SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1710 (21), Wednesday, May 30, 2012
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TITLE: U.S.-Russian 3-Year Multientry Visa Bill to Go to Duma 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: After months of delays, the government has finalized a much-touted visa agreement with the United States and drafted the corresponding bill, though it was unclear Wednesday when the State Duma would hear it.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev approved the bill and ordered it to be sent to the Duma, the government said in a decree published on its website.

The decree was dated and published May 25 but only became known when national media reported it Wednesday.

An aide to Alexei Pushkov, head of the Duma's International Affairs Committee, said Wednesday that the bill has yet to arrive in the parliament.

"Expect this to happen in the next few days," said the aide, who refused to be identified by name. She added that the committee would then discuss when to hear the bill for ratification.

The visa agreement between Washington and Moscow stipulates that successful applicants from both countries would automatically get three-year multientry visas.

It would also do away with the cumbersome requirement of a written invitation.

The facilitation will be felt mostly by Americans because U.S. consulates already give two-year multientry visas to most Russian applicants and require no invitations.

The agreement has been beset by delays in Moscow's government bureaucracy since it was announced in June 2011 by then-U.S. Ambassador John Beyrle.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had promised that it would enter into effect by Dec. 25.

Under U.S. law, the agreement can go into force by a mere exchange of notes, but Russian law demands ratification in both houses of the legislature.

Lawmakers from United Russia have hinted that they would not consider the bill before the U.S. presidential election in November.



TITLE: Weak Ruble Bad for Some, But Not All
AUTHOR: Howard Amos
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Central Bank has begun large-scale intervention in currency markets as steadily slumping oil prices stoked the plunge of the ruble to levels not seen in three years.

The currency closed at 33.68 per dollar Friday, down 0.6 percent. That exchange rate was the lowest since 2009, and Friday was the eighth consecutive day the ruble fell.

“We are conducting quite intensive intervention, and we are selling currency,” said Sergei Ignatyev, head of the Central Bank, RIA-Novosti reported. 

The ruble’s decline in recent days has pushed it to the upper limit of the Central Bank’s floating corridor, 32.15 to 38.15 against the euro-dollar currency basket. Proximity to the 38.15 point was the reason behind the decision to act, he said.

The Western benchmark, Brent crude oil, dropped below the $100 a barrel mark Friday for the first time in seven months. Urals crude, the Russian benchmark, was also down.

“Currency traders capitulated in the face of weakening oil,” Troika Dialog chief strategist Chris Weafer wrote in a note Friday. Weafer warned of the dangers of a “currency panic.”

But the Central Bank said the market will stabilize.

“If the price of oil continues to fall, then it is possible that the ruble will continue to weaken but at a slower tempo than recently, because we are now actively intervening,” Ignatyev said.

Russian stock exchanges reflected declines in international markets. Purchasing managers’ indexes released Friday across Europe and data indicating a rise in U.S. unemployment painted a particularly gloomy picture.

In response to those numbers, the MICEX Index dropped 0.6 percent Friday to 1,298.08. The RTS Index closed down 1.2 percent at 1,227.65.

Ignatyev said Europe was to blame for the problems on Russia’s markets.

Big currency moves are nothing to worry about, Sberbank president German Gref said in an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda published Friday.

“The devaluation of the 1990s frightened the population so much that every time we hear this rhetoric [about a weakening ruble] we flinch and run for our money,” Gref said. “It’s just a current part of financial culture that we have to vaccinate people against.”

Some of the recent declines in the ruble’s value have been exacerbated by the Central Bank’s new approach, which is designed to allow a freer float and keep interventions to a minimum, said Vladimir Tikhonov, chief economist at Otkritie Capital.

“The market has yet to get used to this policy,” he said.

Though plunging markets and a weakening ruble were a sign of gathering storm clouds for some, for others the news was only good.

“The combination of an extremely weak local currency and relatively strong oil prices, if sustained, is set to significantly support Russian oil companies’ profitability,” VTB Capital said in a research note Friday. “[They] are now enjoying the most favorable macro environment ever.” 



TITLE: Sberbank Unimpressed by Navalny Credit Card
AUTHOR: Howard Amos
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A bank card designed to finance Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund was criticized Wednesday by state-owned Sberbank as the opposition leader revealed his biggest financial backers.

The list of 16 includes representatives of major Russian companies.

“It’s incomprehensible,” Sberbank deputy chairman Bella Zlatkis said when asked about the card, which will channel 1 percent of all transactions to Navalny’s coffers. “The technology is incomprehensible, and it’s incomprehensible what they have actually proposed.”

The financial institution that will issue the “Navalny card” will be revealed when the card becomes available in July as the latest accessory for opposition activists.

Although Zlatkis was aware that the idea was in development, she said there were questions about the “legality of the operations of the card.”

