SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1706 (17), Wednesday, May 2, 2012
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TITLE: Russian Envoy Warns U.S. on Magnitsky Bill
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Russia's ambassador to the United States warned the U.S. on Wednesday that legislation to ban Russian officials implicated in the 2009 jail death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky could damage relations between the two countries.
The U.S. State Department expressed support last week for the so-called Magnitsky Act, which is being considered by Congress and would impose sanctions on foreign officials accused of human rights abuses.
"Trying to use it as an instrument of pressure on us will not bring any results except to damage Russian-U.S. relations," Ambassador Sergei Kislyak said on Voice of Russia radio.
He also said the U.S. government was showing a lack of respect for Russia by intervening in the investigation into Magnitsky's death. This "is Russia's internal affair and is being investigated in accordance with Russian law," he said in the interview, Interfax reported.
Kislyak and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made similar comments last month, signaling Moscow's strong irritation with U.S. actions on the case.
Magnitsky died after a savage beating by prison guards in a Moscow detention center in November 2009. He was arrested a year earlier by Interior Ministry officials whom he had accused of defrauding the government of millions of dollars. Although President Dmitry Medvedev ordered an investigation shortly after his death, no one has been convicted of wrongdoing.
The lawyer for Magnitsky's mother said Wednesday that investigators had rejected a request he had filed for further investigation into prison officials, Interfax reported.
Investigators had accused two jail doctors of neglect in the case, but charges were later dropped against one because the statute of limitations ran out.
Britain announced this week that it has adopted immigration rules that could also ban Magnitsky suspects. The new rules bar entry to foreign officials accused of human rights violations in their home countries.
Last summer, the U.S. State Department said it had blacklisted 60 Russian officials implicated in Magnitsky's death, drawing a protest from Moscow, which later said it had blacklisted 11 U.S. officials that it accused of human rights abuses against Russian citizens. Russia has not identified the banned U.S. officials or the citizens.
TITLE: 13 Dead, Dozens Hurt in Dagestan Bombings
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Twin suicide car bombs killed at least 13 people and wounded just over 100 more in the Dagestani capital Makhachkala late Thursday, in what police are calling a terrorist attack.
Analysts said the attack was further evidence of the government’s inability to bring peace to the restive North Caucasus, but warned against linking it to Vladimir Putin’s inauguration on Monday.
The toll from the bombings made it the most deadly terrorist attack since the January 2011 bombing at Domodedovo Airport that killed 37.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but police told Interfax that they had information about who organized the attack and released a list of wanted alleged gang members, all in their 20s.
Many of the dead and wounded were police and rescue workers who rushed to the scene after the first bomb exploded in a Mitsubishi sedan on the outskirts of town at about 10:28 p.m., near a checkpoint called Alaska-30 along the Makhachkala-Astrakhan highway.
The bomb contained about 30 kilograms of TNT, officials said Friday.
Twelve minutes after the first explosion, a bomb containing about 50 kilograms of TNT, which was hidden in a minibus, exploded, sending deadly shrapnel flying and leaving a 30-centimeter crater in the asphalt, police said in a statement.
Investigators have found fragments of bodies that could belong to the attackers, including a man’s foot and pieces of a woman’s body, a police source told Interfax.
A preliminary inquiry showed that one of the suicide bombers was 23-year-old Rizvan Aliyev from Makhachkala, a law enforcement source told Interfax. The identity of the suspected female bomber was unknown as of Friday evening.
Earlier reports said the attack was allegedly carried out by Aliyev and his 19-year-old sister, Muslimat. Both have been on the wanted list after having gone missing late in April.
All those wounded — including 34 police officers and 55 civilians — were taken to local hospitals, police said.
“One of the versions is that the purpose of the attacks was specifically to harm policemen. It explains how the twin bombing was organized,” an unnamed law enforcement official told RIA-Novosti.
Dagestani President Magomedsalam Magomedov said in a statement on his website that the attack was aimed at disrupting bridge-building within the republic’s Muslim community.
Tatyana Lokshina of Human Rights Watch pointed to a recent meeting between Sufi and Salafi leaders that was seen as a sign of reconciliation after years of tension.
“Whoever’s behind this attack is possibly not content with any signs of a possible truce. What they want is an intensification of hostility in the region,” she said, adding that the meeting had more regional significance than Putin’s upcoming inauguration.
The bombs could also have been intended for a May 9 Victory Day celebration, said Enver Kisriyev, head of the Caucasus section of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ center for civilization and regional research.
The Federal Security Service and the Interior Ministry have organized emergency operational search activities and police opened a criminal terrorism case in connection with the incident.
Dmitry Medvedev ordered that Magomedov provide aid to the families of those killed and injured in the attacks, according to a statement posted on the Kremlin website. Putin didn’t comment on the incident on Friday.
The U.S. Embassy and the European Union issued a statement Friday condemning the attacks.
Armed conflicts between militants and security forces are frequent in the North Caucasus. In early March, a female suicide bomber blew herself up at a traffic post about 40 kilometers south of Makhachkala, killing five cops.
“Dagestan is burning. Dagestan is at war,” Kisriyev said.
Putin has based his decade-long rule partly on his ability to maintain order and security, especially in the North Caucasus. The challenge seems to remain after he starts his third presidential rule next week.
TITLE: Medvedev Signs Off on Ecology Policy
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Activists, journalists and private citizens could find it easier to access information about the environmental records of businesses and government agencies under a new policy approved by outgoing President Medvedev.
Freedom of information is one proposal laid out in a 2,900-word environmental policy document published Monday on the Kremlin website.
"Principles of state policy on environmental development in the Russian Federation in the period up to 2030" for the first time identifies "global environmental problems associated with climate change, biodiversity loss, desertification and other negative environmental processes" as having an impact on Russian national interests.
The report also singles out poor water treatment, degradation of agricultural soil and increasing volumes of waste as major challenges facing the country.
Proposals in the wide-ranging document include promoting "environmentally oriented economic growth," slashing pollution from industry to levels "of other developed countries" and making environmental education a key part of schools' curriculum.
Businesses may face compulsory environmental impact assessments for new developments, phased introduction of a system of an environmental audit system and a ban on unsorted garbage.
The document offers no estimate of the costs of the transition to higher standards, but says such projects will be financed from federal and regional budgets, as well as public-private partnerships.
Environmentalists have applauded the sentiments, but warned that though the strategy promises much, it offers little detail.
"We welcome any documents that help to create a system to support the environment," said Vladimir Chuprov, director of Greenpeace Russia's energy program. "Unfortunately, the document is quite empty — there are some very proper statements but no concrete steps outlined on how to achieve it. No ministerial body is named to oversee it, for example — it is entirely written in the passive voice."
Chuprov did welcome the commitment to include environmental issues in new national educational standards — one thing he says should be one of the strategy's top priorities.
But he said he was disappointed that despite references to environmentally friendly growth, there was no mention of transitioning to a low-carbon economy, or more details about the creation of institutions to properly regulate environmental affairs.
Residents of the Marino, Kozhukhovo and Kapotnya districts are breathing the most polluted air in Moscow, according to research by City Hall's department of natural resource use and environmental protection, Interfax reported Wednesday.
An investigation into a flurry of complaints about unpleasant smells from the Moscow oil refinery in Kapotnya, and the Kuryanovsky and Lyuberetsky water treatment plants in Marino and Kozhukhovo showed unusually high levels of hydrogen sulfide, the research showed.
Department officials said they hoped to develop a plan to reduce air pollution at all three facilities by the end of 2012.
TITLE: Blogger With Afro Challenges Conventional Politics
AUTHOR: Jonathan Earle
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: With emerald eyes and a colossal, caramel-colored Afro, Ilya Varlamov doesn't look like a typical Siberian mayor.
Nor does he have the resume.
An architect by training, Varlamov runs iCube, a creative advertising and development agency. But he's best known for his photo blog, one of the country's most popular, which features frequent criticism of the government spliced between pictures of luxury hotels in Singapore, race riots in Moscow and the office of former Kremlin spinmeister Vladislav Surkov.
In a country mostly ruled by drab United Russia party loyalists, Varlamov has challenged ideas about where politicians come from and what they look like. He also briefly turned Omsk, which votes for a mayor next month, into the latest battleground for activists looking to convert winter's mass protests into concrete reform.
"I thought, 'Why not?'" Varlamov said of his mayoral bid in a recent interview, grinning a boyish grin.
"Why should only strongmen become mayors? They're the ones responsible for the miserable state of our country," he said. "I'm different. I don't have any experience stealing or being corrupt."
Varlamov's timing couldn't have been better. Independent mayoral candidates have ridden the winter's discontent to election victories in Yaroslavl and Tolyatti, and activists are flexing the opposition's muscle with a headline-grabbing challenge to the results of a disputed mayoral election in Astrakhan.
Varlamov, a Moscow resident, pledged to turn Omsk, a city of 1.1 million in the heart of Siberia, into a model Russian city with international standards of urban planning.
He often criticizes the government on his blog, particularly with regard to architecture and urban planning, and in December he joined a handful of oppositional public figures to co-found the League of Voters, which promotes the development of civil society.
But in a riddle to detractors, Varlamov denies representing the opposition, even though he received an endorsement from Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader and anti-corruption blogger.
"I never said I would be the candidate from the opposition. This would be impossible," he wrote recently on his blog. "The opposition doesn't have just one candidate. … I'm an independent, civil candidate."
He threw his hat into the Omsk race on April 6 after receiving an invitation via Twitter from a local opposition activist belonging to a group calling itself Citizen Mayor.
Critics immediately dismissed the campaign as a stunt, citing Varlamov's lack of experience in city administration and poor name recognition in Omsk.
Varlamov is a controversial figure in opposition circles, largely because of suspected links to Surkov and the government.
The blogger denies any connection to Surkov or his successor as Kremlin deputy chief of staff, Vyacheslav Volodin.
"The only time I ever saw Surkov was at a news conference. He might not even know who I am," Varlamov said in the interview, adding that the photographs of Surkov's office were the result of a simple request. "I just asked to shoot there!"
For many, however, the smoking gun was the online appearance of an e-mail exchange, purportedly between Varlamov and Kristina Potupchik, spokeswoman for the pro-Kremlin Nashi youth group, that appears to show Varlamov accepting 400,000 rubles ($13,600) for writing blog posts flattering to the Kremlin.
Varlamov has variously refused to discuss the allegations or denied them, fueling speculation that his Omsk candidacy was a Kremlin ploy to discredit the opposition or split the opposition electorate ahead of the June 17 vote, assuring a victory for the ruling United Russia party.
United Russia has nominated the speaker of the city legislature, Vyacheslav Dvorakovsky, as its mayoral candidate. The Communist Party, which beat United Russia to win the Omsk vote in the Dec. 4 State Duma elections, is expected to nominate its own candidate or back an independent candidate at a party conference on Thursday, said Adam Pogarsky, a regional Communist Party legislator.
Vladislav Inozemtsev, who worked as an economic adviser on billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov's recent presidential campaign, is also running, leading to speculation that contributions from Prokhorov might skew the race.
"Varlamov says himself that he's not oppositional," Inozemtsev said by telephone. "I don't see in him an alternative to the status quo. In my opinion, he's a part of the existing system."
Muddying the water, Inozemtsev, a Moscovite like Varlamov, is a member of the Institute of Contemporary Development, a liberal think tank chaired by President Dmitry Medvedev.
For his mayoral bid, Varlamov assembled a "dream team" of advisers to help imagine a Russian city freed from the legacy of Soviet central planning, which placed little emphasis on livability and charm. They include blogger Sergei Mukhamedov, outspoken designer Artemy Lebedev — who pledged to redesign Omsk if Varlamov won — and Maxim Kats, a former poker player-turned-Moscow district council member with an amateur's passion for urban planning.
A vague manifesto written by Varlamov and Kats excoriates poor infrastructure for the disabled and bicyclists and dirty streets. "Every person has the right to walk around in white pants all year round!" it reads.
Other proposals include improving public transportation, closing the city center to traffic, building bike lanes and improving street cleaning.
Kats said by telephone Wednesday that Omsk may never see those plans come to fruition.
He said volunteers had gathered only 3,100 signatures in support of Varlamov's bid to be placed on the Omsk ballot, making it nearly impossible to gather the remaining 6,900 signatures by the May 7 deadline.
Rather than trudge on, Varlamov could call it quits in the next few days, Kats said.
Varlamov, currently traveling in Africa, did not respond to multiple phone calls for comment.
TITLE: Medvedev Appoints Buryatia, Leningrad Region Governors
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev on Saturday promoted Leningrad region deputy head Alexander Drozdenko to the post of governor of the region, the Kremlin said in a statement on its website.
If approved by the regional legislature, Drozdenko will replace his current boss Valery Serdyukov, who has been head of the region since 1998 and whose term is scheduled to be up in July, RIA-Novosti reported.
Medvedev on Saturday also reappointed Vyacheslav Nagovitsyn head of the republic of Buryatia, a post Nagovitsyn has held since July 2007, according to a statement on the Kremlin website.
Elections chief Vladimir Churov said Saturday that at least two gubernatorial elections will be held on Oct. 14, the first such elections following the passage of a law set to take effect June 1 that reinstates popular votes for governors, RIA-Novosti reported. Churov did not specify in which regions elections would take place.
Gubernatorial elections will be held Oct. 14 for all governors whose terms are set to expire from the period of June 1 to Dec. 31.
TITLE: Defense Minister: Missile Shield Negotiations at Dead End
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Correction appended
Speaking Thursday at an international conference on missile defense in Moscow, Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov cast doubt on the future of missile defense negotiations, saying they were leading nowhere.
"We have not been able to find mutually-acceptable solutions at this point and the situation is practically at a dead end," Serdyukov said, cautioning that Russia might be forced to deploy strategic missiles positioned to destroy elements of a Europe-based missile shield.
Russia has been outspoken in its resistance to NATO-backed U.S. plans to deploy a system of missiles to protect its European allies from potential attacks from states like Iran, saying it could neutralize Russian military capabilities.
"We're not talking about introducing any restrictions on the specifications of the missile shield. Only one condition — the zone of possible interception for current and future missile defense weapon systems should not cross the border of Russia," General Staff head Nikolai Makarov said at the conference, Interfax reported.
Makarov renewed threats about placing short-range Iskander missiles in south and northwest locations in Russia to check missile systems in Europe and called such systems "destabilizing."
"A thorough analysis by the defense ministry's research organizations showed that once the third and fourth stages are deployed, the capability to intercept Russian inter-continental ballistic missiles will be real," Makarov said.
NATO officials countered by saying that the Europe-based missile system would be too weak could not possibly intercept Russian missiles.
"We have no desire to undermine global strategic stability. On the contrary, the missile defense system will be able to intercept only a small number of relatively weak ballistic missiles. They do not have the capacity to neutralize Russia's deterrent force," NATO Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow said, RIA-Novosti reported.
Russia has not said whether it will attend next month's NATO summit in Chicago, at which the formal deployment of the missile system is set to be announced. President-elect Vladimir Putin has said he will not attend the event.
