE: Watching Patriarch Kirill Discredit Himself
AUTHOR: By Victor Davidoff
TEXT: Since being enthroned as head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill has never gotten much attention from the world press — until last week. Unfortunately, the reason for this attention will give his future biographers a hard time. The patriarch was caught lying.
First, Kirill told television host Vladimir Solovyov that despite what Ukrainian journalists wrote in 2009, he never wore a Breguet watch that is estimated to cost more than $30,000. Then, without much effort, journalist Andrei Malgin found an official photograph on the site of the patriarchate that had the watch neatly photoshopped out. The only problem is that they forgot to airbrush the reflection of the watch on the table.
The patriarchate quickly explained that the photograph had been doctored by an inexperienced 24-year-old employee — a “lay woman,” the statement emphasized — without permission. Then the original photograph appeared on the site, with what looks like a Breguet watch on the patriarch’s wrist.
Journalist Andrei Loshak wrote on his Ekho Moskvy blog: “It looks like the patriarch indirectly confirmed that he had lied and that he does wear a Breguet. Are they insulting us? In the U.S.S.R., the dissidents who were put away in psychiatric prison hospitals say the hardest thing was staying normal when the norm around you was insanity. That’s just how I feel now.”
Unfortunately, the scandal over the patriarch’s watch isn’t the first time that the Russian church bureaucracy has made Orthodox Christians and nonreligious citizens uncomfortable.
For example, Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, who is considered to be close to Kirill, suggested introducing a national dress code along the lines of what Ayatollah Khomeini prescribed for Iranian women. Metropolitan Tikhon of Novosibirsk and Berdsk demanded that an exhibition of Picasso engravings opened at the local museum be banned. At a meeting with young people in St. Petersburg, Deacon Andrei Kurayev suggested that they disrupt an upcoming Madonna concert by calling the police and reporting a bomb in the concert hall, which is clearly against the law. And finally, there was the almost unanimous reaction of the church clergy to the Pussy Riot case, which paraphrased Luke 23:21: “Crucify, crucify!”
“The Russian Orthodox Church is trying to interfere more and more often in the private lives of Russian citizens and in purely state matters. This interference is becoming more aggressive,” journalist Andrei Kolesnikov noted several years ago on Grani.ru. There are signs that Russians don’t like this. They have had to remind the authorities more often than they would like that the Constitution clearly states that Russia is a secular state.
But there is another view about the growing criticism of the church. The church’s higher council blamed its problems on those who “promote the false values of aggressive liberalism.” Sergei Markov, a former State Duma deputy from United Russia and currently a member of the Public Chamber, supports this conspiracy theory. “This is revenge for the patriarch’s indirect support for Putin during the presidential election,” Markov told Interfax.
The words “indirect support” are as truthful here as the patriarch’s assertion that he never wore a Breguet. It’s no secret that during the presidential election, priests openly urged their flocks to vote for Putin in their sermons in many churches throughout the country. Clearly, this could not have been organized without the patriarch’s approval.
No one can say how many votes the newly elected president received as a result of the church’s support. But it’s clear that the church scandals are reducing the number of potential voters who heed church leaders. This might follow the pattern of Poland in 1995, when the ardent Catholic Lech Walesa lost the presidential election because he was too close to the church. The majority of Poles decided that it was “better to be red than black” and voted for a former Communist functionary. In the same way, Putin’s close relationship to the patriarchate is gradually becoming more of a liability than an asset.
All that’s left is to hope that if church leaders don’t comprehend the principles of tolerance and asceticism, then at least they’ll have the common sense to stop meddling in affairs unbefitting the clergy. Let’s also hope that church leaders start living the way the patriarch has always taught in his sermons: “Asceticism is the victory of man over flesh, over passions, over instinct. And it’s important that everyone have this quality — rich and poor alike.”

<i>Victor Davidoff is a Moscow-based writer and journalist whose blog is chaadaev56.livejournal.com</i>

TITLE: inside russia: Putin’s Private National Guard
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported that President-elect Vladimir Putin is poised to undertake the most significant reform Russia has seen in recent years by creating a National Guard from scratch. These special forces, numbering up to 400,000 men, would answer directly to the president and would be charged with protecting the country from internal threats.
As a result, Russia would resemble a classic South American or Middle Eastern dictatorship. Take, for example, Syria, where for decades men from the lower classes have had only two career options — a dead-end job with a state company or joining the troops that guard the president. Ironically, Putin is considering adopting such a system even after the entire world witnessed how the Libyan version of this model failed miserably, while the Syrian version of this model is headed toward a similar demise.
The creation of dedicated security units unconnected to the army or the police — like the infamous Tonton Macoutes under former Haitian President Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier — does not protect citizens from criminals nor external enemies, but protects the leadership from the people. These units are telltale attributes of a dictatorship.
The Putin regime effectively issued a decree granting freedom to the siloviki, as Peter III had granted certain liberties to the nobility. In freeing the hands of the siloviki, they were allowed to extort, steal and even kill. Paradoxically, the government asked for nothing in return, except for the promise to uphold a sort of gentlemen’s agreement: “You are free to rape and pillage as long as you break up anti-government demonstrations.”
But when the time came to make good on their obligations, it turned out that marauders made bad warriors. This winter, Moscow police openly told protesters they had detained that, had it not been for recent pay raises, they would not have bothered to turn out for street detail at all.
The same with the army. As long as Putin has been in control, there has been a deliberate reluctance to carry out much-needed military reforms in the belief that the first thing an improved, efficient army might do is rise up against Putin. As a result, the army has remained in the same sad state and is incapable of stripping anyone of anything — much less guarding Putin from angry protesters.
The Federal Security Service can’t fulfill this role either. If Putin were to tell FSB officers, whose main focus is their lucrative side businesses, that they should take on the thankless job of dealing with protesters, they would tell Putin to get lost.
Putin created the Nashi youth group to recruit young people from economically depressed towns surrounding Moscow who could be bused into the capital overnight to man pro-government street demonstrations or break up anti-government rallies. But this winter, it became clear that the Nashi youth, whose main interest is drinking and partying at the government’s expense, are of little value.
The only way out of the impasse is to create yet another security structure. The ruling elite will continue to control the petrodollars and most of that money will be deposited in overseas bank accounts, but the difference will be that most of the remaining money will be spent on maintaining a National Guard that will recruit young men without chances for a career in the stagnant economy. They will be paid to protect the very people whose corrupt rule has denied them the chance of a career — and has denied Russia the chance for freedom.