Sberbank has the biggest retail banking operation in Russia.

Navalny, who emerged from 15 days in jail last week, is building a base of financial support to bolster his anti-corruption work and political activities.

The lawyer and blogger told Vedomosti on Wednesday that the 16 top donors to his fund had already given 4.4 million rubles ($135,000) and promised another 4 million rubles in the second half of the year. The fund is hoping to raise at least $300,000 annually.

Among the business leaders who have contributed are Rosgosstrakh vice president Roman Borisovich; Alfa Group’s strategic planning director, Alexei Savchenko; billionaire Alexander Lebedev; and venture capitalist Sergei Filonov.

The fund is headed by Vladimir Ashurkov, a former executive at Alfa Bank who has said he was forced out of the company because of his political affiliations.

Despite a United Russia Duma deputy’s request to law enforcement authorities last week to check Navalny’s finances for evidence of money laundering, Zlatkis said the “Navalny card” is unlikely to be the target of political pressure.


TITLE: Putin Welcomes EU Leaders in St. Petersburg
AUTHOR: Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: ST. PETERSBURG — European Union leaders sit down for the first time with President Vladimir Putin since his return to the Kremlin this Monday for a summit that is expected to send out many signals but little substance.

The two-day talks, which kicked off with a dinner Sunday night, are being held in the Konstantinovsky Palace, an 18th-century baroque estate overlooking the Gulf of Finland outside Putin's hometown, St. Petersburg.

But despite the grandeur, the summit won't see any joint statements or signatures. Rather, diplomats said, EU co-leaders Herman van Rompuy and Manuel Barroso and foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton will focus on getting reacquainted with Putin, who had not been their official interlocutor during the last four years, when he served as prime minister.

"It's all about atmosphere," said a senior EU official, requesting anonymity in order to speak candidly. He added that what the Europeans will look out for most is whether Putin will move away from the Kremlin's previous stance versus Brussels. "There is an expectation that he will make some new marks," the official said.

During his election campaign, Putin sent strong signals that he is less inclined to cooperate with the West, accusing the United States of financially supporting the opposition, which led unprecedented mass protests against him and election fraud.

Putin did pay short visits to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and newly elected French President Francois Hollande last Friday, but only after a longer stop in Belarus, where he held talks with his counterpart Alexander Lukashenko, whom the EU has hit with sanctions for his crackdown on the opposition.

Talks with Merkel and Hollande were dominated by differences over the crisis in Syria, in which Moscow accuses the West of giving one-sided support to the opposition, and both the EU and the Kremlin have announced that they will discuss the issue.

The biannual summits between Russia and the 27-member union usually focus on trade, energy and travel, progress over each having been excruciatingly slow over the past years.

Russia's accession to the World Trade Organization, or WTO, signed last December, removed a big barrier for talks over a new wide-ranging bilateral agreement, but EU officials say they will wait until it goes into effect later this year.

Trade relations are dominated by the country's energy exports to the EU, which reached 158 billion euros (about $200 billion) last year, dwarfing the EU's exports to Russia at 108 billion euros and resulting in an overall trade deficit of 91 billion euros, according to official EU statistics.

Moscow complains that EU energy market policies are disadvantageous to its oil and gas companies, to which Brussels officials retort that European energy companies face more restrictions in Russia.

Long-standing talks about visa-free travel reached a turning point in December, when both sides agreed on a list of common steps that are to be fulfilled in order to start actual negotiations. But those steps amount to a 40-point to-do list, work on which is mainly Moscow's job, prompting extreme caution from Brussels when Kremlin officials say this will be done by January 2013.



TITLE: McFaul and State Department Respond to Attack
AUTHOR: Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul and the U.S. State Department responded Wednesday to blistering criticism from the Foreign Ministry, saying they were surprised by the harsh reaction to the ambassador's comments to university students last week.

"As a proponent of better U.S.-Russian relations, I was surprised by the official reaction to my talk at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow," McFaul wrote on his LiveJournal blog Wednesday.

"The central thesis of my presentation was how much U.S.-Russia officials have accomplished in the last 4 years with the 'reset' in our relations," he wrote, pointing out that then-President Dmitry Medvedev said during a March meeting in Seoul that the "last three years of the U.S.-Russia relationship have been the best period in U.S.-Russia relations in history."

The Foreign Ministry said Monday that it was "utterly shocked" at McFaul's remarks during the talk with the students. In a transcript of the discussion on the school's website, McFaul suggested that Russia "bribed" Kyrgyzstan to close the Manas air base, which the United States has used since 2001 to support military operations in Afghanistan.

"The point of my digressions into past historical practices was not to 'spread blatant falsehoods,' but rather to illustrate precisely how much we have overcome by abandoning these outmoded ways of diplomacy from previous eras," McFaul wrote, addressing the ministry's criticism.