An eight-member Washington delegation is in Moscow this week to meet with Russian officials on missile defense. The delegation will also visit sites for the A-135 missile defense system that protects the Russian capital.
In March, U.S. President Barack Obama was caught in a hot microphone gaffe telling Medvedev he could negotiate concessions on the missile system after the U.S. presidential election in November.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Russia had said it will not attend a NATO summit in Chicago next month; in fact, Russia has not said whether it will send representatives to the event.
TITLE: Putin Will Address Economic Forum Next Month
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Vladimir Putin will deliver a speech as the new Kremlin leader at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum next month, and investors will have a chance to meet the new Cabinet, a presidential aide said Friday.
The annual forum, which will take place June 21 to 23, is used by the government to showcase the economy, while foreign investors attend to meet with key government officials and Russian business leaders.
"President Putin will make a speech, and the new Cabinet will be presented," Kremlin economic aide Arkady Dvorkovich said in an interview with RT television. "The new ministers will take part, so businessmen will be able to talk with the new members of the government."
Dvorkovich also said charges in government policy would be announced and discussed with investors at the forum.
The new Cabinet could be unveiled as early as Tuesday, when Dvorkovich's boss, President Dmitry Medvedev, is expected to be confirmed as prime minister, switching jobs with Putin, who will be inaugurated as president on Monday.
TITLE: Body Found in Elevator Shaft After 6 Months
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The body of a man was found in the elevator shaft of a partially built high-rise apartment building in western Moscow around six months after he died.
The gruesome discovery was made Thursday evening at the building at 2 Ulitsa Tvardovskogo, located between the Strogino metro station and the Moscow Ring Road, Interfax reported.
The damage to the body suggested that the man had died after falling from a significant height, but the remains are so decomposed that it will be difficult to make an identification, the report said, citing a unidentified law enforcement official.
The official said the man was 30 to 45 years old and appeared to have died last autumn.
Police have opened an investigation and are checking the payroll records of the construction company responsible for the building, City 21, to see if the dead man might have been one of its employees, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported on its website.
TITLE: Local Court Makes First Conviction Under Anti-Gay Law
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A St. Petersburg court handed down its first conviction under the city's new anti-gay law on Friday, ordering a leading gay activist to pay a 5,000-ruble fine for his picket against the law.
The district court ruled that Nikolai Alexeyev had promoted homosexuality among minors by picketing City Hall with a sign reading, "Homosexuality Is Not a Perversion" on April 12.
As proof of its verdict, the judge read out statements from several people who had expressed concern to the court that Alexeyev's actions might harm their children, Interfax reported.
Alexeyev denied wrongdoing in court, saying, "I do not know what it means to promote homosexuality, and I do not admit my guilt."
He said his protest had aimed to show that homosexuals have the same rights as other people.
St. Petersburg has come under withering international criticism for passing the vaguely worded law forbidding "the promotion of homosexuality to minors" in March. Several other Russian regions have similar laws, and Moscow is considering adopting one of its own. Federal lawmakers, meanwhile, have called for a national anti-gay law to ostensibly protect children.
Alexeyev promised to appeal Friday's conviction and fine of 5,000 rubles ($170) and said he would take his case to the Constitutional Court and, if necessary, the European Court of Human Rights.
"I'm 100 percent sure that I would win in any European court," he said.
TITLE: LGBT Marchers Detained In May Day Demo
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The police deployed a notorious United Russia anti-gay law to detain 17 LGBT activists for attempting to raise rainbow flags or demonstrate anti-homophobia posters during the May Day demonstration in downtown St. Petersburg on Tuesday.
Before the march started, City Hall official Nikolai Strumentov approached the organizers with two police officers to request that the 100-strong LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) group — part of a larger group of democrats — put away all of their rainbow flags and posters.
He said that the flags and posters violated the ban on the “promotion of sodomy, lesbianism, bisexuality and transgenderism” proposed by United Russia deputy Vitaly Milonov in November and signed into law by St. Petersburg Governor Georgy Poltavchenko in March.
The posters and a large pink banner that the activists held read:
“We didn’t vote for discrimination,” “They came for gays today, they will come for you tomorrow,” “What difference does it make what you are, if you’re a human being,” “Hatred is the enemy of children,” “Freedom to Pussy Riot; freedom to us all,” “LGBT rights are human rights,” “To choose who you love is anyone’s right” and “The world is colorful, not black and white.”
The democratic group’s main slogan and banner, “St. Petersburg Against Putin,” met with no objections from the authorities.
“They just mumbled something disapprovingly,” group organizer and Solidarity Democratic Movement activist Vladimir Volokhonsky said by phone Tuesday.
In 2010, the group of democrats was stopped before it began to march and told to disperse by the police for a banner reading “Fire Matviyenko,” directed against the city’s then-governor Valentina Matviyenko.
Shortly before Strumentov asked for the LGBT activists to put away their posters, a man attacked an activist in an attempt to destroy his poster, which read, “There are 4 percent Orthodox Christians and 4 percent LGBT people in the world. Minorities?” The attacker was detained by police and, according to a witness, dropped a knife as he was being led away.
The activists obeyed the orders and put away their posters, but some tried to raise rainbow flags when marching along Nevsky Prospekt and were swiftly arrested on the corner of Nevsky and Ulitsa Marata. Ten activists were taken by bus to a police precinct.
When other activists called the precinct later Tuesday, the duty officer said the detained would be held until Wednesday morning, saying that those were the orders from his superiors, the Vykhod (Coming Out) LGBT rights organization said in a statement.
Another seven LGBT activists were arrested during the democratic group’s stationary rally, which was held on Konyushennaya Ploshchad after the march, when they attempted to unfurl their posters.
However, instead of charging them under the anti-gay law, the police charged all the 17 detained activists with violating the rules on holding a public meeting and failure to obey a police officer’s orders. The latter offense is punishable by anything from a 500-ruble ($17) fine to 15 days in prison.
Vykhod said in a statement Tuesday that the detentions were conducted roughly by the police, who did not offer any explanation for the arrests.
The police have not admitted to detaining anyone under the anti-gay law. They said in a statement that 15 people had been detained and charged with failure to obey police officers’ orders.
“They make detentions based on the [anti-gay] law, but eventually press some other charges,” detained activist Sergei Kondrashov said by phone from a police precinct Tuesday.
The May Day demonstration, officially celebrated as International Workers’ Solidarity Day under the Soviets, was reformatted into the less innocuous Day of Spring and Labor under the late Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1992.
Traditionally, both pro-Kremlin and oppositional parties take part in the demo, as well as various pressure groups.
It is also the only public rally in which the opposition is allowed to march along Nevsky Prospekt, St. Petersburg’s main street, since President Vladimir Putin introduced restrictions on public protests in 2005 in the wake of the events of the Orange Revolution in Kiev, Ukraine.
In all other cases, planned oppositional marches are routinely banned by City Hall on grounds such as roadworks along the route.
This year, the democratic group also included the Yabloko Democratic Party, Solidarity, Party of People’s Freedom (Parnas), St. Petersburg Observers and the Russian Social-Democratic Union of Youth.
The procession of the Other Russia oppositional party, 12 of whose activists are currently on trial for alleged extremism, went smoothly. More than 100 marched behind a banner reading “Cleanse the Filth from the Kremlin,” and shouted slogans such as “Russia will be free,” “Putin is a thief” and “You obey the law.”
On its way down Nevsky Prospekt, The Other Russia group was joined briefly by the avant-rock band NOM, whose members came in comical stage outfits, one wearing a pig mask.
Another endangered group — anarchists, more than 100 of whom were arrested in the authorities’ crackdown on May 1, 2009 — was not targeted by the authorities Tuesday.
Anarchists marched in a joint group with animal rights activists and arrived at St. Isaac’s Square, where Communists, left-wing activists and nationalists held three simultaneous stationary rallies, with speakers speaking from three different platforms located on different parts of the square.
Putin’s United Russia party marched at the head of the demo in a joint group with the Federation of Independent Trade Unions. Contrary to independent trade unions, such as the local Ford plant trade union, which marched with left-wing activists, the federation is the official heir of the simulated Soviet trade unions.
This pro-Kremlin group, whose main slogan was “For Justice,” estimated itself to be the largest of those taking part at 15,000. It was also reportedly the first to disperse, soon after participants arrived at the site of United Russia’s stationary rally on Palace Square.
The police said a total of 31,500 took part in the event, with 3,000 policemen deployed.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Zorbing Season Begins
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The city’s Zorbday entertainment company, which specializes in zorbing — an activity that involves rolling in a giant transparent plastic ball — will launch its new summer season with a four-day event called Zorbday Big Picnic. It will be held in Tokkari Park in the village of Koltushi outside St. Petersburg from May 6 though 9.
The seasonal opening will give visitors the opportunity to try activities such as hill and aqua zorbing (individually and in pairs), GaGaGames board games, outdoor games including petanque, bike, quad bike and Segway rides, kite flying and driving remote-controlled air models, juggling classes and horseback riding. Organizers promise forms of entertainment for guests of all ages.
The Zorbday Big Picnic will run from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Organizers warn that no alcohol is allowed at the event.
Sexiest Jobs Chosen
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Female stripper, air stewardess and model topped a rating of the sexiest female professions, while fitness coach, male stripper and massage therapist headed the list of the sexiest male jobs.
The profession of female stripper topped the list during an online survey conducted by the Rabota@Mail.ru research center. At least 30 percent of respondents said stripper was the sexiest female job. Stewardess and model shared the second position, getting 18 percent each in the rating.
The top ten sexiest female professions was completed by massage therapist, nurse, fitness coach, receptionist, hotel maid, actress and ballet dancer.
The list of sexiest male jobs was headed by the profession of fitness coach (18 percent), stripper, massage therapist and military personnel (15 percent each). The other professions voted for were dancer, bar tender, pilot, rescue worker, model and sailor.
The survey found that the most erotic female professions involved the presence of a uniform (53 percent) or minimal clothing (49 percent), while sexually attractive male jobs are those involving bravery (29 percent) and strength (28 percent).
Eighteen percent of the survey participants described their occupations as sexy. Among such respondents were sales managers, cooks, lawyers, receptionists, hotel and restaurant employees.
Aeroflot Plugs Tickets
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Passengers of Russia’s national airline Aeroflot will be able to buy plane tickets at Yevroset cellular retail stores.
Yevroset and Aeroflot signed an agreement last Friday, Yevroset’s press service reported. The service will be offered without any commission fee.
The new offer is aimed at making the purchase of Aeroflot tickets more convenient, as there are many more Yevroset offices throughout the city than there are Aeroflot offices. The stores are open seven days a week, and some located in the city center are open 24 hours a day.
Passengers will also be able to return tickets to Yevroset offices within three working days after coordinating the return with Aeroflot.
Passengers will be able to book air tickets both on the Aeroflot website or by phone and on the Yevroset website or at their offices.
TITLE: Teacher Who Refused To Fake Vote Goes On Trial
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Dozens attended a preliminary court hearing last Thursday in support of St. Petersburg teacher Tatyana Ivanova, who refused to falsify results during the December 2011 Duma elections and is being sued for 100,000 rubles ($3,400).
Ivanova was put on trial after announcing that she was pressured to falsify the results at her polling station during the State Duma elections.
The teacher of Russian language and Russian literature, who was the head of an election commission located at her school, refused to falsify the results and reported the situation and the people who instructed her to falsify the results to Novaya Gazeta newspaper, which then published a story.
As a result, the head of the district’s education department, Natalya Nazarova, who Ivanova had mentioned as one of the people guilty of falsifying results, is suing the teacher for damage to her professional reputation, demanding 100,000 rubles ($3,400) in compensation. Nazarova has also opened a case against Novaya Gazeta.
Nazarova was not present in court Thursday.
“This case is the epitome of cynicism,” said film director Tatyana Pertseva, who came to court Thursday in support of Ivanova, who she said she doesn’t know personally.
“It is outrageous that a person who refused to falsify election results in exchange for money could then be forced to pay a fine for not doing the wrong thing.” Pertseva, along with a number of others, held white flowers to show their support for Ivanova.
A group of Ivanova’s students, who also came to the hearing, said they were proud of their teacher.
“There are few people like her who are ready to stand up and tell the truth like that,” 17-year-old student Galina Vasilyeva said. “Our teacher has always been a good example for us and the stand she’s taking concerning the election has become an even more powerful example,” she added.
Ivanova, 53, who has 30 years of teaching experience, quit her job as vice principal of the school after the incident. She said she was in court “because she opened her mouth.”
“Maybe it was not a rational move, but at least it was not a cowardly one. I did it because I was disgusted by the fact that I was asked to falsify results and I refused for my students’ sake so that they would know that such things are wrong,” Ivanova said outside the courtroom.
Earlier, Ivanova said that at a meeting with heads of the district’s election commission, Nazarova and several others informed those present about various ways to falsify election results.
Ivanova said they were asked to add up to 200 false ballots for the United Russia party to increase its percentage in the elections. Heads of election commissions were told it was possible they might receive financial compensation for their work, she said.
Ivanova said that when she refused to take part in the falsifications, she received repeated requests encouraging her to change her mind.
“I didn’t do it because I was disgusted by the idea,” Ivanova said, adding that for the last 14 years she had headed different election commissions and had never witnessed any similar situations.
Ivanova said that although there were other heads of election commissions at the meeting where she was told how to fake election results, none of them had yet volunteered to serve as witnesses in her case. She said she knew many people who had refused to falsify results, but who did not go public with that information.
“People are afraid of losing their jobs,” Ivanova said.
Yekaterina Molotskova, a teacher from a different school who also came to support Ivanova in court Thursday, said: “In Russia, teachers, who normally have quite low salaries, are very dependent.”
After information about Ivanova’s case appeared in the media, Twitter users popularized the hashtag ‘Tatyanaivanova’ to show their solidarity with the teacher. Ivanova said she has received many messages of support from different people, who have also offered to help collect the sum of money for which she’s being sued.
“People are sure that we won’t win the case because it’s not possible to beat the system,” Ivanova said.
TITLE: Zenit Celebrates League Title
AUTHOR: By Daniel Kozin
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Thousands of St. Petersburg residents celebrated in the city center Saturday after FC Zenit St. Petersburg clinched a 2-1 home victory against Dynamo Moscow to claim the Russian Premier League title for the second season running.
The team now holds three Russian titles, adding to triumphs in 2010 and 2007, capping the most successful period in the club’s history.
With four games remaining and a 12-point lead over second-place Dynamo at the start of the match, a draw would have been sufficient for Zenit to retain last year’s crown.
The holding champions had other ideas though, with first-half goals coming from Russian internationals Roman Shirokov and Alexander Kerzhakov. Apart from a sole Dynamo goal and a red card to veteran Zenit midfielder Konstantin Zyaranov, the main entertainment of the second half came from the passionate home supporters.
Zenit’s most hardcore fans, known as “ultras,” did everything to live up to their notorious reputation. Having marched 5,000 strong in a parade from Palace Square to the Petrovsky stadium, equipped with flares, flags and raucous singing, plenty was left over for an impressive spectacle as the clock ticked to a final victory. The frequency of firework blasts coupled with trumpet and drum-accompanied chants of “Cops are idiots!” prompted riot police to form two rings around the fan’s sector in anticipation of what was to come. As chairs were thrown in increasing numbers and stadium barriers were torn down, the enormous police presence could do little to prevent celebrating fans from storming the pitch at the final whistle, as in last season’s championship match.