<i>Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.</i>

TITLE: Back to basics
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The JFC Jazz Club, a small jazz venue in a courtyard on Shpalernaya UIitsa in downtown St. Petersburg, has become a staple of local jazz and is reputed for its careful selection of artists and diverse, often innovative daily concerts in a comfortable environment. 
This week, the club, which has hosted more than 5,000 concerts — featuring international jazz figures such as Eddie Gomez, Lenny White, Courtney Pine, Randy Brecker and Paul Bollenback — celebrates its 18th birthday and launches its 18th indoor music festival, Jazz Spring in St. Petersburg, which will last 18 days.
The JFC Jazz Club opened on April 12, 1994, and was initially called the New Jazz Club and located in the Tavrichesky Gardens.
“It all began with me playing in a band, we traveled a lot and spent a lot of time in Lille, France,” said Felix Naroditsky, JFC Jazz Club’s founder and director, who played the trumpet with the Admiralty Brass Band in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
“We were based in Lille and went to other cities and to Germany from there. And when we had a night off, which was not very often, we liked to go to one music place called Blue Piano Club.” 
“Visually, it had a blue color palette and maybe it wasn’t a real jazz club, but rather a jazz bar. But we liked that the musicians there changed all the time and that it had an interesting atmosphere. We became regulars there and friends with the manager. He was pleased that people from Russia were interested in what they were doing.”
After a while, Naroditsky and the other musicians began to be invited to the venue’s parties for friends. “It was basically like a jam session, but not for everyone,” Naroditsky said.
“Sometimes he invited musicians from Paris, who came to visit their Lille friends, and put together jam sessions, to which they invited only their close friends. And because we were on good terms with the manager, he decided that we were close friends who could come to those parties. The bar was open, drinks flowed freely and the parties lasted until the morning.”
“When we came back to St. Petersburg and looked around, we realized that there were no places like this at all. There were restaurants, but nothing affordable to a more modest public.”
According to Naroditsky, he wanted to have a venue where musicians would feel free, where the difference between visitors and musicians would be almost imperceptible and where the stage would be open for musical innovation and anything else remarkable as far as improvised music was concerned.
“Last but not least was our desire to have an atmosphere that would smell of creativity and benevolence — something that no place in the city had at that time,” he said.
Before launching the club, Naroditsky started cooperating with jazz keyboard player Andrei Kondakov, who became the club’s artistic director.
“Kondakov lived nearby and I would see him when he was riding his bike there,” Naroditsky said. “Before that I had seen him at the Jazz Philharmonic Hall; he would not sit behind his keyboard, but played standing, he was so full of energy.”
Striving to avoid becoming a purely local project, Naroditsky appealed to people familiar with the international jazz scene, including jazz musicologist Vladimir Feyertag, jazz critic and promoter Alexander Kan and saxophonist Igor Butman, who by that time had done a stint as a jazz musician in the U.S.
Naroditsky admits that the new club fed on the tradition of Leningrad jazz.
“Perhaps we managed to last and still have room to develop because we did not emerge in a vacuum; thankfully we built on the foundation created by Feyertag, [Kvadrat Jazz Club’s founder] Natan Leites and [St. Petersburg’s seminal jazz musician, band leader and the founder of the Jazz Philharmonic Hall] David Goloshchyokin,” he said. 
“We didn’t invent the bicycle, we simply took the best of what existed in European and American jazz clubs.”
He said that European vision helped to break through in post-Soviet Russia, where the older managers who knew how to work within the framework of the Communist Party and the Communist Union of Youth were at a loss.
“We understood what sponsorship, partnership and alliance were,” Naroditsky said, adding that Vladimir Kekhman and Sergei Adonyev of the fruit-trading company Olbi Jazz provided financial help without which the club’s opening would not be possible. (Kekhman, now a billionaire, has been the general director of St. Petersburg’s Mikhailovsky Theater since 2007.) 
Fittingly, the club changed its name to the Olbi Jazz Club, and, subsequently, when the company became the Joint Fruit Company, changed it again to the JFC Jazz Club.
“They liked the idea of having a jazz club in the city,” Naroditsky said. 
“We had 30 days in a month to let everybody play. Secondly, we introduced the American idea of a jazz club, where everything is allowed — everything that doesn’t prevent the person next to you from enjoying the music. If it doesn’t make it difficult to listen to the music, you can talk, smoke, clap or shout. 
“And throughout the entire 18 years we have only had to make a couple of reprimands. Strange as it may seem, it was young Americans who perhaps didn’t know how to behave in a jazz club. The music should dominate and you shouldn’t get in the way.”
Musicians such as French horn player Arkady Shilkloper, double bassist Vladimir Volkov and Butman, who had broad experience performing both at home and abroad, were crucial in forming the venue’s ideas, direction and music policy, according to Naroditsky. 
“Essentially, it was them who helped the club to become a home for the musicians,” he said.
“That’s because if musicians feel at home here, then the public will feel at home too.”
Looking at the local jazz scene 18 years later — and with jazz and blues venues coming and going — the most important places for jazz remain the same couple: The Jazz Philharmonic Hall and the JFC Jazz Club.
“There are still few venues where music is the main focus,” Naroditsky said. “People find themselves in circumstances in which they have to make money, and it’s very difficult to make money when you have unique, perhaps experimental music programs that are not that easy to understand. It’s not a mass market.
“The owners have to know how to add up, unfortunately, so they are forced to base their decisions on elementary notions like whether it’s fun or not. Our notions are different; what’s important to us is whether it’s interesting, unique and talented.”
The JFC Jazz Club’s original interior, designed by Dmitry Sharapov, was deliberately planned to compensate for the lack of public at most experimental concerts.
“He fulfilled our request that it should not look like an empty room, to prevent people from getting a shock,” Naroditsky said. “Sometimes there are really interesting concerts, but the music might be so difficult to comprehend that not many people will come to listen to it, but visually you can’t see that the room is half-empty.”
But for many concerts, the venue — which can hold about 40 people sitting at its 12 tables and another 20 to 30 at the bar — is too small to accommodate everybody who wants to attend, so advance booking is advised.
Never one to fall behind, the JFC Jazz Club has recently introduced live video broadcasts of every concert on the venue’s website, which is activated at 8 p.m. every night and stays live until the end of the show.
The venue often books visiting bands and musicians from other Russian cities and abroad.
“Perhaps this is the main difference between us and other venues,” Naroditsky said. 
“We have no obligations to local musicians, so we offer our stage first and foremost to visiting bands. Firstly because they’re fresh, secondly, it motivates local musicians who can see what is happening around them.
“Bands from the same place often sound somewhat similar. This applies to Baltic bands or Scandinavian bands... The same is true in St. Petersburg; all St. Petersburg bands sound a bit similar, even if they play in different styles.”
What’s changed during the past 18 years is the number of full-fledged jazz acts performing in the city, which has increased partly due to the activities of the JFC Jazz Club.
“When we started out, there were four or five bands performing in the city: They were Digest vocal group, the Leningrad Dixieland Band, the Valery Belinov Band and the Valery Zuikov Band. There were very few of them, and concerts were similar to jam sessions, with the musicians playing a couple of dozen jazz standards,” Naroditsky said.
“Because of touring bands that came with their original music, local musicians eventually realized that they would only be interesting if they had their own original music, their own style and their own sound. Now we have a hundred bands in St. Petersburg that play mostly original music.”
From the beginning, the JFC Jazz Club was a hit among Americans and Europeans working in the city, but slowly the venue’s local audience began to grow as well. 
“The percentage of locals [to foreigners] was not very big, but now the ratio is equal,” Naroditsky said.
“But we still welcome Europeans and Americans and believe that our venue makes the city appealing to tourists, who understand that our city is not about dogmatism; it’s not simply classical architecture, but also up-to-date contemporary art.”