"Maybe I shouldn't have spoken so colorfully and bluntly. On that, I agree and will work harder to speak more diplomatically," the former Stanford professor added.

State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland answered questions about the diplomatic spat at a daily news briefing Tuesday.

"He was making the point that with regard to Kyrgyzstan and the importance of the Manas transit center, that we are very transparent … we ask for the same information and the same support from Russia. So it's no longer this sort of secret competition that you had in the Soviet era," she said.

The "irony" of the presentation, she added, is that it was "all about the benefits that the reset in U.S.-Russian relations has brought for Russia, for citizens, for groups across the country and for the United States."

In his blog, McFaul echoed Nuland's statement.

"As one of the architects of [the reset] policy and as President Obama's representative here in the Russian Federation, it is natural that I would give a talk applauding the results of the reset."

In a copy of the presentation posted on his blog, McFaul outlines the history of the reset, as well as positive results of the policy for business, diplomacy,  society, and security and military cooperation.

Nuland reiterated U.S. support of the ambassador.

"As one of the architects of the president's reset policy, he's in a position not only to really understand the benefits, but also to try to continue to advance them. So from that perspective we considered him an extremely strong ambassador."


TITLE: City Mistakenly Plants Marijuana Field Instead of Lawn
AUTHOR: Ken Martinez and Peter Spinella
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: After the city spread soil containing "grass" seeds around the Brateyevo metro station, a field of marijuana plants sprouted up instead of a lawn.

But don't go rushing over there with your bong.

Federal agents have already uprooted more than 230 of the illicit weeds, RIA-Novosti reported Thursday, citing the Federal Drug Control Service.

The Brateyevo metro station is under construction in the city's south end. Workers had filled the area with the soil as part of the development project.

The soil is currently being replaced. An investigation is under way to determine its supplier as well as why it was filled with the seeds of a psychotropic plant that can also be turned into practical items such as rope, lip balm and clothing.



TITLE: Protest Figures Detained, Activists Find New Base
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The police arrested local opposition leaders Olga Kurnosova and Nikolai Bondarik as they distributed white balloons for the second Test Walk that started on St. Isaac’s Square amid City Day celebrations Sunday.
The walk, whose aim was to check whether residents can walk around freely with white balloons and white ribbons — which represent the campaign for honest elections and anti-Putin protests — went ahead without Kurnosova and Bondarik, who were taken to two different police precincts and charged with jaywalking. 
They were fined and released about three hours later, Kurnosova said.
Between two and three hundred took part, marching on Nevsky Prospekt toward Ploshchad Iskusstv, where anti-Putin protesters have been gathering after being evicted from two previous locations.
However, when one protester started reading poetry aloud, a policeman with a megaphone began warning that the event was not sanctioned and that participants would be detained.
On Sunday morning, six opposition campers were detained while they were sitting on benches on Ploshchad Iskusstv near the Alexander Pushkin monument and charged with violating St. Petersburg’s environmental law. They were released two and a half hours later, and also face fines.
After two weeks of camping in the gardens in front of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the Occupy St. Isaac’s protesters were told to move out when maintenance work was suddenly announced on May 21 and the garden was enclosed by a yellow metal fence.
According to the city authorities, the garden’s paths were to undergo maintenance work in preparation for City Day on Sunday. 
On Sunday afternoon, the garden was still closed and no work was being carried out. There were two small heaps of sand and gravel and one uniformed maintenance worker sitting in the grass in the otherwise deserted garden.
To avoid conflict with the police, the protesters moved to the nearby Alexandrovsky gardens in front of the Admiralty, where they created a toy rally by placing stuffed toys next to miniature posters with baby-talk slogans such as “Putin is a baddie” or “Putin, I don’t want to play with you.”
The installation was used by the police as grounds for accusing the protesters of holding an unauthorized rally and driving them out of the garden. Since Saturday, the protesters have made the garden on Ploshchad Iskusstv their new base.