Fans were left celebrating the end of another successful season under Italian coach Luciano Spalletti late into the night. In a move typical of the modest style for which Spalletti has become known, at the post-match press conference, the coach credited his first team staff as the behind-the-scenes foundation of the season’s success.
“I think that [this season] was a masterpiece,” he said. “And in order to create such a masterpiece, you need the collective efforts of many capable professionals.”
To the relief of fans and the club’s board, Spalletti ended speculation over his future by signing a three-year contract extension in January. This season’s consecutive title is made all the more remarkable by the fact that no major revisions of the championship winning squad of 2010 were made. Saturday’s team included five homegrown players and three foreigners.
Following on from this season’s success, Alexei Miller, general director of club sponsor Gazprom, outlined future plans to make the club one of the best in Europe.
“We have a very strong squad that can confidently win the Russian championship and enter the playoff stages of the Champions League, but to reach further heights we will have to add to the squad during the summer transfer window,” said Miller.
TITLE: City Calls Off Orlov Tunnel
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Tyomkin and Alla Tokareva
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: City Hall has canceled the construction of the Orlov Tunnel under the Neva River, deputy governor Sergei Vyazalov announced last week.
According to him, an evaluation of the project showed that it would entail significant expense to the budget without improving the city’s transport situation. The funds allocated for the tunnel could be used to double the number of the city’s trams, he said.
A tunnel of one kilometer in length was due to have been built under the Neva to the Smolny district. The construction was due to have been financed in equal parts by the city budget, the federal investment fund and the concessioner, Nevskaya Kontsessionnaya Kompaniya (Nevsky Concession Company, NKK), which was chosen by tender and is controlled by Vitaly Yuzhilin’s First Quantum company. The project was valued at a total of 47.7 billion rubles ($1.6 billion) or about 70 billion rubles ($2.4 billion) including the tunnel’s interchanges. The concessioner had won the right to manage the tunnel and charge a toll for its use for the next 30 years.
In September 2011, City Governor Georgy Poltavchenko put the project on hold, and 3.5 billion rubles ($119 million) toward its construction were excluded from the city budget for 2012. The concessioner was awarded 1.1 billion rubles ($37 million) from the budget for work already carried out. A representative of NKK declined to comment on the situation to Vedomosti for this story.
According to Vyazalov, City Hall will ask the Finance Ministry and Transport Ministry to allow it to keep the unspent 15.5 billion rubles ($528 million) of funding. The money could be spent on ring roads outside the city center or on the reconstruction of the Obvodny Canal.
TITLE: City Hall Assures FIFA Rep That Stadium Will Be Ready
AUTHOR: By Maria Buravtseva
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: FIFA representatives visited the city’s new stadium being built on Krestovsky Island last week. The soccer officials received assurances from the city authorities that the stadium would be ready in time for the 2018 World Cup, said Jurgen Muller, head of the FIFA commission. According to Muller, the commission will decide in September whether the stadium corresponds to FIFA standards. Petersburg officials promise to finish building the stadium by 2014, said Alexei Sorokin, head of the 2018 FIFA World Cup Russia Local Organizing Committee. Nikolai Rastvortsev, deputy chair of the city’s Sports Committee, confirmed this.
Yelena Guryanova, a representative of Transstroi corporation, the contractor, said that the deadlines and cost of the stadium would be established after a state evaluation of the project. The stadium is 60-percent complete, while some individual elements of it are 90-percent ready, she said.
The evaluation is expected at the end of May, and the financial assessment in mid-June, said a source familiar with the progression of the stadium’s construction.
Earlier, City Governor Georgy Poltavchenko said that the stadium would be completed by the end of 2013. The most recent cost estimate named for the project was 33.1 billion rubles ($1.1 billion) — 370 percent higher than the original estimate five years earlier. The stadium’s construction has cost the city budget 13.9 billion rubles ($473 million).
The longer projects on such a scale are under construction, the greater the chance of them not conforming to current building norms, said Sergei Sveshkov, an expert on industrial construction.
According to Sorokin, the stadiums that will host the 2018 World Cup have to be ready by May 2017.
TITLE: Petrogradskaya Work Delayed
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Large-scale repair work on the city’s Petrogradskaya metro station has been postponed until December. The construction was initially planned to start in June, Interfax reported.
The schedule has changed due to roadwork being done on the Pirogovskaya embankment and the redistribution of passenger flows. Petrogradskaya metro station is now planned to close Dec. 15.
TITLE: Medvedev Accepts Top Party Job
AUTHOR: By Jonathan Earle
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — In a widely expected move, President Dmitry Medvedev has accepted an offer to take over the United Russia party, all but guaranteeing his election at a special convention this month.
President-elect Vladimir Putin announced last week that he would resign the party chairmanship after his May 7 inauguration and recommended that Medvedev take his place.
Late last week Medvedev accepted a formal offer from Boris Gryzlov, the party’s second in command.
Often regarded as a liberal among the ruling elite, Medvedev also moved to align himself more clearly with the party’s conservative majority.
“I’m often told that I’m a liberal. But I can tell you openly: My convictions have never been liberal. … I have conservative values,” he said, Interfax reported.
Analysts said the statement was an attempt to smooth over relations with the ruling party’s conservative majority, which Medvedev has irritated as president by placing modernization and privatization at the forefront of his domestic policy.
“Medvedev is showing all the signs of a politician who needs United Russia to see him as one of their own,” said Alexei Mukhin of the Center for Political Information. “Earlier, Medvedev criticized the party like a normal person. Now he’s adopted the rhetoric of a party leader.”
Medvedev is expected to be elected party chairman at a May 26 convention, and he could become a member before that, senior United Russia State Duma Deputy Sergei Neverov told Interfax.
In a mild rebuke of his mentor, Medvedev said that future presidents should be associated with a party.
“Or else, we simply can’t explain to people which political force is in power,” he said, Interfax reported.
Neither Putin nor Medvedev were members of political parties during their presidencies, even though Putin maintained the post of United Russia party chairman.
In a show of mixed feelings within the ruling party, Putin’s announcement last week sparked a minor exodus of party members opposed to Medvedev’s arrival, including Alexei Chadayev, the head of the party’s political department, who criticized Medvedev’s ability to lead.
“The defections by conservatives within the party were very unpleasant for Medvedev, and he wants to stop the trend from people within the conservatives of the party,” said Pavel Salin, an expert with the Kremlin-connected think tank Center for Current Politics.
Yelena Pozdnyakova of the Center of Political Technologies said being seen as a conservative will help Medvedev as prime minister, a job he has been publicly promised by Putin.
“If he wants to work well with the Duma, where United Russia holds a majority, he’s going to have to gain the trust and support of the party,” she said.
The remark is certain to spark further disillusion among Medvedev’s liberal admirers, many of whom have been disappointed by the pace of political and economic reforms.
“Despite his liberal talk, it’s always been clear from the decisions he’s made as president that he’s a conservative at heart,” Mukhin said. “Medvedev began radical political reforms only after he effectively became a lame duck. It was clear that they were reforms for Putin, not for Medvedev,” he said.
TITLE: Coach Advocaat to Quit Russia After Euro 2012
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia coach Dick Advocaat reportedly will not extend his contract and will quit after the European Championship.
“After the European Championship, I’ll go,’’ Advocaat was quoted as saying in the Sport-Express newspaper on Monday. “I can’t tell you the reason yet, but knowing about all the speculation, I’ll say right now, it’s not about the money.’’
Advocaat signed a two-year contract in April 2010 with an option for two more years and the primary goal of qualifying for Euro 2012, which runs from June 8 through July 1 in Poland and Ukraine.
Advocaat succeeded fellow Dutchman Guus Hiddink, who led Russia to the semifinals of Euro 2008 but failed to qualify for the World Cup.
In two years under Advocaat, Russia won 10 matches, tied five and lost three.
The team won Group B in qualifying for this summer’s tournament and will open against the Czech Republic in Group A on June 8. Poland and Greece are also in the group.
“I haven’t told the players yet. I’m sure that this news won’t influence our preparation for the Euros,’’ Advocaat said.
Russia is scheduled to face Uruguay, Latvia and Italy in tune-up matches before heading to Wroclaw, Poland, for its Euro 2012 opener.
Advocaat took Netherlands to the 1994 World Cup quarterfinals and Euro 2004 semis.
He is the first foreign coach to win a title in Russia — coaching Zenit St. Petersburg to the Russian league title in 2007 and the UEFA Cup championship the next season.
TITLE: Opposition Activist Detained, Beaten For Anti-Putin Prayer
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — An opposition activist was detained and beaten Sunday after he tried to enter Moscow’s landmark Christ the Savior Cathedral to pray for Russia to be delivered from Vladimir Putin.
Several riot police officers forced Roman Dobrokhotov into a police car just meters from Russia’s largest church, widely seen as a symbol of resurgent Orthodox Christianity after seven decades of atheist Communist rule. Dobrokhotov, who leads a small anti-Kremlin youth movement, heckled President Dmitry Medvedev during his speech in the Kremlin in 2008.
Another activist, Maria Baronova, of the Resistance anti-Kremlin group, entered the cathedral, but was cornered by a group of Orthodox priests and men who tried to escort her out.
A dozen activists from the militant Union of Orthodox Banner Bearers group lined up in front of the cathedral, shouting obscenities at Dobrokhotov and Baronova. The group is known for dispersing gay rallies, and for protesting against pop star Madonna’s shows in Russia and burning Harry Potter books.
Hours later, when Dobrokhotov was leaving a police station where he was held, seven men assaulted him, injuring his ear, he said.
“They looked like soccer fans,” he told The Associated Press, referring to burly and aggressive young men who are often involved in street fights and violence after soccer matches across Russia. “Luckily, police interrupted them and detained one of them.”
Opposition leaders have long claimed that pro-Kremlin youth movements hire soccer fans to disperse anti-Kremlin rallies and beat up government critics.
The anti-Putin prayer followed a February prank by feminist punk rock band Pussy Riot.
Three members of Pussy Riot face up to seven years in jail for their February anti-Putin prayer at the cathedral. Their treatment has provoked a public outcry and contributed to growing criticism of the church, a powerful institution with close ties to the Kremlin.
TITLE: EU Chief to Snub Euro 2012 in Ukraine
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BRUSSELS — The chief of the European Union’s head office says he will not go to Ukraine during the European soccer championships in June unless there is a swift improvement in the human rights situation there.
EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and other European leaders piled the pressure Monday on the leadership in Kiev in support of jailed former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.
Barroso’s announcement followed that of EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding, who is skipping the ceremonial Euro 2012 opening on June 8.
“It is clear that as things stand now, the president has no intention of going to Ukraine,” Barroso’s spokeswoman said.
The tournament, more important to Europe than the Olympic soccer tournament, is being co-hosted by Poland and Ukraine from June 8 until July 1.
Activists have called for protests against Ukraine, where Tymoshenko is serving a seven-year jail sentence in a case the West has called politically motivated. Ukraine’s president is a fierce rival of Tymoshenko but government officials have denied any claims of bias in the case.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s environment minister has urged top European government officials to boycott the Euro 2012 matches. Also, German news magazine Der Spiegel reported that Merkel will abstain from attending any matches and urge her Cabinet members to do so as well unless Tymoshenko is freed to undergo medical treatment abroad.
The German government has offered to treat her in Berlin, but Kiev has rejected the offer.
Also Monday, Czech President Vaclav Klaus canceled his visit to a summit of Central European leaders being held May 11-12 in Ukraine because of Tymoshenko’s treatment, his spokesman said.
German President Joachim Gauck said he also will not travel to the Yalta gathering.
Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Oleg Voloshin tried to downplay the announcements.
“I hope that German statesmen won’t reactivate the methods of the Cold War and try to make sports a hostage to politics,” he was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.
Poland, as co-host of Euro 2012 but also an EU member, is in a tough position.
“We believe that at this point calls for a boycott of the Euro 2012 are totally unfounded,” government spokesman Marcin Bosacki said. “These two things should not be linked together.”
He stressed that Poland has made it clear to Ukraine’s authorities that it did not approve of the trial and the treatment of Tymoshenko but added that she herself had asked others not to link the two events. “Poland will follow that appeal,” Bosacki said.
TITLE: President, PM Walk in May Day March
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Police said more than 150,000 people participated in a march Tuesday down one of Moscow’s main arteries to a square near the Kremlin, accompanied by President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who arrived to greet the crowd just days before they will switch jobs May 7.
Medvedev confirmed his attendance ahead of time for the event organized by the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia, United Russia and the All-Russian People’s Front, while Putin had remained silent regarding his invitation.
The march, which started from the Belorusskaya metro station and made its way along Tverskaya Ulitsa, was led by about 50 trade union leaders, followed by marching bands cranking out parade tunes.
Marchers carried an array of posters celebrating May Day, like those reading “Peace, Work, May,” though many also carried symbols of the trade unions, United Russia and the All-Russian People’s Front.
Many participants arrived as part of large groups, with organizers taking down names in notepads and holding flags. As has been common in recent pro-Kremlin rallies, large numbers of people have been bussed in from neighboring regions, including from Tver, Yaroslavl, Kostroma, Smolensk and Vladimir. Trade union federation chairman Mikhail Shmakov said earlier that bringing people from surrounding regions was “normal trade union practice.”
Participants of the rally gave different reasons for coming. A chemical plant worker named Sergei shrugged off questions from Slon.ru journalists.
“I came here myself, no one forced me,” he said. “And I brought my granddaughter to see. After all, it is May Day. Why not go for a stroll on a warm day?”
Others said they received specific instructions from employers to attend the rally. “We were told to come without fail,” a government employee named Svetlana said. “However, they did give us the day off and some small compensation for participating in the demonstration. We also were told not to talk to the press and not to name the place where we work,” she said.
Several other marches and rallies were planned for May 1, ranging from several hundred participants to 5,000. The largest, organized by the Communist Party and Working Russia, was led by Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov. Participants marched with portraits of Lenin and even Stalin, Interfax reported. Police put attendance at 3,500 — that’s 1,500 less than the approved limit.
May Day rallies brought thousands of participants in other cities as well. Police said at least 217,00 attended 461 events held in 332 cities in the Far East, Interfax reported.
In St. Petersburg, 17 gay rights activists participating in a May Day rally were arrested as they marched along Nevsky Prospekt (see story, page 2). St. Petersburg adopted a law in March banning “homosexual propaganda” targeting minors.
Opposition leaders, including anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny, Parnas co-leader Boris Nemtsov, and Left Front head Sergei Udaltsov, cancelled plans for their own rally that was to take place Tuesday, instead opting to save strength for the planned May 6 “March of a Million.”
TITLE: Russia Won’t Bar American Artists
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Moscow is deeply unhappy with Washington’s decision to deny a visa to singer and lawmaker Iosif Kobzon, but won’t retaliate by barring U.S. artists from entry, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in an interview published Saturday.