TITLE: CHERNOV’S CHOICE
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The women arrested for allegedly belonging to <b>Pussy Riot</b> have been supported by Amnesty International and Estonia’s president and parliamentary deputies, but without knowing the background, some readers appear slightly confused about why an anti-Putin protest had to be held in a church. 
So why in a church? First of all, the song and video, both entitled “Holy Madonna, Drive Putin Away” was technically a prayer, a desperate action undertaken by the group after seeing that 100,000-strong peaceful demos have no effect.
The group was protesting not only against Putin, but also against Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, for his support of Putin and his criticism of protests. It was also against the anti-constitutional merging of the state and church in post-Soviet Russia.
Days before that, Patriarch Kirill publicly supported Putin during the presidential election campaign, describing the Putin era as a “miracle of God,” and dismissed protests against the massive violations and unlawfulness that passed as elections, but were a de facto reappointment of Putin.
Kirill is criticized for not being a real believer, but a kind of businessman. His $30,000-gold Breguet, Cadillac Escalade and apartment in a prestigious building have served as sources of recent scandals.
The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, where the event was held, was chosen because it has in a way become the Kremlin’s own church, where Russian leaders are shown praying on church holidays on television. It was where Kirill’s remarks praising Putin were made.
The church was blown up by Stalin in 1931 and built anew in the 1990s. This project was one of the first signs of the new post-Soviet state trying to reincorporate the Orthodox Church.  
It has been recently criticized for being a big-time business, with underground parking, a car wash, and a rental banquet facility. It was also offering to rent out the surrounding territory to tenants wishing to build restaurants on it. 
Pussy Riot’s members, who claim to be believers, in fact stood for true faith and for cleansing the Russian Orthodox Church of its vices. In this sense, their actions can be compared to the Cleansing of the Temple.
The event was deliberately held on the second Tuesday of Maslenitsa (Shrovetide) week (ahead of Forgiveness Sunday and Lent), which is a day of games, songs and entertainment, when some types of mischief are allowed and holy foolishness is displayed.
Their imprisonment has nothing to do with the law, as bad as it is. The criminal code article under which they have been charged is about “hooliganism … motivated by religious hatred.” They fit neither description.
Meanwhile, the arrested women Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina have been in prison for 41 days, while Yekaterina Santsevich, who was arrested on March 15, has been held for 28 days in prison. They could spend up to seven years there.

TITLE: First among equals
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: “Salmon swims upstream, it is born that way; and I have the same sort of character,” says Arthur Mitchell, founder of the Dance Theater of Harlem — the first ever African American classical ballet company — in way of explanation for his admirable courage and nerve. Mitchell, 78, is an icon for several generations of African American dancers.
It is hard to be the first, but if you win, adrenaline and glory are all yours, and Mitchell thrives in an environment of challenge and resistance. 
The dancer goes as far as to argue that it was more his nerve than his talent that won him a place at the High School of Performing Arts where he took his first classes in the late 1940s. 
While this claim is no more than speculation, the truth is that nerve has always characterized Mitchell. He started taking dance classes when classical ballet was a restricted territory for black people. Even when the legendary choreographer George Balanchine offered him a place at the prestigious New York City Ballet in 1955, effectively making Mitchell the first African American to join a major ballet company in the U.S., the chorus of those trying to talk him out of it was a mighty one. And of course, starting a dance company in Harlem, the notoriously poverty-stricken and unsafe area that most of New York’s whites believed should be best avoided, was declared pure madness by his critics.
But Mitchell refused to listen to them. His talent is complemented by the confidence of a lion and adrenaline drive of a Formula One champion. Nothing seems to be able to knock him off his feet. And the temptation to be the first was too hard for him to resist.
“You may not be earning a fortune but you are making history,” is what Mitchell would tell the members of the Dance Theater of Harlem, which he founded in 1969, led for almost four decades and where he is now artistic director emeritus. 
Mitchell is in St. Petersburg this week to take part in a series of master classes held as part of the 11th Dance Open festival that runs from April 11 through 17.
His attitude toward life is potentially just as valuable for Russian pupils as his technique. Trapped in reflection, and ever wondering if they are doing the right thing, Russian artists have always been very sensitive to criticism. Even a verbal attack — which could be driven by something as base as envy — could do a lot of damage to the artist, and in some cases ruin their confidence.
“They received me very warmly at the New York City Ballet, but you know, I was not really looking for everyone’s approval; I mean, Balanchine gave me this job, and well, if some of them do not like the fact that I am black or are not happy with what I do, it is their problem, not mine,” Mitchell smiles. 
Pressure was high on Mitchell at NYCB. The dancer represented not only himself: He was out there on stage for a whole race of people.
“It took much more than any technique or dedication; it was desire that was bigger than me and fortunately this was what Balanchine saw in me,” Mitchell recalls. 
“The thing with Mister B was that as someone who had left his home to move to the West, he understood what it is to be the only one in a situation,” Mitchell said. 
In 1969, shortly after the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Mitchell founded the Dance Theatre of Harlem together with Karel Shook. Rooted in the spirit of idealism of the Civil Rights Era, the school began with classes taught in a garage on 152nd Street in Harlem.
A fallacy existed at the time that black people could not perform classical ballet, and Mitchell did not find himself flooded with applications from potential students. So he had to take what he could find, train them and develop them into real artists. 
The first students of his classes were not much different from Mitchell himself in his early teens. He became the family’s breadwinner at the age of 12, making his first money by polishing shoes, running errands for the local ladies of the night and working as a delivery boy in a butcher’s shop.
The theater began with two dancers and thirty children. Skepticism abounded.
“People said ‘Listen, this is a European art form and you won’t get any interest,’” he recalled. Yet Mitchell’s project proved a sensation. In two months he had 400 children in classes, and the numbers doubled within the following four months. 
To attract young people to the classes, Mitchell used the analogy of basketball: He would ask a potential pupil how tall they were and then explain how things would work for them depending on their height. He would tell them that ballet exercises could be very sporty.
For example, in learning to perform demi-plies, the more you push against the floor, the higher you can spring.
And it did the trick. Boys flocked to the company as they liked the athleticism of dance.
The school’s mission is far beyond pure artistic goals or even the principle of equal opportunities.
“I felt that it was very important that I go back into my community and do something, and I felt that discipline that you would learn in classical dance would enter the everyday life of people and they would become better human beings,” Mitchell said. 
In addition to works choreographed by Mitchell, the dancers were given the opportunity to dance ballets by Balanchine, who granted the Dance Theatre of Harlem the right to perform them. Dancing “Concerto Barocco” and “Serenade” every night, the dancers developed the special kind of speed essential to a professional dancer. In many senses, Balanchine became the theater’s godfather.
“Do you know that you are going to lose your sleep forever?” This question was the blessing that Mitchell received from Balanchine, who became the company’s first vice-president. It was the only board of directors on which Balanchine ever consented to serve.
Mitchell was indeed well aware of the potential sleep deprivation that would come as part and parcel of the theater’s foundation, but he felt well prepared.
The dancer sought inspiration in classical ballet plots, yet he wanted both the audiences and the performers to closely relate to the stories unfolding on stage. To create “Creole Giselle,” his own take on Marius Petipa’s world-famous classic, Mitchell found parallels in the south of the U.S.
“Giselle” tells the story of a peasant girl who dies of a broken heart after she falls in love with a young nobleman disguised as a peasant. In Mitchell’s ballet, Giselle is not a peasant but a slave, and every single character is based on a real-life story.
“In New Orleans there are these beautiful mulatto women who would rather dance than eat,” he recalls. “And if they were in love and if their heart got broken they would die. We told the same story, but we put it in the locale of Louisiana, which made sense for us. The issue was how long certain people had been free for — since their childhood, or only for a couple of years. And that was the whole structure. Very rich young planters always had a [slave] mistress, and the mother of that young lady would bargain with him and ask if he would give her a house or send the kids to study in Europe.”
Mitchell’s take on Stravinsky’s ballet “The Firebird” had a different ethnic twist to it. The choreographer moved the characters to a mythical island in the Caribbean so that it could be danced by black people. 
“Despite changing the ethnicity, we kept the soul of the piece and it became a huge success,” Mitchell said. 
Although the repertoire of the Dance Theatre of Harlem is eclectic, the core of the training is classical ballet, as the classical school equips performers with the technical foundation from which they can then develop in any direction they choose, from classical to tap.
“Things have changed so drastically in the world today: At one time you were a modern dancer, a ballet dancer or a tap dancer; today you have got to be a good dance artist who dances all the styles, because the choreographers today are doing a lot of crossover work,” Mitchell explained.
“My dancers need to be musical and they need to understand that in dance theater, eclecticism is very important,” he added. 
Versatility is key to the performers of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, who serve their audiences a fusion of a jazz ballet, a Balanchine ballet and an African ballet and need to be able to execute a swift and smooth switch from style to style. 
“Whenever I look for dancers, the first thing I look for is someone who makes magic when they hit the stage,” Mitchell said. “I am always trying to go with an open mind and whoever makes the magic, that is the person I am looking for. I do not get out the tape and measure them! There are millions of dancers — someone short, someone tall, whatever — but if they make magic, nothing else matters.”