“We are probably more polite regarding artists — if a person does not have a palpable criminal record, we will never act like this” Lavrov told state-owned Rossia 24 television, according to a transcript on his ministry’s website.
Kobzon, a legendary Soviet crooner and State Duma deputy for the ruling United Russia party, was denied a visa to the United States earlier this week. He has been unable to visit the U.S. since 1995, when his visa was revoked on suspected mafia ties, except for a brief trip in 2000 as part of an official delegation.
Lavrov said the latest refusal was based on accusations of organized crime links and “apparently” also of drug trafficking, but said they were unfounded and stemmed from “stereotypes and phobias” among U.S. authorities.
He added that Moscow had lobbied for Kobzon “at the highest level” and that he had raised the subject many times with U.S. Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.
He said the decision was especially unpleasant because Kobzon, who turns 75 in September and is ill with cancer, wanted to mark the upcoming May 9 Victory Day in the U.S. “The denial contradicts common sense and rapprochement between our peoples,” he said.
The Ukrainian-born Kobzon admits knowing criminal figures like the late Vyacheslav Ivankov, but insists that he was never involved in illegal activity. A longtime close ally of former mayor Yury Luzhkov, Kobzon was elected to the Duma for the fifth time in December.
Critics have long accused Moscow of harboring international criminal figures. Prominent mafia bosses Semyon Mogilevich from Ukraine and Tariel Oniani from Georgia lived quietly in Moscow for years before being arrested in 2008 and 2009 respectively.
Despite the Kobzon affair, Lavrov praised ties with the U.S. by saying both countries have “reached a level of cooperation unseen in previous years.” As examples he singled out the wide-ranging presidential commission and joint projects like the Skolkovo foundation.
But he added that the relationship was constantly challenged by “ripples” stemming from Washington’s finger-pointing at Russian democracy.
Lavrov complained about a “lingering American mentality to always and everywhere seek levers to pressure its partner by raising human rights and democracy.” This, he said, “verges on interference in internal affairs.”
TITLE: Medvedev Chooses New Perm Official
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Former Regional Development Minister Viktor Basargin, who was appointed as Perm’s next governor over the weekend, has promised to improve the region’s infrastructure.
President Dmitry Medvedev replaced the governors of Perm and Yaroslavl on Saturday, continuing a shuffle that has seen a dozen regional leaders dismissed since December.
Basargin, whose appointment needs to be confirmed by the regional legislature, will replace Oleg Chirkunov, who had governed Perm since December 2005 and whose current term was to expire in 2015.
He and Yaroslavl Governor Sergei Vakhrukov both left their posts voluntarily, according to statements posted Saturday on the Kremlin website.
Medvedev had criticized Vakhrukov, appointed in December 2007, at a meeting last Friday of the ruling United Russia party for his choice of a candidate in the recent Yaroslavl mayoral election who lost to an opposition-backed candidate.
The president complained that Vakhrukov had chosen businessman Yakov Yakushev to run for United Russia instead of former Yaroslavl Deputy Mayor Sergei Yastrebov, who had won the party’s primary vote.
Yakushev lost the April 1 election, garnering 27.8 percent of the vote compared with 69.6 percent for municipal lawmaker Yevgeny Urlashov, who had the support of the political opposition.
On Saturday, Medvedev appointed Yastrebov as acting Yaroslavl governor.
TITLE: Language Barrier Obstacle for Business
AUTHOR: By Howard Amos
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian companies find cultural differences and linguistic barriers more of a problem when looking to expand internationally than most of their emerging market peers, according to research released last month.
Unfamiliarity with foreign mores and a poor command of languages are perceived to be obstacles to global business success by 89 percent of Russian companies surveyed by the Economist Intelligence Unit and language-teaching firm Education First in a report titled “Competing Across Borders.”
In China, the figure was 67 percent and in Brazil 70 percent. Just 36 percent of companies headquartered in Scandinavian countries felt restricted by cultural and linguistic differences while the figure was 55 percent in the United States and 62 percent in Britain. The global average was 64 percent.
“When a company goes to do business outside its home market it is somewhat like going on a first date,” said Abhik Sen, who led the research for the Economist Intelligence Unit. “You kind of know what you want … but you’re not sure how it’s going to turn out.”
By this simile, Russia is not lucky in love. The report, which surveyed 572 top managers from global companies, also showed that 49 percent of Russian respondents admitted that their companies had been hit by financial losses as a result of linguistic and cultural difficulties — 6 percent higher than the global average.
The level of mistrust in translations was also greater in Russia where 36 percent said they suffered from poor translations compared with 23 percent worldwide.
Participants at a round-table discussion at Education First’s Moscow offices April 24 also highlighted another trend. Both Russian and foreign companies rate the need for languages very highly but are unwilling to do much to resolve the issue.
“There is a real tension between the awareness of a gap in language skills and the actual implementation of policy,” said Christopher McCormick, vice president at Education First.
This divergence between understanding the problem and trying to implement a solution is often a result of complacency and short-term thinking, said Sen from the Economist Intelligence Unit.
Globally, learning Russian is not considered much of an asset for companies seeking to expand internationally over the next five years. Just 3 percent of international respondents said it was a language crucial to their overseas growth plans.
Almost 70 percent said English was the most sought-after language, with Mandarin in second place at 8 percent.
TITLE: Revenue Increases For Mail.ru Company
AUTHOR: By Rachel Nielsen
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The increased popularity of Mail.Ru Group’s online games, social networks, applications and advertising pushed up revenue 45 percent in the first quarter, while revenue for 2011 increased nearly 60 percent, the Internet company said.
First-quarter revenue this year was $160.3 million compared with $110.6 million in the year-earlier period, while 2011 revenue was $515.4 million compared with year-earlier revenue of $324.7 million, an increase of about 59 percent, Mail.Ru said in its latest financial statements, released late last week.
The company, which is traded on the London Stock Exchange, reported net income of $208.6 million in 2011 versus $80.8 million in 2010.
Mail.Ru had a 41 percent increase in the number of daily visitors to its Odnoklassniki social-networking site and a 21 percent increase to its Mail.Ru web portal in March of this year versus March 2011.
“Their websites have become more popular and have taken market share,” said David Ferguson, a Renaissance Capital investment analyst.
“The business is doing very, very well at the moment,” he said in a telephone interview.
Mail.Ru also owns the Moi Mir social-networking site and instant messaging applications ICQ and Mail.Ru Agent. It holds about a 40 percent stake in VKontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook, and about 21 percent of electronic-payments company Qiwi.
Russia has the greatest number of Internet users in Europe, or 51 million users, but that is just 36 percent of the population, meaning there is significant growth potential.
TITLE: Putin Ponders Best Path For Economic Growth
AUTHOR: By Irina Filatova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Economic Development Ministry expects the country’s economy to grow 3.4 percent this year before expanding 4.7 percent in 2015, according to an updated version of the forecast that was approved at the Presidium meeting chaired by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin late last week.
But it remained unclear whether the new government to be formed after Putin moves to the Kremlin this month will choose to proceed with developing innovations or continue to rely on the burgeoning energy sector.
“There’s no final decision yet,” Deputy Economic Development Minister Andrei Klepach told journalists after the Presidium meeting.
“We have two options, two scenarios at the moment. Another round of discussion will be held and after that the government will come to a decision either way,” he said, RIA-Novosti reported.
Discussions might take up to a month, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said by telephone.
Both scenarios drafted by the Economic Development Ministry provide an outlook on the country’s economic growth until 2030 and assume that oil prices will reach $158 a barrel in 2030 compared with $97 a barrel in 2013, according to the government website.
In a conservative scenario, Russia will continue to rely heavily on oil and gas in its economic development.
This model involves “active modernization” of the energy sector, while “retaining a relative lag” in the technology sector, with anticipated average growth of gross domestic product reaching 3.6 percent a year.
This scenario forecasts that the state budget will balance after 2015.
The innovative scenario focuses on developing the technology sector, as well as increasing investment in science, education and health care as a mainstay of the country’s economic growth, which is expected to result in more robust economic growth and slowing inflation, while retaining the budget deficit and expanding public debt.
It also involves modernizing transportation infrastructure and the energy complex and “a large-scale change in Russia’s export structure,” according to the government’s statement.
According to the statement, “this option suggests a significant increase in the efficiency parameters of the economy,” with labor capacity more than doubling by 2030 from the 2010 level and the joint share of telecommunications, automotive construction and the knowledge-based sectors growing 80 percent.
With an average GDP growth of about 4.4 percent a year, Russia will become the world’s fifth-largest economy by 2021, having moved from its current sixth place, the statement said.
Kremlin economic aide Arkady Dvorkovich, spoke in favor of the innovative scenario.
“The demand for energy resources can change, but knowledge is power,” he told Vedomosti. But the Economic Development Ministry didn’t rule out that the majority of votes might be cast for the model based on energy resources, since it’s in line with Russia’s “dominant interests,” Vedomosti reported.
Given the government’s focus on modernization and enticing foreign investors, “it’s hard to imagine that the conservative scenario will be chosen,” as the government sees the innovative model as more justified, said Vyacheslav Smolyaninov, a strategist at UralSib Capital.
But he noted that no matter which of the two scenarios will be chosen, the real development of the global economy might be completely at odds with expectations.
TITLE: Properties on Sale for Rubles
AUTHOR: By Ken Martinez
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Moscow city authorities have held the first auction in their plan to distribute rental rights to buildings recognized for their historical and cultural significance — at the price of 1 ruble per square meter.
But the deeply discounted price scheme isn’t so simple. The auction is part of a program to have private investors restore dilapidated buildings in the center, and the 1-ruble price tag takes effect only once the building “looks like it did in the 19th century,” which experts estimated for some properties would require restoration costing 300 million rubles ($10 million), Kommersant said.
At the auction last week, three buildings from the 18th and 19th centuries in the city center were put on the block and went for between 13.8 million rubles ($469,000) and 20 million rubles a year, before the discount takes effect.
Earlier this year, city officials announced the revolutionary plan for restoring historic buildings. According to the plan, investors would receive the properties on rental contracts of 49 years, with the condition that the restoration projects take no longer than five years. About 244 buildings deemed to have historically significant architecture are to be included in the project.
TITLE: Boris Berezovsky Takes13M-Euro Hit
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia has seized real estate in France worth about 13 million euros from former tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who lives in London and is wanted by Russian authorities on fraud and other charges, a Prosecutor General’s Office report said.
The report said more than $320 million worth of illegally obtained property and funds had been seized as a result of requests to foreign governments, including $300 million in Switzerland allegedly embezzled from state-owned shipping company Sovkomflot by businessman Yury Nikitin, Interfax reported.
Nikitin is wanted by Russia on theft charges stemming from a case opened in 2005, when authorities accused him and four associates of stealing more than $700 million from Sovkomflot.
Authorities have seized property from Berezovsky before. In February of last year, Russian prosecutors said that at its request, France seized two yachts worth a combined $20 million and other valuables, including paintings, owned by the tycoon and former Kremlin kingmaker. At the time, Berezovsky denied ownership of the yachts.
And in 2007, French authorities seized a $20 million villa from Berezovsky at Russia’s asking.
Russia has unsuccessfully sought Berezovsky’s extradition from Britain on a variety of charges, including embezzlement of millions of dollars from state-owned airline Aeroflot and automaker AvtoVAZ.
TITLE: The U.S. Obsession With Absolute Security
AUTHOR: By Ruslan Pukhov
TEXT: The United States is stepping up the creation of its missile defense system, which is based on two key elements. The first is the land- and sea-based Standard SM-3 interceptors, which are to be deployed in Europe and, at some point in the future, in Asia. The second consists of a limited number of the more high-energy GBI interceptors, already deployed in the United States.
Officially, the main purpose of the system is to defend against the potential intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, and intermediate-range missile threat from Iran and North Korea. It is said that the system is not targeted against Russian or Chinese ICBMs. Washington has always argued that it is building a limited missile defense system that does not jeopardize the nuclear deterrence capability of the other nuclear powers.
There is no doubt that in its current form, the U.S. missile defense system does not pose a threat to Russia’s strategic nuclear forces. Nor will it pose such a threat in the next 10 to 15 years.
The number of U.S. missile defense interceptors is limited. So is its ability to intercept high-speed targets such as ICBMs. That is why the system cannot intercept any significant proportion of the Russian ICBMs. The 30 GBI interceptors that have already been deployed in the United States can probably take out no more than seven or eight single-warhead ICBMs, such as the Topol or Topol-M.
The SM-3 interceptors that will be deployed in Europe probably lack any capability against ICBMs and their warheads at the midcourse and terminal phases of their trajectory. It is possible that the SM-3 Block IB interceptors, which are scheduled for deployment in 2015, will have some capability against ICBMs, especially during the terminal phase, but that capability will probably be limited. But in 2020-25, the United States plans to deploy about 200 SM-3 Block IIB interceptors, which will be able to take out about 50 ICBM warheads.
Although the U.S. missile defense system is, in the short term, targeted against pariah states, it is obvious that this is only half of the truth. The true goals behind the large-scale missile defense program are far more ambitious.
The broader reason for the long-term U.S. missile defense program is Washington’s desire to make the United States completely secure against all missile attacks. That aspiration for complete invulnerability is at the core of Washington’s strategy for national security.
After the Soviet Union developed strategic missile capability in the early 1960s, the United States’ period of complete invulnerability against a nuclear attack abruptly ended. That came as a massive shock to the American psyche and worldview, and the United States has still not overcome the consequences of that shock. It is no wonder that the country’s political and military strategists have always aimed to restore the absolute invulnerability that the United States once enjoyed. This is possible if the United States develops advanced missile defense technologies.
This is why Moscow believes all U.S. assurances that its missile defense system “will not be aimed against Russia” to be empty and absurd. How can they be taken seriously if the ultimate goal of all U.S. missile defense programs is to achieve the complete defense of U.S. territory against all nuclear missile strikes — something that would eventually negate Russia’s strategic nuclear capability?
Based on current projections, the U.S. missile defense system will remain “limited” for another 20 years. It is estimated that during that period the system will lack the numbers and performance characteristics to pose any real threat to the Russian strategic nuclear forces. But after 2030, the growing size and improving performance of the U.S. missile shield will put serious pressures on Russia’s strategic nuclear forces.
Russia regards preserving its strategic nuclear deterrence capability as an absolute national security imperative in the face of the much greater integrated military and economic potential of the United States, NATO and China. Russia’s strategic nuclear forces enable it to maintain its status as a great power, as well as a “great equalizer” vis-a-vis the military capabilities of other global powers. The country’s nuclear arsenal makes it possible to pursue a policy of military deterrence without maintaining a huge and expensive conventional army. Finally, its nuclear deterrent serves as a guarantee that Russia will not be dragged into an armed conflict against its own will.
That is why in the long run the development of the U.S. missile defense program is a threat to the very foundations of Russia’s national security.
At the same time, however, Russia lacks any real instruments to prevent the United States from implementing its missile defense plans or even to slow their progress. There is a solid consensus among many Americans and in the political establishment that the United States must attain maximum, total security against all missile attacks, including those that could be launched by Russia and China.
Moscow has nothing to offer Washington in return for abandoning its pursuit of absolute security through missile defense. Remember the 1986 summit in Reykjavik, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev offered U.S. President Ronald Reagan complete nuclear disarmament in return for abandoning the Strategic Defense Initiative, Reagan’s enormous program for global missile defense? It was not surprising that Reagan turned down the offer.
The United States’ pursuit of an advanced global missile defense system is tightly intertwined with the idea of U.S. global dominance. This goes to the very heart of U.S. foreign and defense policy. For that reason, all negotiations with the United States on limiting missile defense issues end up going nowhere, something we have witnessed over the past several years, if not the past three decades. Given that Russia is the weaker party in bilateral relations, there is no compelling reason for Washington to tie its hands on an issue it considers central to its military and national security strategy just for the sake of good relations with Russia.
For this reason, it is equally hopeless for Russia to try to extract any binding commitments from the United States on missile defense by linking the issue to strategic nuclear reductions. Nor is there much point in negotiating with Washington about developing joint missile defense projects.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once said, “Absolute security for one state means absolute insecurity for all others.” It was laudable that Kissinger openly acknowledged this axiom. Now, Russia has to take the necessary measure to make sure that Kissinger’s axiom doesn’t become reality.
Ruslan Pukhov is director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies and publisher of the journal Moscow Defense Brief.
TITLE: russian unorthodox: Why Russia’s Police Love Poppy-Seed Rolls
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
TEXT: Ten years ago retired colonel Alexander Polukhin, a professor at the Aviation Engineering Institute in Voronezh, launched a family business with his wife, their daughter, and his wife’s sister. The four decided to open a small bakery with an adjoining café. They gave it the homey name Ochag (the Fireplace).
The story of this small business started happily. But two years ago, the Polukhins received a visit from the regional branch of the Federal Drug Control Service. Its officers were interested in one of the most popular items the bakery made, poppy-seed rolls. Laughable though it might seem, it appears the inspectors thought they were on the trail of morphine.
The outcome has been much less funny, as the Polukhin family await trial on drug charges.
Investigators contend that the bakery was camouflage for an illicit drugs operation. They allege that the business was trading in poppy straw, an agricultural by-product of poppies from which morphine can be extracted.
Though it is the straw, or husk, of the mature poppy, and not the seeds, that is the source of opiate production, police in Russia contend that bags of poppy seeds still contain bits of straw.
The drug police had apparently pricked up their ears when they learned that Ochag’s poppy-seed rolls were selling like hot cakes. And, although they found no poppy straw at the Polukhins’ premises, the officers began to visit the bakery and café with growing frequency.
“At first they offered us protection — they demanded that we pay them a certain amount of money every month. On that basis, they said, we could continue our business unmolested,” Alexander Polukhin said.
But the retired military officer refused to accept the offer. And that was when the ordeal for him and his family began in earnest. His daughter was arrested and has now been in custody for nearly a year.
Family members say Polukhin’s sister-in-law, a partner in the business, has had two stays in a psychiatric hospital after suffering a breakdown they attribute to the investigation.
The Polukhin case reminds me of a joke from the last days of the Soviet Union, when the shelves in the shops were often bare and addiction to hard drugs was a growing problem.
A customer walks into a bakery and asks for a poppy-seed roll.
“Get out of here — you must be joking,” says the shopkeeper. “Next you’ll be asking for a loaf of heroin!”
But Russian law enforcement is not known for its sense of humor. At the end of March police arrested people who had joined a flash mob outside the headquarters of the Drug Control Service. The demonstrators had tried to sell staff at the service some poppy-seed rolls, so that they could test out any psychoactive effects for themselves.
The case of the Ochag bakery and the Polukhins is not an isolated one. It has now come to light that last year drug enforcement officers carried out a nationwide operation, code-named — you guessed it — Poppy Seed, which resulted in more than a dozen convictions. Those on the receiving end of this crackdown were selling products made with poppy seeds at shops and bakeries.
The convictions were for selling “raw materials that can be used to make drugs.”
In the coming Ochag café trial, the odds seem stacked against the Polukhins. Though the case has received nationwide coverage, the authorities have refused to respond to repeated inquires from journalists about it.
Human rights groups say dozens more bakers and shop owners are being investigated.
Meanwhile poppy-seed rolls are produced in bakeries all over the world. So why in Russia has baking them become such a risky profession? And, conversely, if they are so dangerous, why not ban them?
The answers lie in how the Russian system of investigating crime functions.
Police in Russia must make monthly quotas, on which their bonuses depend, for crimes solved and new cases opened.
So a ban on the use of poppy seeds in baking would cause a drop in the numbers of drug crimes investigated and “solved.” That the makers of poppy-seed rolls might not be criminals at all does not seem to worry the authorities.
This system can also be a major cause of torture and ill-treatment, and Russia has become notorious for confessions being beaten out of suspects, sometimes with fatal consequences.
A full version of this commentary is available at Transitions Online, an award-winning analytical online magazine covering Eastern Europe and CIS countries, at www.tol.org.
TITLE: Prose and protest
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: With a new novel and a poetry collection freshly published and a music album about to be released, the 69-year-old author and dissident Eduard Limonov — whose biography won a major literary award in France last year — came to St. Petersburg last week. He came not, however, to promote his literary achievements, but to support the 12 local activists of his party The Other Russia, now on trial for oppositional activities and facing sentences of up to four years in jail.
Dubbed the “Trial of the 12,” the case has raised many questions, but Limonov — who spent two years in prison and a prison camp charged with the illegal acquisition, storage and transportation of arms before he was released on parole in 2003 — said it’s typical of the way in which Russian law enforcement operates.
“I remember my own criminal case and those of other people; for instance I wrote a book about entrepreneur [Anatoly] Bykov,” Limonov said.
“I went to Krasnoyarsk and investigated [the case] in 2000, I read his indictment, and it contained absolutely ridiculous things — for instance, that there was a criminal group affiliated with him that he was planning to use to assassinate [President Boris] Yeltsin. That was one charge. Another was that he wanted to separate the Krasnoyarsk Krai from Russia. And so on.
“At that time I had never been on trial myself, and when I was reading it I thought how ridiculous it was. He was a standard criminal businessman. [Such things] couldn’t even have occurred to him!
“This man, who had a portrait of Putin on the wall in his office, wanted to break away the Krasnoyarsk Krai and declare it independent? He couldn’t even imagine anything like that! The special services that prepared the case are indomitable idiots. Knowing what kind of courts the case will go to, they mold whatever they like out of shit.”
The indictment against the 12 Other Russia activists in St. Petersburg, who are charged with continuing the activities of Limonov’s banned National Bolshevik Party (NBP), contains offenses including jaywalking and swearing in public with the “aim of promoting the illegal activities” of the defunct NBP.
“[The investigators] live in a world that is friendly to them,” Limonov said.
“They know that the judge will take the case, while in a normal world, the judge would take this case and slap the investigator with it across the face and throw him out. Ours is a make-pretend world where everybody agrees that it is so. It’s like Andersen’s genius short story about the naked king [The Emperor’s New Clothes] when everybody believes that he’s dressed and everything’s fine. Judicial brethren are not human. Just look at their faces!”
Near the court, Limonov was met by massive police presence, and followed by plainclothes agents in two cars when he was driven away by activists after speaking to the press.
In March 2009, Limonov announced that he was going to run for Russian presidency in the 2012 elections, and published a presidential manifesto called “Limonov 2012.” He demonstrated that he was serious in November last year, when he stated that he would give up the French citizenship that he received in 1987. Under Russian law, presidential candidates cannot have dual citizenship.
However, when Limonov and his supporters came to a hotel in Moscow on November 11, where they were to hold an assembly to nominate him as a candidate, they found the hotel surrounded by the police, while signs announced that “urgent repair work” was underway in both of the conference rooms that he had rented.
The assembly — attended by more than the quorum of 500 — was held in a rented bus outside the hotel, but a week later the Central Elections Committee refused to register him as a candidate on formal grounds. The refusal was backed by the Russian Supreme Court the following month. Limonov was the first of seven candidates, including the Yabloko Democratic Party’s leader Grigory Yavlinsky, to be denied registration as a candidate.
“Whether we’re good or bad, we’re quite prominent personalities in Russian politics and society,” Limonov said.
“What the liberals did was silly; thousands of observers were everywhere, and they still cannot present the authorities with anything substantial. Violations? Yes, there were violations, but all these videos are nonsense.
“They should have said from the very beginning: If seven independent candidates were dismissed, it made the elections illegitimate. What kind of proof did they need? What observers? They should have made a stand on it. It was not only in my interests, as a person who was denied registration, but in the interests of society as a whole. It was evident and comprehensible.”
Limonov describes the state of Russian society as a “distorting mirror.”
“There’s a mutual agreement to see the world the way it is presented to us,” he said. “People have to destroy this agreement and learn to see the world as it is. Because the real world does exist, and it is not good to us.”
Limonov believes Russia lost a rare historic chance to defeat the Kremlin during December’s anti-electoral fraud protests, when Solidarity leader and former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov and other liberal leaders made separate agreements with the authorities and moved the December 10 demo to the more remote Bolotnaya Ploshchad in order to get it authorized and avoid a police crackdown, instead of insisting on the central Revolution Square, close to the Kremlin’s “sore points,” as Limonov suggested. He described the liberal leaders’ behavior as “treason.”
In their turn, the liberals accused Limonov of wanting “bloodshed.”
Limonov expressed sympathy for Oleg Shein, a candidate for the position of mayor of Astrakhan, who held a month-plus hunger strike after the victory went — as a result of massive electoral fraud, the opposition said — to a United Russia candidate, but said that hunger strikes are not efficient in a country like Russia.
“The very method of a hunger strike implies at least some remnants of morals,” Limonov said.
“Ours is an immoral society. Daredevils from the State Duma say, ‘So what? Let Shein die, it’s OK. He had it coming.’ When I was put in prison, lots of people were happy. ‘He had it coming.’ There’s a total lack of understanding that he’s a living creature, that he suffers, Shein, whatever you think about him.”
Limonov, who hung out with the Ramones and other punk bands in his days as an émigré author in New York from 1974-1979, said that the imprisonment of three members of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot, two of whom have been in custody since March 3 after performing a “punk prayer” in one of Moscow’s best known cathedrals, had harmed the Russian Orthodox Church itself.
“They’re girls, a punk band, they should have been released long ago so that the church would not disgrace itself,” Limonov said.
“The Church declines in the eyes of society with every day. It proves that it’s not only barbaric and archaic, but that it’s also silly. [Pussy Riot] didn’t hurt God, but the church hierarchy. I’m not on either side, I’m on the side of my country, and such stupid scandals are very telling of a certain underdevelopment in our society.”
Limonov appears to be as prolific as ever. In the past couple of months, he has published a collection of poetry called “Atillo Dlinnozuboye” (Long-Toothed Atillo) and an autobiographical novel called “V Syrakh” (In Cheeses), named after Moscow’s historical district Syromyatniki (“cheesemakers”) where Limonov lived in the mid-2000s.
“The world sees poetry as sort of retro, something that eccentric people do,” he said. “So as one of those eccentric people, I’m happy to indulge myself in writing it. Since leaving prison, I’ve already published five collections of poetry, one after another.”
The writer did not speak much about his novel.
“The publishers, Limbus Press, asked me to write a novel like it, so I did,” he said. “It’s just one of my books.
“I stopped reading novels 25 years ago; I have no interest in fiction. What I read is crazy books. Crazy ideas are the most interesting and the most reasonable.”
Limonov expressed far more enthusiasm when speaking about his upcoming book, to be published by Ad Marginem publishers in Moscow later this month. Called “Illuminations,” it is a collection of subversive views in which he attacks generally accepted truths such as Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.
“I think it’s an astonishing book, it reexamines many hypotheses, mainly dealing with the origin of man, why he was created,” Limonov said.
“It’s a very interesting thing for me to do, because I know how to do everything else. It’s a collection of paradoxical things that will attract attention, regardless of whether that is desirable or not.”
Limonov’s poetry will also be featured on a 28-track double music album titled “Limonoff.” Produced by his occasional lawyer Sergei Belyak, the album features about 20 bands — from the electro-punk band Barto to the St. Petersburg veteran avant-rock band NOM — who have written and performed songs based on Limonov’s poems.
“[Belyak] got in touch with many different music bands, including Spanish bands, Latvian bands, Ukrainian bands, whoever,” Limonov said.
“Mostly up-and-coming ones, but also some veterans. I didn’t take part [in selecting the bands], but I listened to some of it. It’s interesting. He simply gave away my poems for the bands to choose. I don’t know why he did it, but it’s fine by me.”
Featuring a photo of Limonov holding an electric guitar on the cover, “Limonoff” is due out on the Moscow label Soyuz later this month.
International interest in Limonov both as a personality and political activist has been on the rise since last year, when French author Emmanuel Carrere’s “Limonov” became a best-seller in France and won the Prix Renaudot, France’s second most coveted literary award after the Prix Goncourt, in November.
Limonov lived in France from 1980 until 1991, when he returned to Russia.
“[Carrere] is a very influential man and if some other person had written [the biography], it would probably have gone unnoticed,” Limonov said.
“But he has a reputation as the best or one of the best French authors, he’s from the upper French bourgeoisie, his mother is the secretary of the Academie Francaise, his father is a major industrialist. [‘Limonov’] was made a phenomenon. It’s enough to say that [President Nicolas] Sarkozy has already spoken about the book four times.
“It won three awards and only didn’t win the Prix Goncourt because of its subject. As the award’s secretary said, ‘It was not [Carrere] who was not given the award, it was his subject.’
“They are divided in that wonderful country. Some think Limonov is a hero, while others think that he’s an adventurist and an anti-hero. I think it’s good to be either.”
TITLE: Timeless beauty
AUTHOR: By Kristen Steagall
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Portraits and belongings of famous female dancers, actresses and singers from Russian theater during the late 19th and early 20th centuries are on display at the State Museum of Theater and Music in a new exhibit titled “Beauties of the Russian Stage: Beauty Without Photoshop.”
The exhibit aims to showcase how beauty was portrayed before the days of the now-ubiquitous airbrushing and photoshopping techniques, when the woman in front of the camera was the same woman seen in the photograph. Even without the aid of a computer and a “touch up,” these women were able to create evocative and unique images of themselves. The soft smiles and bedroom eyes worn by the women in the photos draw people in, making them believe they are hiding some secret. Contrast these images with today’s, where little is left to the imagination — Charlize Theron pulling at her decolletage behind a bottle of J’Adore Dior or Julianne Moore lounging naked in Cartier ads — and the 19th-century demureness actually seems more scintillating than the bold sexuality printed now.