TITLE: Something old, something new
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The 11th International Dance Open Festival that runs from April 13 through 16 celebrates a diversity of styles, while showcasing the finest traditions of Russian ballet.
Joining world-class ballet celebrities in the festival’s program will be ballet students from across the globe. Emerging ballet talent from the U.S., Japan, Venezuela, Panama, Finland and other countries will take to the stage on April 13 in a children’s gala concert at the Zazerkalye Theater.
April 14 will see the Russian premiere of the “Rock the Ballet” show by the internationally renowned U.S. troupe Bad Boys of Dance. Last year, the company performed an excerpt from the show at the festival’s closing gala concert. This time round, the city’s audiences will be able to enjoy the show in full.
The ensemble is noted both for their original performance style — which blends choreography and acrobatics set to pop songs — and for seemingly getting a kick out of shocking the audience. The Bad Boys of Dance thrive on extravaganza, often joining forces with musicians such as Lady Gaga and Sir Elton John, who have made provocation their signature style.
As one recent critical review put it, “An unashamed pop-ballet, ‘Rock the Ballet’ throws out the stuffiness of tradition and replaces it with beats and provocative moves.”
The festival’s opening gala on April 15 at the St. Petersburg Conservatory Theater pays tribute to the legendary Russian ballerina and coach Natalya Dudinskaya (1912-2003).
Dance Open brings together Russian dancers, most of whom once studied with Dudinskaya, such as the Mariinsky Theater’s Ulyana Lopatkina and Viktoria Tereshkina, the Mikhailovsky Theater’s Ivan Vasilyev and the American Ballet Theater’s Vladimir Malakhov, as well as their foreign counterparts.
Yekaterina Galanova, founder of the Dance Open festival, is also a former pupil of Dudinskaya.
“With this gala concert we would like to recreate the particular spirit of warmth that Natalya Dudinskaya radiated,” Galanova said.
Both on stage and in life, Dudinskaya was the personification of “joie de vivre.” Her dancing technique was once labeled “choreographic bel canto,” a reference to the classic Italian vocal school demonstrated at its best by singers like Maria Callas.
She brought power, passion and a fiery temperament to her interpretations of classical-ballet roles: A regal Aurora in “Sleeping Beauty,” a magnificent Odile in “Swan Lake,” a tormented Nikiya in “La Bayadere,” and a flirtatious Kitri in “Don Quixote.” One of her favorite roles was the title part in “Cinderella” in a production staged for her by her husband, the renowned Soviet choreographer Konstantin Sergeyev.
Dance Open is also running a series of master classes by some of the world’s most respected and admired ballet dancers and coaches, including Arthur Mitchell, founder of the Dance Theatre of Harlem (see interview, this page). 
The festival ends on April 16 with a gala performance that will bring together the cr&#232;me de la cr&#232;me of the international ballet world in the caliber of Isabelle Ciaravola and Mathieu Gagnon (Paris Opera Ballet), Jonah Acosta (English National Ballet), Ashley Bouder and Daniel Ulbricht (New York City Ballet) and Otto Bubenicek (Hamburg Ballet).

<i>The Eleventh International Dance Open Festival runs from April 13 through 16. For more information visit www.danceopen.com</i>

TITLE: Coming unstuck
AUTHOR: By Tatyana Sochiva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Artist Nikolai Vasiliyev is using adhesive tape to get the idea of social problems to stick in people’s heads. His exhibit, “Tape Art,” is the first project to be shown at Mixed Media, a new exhibit space at Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art.
Tape art, which has existed for about 25 years, is a type of street art in which artists use tape instead of paint to create images.
Vasiliyev used this inexpensive, readily available material to create a collection of children’s portraits that have never before been shown together. In his collection, Vasiliyev focuses primarily on the children of migrant workers who are forced to grow up not only in difficult living conditions, but also in an alien culture. 
His pictures are based on photographs of children living in the southern outskirts of St. Petersburg, as well as on characters from his own imagination.
The backgrounds of the portraits are advertisements, which can still be seen through the semi-transparent tape used to depict the subjects of the portraits themselves. In this way, Vasiliyev attempts to show the contrast between the world of a poor child with the materialistic world of the consumer market for cell phones, plasma TVs and gadgets.
Vasiliyev has chosen to depict the faces of young people from less fortunate backgrounds to convey a range of children’s emotions, including mistrust, sadness and anger. Their faces succeed in saying far more about this social problem than anything a migrant worker might express in words about the struggles in their everyday life.
The theme of these children and their position in society is important to Vasiliyev both as a father and as a street artist. With this collection, he attempts to portray street characters and bring social issues to people’s attention.
Artists have been creating tape art for about 25 years, but often remain anonymous. Even under museum conditions, tape pictures usually only last for about three years due to the non-durability of the tape.
Vasiliyev has been working in tape art since 2007 and is one of the few Russian tape artists with pieces on display in both Russian and foreign museums. 