Take for example the portraits of Lina Cavalieri, an Italian who grew up in a Roman Catholic orphanage, ran away to join a traveling theater group, married the Russian Prince Alexander Bariatinsky and ended up on opera stages in New York City, Paris and St. Petersburg. In one particularly striking portrait, draped in pearls and baring her shoulders, Cavalieri looks directly at the camera, inviting the onlooker to entertain her. It’s coy and brash at the same time, a theme that seems to repeat itself in the exhibition. The sexuality exuded by these women seems simultaneously repressed and expressed, demure and overt. Add to these adjectives mischievous, shy, seductive, playful, sad, and bold and an idea begins to form of the amazing range of emotion these theatrical beauties were able to evoke.
Even dressed as a matador for the Mariinsky Ballet, Marie Petipa — the daughter of Marius Petipa, the noted choreographer of “The Sleeping Beauty,” “Don Quixote” and “The Nutcracker,” and his first wife Maria Surovshchikova-Petipa — exudes femininity.
Maria Kuznetsova, an opera singer and actress from a long line of Ukrainian and Russian intellectuals, and who helped to finance Sergei Diaghilev’s Saisons Russes, was a symbol of chic and refinement, as evident in her portraits. In one she looks almost dangerously sleek in a black velvet dress with a cigarette aloofly dangling from her lips. Tamara Karsavina, star dancer of the Ballets Russes, is also featured in the exhibit.
Other women on display include the venerable Mariinsky prima ballerina Anna Pavlova, Yevgeniya Mravina, the most beautiful soprano the Mariinsky had ever seen and whose sister Alexandra Kollantai compared her to Raphael’s Madonna, and actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya, who was not known for her beauty but rather for the passion with which she embarked on each of her endeavors in life.
The limited technology of the day makes the spectrum of emotions all the more impressive. The lack of color and the inability to quickly capture images and manipulate them necessitated a subtlety of carriage and demeanor not seen today. The result is unique images of the soft, feminine beauty extolled at the turn of the century.
“Beauties of the Russian Stage: Beauty Without Photoshop” runs through Nov. 27 at The St. Petersburg State Museum of Theater and Music, 6 Ploshchad
Ostrovskogo. M. Gostiny Dvor. Tel. 310 1029. www.theatremuseum.ru.
TITLE: the word’s worth: A heavy hitter
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: Òÿæ¸ëûé: heavy, difficult, oppressive, depressed
Òÿæ¸ëûé (heavy), like its antonym ë¸ãêèé (light), is more than just a description of weight. It also refers to a variety of difficult, depressing, or oppressive qualities — you know, stuff that is, like, heavy, man.
It can describe something that weighs a lot, like òÿæ¸ëûé ÷åìîäàí (a heavy suitcase), the bane of my existence when I am traveling. It might also be used to describe something that doesn’t weigh a lot, but more than expected — like the small traveling purse that I pack to the brim with electronics and books.
This äàìñêàÿ ñóìî÷êà (ladies’ purse) may look like it’s only filled with lipstick and lace hankies, but when porters try to pick it up, they exclaim: Óô! Òÿæ¸ëàÿ! ×òî ó âàñ â ñóìêå — êèðïè÷è? (Yikes! That’s heavy. What have you got in your bag — bricks?)
Òÿæ¸ëûé can also be used to describe thick cloth, like òÿæ¸ëûå øòîðû (heavy curtains), or something that gives the impression of weight, like òÿæ¸ëûå òó÷è (thick clouds). On gloomy days, Russians perceive the sky to hang low, which may be technically impossible but is very expressive as òÿæ¸ëîå íèçêîå íåáî (literally, “heavy, low-hanging sky”).
Low ceilings can also be heavy in Russian, as if they pressed down on the inhabitants: Îíè æèëè â ñòàðîì äîìå ñ òÿæ¸ëûìè íèçêèìè ïîòîëêàìè (They lived in an old house with oppressive low ceilings).
Greasy or rich food can also be on the heavy side: Ïîñëå òÿæ¸ëîãî îáåäà ÿ õîòåëà ïîëåæàòü (I wanted to lie down for a while after the heavy noon-day meal).
People, creatures and other objects can be òÿæ¸ëûå in several senses. Most commonly, òÿæ¸ëûé refers to people who are unsociable, depressed, or argumentative and therefore difficult to get along with. Æåíà — î÷åíü òÿæ¸ëûé ÷åëîâåê, è áåðåìåííîñòü ñäåëàëà å¸ ñîâñåì íåâûíîñèìîé (My wife is, in general, a very difficult person, and when she got pregnant, she became completely unbearable).
When used to describe an audience, òÿæ¸ëûé means difficult in the sense of impossible to engage, easily distracted or hard to keep under control. In American English, òÿæ¸ëàÿ àóäèòîðèÿ in the theater is a tough crowd. In school, òÿæ¸ëûé êëàññ might be an unruly class.
Òÿæ¸ëûé can also be a synonym for áîëüøîé (massive), so you might come across a òÿæ¸ëàÿ ñîáàêà (huge dog). It can also have the sense of being clumsy, so you might hear about òÿæ¸ëûé ìóæèê (lumbering hulk). Òÿæ¸ëûå ÷åðòû ëèöà are gross features.
When used to describe the arts, òÿæ¸ëûé usually refers to a style that is obtuse, convoluted, or otherwise difficult. The writer with òÿæ¸ëûé ÿçûê (ponderous writing style) is not someone you take along for vacation beach reading.
But there are also heavy calques from English. Òÿæ¸ëûé ðîê (hard rock) may be hard to listen to, but it’s not Wagner.
And then òÿæ¸ëûé can be used to describe anything that causes difficulty, emotional or physical suffering, such as òÿæ¸ëàÿ áîëåçíü (serious illness).
Or the aftermath of a natural disaster: Òÿæ¸ëûå ïîñëåäñòâèÿ ïîæàðîâ áóäóò äîëãî îùóùàòüñÿ (The dire consequences of the fires will be felt for a long time). Or a hard day with the kids: Òÿæ¸ëûé äåíü! (What a rough day!)
Thinking about your òÿæ¸ëûå äåòè (ill-behaved children), you can sigh: Ó ìåíÿ òÿæåëî íà äóøå (I’m heart sick; literally, “it’s heavy on my soul.”)
But your friend will say: Íå óíûâàé! Ñòàíåò ëåã÷å! (Lighten up! Things will get easier!)
Or at least your kids will get older.
Michele A. Berdy, a Moscow-based translator and interpreter, is author of “The Russian Word’s Worth” (Glas), a collection of her columns.
TITLE: Lights, camera, inaction
AUTHOR: By Tatyana Sochiva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The internationally acclaimed French American actress Julie Delpy, who starred in “Before Sunset” and “Broken Flowers,” has also proved herself as a film director. Her first movie, “Two Days In Paris,” received favorable reviews from critics and won the “Coup de Coeur” award at the Mons International Festival of Love Films. This month, local moviegoers have the chance to see her latest project, “Le Skylab” (“The Skylab”) at the city’s Dom Kino cinema in its original French language with Russian subtitles.
“Le Skylab” is a charming comedy that depicts a family celebration in sunny Brittany, France in 1979. In the film, numerous relatives, both adults and children, get together to wish their grandmother a happy 67th birthday, sunbathe, eat and socialize.
The film itself consists of comic episodes in which children often act like adults and adults tend to behave like children. The film is not centered around one specific significant event or serious conflict. Nor, however, is it like a Chekhov play, which often seems uneventful on the surface, but is actually full of hidden tragedy. In “Le Skylab,” a series of potentially dramatic situations are ironically reduced into everyday trifles. An ex-paratrooper desiring to return to his ways of killing and theft breaks down in tears like a young child; a man who attempted suicide is quickly comforted by young children; and contrary to the characters’ fears, the Skylab space station burns up over Australia, leaving Brittany out of harm’s way.
The characters themselves are artfully developed and are one of the film’s strongest assets, giving the movie depth and interest despite the absence of dramatic action scenes and impressive special effects. The actors, including Delpy herself, embody their characters completely, making the relationships, events and interactions seem believable, real and relevant.
“Le Skylab” belongs neither to the category of conceptual art films nor popular mainstream flicks. It is simply an amusing comedy, which brings nothing particularly new to cinema, leaving a pleasant impression on the audience, despite its sometimes below-the-belt jokes, which seem more naive than vulgar. In her film, Delpy has demonstrated that summer vacation and family celebrations seen through a child’s eyes can often be more touching and leave more of an impression than any sort of incredible story or unusual and surprising event.
“Le Skylab” is now showing at Dom Kino, 12 Karavannaya Ulitsa. Tel. 314 5614.
TITLE: Russia’s Nobel winners
AUTHOR: By Raymond Stults
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The greatly underpublicized Russian Nobel Prize and the foundation that supports it are named in honor of Ludvig Nobel, an elder brother of Alfred Nobel, whose enormous wealth, derived in large part from the invention of dynamite, lies behind the infinitely better known Nobel Prizes that are awarded annually in Sweden and Norway.
Ludvig Nobel was born in Stockholm in 1831 and moved with his family at a very early age to St. Petersburg, to which his industrialist father, Immanuel, had been invited by the Russian government for the purpose of establishing an armaments factory. Due to a sharp fall in orders for armaments following the end of the Crimean War in 1856, Immanuel Nobel’s business became bankrupt and, in 1859, he returned to Sweden. But Ludvig chose to remain in Russia, eventually opening a factory of his own to produce a wide range of military equipment. In the 1870s, he also became involved, together with brothers Alfred and Robert, in exploiting the oil riches in the region of the present-day capital of Azerbaijan, Baku.
Soon after Ludvig’s death in 1888, his family applied a part of the vast fortune he had accumulated to establishing a foundation for the purpose of bestowing awards on innovators in industry. The foundation and its awards survived until the Bolshevik Revolution, following which the family’s assets were nationalized and the family itself left Russia.
Dormant for nearly 80 years, the Ludvig Nobel Foundation was revived in 2005 and its scope broadened to award prizes “for outstanding professional achievements” in a variety of walks of life. Sidestepping the world of politics and government, its 32 prizes to date have gone to a who’s who of prominent figures in Russian culture and the arts, science, medicine, space exploration and sports.
This year’s four Russian Nobel laureates included two from the world of sports: Larisa Latynina, Russia’s greatest-ever female gymnast, who collected what remains a record total of 18 medals (nine of them gold) at the Olympic Games of 1956, 1960 and 1964; and 89-year-old Mikhail Bobrov, a hero of the Siege of Leningrad and of battles in the Caucasus during World War II and subsequently one of the Soviet Union’s, and later Russia’s, leading athletics trainers.
A third laureate, cosmonaut Sergei Krikalyov, who participated in six space missions between 1988 and 2005 and holds the absolute record for time spent in space — a total of 803 days, nine hours, 41 minutes and 23 seconds — was absent from the ceremony due to an illness. And the fourth laureate, Baron Eduard von Pfalz-Fein, missed the ceremony owing to the infirmities of old age. Born in Russia 100 years ago this June, Pfalz-Fein fled the country with his family at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, eventually settling in Liechtenstein, where he set about, among many activities, collecting works of art and historical objects taken from Russia during the Revolution and returning them to their land of origin. He was also the leader of a decade-long and ultimately unsuccessful search for the panels of the Amber Room of the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, near St. Petersburg, that were allegedly carried off by German troops during World War II.
TITLE: in the spotlight: Dishing the dirt on Pussy Riot
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
TEXT: Last week, Rossia channel came out loud and clear with its position on the Pussy Riot punk group, airing a talk show called “Provocateurs” with a weeping nun and ominous graphics of snakes slithering over the screen.
It was high time to have a dirt-digging documentary on Pussy Riot, the outrageous all-woman punk group who briefly sang a protest song about Vladimir Putin in Christ the Savior Cathedral. Three women are now in detention and face a life-changing seven years in jail. Although the song lasted a minute at most and was viewed directly by a handful of worshippers and journalists, it has somehow snowballed into a matter of national importance.
The show was part of Rossia-1 channel’s “Special Correspondent” strand and was hosted by Arkady Mamontov, who exposed the British spy rock allegations that were later confirmed by London. He obviously has good contacts, even if that show concentrated on casting a shadow on Russian NGOs that Britain funded.
To be fair, Mamontov gave viewers of the Pussy Riot show on Tuesday evening an early warning that it was not going to be a masterpiece of balanced reporting.
On Facebook, he addressed Russian Orthodox believers with World War II rhetoric: “Brothers and sisters, watch the show, it will be interesting. I hope you learn a lot that is new. We are on the right side, the enemy will be confounded, victory will be on our side.”
On the show he was frank. “It’s not that I hate blasphemers, but an enemy is an enemy,” he told guests.
The show had a talk-show element and a pre-filmed documentary that included interviews with all three women at the pretrial detention center. The guests included church spokesman Vladimir Legoida and film actress-turned-nun, Olga Gobzeva, as well as one of the male worshippers who grabbed the women.
“There was not a single person in the room who even defended the arrested Pussy Riot activists, nor looked at the situation calmly and objectively,” the Lenta.ru news website wrote.
I got invited on the show because I was in the church as a reporter when the women performed and was quite keen to say what happened. But my colleagues strongly advised me to say no and, after watching, it was clear why.
At one point, Mamontov called journalists who covered the protest “accomplices in this witches’ coven.”
Some claims in the show seemed one-sided, while others seemed to float free of any basis in reality.
In the most far-fetched allegation, Mamontov hinted that exiled businessman Boris Berezovsky was behind the protest, citing a bizarre letter he wrote in January to the Russian Orthodox Church ahead of the presidential election asking it to back regime change.
“The letter from Berezovsky to the Patriarch came straight before these protests. Doesn’t this seem to you to be a planned situation?” Mamontov asked the guests.
The channel showed a mysterious Russian Orthodox believer called Alexei being egged by a protester outside the court. But it omitted to mention that he had just done the same thing to one of the women’s supporters.
Lenta.ru pointed out that the show made no mention of the women’s actual message in their song, which criticized the church for its close ties with the authorities and called for it to reject Vladimir Putin: “Holy mother, throw Putin out!”
It did interview the Russian head of Amnesty International Sergei Nikitin, who called it a “political protest.” But it was strange that the film did not mention that the women have done a number of other political protests, none of which were in churches.
TITLE: THE DISH: Lapsha
AUTHOR: By Jack Stubbs
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Noodling around
Variety is said to be the spice of life, but sometimes spice itself is what really gives life a kick. Lapsha (Noodles) bills itself as an Asian restaurant specializing in Thai and Indian dishes, but its ownership by the Probka restaurant group — a series of upscale wine bars and Italian eateries spread across the city — is an influence it could do well to shake off.
Lapsha greets you with the slick, efficient style of a Japanese noodle bar. A deep red floor provides a stark and immediate contrast to white walls, adorned with illustrated blackboards and contemporary art. Wooden and steel tables come preset with chopsticks and saki glasses, while jazz music and a vintage red scooter in the corner lend a degree of sophistication to the whole affair.
The feel here is definitely one of cool, contemporary dining. Unfortunately, this does not transfer to the menu, which quickly reveals itself to be, at the very least, confused. Lapsha’s tagline of “curry, pasta, wok” manifests here in a very small number of dishes from a lot of different places. The curry section, for instance, offers four choices: One Indian, two Thai and the last ambiguously dubbed “Asian.” Furthermore, Thai classics such as Tom kha gai soup and Pad Thai noodles clash with a seemingly superfluous and minimal selection of Italian dishes.