<i>“Tape Art” runs through April 21 at Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art, 
2, 29th Line of Vasilyevsky Island. 
Tel. 324 0809. M. Vasileostrovskaya. www.erarta.ru.</i>

TITLE: Life imitates art
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Kravtsova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: While spring is seemingly in no rush to reach St. Petersburg, snapshots of sunny Italy going on display this week at Rosphoto photography center will bring a little cheer to the city. A retrospective of works by the prominent Italian photographer Franco Fontana will be unveiled on April 13.
Fontana has experimented with various types of photography including fashion, portraiture, nudes and still-life, and has collaborated with publications including American and French Vogue, Time magazine and the New York Times. Nevertheless, it was the picturesque landscapes of his motherland that helped him to become a significant figure in contemporary photography.
His exhibit at Rosphoto comprises a photographic journey to admire the landscapes of provincial Italy, the Mediterranean and Tyrrhenian coasts and Sicily. The exhibition features photographs taken between 1970 and 2007.
In his works, Fontana contrasts the stern, geometrical and precise lines of natural landscapes with a palette of garish colors, making the images both simple and ingenious at the same time. 
Heavily influenced by abstract impressionists such as Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Ed Reinhardt, Fontana experiments with the interplay of color and form, which distinguished his art photography from the black-and-white photo works of his contemporaries.
“Fontana started to experiment with color photography long before digital technology appeared,” said Andrei Martynov, the exhibit’s curator. “That is why his works are so important.”
None of Fontana’s photographs have been edited using computer programs. Everything is real and natural, but seen through Fontana’s lens, the subjects take on a different appearance. 
“I think photography is not a study of positive reality but a search for an ideal truth of suggestion, mystery and fantasy,” Fontana has said. “To take a photograph is to possess; it is an act in which knowledge and profound possession are acquired. Photography should not reproduce the visible; it should make the invisible visible.” 
At first glance, Fontana’s photography resembles pictorial art rather than a photographic image.
“He has found his own type of photography — a half-abstract photography of geometrical forms,” said Martynov. “It is unique in its own way, and his photography can definitely be compared to oil painting.” 
The colors and shapes Fontana captures in his photos often create a mood of peace and happiness. The artist’s rural landscapes are full of sunshine and expressive colors. 
“His color palette is thoroughly Mediterranean,” Martynov said. 
“Not every photograph has the optimistic boost that Fontana’s works do. That was one of the reasons for bringing the show to St. Petersburg,” he added.
Fontana’s works can currently be found in more than 60 museums around the world, including London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His photographs can also be found in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.
The exhibition at Rosphoto is unique in that the photographs on display are from Fontana’s private collection.
“These works were first shown at the Moscow photo biennale in 2008,” said Martynov. “After that, the exhibit was shown in several other Russian cities. St. Petersburg will probably be the last city where this exhibit will be shown.”

<i>“Franco Fontana. Photography” runs from April 13 through May 20 at Rosphoto, 35 Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa. Tel. 314 1214. M. Sennaya Ploshchad / Sadovaya. www.rosphoto.org.</i>

TITLE: in the spotlight: Celebrity causes — and faces
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
TEXT: Last week, the Federation Fund brought another batch of Hollywood stars to Moscow, film star Jim Carrey was reported to be on the point of marrying a Russian student, and Komsomolskaya Pravda revived the art of face-reading to solve the enigma that is It Girl and journalist Ksenia Sobchak.
After splashing out on huge billboards across Moscow, the Federation Fund, which invites stars over for fundraisers for sick children, held a charity auction that attracted a lot less media attention than its previous efforts. That could be due to the section on its website devoted to suing media outlets. This time, the Daily Mail gave it the biggest coverage, focusing on the burning issues of whether Sophia Loren should be showing cleavage at her age and how tiny 1980s pop singer and former X Factor judge Paula Abdul looks in real life.
The foundation attracted a lot of speculation when its first high-profile concert included a performance by then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. And later a mother of a child who was visited in the hospital by film star Sharon Stone complained to Ekho Moskvy radio that she had seen no more concrete help. The foundation scrambled to provide evidence of its donations, until then not made public. It also sued media over critical coverage but with little success. A statement on its website complains that “such cases are extremely dangerous for the litigant.”
According to a brief summary on its website, its two charity concerts in Moscow last summer raised $765,000 for hospitals, plus buying an apartment in Beslan for a young man who was nearly blinded while saving a boy playing with a hand grenade. It’s a lot of money, but the pomp of the events, with a massive turnout of stars spending several days in Moscow, raises questions about the costs.
The website says the concert Putin appeared at in December 2010 raised far more, with 372 million rubles ($12.6 million dollars) going to hospitals in cash form plus a list of equipment and toys donated.
This week Hollywood stars gave the foundation a vote of confidence, however, with Sophia Loren turning out for the third time and Woody Allen and Kevin Costner, who came to previous events, donating lots.
Meanwhile, newspapers speculated that film star Jim Carrey was about to marry a Russian student, Anastasia Vitkina. The New York Post reported that they were in a relationship late last year, but suitably for a potential star’s spouse, no one seems to know much about her. Even the Russian tabloids have not come up with any juicy details about her Russian origins, while Kommersant simply wrote that she was born and grew up in Russia. Her reported age varies from 23 to 30, but she is evidently a fair bit younger than Carrey, who is 50. It must be love because she let him take her on a date to a Guns n’ Roses concert. Still, that was not as bad as Komsomolskaya Pravda, which gave up a whole page to discussing Ksenia Sobchak’s face, based on a documentary about the “science” of “phenotypology.” Her flared nostrils indicate a fiery temperament and “not the strongest nerves,” apparently, while her long neck shows she likes to take the initiative. Sobchak’s nerves were certainly tested Thursday when U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul pulled out of her GosDep 2 talk show at the last moment, when the audience had already unfurled Stars and Stripes flags. McFaul has been tweeting to Sobchak about his keen desire to go on the show, which is barred from MTV, but he failed to turn up, forcing Sobchak to field a somewhat one-sided discussion of U.S.-Russian relations on the show, which is filmed live.

TITLE: THE DISH: Bazar
AUTHOR: By Ciara Bartlam
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: <b>Market fresh</b>
From spring to harvest in the blink of an eye, Bazar celebrates the seasons of St. Petersburg. Located in the premises that were formerly home to the restaurant Vesna, one of the many fusion restaurants in the city, Bazar showcases a new novelty from this little nook in Konyushennaya Ploshchad — home-grown cooking. 
Long gone are the pristine white tablecloths and crystal glasses of Vesna. The old restaurant, whose name translated as “spring,” has been reinvented to suit a new fashion for wholesome, fresh local produce minus the mud, as seen at the LavkaLavka market stall on New Holland last summer. 
Everything in Bazar is warm, from the wooden decking, to the huge decorative lampshades hanging from the ceiling of the main room, to the friendly faces of the wait staff greeting guests as they walk through the door. Fancy is a word that cannot be applied to this restaurant: Instead, it is elegant, unassuming and incredibly endearing.  
Bazar — like Vesna before it — is the brainchild of Valery Kudryashov and his mother, who wanted to bring home-cooking to the restaurant scene. Using only the best ingredients, they serve a range of good quality, authentic Russian and Caucasian dishes. These include the usual suspects such as three types of khachapuri (Georgian cheese-bread) priced from 300 to 350 rubles ($10 to $12). But the menu also includes some more unexpected dishes, like salmon steak wrapped in parchment (490 rubles, $16.50) and rabbit stewed in milk (580 rubles, $20). True to the ethos of the restaurant, both of these dishes comprise high-quality ingredients fresh from the farm. The rabbit was divinely creamy and well matched by a dollop of mashed potatoes that complemented the full flavor of the meat. The salmon was salubrious, restoring all the senses with its delicate texture and moreish flavor. Having been wrapped in parchment while cooked, it was magnificently moist and a delight for the taste buds.  
From the Lent menu, the saut&#233;ed zucchini (230 rubles, $8) was delicious and surprisingly filling — a good thing for those following a strict Lenten diet, only eating once or twice a day in the lead-up to Easter. The flavors of the zucchini and the tomatoes warmly invite guests, and their senses, to reminisce of home and, with the wintery weather still on the streets, to fill themselves with wholesome warmth and the priceless sensation of being fed by someone who really cares.
Accompanied by what can only be described as one of the best khachapuri in the city, Bazar lives up to every expectation as a country-style restaurant with only good food and no fuss. The khachapuri po-Megrelsky (350 rubles, $12) was simply delectable, with flaky dough that was far less heavy than usually encountered. With a glass of rustic, Primitivo red wine (300 rubles, $10), the only thing this dining experience lacked was an open fire and a good nap at the end.
The strawberry soup (190 rubles, $6.50) comes highly recommended as something fresh to cleanse one’s palate after being fed to the brim, as is usually the case when one visits a Russian home. And that is exactly what it does: Fresh strawberries and a spoonful of lime sorbet lighten the load after a hearty meal and revitalize anyone indulging in it.
Bazar is truly like a home from home, but with one added extra of which few apartments in Russia can boast: A mini-market tucked away inside, selling fresh fruit and vegetables, dried fruit and nuts, fresh dairy products and other locally-produced farm goods. It’s not a big market by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a lovely touch to add to the rural feel of this little hideaway in the center of a big city. Lucky guests may even find themselves leaving with an orange in their pockets as a gift from their wonderful hosts.