Nevertheless, there are hopefully enough of the usual suspects to please Asian food connoisseurs. Prices range from 199 rubles ($6.80) for a bowl of chicken and prawn wonton soup up to 699 rubles ($23.80) for beef steak with Pepe Verde sauce. A wine list with prices from 1,000 rubles ($34) upwards is readily on hand and a pint of decent Danish beer will set you back 210 rubles ($7.10). A vegetarian menu is available on request and all dishes can be spiced to order.
Five-spice chicken salad (349 rubles, $11.90) provided a brilliant contrast of rich oriental spices and succulent chicken breast against a zesty salad of cucumber, tomatoes, bean sprouts, asparagus and citrus fruits. The dim sum (dumplings) with chicken and prawns (289 rubles, $9.85) were steamed to perfection, and avoided falling into the trap of being cooked until they were too dry. A skilful use of spices to complement the chicken and prawn made for a dish that was subtle yet delectable.
Unfortunately, the main courses did not follow in the same vein. The green beef curry (499 rubles, $17), in keeping with Thai culinary traditions, had so much sauce that it was more of a soup than a curry, and one would do well to order it with the available extra rice for 59 rubles ($2). It was appetizing and the meat was particularly well cooked, but the use of green curry paste from a shop-bought jar was disappointingly evident in the cooking.
The Pad Thai noodles with chicken for 299 rubles ($10.20) were regrettably nothing special. The flavors were well blended and the accompanying side salad and bowl of fish soup was a pleasant addition, but, upon closer inspection, it appeared that the noodles themselves might well have actually been Tagliatelle. Perhaps a cuisine twist too far?
For dessert, the Thai black rice pudding with coconut milk and mango (249 rubles, $8.50) was beautifully cooked — cinnamon flavors in the rice blended perfectly with the mango and coconut to make up a delicious and traditional dessert. It was, however, significant in size and rather overwhelming at the end of a large dinner. The fresh pineapple (249 rubles, $8.50) was, as billed, fresh, juicy and perfectly ripe. Served on a large platter and with more than enough to share, it is definitely a dessert that welcomes an extra fork or two.
Lapsha tries hard to please, and in many ways succeeds, but would do well to make the most of what it has the potential to be very good at — simple and traditional Asian dishes — and do away with the distractions. Less, as they say, can so often be much, much more.
TITLE: International Adoption: The American Dream?
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: When American Denise Wesolowski found out that she could not have her own biological children, she was upset, but years after learning the news, she said she was “glad it worked out that way.”
“That’s because now we have our Anna!” Wesolowski told The St. Petersburg Times.
Back in 1993, Wesolowski and her husband turned to Russia to adopt a child.
It took them almost a year to arrange the adoption from Russia, and in December of 1993, they finally received a phone call that an 11-month-old girl from Moscow was available for adoption.
The family’s caseworker at the adoption agency told them that the baby might be deaf, but that didn’t stop the couple from wanting to know more about her. Seeing pictures of the baby left them confident that “she was going to be our child.”
“We excitedly called the adoption agency and said ‘yes,’” Wesolowski said.
In 1994 the happy parents finally brought one-year-old Anna from Russia to their American home.
According to official statistics from Russia’s Ministry of Education and Science, during the past 12 years, more than 45,000 Russian children have been adopted by Americans. Thousands more have been adopted by Spanish, Italian, German, French and other families. Taking into account the uncontrolled statistics of foreign adoption in the 1990s, the figures then will have been two or three times higher, experts say.
In recent years, Russia, along with China and Ethiopia, has become one of the top countries from which Americans adopt children.
However, Russia is now becoming a trickier option for foreigners wishing to adopt, as Russian authorities are trying to significantly decrease the number of Russian children adopted and taken abroad for a number of reasons.
In March of this year, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin called for the minimization of foreign adoption in Russia.
“We must aim for the majority of Russian orphans to find new families in Russia. Foreign adoption should become a rare, exceptional case,” Putin said at a government meeting devoted to issues included in the ratification of the Russian-American adoption agreement.
“We understand that in the majority of cases, children are adopted by foreign families that really love them. However, there are also tragic cases that involve the deaths of Russian children in adoptive foreign families,” Putin said.
In recent years, Russia has been outraged by a number of cases in which Russian children adopted and taken abroad by foreign families either died in tragic circumstances or were returned to Russia under questionable circumstances.
According to Russia’s children’s ombudsman Pavel Astakhov, since 1992, at least 19 adopted Russian children have died as a result of accidents or been killed by their adoptive parents in the U.S. alone.
In 2009, a Russian boy, Vanya Skorobogatov, who with his twin sister Dasha was adopted in 2003 by the Cravers, an American family, died as a result of a head injury. When doctors at the hospital examined the boy, he was reportedly found to have 80 other wounds on his body. His adoptive parents insisted that he had inflicted all of the injuries on himself. The Cravers were sentenced to 16 months in prison for manslaughter.
In July of 2008, 18-month-old Dima Yakovlev died after his adoptive American father left him in a locked car in a parking lot for nine hours on a hot day, having forgotten to drop the child off at daycare on his way to work. The temperature inside the vehicle reached 50 degrees Celsius. An American court ruled that the case was an accident on the father’s part.
It was the story of eight-year-old Artyom Savelyev, whose adoptive mother sent him back to Russia alone on a plane with a note stating she could no longer look after him, that sparked the hottest discussion concerning Russian-American adoption. It was then that Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov proposed freezing the adoption process between the countries until a bilateral agreement stipulating the duties of adoptive parents was signed.
The agreement, which proposed tougher rules for such adoptions, including a requirement for potential parents to undergo psychological training and for adoptions to be arranged only by agencies accredited by the State Department, was signed in Washington last July, but has not yet been ratified by legislators from either country.
The document also stipulates that the child must be monitored more closely after adoption. Seven rounds of negotiations on the agreement were delayed due to varying legislation in American states, and due to Russia’s refusal to allow gay couples to adopt Russian children. Eventually, both sides agreed not to allow homosexual couples to adopt Russian children, RIA Novosti reported.
Putin said the incidents and deaths that had taken place abroad were due to the “low requirements for adoptive parents and the low level of authority held by guardian services that might intervene in the event of a bad situation arising.”
Cases involving the cruel treatment and deaths of adopted children in Russian adoptive families are also registered with alarming frequency. More than 8,000 children adopted by Russian families were returned to children’s homes in 2009. More than 3,000 of them were abused, Alina Levitskaya, the director of a department at the Ministry of Education and Science was cited by Rossiisksaya Gazeta as saying.
“Unfortunately, our society doesn’t have the same reaction to such statistics as it does to the sad cases that happen to Russian children abroad,” Levitskaya said.
However, Svetlana Agapitova, the children’s ombudsman for St. Petersburg, said that the Russian authorities do not intend to completely freeze foreign adoption.
“The idea is to create a situation in which only accredited and reliable adoption agencies can set up and manage adoptions,” said Agapitova. “They would monitor the adopted child’s life and well-being. There are currently many agencies that don’t have the required status. That is why Russia is now working on certain agreements with other countries regarding the matter,” she explained.
Agapitova said it is impossible for Russia to ban foreign adoption.
“First of all, there is no line of Russian adoptive parents waiting to adopt that would allow for all Russian orphans to find a home,” said Marina Levina, president of the St. Petersburg Roditelsky Most (Parents’ Bridge) charity organization.
“Russians do however have a definite priority over foreigners in the country. To change the situation and encourage more Russians to adopt, the Russian authorities should promote adoption and perhaps provide financial aid to Russian adoptive parents,” she added.
Levina also said there were still reasons for allowing a certain number of children to be adopted by foreign families.
One of them was the unwillingness of most Russian families to adopt sick children, especially those with severe health problems and illnesses such as HIV, hepatitis B and C, Down syndrome and others. Foreign families are ready to adopt such children more often than Russians are, Levina said.
A difficult aspect of foreign adoption first of all includes “tougher adaptation for both the child and their adoptive parents,” she said.
“When a child is adopted and moved to a different country, they experience a situation that is twice as stressful: They not only find themselves in a new family, but also in a new country, with a different culture and language. Everything is different for them — even food, water and air. In some cultures people are not as emotional as Russians and that may also be a difficult moment for an adopted child whose new parents are reserved by nature,” Levina said.
“All of this often leads a child to misbehave for a long time and causes even more stress for the adoptive parents, who may also become frustrated,” Levina said.
“Adopted children may cry a lot at first, wake up during the night and even kill animals before they eventually calm down. That can really drive adoptive parents crazy,” Levina said.
Levina said that she knew a Russian family who adopted a child who had seen his own mother stabbed to death. “For a year and a half, that kid used to describe in detail the scene he had witnessed to his adoptive family,” she said.
In the end, such stress leads to a number of situations in which adoptive parents return the children to the places they got them from, she said.
Levina, who has an adopted daughter of her own, said it was very important to provide adoptive parents with social and psychological training. Some good adoption agencies provide such services, but there are many that don’t, she said.
In contrast, when foreign adoptive parents come back home with their newly adopted child, they find themselves in a sort of vacuum. Psychological help may be too expensive in their countries and they become confused about what to do and how to behave, Levina said.
Adopting Russian children is already far more difficult for foreigners than it is for Russian citizens.
Russians have priority in the adoption of Russian children. Foreigners, on the other hand, are allowed to adopt a Russian child only after no Russians have applied to adopt them during the course of six months.
For Russians, the adoption procedure is free, and a number of the country’s regions provide a one-off cash bonus to adoptive families that can reach up to $10,000. Foreigners, on the contrary, have to pay adoption agencies between $40,000 and $50,000 on average and receive no benefits from Russia.
The amount of time it takes to complete the adoption process is also different. For Russian citizens it normally takes from one to three months, while foreigners spend about 18 months completing the adoption. Foreign parents are required to fill out much more paperwork and need to translate all their documents and have them notarized.
Many people are prepared to face this complicated process if it means they will get a child.
In 2010, the number of children adopted in Russia totaled 11,157. Of these, 7,802 were adopted by Russians and 3,355 — including 148 handicapped children — were adopted by foreigners. According to the Ministry of Education and Science, most of these children were adopted by families in the U.S. (1,016). Other adoptive parents were from Spain (792), Italy (686), France (304) and Germany (150).
In 2011, U.S. citizens adopted 970 Russian children.
During the past four years, the number of Russian children adopted by foreigners has decreased by 50 percent, Levitskaya said at the All-Russia Adoptive Families Forum last November, RIA Novosti reported.
However, the statistics in Russia were not much better, with the number of Russian families willing to take in orphaned children for different degrees of care, including adoption, foster care and guardianship, decreasing by 40 percent, Levitskaya said.
“In 2010 Russian families took in 72,500 orphans for different levels of care, while in 2007 they took in 111,700,” she said.
The total number of children in care in Russia totals more than 700,000. About 70 percent of these children have been taken in by foster parents, adoptive families or receive guardianship. However, about 130,000 remain in orphanages, Astakhov said, Novye Izvestiya daily reported.
The fate of those who grow up in children’s homes is not very promising. According to the state prosecutor’s office, after leaving institutions, 40 percent of them turn to a life of crime, 40 percent become alcoholics or drug addicts and 10 percent commit suicide. Only 10 percent manage to adapt to and live a normal life.
Some experts believe that there is another choice besides adoption or growing up in a children’s home.
Joanna Rogers, director of the St. Petersburg organization “Partnership for Every Child,” believes that any adoption, be it foreign or Russian, is usually far from the best way of solving a negative situation for a child in need.
“Many surveys show that living with one’s biological family, even in a bad situation, is still better than living with a good adoptive family. It’s much more natural for a child to stay in their own family,” Rogers said.
According to this theory, the state should invest first of all in helping parents to look after their children rather than taking them into care. “It seems that Russia has chosen this path for the moment, which is right,” said Rogers.
Rogers said that up to 95 percent of Russian children whose parents lose custody of them could stay with their own families if the state provided substantial social, psychological and sometimes financial help to their parents.
At the same time, she said that Russia’s new policy on the potential minimization of foreign adoption would also help its reputation as a civilized country that is a member of the G8.
“None of the G8 countries, be it the U.S. or Germany, have that much foreign adoption because a civilized state should be able to take care of its children itself,” Rogers said.
“Adoption should be a last resort. If it still happens, then children should preferably be adopted into Russian families because it’s always more natural for kids to stay in their own country, within their native culture. Foreign adoption should be available only for kids who have no other chance for a better life,” she said.
Levina said the reason why foreigners come to adopt Russian children or those from other countries often has to do with long waiting lists for adoption in their own countries. For instance, in the U.S. and many European countries, biological parents are rarely deprived of their parental rights. Therefore children in those countries can officially only have foster families, which are not the same as adoptive ones.
“In European countries, there is competition for adoption among potential parents, whereas in Russia potential adoptive parents have a variety of children they can choose from,” Agapitova said.
At the same time, Rogers said it was not fair that the Russian media followed occasional tragic cases concerning Russian adopted children abroad so aggressively, but ignored hundreds of similar cases in Russia.
“Here the rules of the media are that people are more interested in what happens to their compatriots abroad,” Rogers said.
Several months after the Wesolowskis brought Anna to the U.S., they found out that she had profound bilateral hearing loss. She was fitted for hearing aids and at the age of two she started going to the DePaul School for Hearing and Speech in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. When Anna was 12 years old she made the decision to get a cochlear implant and had an electronic hearing device put in, Wesolowski said.
“When the implant was first turned on, the look of amazement on Anna’s face was priceless,” Wesolowski said. “She could hear our voices, music on the radio, birds chirping, and even thunder, all of which she was unable to hear before. Anna was able to attend public school when she turned 13 years old and she has done wonderfully there. She has been on the honor roll every semester.”
A few years ago, the Wesolowskis decided to try and get in touch with Anna’s Russian family. Lidia, Anna’s birth mother, was very happy to finally learn what happened to her child. Back in the 1990s Lidia, who already had three older children, gave Anna up for foreign adoption when she realized that she wouldn’t be able to provide her newborn daughter, who was deaf, with proper medical care.
“We were thrilled to receive pictures of Anna’s Russian family — it was so nice to see the resemblance to her three older siblings and parents,” Wesolowski said. “We have been communicating by email ever since and we have sent packages and pictures to them.”
On May 25, Anna will graduate from high school. She has already been accepted to Saint Vincent College on a partial scholarship, and will start her freshman year in the fall. Anna is going to study bioinformatics. After she completes her four-year degree, she wants to go on to get a master’s degree in neuroscience.
“I truly hope that the Russian authorities keep adoptions open to Americans,” Wesolowski said.
“The help that Anna got from living in the United States was a true miracle. What would her life be like if she had never been adopted?” Wesolowski asked. “She would live with her parents in their apartment and have no access to the hearing world. She would not have learned to speak or lip-read or even be able to go to school. By hearing the success stories of the children adopted from Russia, how could they not want children to have a better way of life?” she said.