TITLE: The Gateway to Moscow
AUTHOR: By Howard Amos
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: TVER — Scattered across the world are three monuments to Afanasy Nikitin, one of the first-recorded Europeans to go to India — and a Tver native.
There is a black obelisk to the south of Mumbai where he purportedly stepped ashore and a statue in Ukraine’s Feodosiya where he documented his adventures. But the grandest memorial stands in his hometown.
The bronze figure shows the bearded explorer, who may have converted to Islam while in India, striding forward and full of purpose. It stands by the Volga River on the city’s long embankment, which is fringed on both sides by churches and the pastel-colored facades of 18th-century houses.  
Nikitin left the city known as the “gateway to Moscow” in the 15th century and traveled down the Volga, down to Baku and then across the Caspian Sea and through Persia to India.
Though he never made it back alive, his book “Journey Across Three Seas” became a famous travelogue. A movie of Nikitin’s life was made in both Hindi and Russian in 1958, and rock heartthrob Boris Grebenshchikov even wrote a song about the merchant with wanderlust.
But Tver’s link with India is not just something that belongs to history. One of the city’s poster boys today is Indian-born Harminder Chhatwal, owner of the region’s most successful supermarket chain, Tverskoi Kupets. Chhatwal came to the city as a student in 1991 and has lived there ever since. Now a Russian citizen, he even entered local politics on the United Russia ticket.
Chhatwal is not the only foreign presence in town. Japan’s Hitachi began the construction of a heavy-machinery factory with the support of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development last year. And there are joint ventures with Swedish and Swiss firms. Finnish coffee giant Paulig opened a roaster in 2011, which can process up to 6 million kilograms of coffee annually.      
The older of the two bridges that straddle the Volga as it meanders through Tver is a formidable cast-iron structure built by a Czech engineer in 1898 and partly financed by a French-Belgian carriage-making company.
The Volga is the heart of the city, which grew from the point where the 3,530-kilometer waterway joins with its more diminutive partner, the Tvertsa River. The city is the first big urban center of note on the Volga, which arises from a spring nearby in the Tver region.  
Tver is also located on the main railway lines and roads between the country’s two biggest cities — under the tsars the city was the 19th of 25 postal stations from the capital, St. Petersburg.
Though historians trace its origins back to the 12th century when Tver was founded by traders from Novgorod and recount its medieval struggle for supremacy with a young Moscow, there is little trace left of those times. A cataclysmic fire in 1763 means that the dominating architectural decor today is of Catherine the Great’s 18th century.
Much, of course, was reconstructed after World War II and the Nazi occupation. About 20,000 Soviet soldiers were killed in the 1941 battle for the city. Then Tver was known as Kalinin, after the Bolshevik revolutionary and official head of the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1946.      
In recent years, Tver has undergone a new cultural renaissance. As part of a state program called, Ver v Tver, or “Believe in Tver,” Moscow art entrepreneur Marat Gelman has launched a modern art gallery, TverCA, in the run-down Soviet river station at the confluence of the Volga and the Tvertsa. Following a similar project in Perm, Gelman is looking to replicate his success.      
But the well-maintained city center, redolent with neoclassical elegance, fades when you venture outside the city. The region as a whole has one of the highest levels of population decline in central Russia, losing 8 percent of its residents between 2002 and 2010, according to census figures.
More poetically, the region is also littered with the crumbling country estates of the imperial nobility that used to exit en masse from St. Petersburg in the summer months. A lack of funds and the sheer quantity of these sites mean that they are gradually being lost forever.
One modern son of Tver, the chanson superstar Mikhail Krug, had a particularly tragic end when he was killed by intruders in his city apartment in 2002 at the age of 50. His grave is still a point of pilgrimage for avid fans.
In a song about his home, “My Dear Town,” Krug’s opening verse goes: “My dear town of grief and tear/ The trusty foundation of Old Russia / You fall asleep to the whispers of the Volga and the Tvertsa / You fall asleep to the whispers of birches / Sleep my dear Mother Tver.”  
Krug is buried in the Dmitovo-Cherkassky Cemetery.   

<b>What to see if you have two hours</b>
Any visitor to Tver will be drawn inexorably to the city’s riverfront. But, never fear, this is where you should be. The city’s main sites, including onion-domed churches, monasteries, parks, monuments and the graceful 18th-century houses, line the flanks of the Volga. One can simply stroll up and down the two sides of the river, enjoying the view.
The most spectacular site to visit is Catherine the Great’s Travel Palace (3-3a Sovietskaya Ulitsa; +7 4822-34-25-61; gallery.tversu.ru), where emperors would stay on their trips between Saint Petersburg and Moscow. Set slightly back from the river, Russia’s most famous historian, Mikhail Karamzin, once did a public reading in the building to an audience, which included Alexander I. Today, it is an art gallery housing works by local artists and some treasures from nearby archaeological excavations.

<b>What to do if you have two days</b>
Those with more time on their hands can drop by some of the city’s churches and museums, or even venture out into a hinterland famed for its thousands of freshwater lakes.
Some of the small museums worth a visit include the Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin House-Museum (11/37 Rybatskaya Ulitsa; +7 4822-34-34-96), where the famous satirist lived while he was serving as a deputy governor, and if peasant tools and merchant trinkets are your thing, the Museum of Tver’s Way of Life (19/4 Ulitsa Gorkova; +7 4822-52-49-03) or the Tver Local History Museum (5 Sovietskaya Ulitsa; +7 4822-34-47-15). Information about all of Tver’s museums — and those in nearby towns — can be found at Tvermuzeum.ru. 
If you have time to leave the city, a pleasant day trip can be made 60 kilometers along the road to St. Petersburg to the old town of Torzhok that has its own Travel Palace built for Catherine the Great. Further to the east is the picturesque Seliger Lake — actually a system of lakes — set in the rolling Valdai Hills. In July, the area is inundated with tens of thousands of youthful supporters of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin taking part in their annual political forum.   
If you have time to head westward, you could aim for the small town of Kalyazin — also within striking distance of Sergiyev Posad and some of the northernmost towns of Moscow’s Golden Ring. On the Volga, Kalyazin is known for the haunting sight of the bell tower of the Makaryevsky Monastery that rises above the waters of the Uglich reservoir. The site was flooded during the construction of a hydroelectric station in 1940.

<b>Nightlife</b>
Classical music-lovers can visit the Tver Region Philharmonic (Teatralnaya Ploshad; +7 4822-34-64-34; tverfilarmonic.ru) that puts on regular concerts. Or you could see a movie at one of the only Soviet architectural intrusions on the city’s riverfront — the Zvezda Cinema (1 Naberezhnaya Stepana Razina; +7 4822-77-71-91; zvezda-kino.ru), which was built in 1937 as the constructivist movement was ending. The Tver Academic Drama Theater (16 Sovietskaya Ulitsa; +7 4822-32-09-09; dramteatr-tver.ru) also puts on regular shows.
If you’re looking to lengthen your evening, however, then the Sunrise Club (50 Ulitsa Zhigareva; +7 4822-34-96-55; clubsunrise.ru) has one of the biggest dance floors in town — it also functions as a restaurant during the day. And for fans of the 1980s, there is the ‘80s Disco (5 Ulitsa Blagoyeva; +7 4822 50-33-22).  

<b>Where to eat</b>
The pedestrian mall Tryokhsvyatskaya Ulitsa — Tver’s version of Moscow’s Arbat — that runs through the center, part way between the railway station and the Volga is packed with fast-food outlets, coffee houses and restaurants. Western chains like Baskin-Robbins compete with Russian chains. Andy Warhol mock-ups of Saddam Hussein and Colonel Moammar Gadhafi make the Kalinin Bar (25/29 Tryokhsvyatskaya Ulitsa; +7 4822-35-71-42) one of the most visible. It serves basic food as well as drinks. Another option is Fortuna (15 Tryokhsvyatskaya Ulitsa; +7 4822-33-09-49; fortuna-tver.ru) that offers a wide variety of dishes in an old merchant house. Main courses start from about 500 rubles ($17).  
Many of Tver’s pricier restaurants are to be found attached to its hotels. One is Birch Groves (14 Moskovskoye Shosse; +7 4822-49-77-80; parkhotel.ru/restaurant), a part of the Tver Park Hotel, where meat dishes cost about 1,000 rubles.  

<b>Where to stay</b>
The 159-room Volga Hotel (1 Ulitsa Zhelyabova; +7 4822 34-81-23; volga-tver.ru) is an unlovely building near the center of town — but rooms can be had from 2,500 rubles ($83) a night and apartments from upward of 5,000 rubles ($166). An even more budget option is the Tourist Hotel (47/102 Ulitsa Kominterna; +7 4822-34-61-78; hotel-tourist.ru), a stone’s throw from the railroad and bus stations. A one-person room starts at 1,300 rubles ($44) a night.
With a restaurant, spa room and conference facilities, the Osnabruk Hotel (20 Ulitsa Saltykova-Shchedrina; +7 4822-35-84-33; hotel.tver.ru) in the center of town offers a more upmarket stay. A one-person bedroom begins at 3,200 rubles ($110) while the top-range luxury rooms will set you back between 4,900 rubles and 5,900 rubles ($165-200). Nearer the edge of town but overlooking the Volga River is the smaller Tver Park Hotel (14 Moskovskoye Shosse; +7 4822-53-77-22; parkhotel.ru). A deluxe suite with a Volga view costs 4,600 rubles per night.

<b>Conversation starters</b>
If you want to get a reaction out of somebody from Tver — possibly a smile, possibly not — call them by their nickname — kozyol (for a man) or kozla (for a woman), which means goat. The apocryphal reason behind the (affectionate) term is that once, arriving in Tver after long delay, Catherine the Great found only a stray goat waiting where she was supposed to have been met by cheering crowds.
Or you could bring up former Tver Governor Dmitry Zelenin who stepped down in 2011, shortly after he used Twitter to post a photo of a worm he purportedly found in his food at a presidential reception. The Kremlin cast doubt on the veracity of his claim.  

How to get there
The easiest way to reach Tver from St. Petersburg is by train. There are dozens of daily trains from the city’s Moscow Railway Station. The journey takes at least six hours and tickets cost 870 rubles ($30) for a platzkart ticket and 2,070 rubles ($70) for a coupe ticket each way.
On the main line between St. Petersburg and the capital, the express Sapsan service is the quickest option — it stops in Tver 2 hours and 40 minutes after leaving St. Petersburg. Ticket prices vary depending on the day and time, but can cost between 2,200 and 6,000 rubles ($74 to $200).
Tver is not served by a civilian airport, although there are plans to build one.
<hr />
<b>Tver</b>
Population: 404,150
Main industries: Machine-building and chemicals
Mayor: Vladimir Babichev
Founded in 1135
Interesting fact: Empress Catherine the Great said Tver was Russia’s second most beautiful city after St. Petersburg.
Helpful contacts: • Mayor Vladimir Babichev (+7 4822-35-57-88; tverduma.ru), • head of the Tver Chamber of Commerce Leonid Musin (+7 4822-35-98-43; tverregion.ru)
Sister cities: Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria; Yingkou, China; H&#228;meenlinna, Finland; Besancon, France; Kaspovar, Hungary; Bergamo, Italy; Khmelnitsky, Ukraine.
<b>Major Businesses</b>
• Tver Wagon Factory (45B Peterburgskoye Shosse; +7 4822-55-91-00; tvz.ru). One of the oldest factories in town, it has been churning out railway cars since its opening under Tsar Nicholas II in 1898. The biggest factory of its type in the country, it is 42.5 percent state-controlled.
• Tvershyolk (1 Dvor Proletarki; 
+7 4822-42-24-97). Built in 1954 on the ruins of a cotton factory destroyed during World War II, Tver’s silk factory actually works with a variety of fabrics, including flax, and fulfills uniform contracts for the Defense Ministry and other security agencies.
• Tverstekloplastik (45 Ulitsa P. Savelevoi; +7 4822-55-33-11; steklonit.com) is one of two factories owned by Steklonit, part of the Ruskompozit group, the country’s biggest producer of synthetic materials and fiberglass. The plant produces glass fibers used for everything from small boats to ice hockey protection pads.