“My greatest wish is that someday we will be able to travel to Moscow and visit her family and personally thank them for the great sacrifice they made by putting Anna in the children’s home to be adopted,” Wesolowski said.
TITLE: Teens Get Crash Course on Living Abroad in U.S.
AUTHOR: By Jonathan Earle
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Russian high school students listened eagerly to tips on living in the United States.
Be communicative and polite, keep an open mind when encountering America’s diverse forms of worship, and volunteer in your community, like millions of Americans.
“Remember: It’s not right, it’s not wrong, it’s just different,” said Natalya Sirchenko, who coordinates student exchange programs for the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.
Skinny girls, your host parents might think you’re not eating enough, cautioned Yelena Fomenko of the American Councils for International Education, a Washington-based NGO that runs the FLEX travel-study program with funding from the U.S. State Department.
Host parents also might ask you to do “man’s work” like shoveling snow, said Fomenko, herself a FLEX alumna.
Girls in the room tittered.
The dangers of online social networks were also expounded upon. “You’re going to America to learn about American culture. How can you do that when you’re constantly talking to your Russian friends on Vkontakte?” Fomenko said.
Twenty of the 24 teens seated in rows on the second floor of the American Center in Moscow are among 244 finalists nationwide who will spend the next school year in the United States, living with host families, attending high school and participating in community life.
The remaining four are alternates, meaning they’ll go only if finalists drop out.
The 15- and 16-year-olds in the room are an elite sample of the first post-Soviet generation, and the experience they bring back could very well change Russia.
The stringent application process for the 2012-13 school year started in the fall, as The St. Petersburg Times reported Nov. 15, with the first story in a two-year series that is following the teens from the start of the application process to their return to Russia after studying abroad.
FLEX accepts a smaller percentage of applicants than Harvard. But the teens from Kirov, Samara, Tolyatti and other places in south-central Russia who attended their first official meeting last week were too anxious and excited about the upcoming journey to revel in being among the chosen 1.2 percent.
Having proved their maturity, intelligence and adaptability to program administrators, the teens must now prepare to make new lives from scratch in a foreign country.
“I’m looking forward to improving my English, growing up and discovering new parts of myself,” said Katya Shumailova, 15, whose native Kirov is 9,400 kilometers east of Lakeland, the midsized city in central Florida where she’ll spend her next academic year.
Students and parents whispered as they waited for the start of the presentation on what to expect in the United States.
Svetlana Rumyantseva, 16, of Tolyatti, does not know where she will study yet but was excited about joining the cheerleading squad at her new school.
“I’ve watched a lot of movies about cheerleading,” she said, adjusting her ponytail. “I love the way they jump around and shout things together. It looks like so much fun.”
Next to her, Valery Primov, 16, said he was worried about having to pass Russian school exams at the end of his year abroad. “In reality, I’ll be studying at two schools at once,” he said.
Across the aisle, Valeria Tuleyeva, 16, sat alone. Tuleyeva is an alternate, meaning she might not get a spot on the program. “I really want to go. I mean, I really, really want to,” she said. “The FLEX alumni I talked to said it was the best year of their life.”
More than 7,300 Russians have graduated from FLEX, which is marking 20 years in Russia and the former Soviet Union this year, and they have brought their experience and language skills to leadership positions in business, government and elsewhere.
For many students, the selection process is nerve-racking from start to finish.
Ivan Chesnakov, 16, credited luck and a little help from his parents for his success. “I didn’t even get through the first round last year,” he said. “I think my examiners this year were impressed that I knew that Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president.”
His father, Leonid, a real estate developer in Kirov, craned his neck to listen in.
“There were so many forms to fill out,” his son said. “We stayed up until 4 a.m. one night, and my mother spent days bringing candies and chocolates to doctors to get them to sign all the papers.”
The lights were dimmed and the presentation began. Cynthia Ehrlich, head of academic exchanges at the U.S. Embassy, spoke first.
“When I was growing up, we had drills in school where we had to get under our desks and put on gas masks,” she said. “We were afraid that at any moment, the Soviet Union was going to bomb us.”
The parents exchange knowing smiles. “We did!” one said, eliciting chuckles.
“Now we have a whole generation that are too young to remember those horrible, old days,” Ehrlich said. “Nevertheless, there’s no substitute for first-hand experience.”
Yelena Fomenko and Bo Knutson, also of the American Councils, outlined the program in slide after slide, showing teens how to make the most of their experience and reassuring parents that their children will be in good hands.
Parents were asked to let their children “spread their wings” in the United States: Don’t visit, don’t solve their problems for them and don’t panic. One phone call every two weeks.
Again and again, the students were asked to abide by the rules of their host families regarding Internet use, chores, curfews and the like.
With each gentle suggestion, each juicy cultural tidbit, the parents grew restless, almost wistful. “We didn’t have any of these opportunities growing up,” said Leonid Chesnakov, 41, the real estate developer.
But it isn’t jealousy that made the excitement bittersweet for the parents, it’s the realization that their children are leaving home for the first time and that the pull of the outside world will only get stronger with time.
The program is supposed to prepare students to make a difference in their home communities, but it can also inspire them to move to bigger cities or even abroad.
Sergei Rumyantsev, 41, a masseur from Tolyatti, shrugged at the suggestion that his daughter might eventually leave Russia. “That’s freedom for you,” he said. “What can a parent do except point them in the right direction?”
According to program regulations, the students cannot return to the United States for two years after the conclusion of the program, unless under special conditions.
TITLE: May Day Sees Global Protests
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MANILA, Philippines — May Day moved beyond its roots as an international workers’ holiday to a day of international protest Tuesday, with rallies throughout Asia demanding wage increases and marches planned across Europe over government-imposed austerity measures.
Thousands of workers protested in the Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan and other parts of Asia, with demands for wage hikes amid soaring oil prices a common theme. They said their take-home pay could not keep up with rising consumer prices and also called for lower school fees.
In debt-crippled Greece, more than 2,000 people marched through central Athens in subdued May Day protests centered on the country’s harsh austerity program. Young men targeted political party stands, and minor scuffles broke out. Two stands were destroyed and another one partially burnt. There were no injuries.
Other Europeans also planned to take to the streets to protest measures to cut spending that are being blamed for a big jump in the number of unemployed, particularly in Spain, where one in four people is now out of work.
In the United States, demonstrations, strikes and acts of civil disobedience were planned, including what could be the country’s most high-profile Occupy rallies since the anti-Wall Street encampments came down in the fall.
In Asia, workers demanded wage increases in peaceful but noisy protests.
In the Philippine capital, Manila, more than 8,000 members of a huge labor alliance, many clad in red shirts and waving red streamers, marched under a brutal sun for 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) to a heavily barricaded bridge near the Malacanang presidential palace, which teemed with thousands of riot police, Manila police chief Alex Gutierrez said.
Another group of left-wing workers later burned a huge effigy of President Benigno Aquino III, depicting him as a lackey of the United States and big business. A few hundred workers marched to the U.S. Embassy, but were stopped by riot police about a block away. The protesters burned a mock U.S. flag and went away.
Aquino rejected their calls for a $3 daily pay hike, which he warned could worsen inflation, spark layoffs and turn away foreign investors.
In Indonesia, thousands of protesters demanding higher wages paraded through traffic-clogged streets in the capital, Jakarta, where 16,000 police and soldiers were deployed at locations including the presidential palace and airports.
In Taiwan, several thousand anti-government protesters marched through downtown Taipei, demanding higher wages, lower school tuition and better conditions for foreign workers. Workers waving the Thai flag rallied in Bangkok for better pay.
“It is always the case that low-income groups across Asia feel a disproportionately larger impact of rising prices,” said Wai Ho Leong, a Singapore-based economist with Barclays Capital. “Coupled with rising inflation expectations, the case is building to do more for lower income [workers]. Minimum wages are one way.”
In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, some 500 people rallied, calling for a higher minimum wage than the one announced Monday by Prime Minister Najib Razak.
Najib’s plan for the country’s first-ever minimum wage calls for minimum monthly pay of 900 ringgit ($297) for private-sector workers in peninsular Malaysia and 800 ringgit ($264) in two poor eastern states.
The protesters marched from a market to the headquarters of Maybank, the nation’s largest bank, calling for a minimum monthly wage of 1,500 ringgit ($496) a month.
In Hong Kong, more than 1,000 joined a protest march to demand that the city’s minimum wage, which was introduced exactly a year ago, be raised to 33 Hong Kong dollars ($4.25) per hour from HK$28 ($3.60), according to local broadcaster RTHK.
In nearby Macau, about 500 people marched for workers’ rights and full democracy in the legislature, the broadcaster said.
TITLE: U.K. Lawmakers Claim Murdoch Unfit to Lead
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON — News Corporation chief Rupert Murdoch is unfit to lead his global media empire, an influential group of British lawmakers said Tuesday in a closely divided ruling.
In a scathing report, the lawmakers said Murdoch’s company misled Parliament about the scale of phone hacking at one of its tabloids.
Parliament’s cross-party Culture, Media and Sport committee said News International, the British newspaper division of Murdoch’s News Corp., had deliberately ignored evidence of malpractice, covered up evidence and frustrated efforts to expose wrongdoing.
The 81-year-old media mogul has insisted he was unaware that hacking was widespread at his now-shuttered News of the World tabloid, blaming underlings for keeping him in the dark.
The legislators said if that was true, “he turned a blind eye and exhibited willful blindness to what was going on in his companies.”
“We conclude, therefore, that Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company,” the report by the panel of 11 lawmakers said.
The judgment on Murdoch implies that News Corp., which he heads, is also not a fit to control British Sky Broadcasting, in which News Corp. holds a controlling stake of 39 percent.
Louise Mensch, a Conservative Party member of the panel, told reporters the committee had been divided over the harsh criticism of Murdoch.
Four Conservative members of the committee opposed the suggestion that Murdoch was unfit to lead a global company, but that stance was endorsed by four Labour Party members and one Liberal Democrat. The panel’s chairman, a Conservative, did not vote.
The committee agreed unanimously that three key News International executives misled Parliament by offering false accounts of their knowledge of the extent of phone hacking at the News of The World — a rare and serious censure that usually demands a personal apology to legislators. Those were Les Hinton, Colin Myler and Tom Crone.
The report said Murdoch’s 39-year-old son James, a former News International executive chairman, was also badly at fault over the scandal.
Lawmakers said phone hacking at the tabloid dated back to at least 2001, and insisted that James Murdoch could have halted the practice as early as 2008.
“As the head of a journalistic enterprise, we are astonished that James Murdoch did not seek more information,” legislators wrote.
But they stopped short of accusing the younger Murdoch of misleading lawmakers when he claimed not to have fully read a 2008 email that he had received. The email outlined that hacking was widespread.
The committee said Hinton — a former executive chairman of News International who resigned from his post as the publisher of The Wall Street Journal amid the hacking scandal — had misled them over his repeated claim that hacking was not rife at the News of The World. The committee urged Parliament to take action against him. Hinton worked as a top Murdoch aide on both sides of the Atlantic for decades.
The committee also demanded action against New York Daily News editor Colin Myler, also a former News of The World editor, and the British tabloid’s longtime lawyer Tom Crone. It said they both had misled Parliament about their knowledge of the scandal.
Committee chairman James Whittingdale said “it is for the House (of Commons) to decide what consequences follow” from misleading Parliament.
Murdoch’s News Corp. has been buffeted by the scandal, which has claimed the jobs of a string of his senior executives and several top British police officers amid allegations that Scotland Yard failed properly to investigate tabloid wrongdoing for years.
Murdoch closed down the 168-year-old Sunday tabloid last July amid public revulsion at the hacking of voice mail messages of celebrities and victims of crime, including murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.
At least 25 past and present employees of News International have been arrested by police investigating phone hacking, bribery and computer hacking. Murdoch has paid out millions to settle lawsuits from about 60 celebrities, sports stars, politicians and other public figures whose voice mails were hacked. Dozens more lawsuits have been filed.
Throughout the scandal, News International’s approach “was to cover up rather than seek out wrongdoing,” the legislators wrote.
News Corp. said it was “carefully reviewing the Select Committee’s report and will respond shortly.”
“The company fully acknowledges significant wrongdoing at News of the World and apologizes to everyone whose privacy was invaded,” it said in a statement.
TITLE: 103 Dead, 100 Missing in India Ferry Tragedy
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BURABURI, India — Army divers and rescue workers pulled 103 bodies out of a river after a packed ferry capsized in heavy winds and rain in remote northeast India, an official said Tuesday.
At least 100 people were still missing Tuesday after the ferry carrying about 350 people broke into two pieces late Monday, said Pritam Saikia, the district magistrate of Goalpara district.
Deep sea divers and disaster rescue soldiers worked through the night to pull bodies from the Brahmaputra River in Assam state. Rescue operations were centered around the tiny village of Buraburi near the India-Bangladesh border.
Heavy winds and rain hampered rescue operations, said Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi, Assam’s top elected official.
“I will be ordering an inquiry into the cause of the accident, but right now our priority is to account for every person who was on the ferry,” Gogoi said.
Around 150 passengers swam to safety or were rescued by villagers, said Saikia, who was supervising the rescue operations.
Divers and rescue workers with rubber rafts scoured the river Tuesday in the search for survivors amid the floating debris, which was all that remained of the ferry.
Passenger Hasnat Ali told local television the storm tossed about the ferry, and he and others who were riding on the roof were thrown off or managed to swim ashore before the vessel was dashed to pieces. But about 200 people were packed inside the ferry along with cargo.
Another passenger told New Delhi Television channel there was no lifeguard or life boats on the ferry.
The accident occurred near Fakiragram village in west Dhubri district, about 350 kilometers west of the state capital, Gauhati, and close to where the Brahmaputra River enters Bangladesh.
The area is dotted with riverside settlements and islands, and boats are the most common mode of transport. Most ferries are overcrowded, with little regard for safety regulations.
Soldiers and members of India’s disaster response team pulled the remains of the ferry from the river using ropes tied to two tractors.
Hundreds of anxious people, many weeping, waited for hours near Buraburi, looking for their loved ones.
Indian authorities have sought the help of their Bangladeshi counterparts to locate bodies that may have been swept away by the river’s fast current.
TITLE: Israel Ex-Opposition Leader Tzipi Livni Quits Parliament
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: JERUSALEM — Former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni announced her resignation from parliament on Tuesday, weeks after she was ousted as opposition leader, in a move that could shake up Israeli politics ahead of widely expected national elections.
Livni, a one-time chief peace negotiator who is widely respected internationally, vowed to remain active in politics. She has been rumored to be considering joining a new centrist party being formed by popular former TV anchorman Yair Lapid.
“I leave at this stage, but I’m not leaving public life,” Livni said. “The citizens of Israel deserve more than the current policy.”
Just a few years ago, Livni was one of the country’s most popular politicians. A founder of the centrist Kadima Party, she served as foreign minister from 2006 to 2009, a time when she was Israel’s chief negotiator with the Palestinians. That experience gained her respect in international circles and helped land her on lists of the world’s most influential women compiled by such publications as Time, Forbes and Newsweek.
But in her three years as opposition leader, she faced heavy criticism for what was widely seen as an ineffective term.