TITLE: Exhibit Provides Look Into Elite Children’s Lives
AUTHOR: By Jemma Buckley
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Anna Skladmann’s exhibition “Little Adults” gives viewers a rare glimpse into the closely guarded world of the children of Russia’s newly rich elite, the first generation of heirs and heiresses who were born into the wealth amassed by their parents in post-Soviet Russia.
The photos focus on children between the ages of 6 and 12 and their position in the world as “Little Adults,” Skladmann said in an interview.
Yakov is depicted wearing a suit jacket and holding a Kalashnikov, while ballerinas dance on the golden-framed TV behind him. Arina wears long leather gloves and leans against a vintage car from her father’s collection. Alisia sits cross-legged under a chandelier wearing a tiara and a mink coat in her mother’s fur shop.
Skladmann said she wants the project to be seen as a historical document, with the surnameless children serving to represent a whole generation of what she calls “child-successors.”
“Maybe in 50 years time we will pick up these photographs and understand how that society started forming itself,” Skladmann said. “What is happening now is a social phenomenon that has been absent in Russia since the time of the tsars. At that time they had these great court painters, who I’ve studied nonstop. In my photographs, I wanted to capture the reality but also portray it stylistically as the new court painter.”
In one portrait, Antoshka wears a Hussar’s uniform. He stands solemnly with his arms by his sides.
At the private opening of the exhibit, Antoshka, wearing a cap and baggy jeans, came up to Skladmann and asked whether she could reshoot his photograph. “I want to add more of a hip-hop vibe,” he said.
“Court painters would decide on the location and outfits for their subjects and make them pose for hours on end. My methods aren’t that extreme, but nothing in these photographs is an accident. We were building a stage together, around a character,” Skladmann said.
Not all of Skladmann’s subjects were happy with the stage she built for them.
In comments accompanying the portraits, Skladmann describes how Liza, sitting on the end of an absurdly long dining table in a pristine white dress, spent the entire shoot itching to get changed and back to her favorite pastime — skateboarding along the smooth white corridors of her family home.
Vadim, wearing a large red bow tie and standing on the rooftop terrace of his family home with Moscow laid out behind him, asked Skladmann how many photographs she planned on taking. When she promised no more than 10, Vadim counted down until the 10th click before retreating inside to put on his pajamas and watch TV. Skladmann had meant 10 films, not 10 shots.
Other children, however, were more resigned to life in the spotlight. Meara, photographed in the synagogue he attends, received a call from his grandmother after the shoot.
She asked Meara how it had gone, and Skladmann wrote that he answered with the world-weariness of an elderly Jew. “Well, it was nothing out of the ordinary — just a simple photo shoot.”
The exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art is the first large-scale showing of Skladmann’s project in Russia, having already received good receptions in the U.S. and Europe.
“The exhibition in Moscow will take the project to another level. It’s easier when I show it in Europe or America because I’m showing them another world. Here it’s more complicated because I’m forcing people to look in a mirror at their own society. I’m nervous about how people will react,” Skladmann said.
Born in Germany to Russian parents in 1986, Skladmann first came to Russia as a young teenager in 2000 when she attended a masquerade ball.
“They had a special children’s table and because it was a ball they were dressed up, but not in the way that I knew it, say for Halloween or for a carnival. They were all dressed up like little adults, and behaving like them too,” she said.
This impression stuck in Skladmann’s mind. When she returned to Moscow in 2008 she met a young girl named Nastya at a tea party, who would help get her into the homes and lives of other members of Russia’s elite.

TITLE: Veterans From 1979 War Turn Detective, Bring Home Comrades
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — In the years following his disappearance from his truck battalion during a mission in Afghanistan in 1982, some of Alexei Zuyev’s former comrades in arms reported seeing him alive behind enemy lines.
But as it turned out, the 19-year-old Soviet soldier who disappeared 30 years ago in Afghanistan’s Parvan province was shot by his captors, the Afghan mujahedin fighting the Soviet Army.
The determination of Zuyev’s fate led to the recovery of his remains, and he was due to be buried with full military honors Wednesday, April 11 in his native Kazakhstan.
An emotional farewell ceremony for Zuyev was held in Moscow late last month near the Poklonnaya Gora monument. The monument features a Soviet soldier returning from Afghanistan.
“We are bringing our friend back home,” former officer Ruslan Aushev said at the ceremony.
All that was made possible by the efforts of the Committee of International Soldiers’ Affairs, led by Aushev, a charismatic general who commanded Soviet troops in Afghanistan and also served as president of Ingushetia from 1993 to 2001.
More then 15,000 Soviet soldiers died during the Afghanistan war, which started in 1979 as a Soviet attempt to install a friendly government in Kabul.
Since then, Afghanistan has once again turned into a battlefield, as U.S.-led coalition forces slug it out with Taliban radicals.
Amid the current carnage, former Soviet soldiers are coming back to the war-torn country — this time not to fight but to look for the remains of their dead.
In February, the committee returned the remains of Sergei Kolesov, another former soldier who fought in Afghanistan and was buried in his native St. Petersburg after having been missing for nearly 28 years.
Since its founding in 1992 throughout the Commonwealth of Independent States, the committee has brought home the remains of four soldiers killed during the war.
The search process involved sifting through scattered bits of information provided by former veterans, finding the remains with the help of locals and identifying them using a costly DNA procedure.
The remains of 15 people are still awaiting DNA identification.
In Zuyev’s case, the DNA sample was taken from his sister, who was the only survivor from the soldier’s family.
Alexander Lavrentyev, a former intelligence analyst and a deputy head of the committee, said it took him several years to find Zuyev’s remains.
The only information he had about the soldier was “Alexei from the Kokchetav region.”
The committee’s goal is to find all 266 soldiers still missing in Afghanistan. Half of them hailed from Russia.
For much of the 15-member committee’s existence, money was a critical question. Its charter specified that the group was to be self-financed, and survival depended on donations from former veterans who had become businessmen.
The situation changed in 2009 thanks to Aushev, whose efforts to secure outside funding were successful.
Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Belarus agreed to provide annual donations for the committee.
In 2010, the committee received about 2 million rubles ($70,000) from the four countries, although Russia provided most of that, Lavrentyev said.
Lavrentyev traveled to Afghanistan to find Zuyev’s remains. The trip included visits to remote Afghan provinces, tips from elderly witnesses and talks with former rebel commanders.
“I personally got a message from the man who shot Zuyev,” Lavrentyev said. “He said that he died like a soldier.”
Lavrentyev said he was driven by a desire to restore Zuyev’s good name. Some of Zuyev’s comrades suspected him of betraying the Soviet cause.
“Thanks to your efforts, we can now consider Zuyev a hero, not a traitor,” Sergei Pivovarov, who served with Zuyev in one battalion, told Lavrentyev at the ceremony on Poklonnaya Gora.
Lavrentyev said that during his time in Afghanistan, former enemies welcomed him and his teammates in a spirit of peace.
“They said there is no more war between us. After seeing the current situation, they have started to treat Russians far better,” he said.
Lavrentyev added that many former Soviet Afghan war veterans who had visited his office in downtown Moscow were at first shocked to see pictures of the committee members meeting Akhmad Shakh Masud, a late Afghan war rebel.
The committee’s work has become a personal challenge for Lavrentyev. His former business partner, also an Afghan war veteran, asked him to join and help Aushev run the day-to-day operations.
“I did not serve there,” Lavrentyev said. “But I was not an outside observer, because my friends went through Afghanistan.”
Although more than 600,000 Soviet soldiers fought in Afghanistan, the war once described by journalist Artyom Borovik as “hidden” has left indelible scars on the memories of Russians.
According to a 2009 VTsIOM poll, 47 percent of respondents called the mission a “questionable undertaking of the Soviet government.”
Soon after pulling out of Afghanistan, the Soviet government turned its back on the soldiers.
Many of them suffered psychological trauma, and during the 1990s some became involved in criminal activity.
Lavrentyev said that in the 20 years of searching by the committee, 29 missing soldiers have been found in Afghanistan living under new names and practicing Islam.
Of that group, 22 agreed to return home; the rest decided to stay.
In Lavrentyev’s words, “many of the ones who survived are emotionally destroyed people.”