TITLE: Hospice Marks Children’s Day
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Kravtsova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: As International Children’s Day is celebrated around the world on June 1, a charity event aimed at drawing attention to one of the most sobering social topics, child mortality, will be held in the city. 
On this day, people are encouraged make a donation to St. Petersburg Children’s Hospice and in exchange receive a white paper flower as a sign of hope and new life. Organizers insist, however, that while raising money for the organization is important, the main idea of the event is to raise awareness of the issue. 
The idea for Friday’s drive came from a charity event held in Russia before the 1917 Revolution. Founded by Tsar Nicholas II and first held in 1911, the event was organized to raise money for severely ill patients by allowing people to buy a white flower at a price they set themselves.
The paper flowers for this year’s event were made by elementary school students as part of a “lesson of goodwill” that took place on May 18 in every school in St. Petersburg. 
“The fact that children made these flowers means that thousands of pupils are now aware of who they made them for and why. That is important,” said Pavel Krupnik, executive director of the St. Petersburg Children’s Hospice.
The St. Petersburg Children’s Hospice opened in 2003, funded by private donations as a medical service that visited people at home and became the first hospice service for children in Russia. Seven years later, in June 2010, it transformed into a full-fledged in-patient department and state medical institution. But its main building, situated in the city’s Kurakina Dacha Park, doesn’t look like a standard medical establishment inside or out. 
“The idea of the hospice originated when archpriest Alexander Tkachenko — the founder of the hospice — saw a children’s hospice in America. It looked like a dream house or Disneyland. He wanted to create something similar in Russia,” said Krupnik.
Children under the age of 18 years old with congenital disorders and terminal illnesses including cancer, neurological diseases and others live at the hospice. At the moment, the hospice has more than 200 patients. It provides 24-hour care for 18 children, day care for about 10 children, and home care for the rest. The youngest patient is only two months old — a girl whose parents declined to take her home from the hospital because she was born with a terminal illness.
The hospice sees itself as an end-stage service establishment within the palliative sector of medicine.
The idea is not to have children die in a hospital, but to relieve pain and provide them with psychological and emotional care, thereby improving the quality of their lives. Providing the parents of sick children with psychological care, including after their child dies, is another crucial part of the service. 
Russia’s palliative care legislation was created more than 20 years after the country’s first hospice — a hospice for adults, also in St. Petersburg — was founded. Under the federal law on health protection passed on Nov. 21, 2011, palliative care is considered to be a separate type of medical care and is free to those who use it. The law helped to bring the mandate concerning the fundamentals of palliative care for children to the forefront. It also helped set basic standards for children’s hospices and address problems such as supplying hospitals with necessary medications.
“There is always enough medication for hospice-based patients, as it is provided by the state, whereas the situation with home-based children can be challenging,” said Olga Shargorodskaya, head of the hospice’s social services department.
“Some time ago, the hospice suffered a shortage of medication. Of course the funds allocated by City Hall are not enough to cover what we need because they are provided according to the norms of an ordinary hospital. The hospice wouldn’t be able to afford medication, food and care without additional funds raised by charity events and donated by individuals,” Krupnik said. 
An affiliate of the hospice was built on the outskirts of the city in Lakhta in 2011, and now functions funded solely by donations. Children from other regions stay there between operations and the primary treatment they receive at the hospital.
“For now, most donations come from businessmen,” said Krupnik. “The majority of them have never visited the hospice. They are willing to help, but they don’t want to see children suffer. Psychologically, it’s very difficult.” 
The staff are one of the most important elements of the hospice, as its members not only care for the children, but also work to create a homely atmosphere. 
“At one point we had a high personnel turnover, especially among young staff and volunteers,” said Krupnik. “They would care for a child, and then he or she would die. Then that employee would leave and new people would come. But if people stay at the hospice for at least half a year, they usually end up staying for a long time. But it’s difficult to deal with the fact that these children will die,” he said.
Now the hospice plans to become a training ground for specialists from other regions of Russia aiming to work in the sphere of palliative care. Consultations for those looking to open a hospice in their region are already being held. 
The hospice always needs volunteers: Those who are able to spend some time with the children, read to them or play games with them.
Some 600 volunteers, including students from St. Petersburg State Medical University will volunteer at the June 1 event. From 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. the students will hand out flowers at 100 locations around the city, primarily near subway stations. All volunteers will be wearing medical uniforms and one person in each group will wear a surgical apron with the image of a flower depicted on it. In addition, events such as concerts and master classes on making paper flowers will be held near Gostiny Dvor metro station and at the Bukvoyed bookstore at 46 Nevsky Prospekt.
“I understand that not everyone can help the hospice; some of them choose to give money to children who can be saved, but on June 1 it is impossible to ignore the issue of dying children,” said Krupnik.

TITLE: City Dwellers Show Loyalty
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The majority of St. Petersburg and Moscow residents love living in their cities, according to a new poll.
According to a sociological survey carried out by the website Superjob.ru, at least 87 percent of St. Petersburg residents and 72 percent of Moscow residents said they liked living in their cities. 
St. Petersburg residents were quoted as saying, “I have loved St. Petersburg since I was a child and I’m still madly in love with it” and “St. Petersburg is closer to Europe, people are more well-mannered here than in some other cities, and life here is safer.” 
However, according to the sociologists’ data, both St. Petersburg and Moscow have lost some of their fans; last year the number of St. Petersburg residents satisfied with their life in the city totaled 88 percent, while the figure in Moscow was 75.
This year the number of those dissatisfied with living in Moscow was registered at 28 percent. In St. Petersburg this number was 13 percent.
Fifty percent of Muscovites and 55 percent of Petersburgers said that the most actively developing spheres in the two cities were social — restaurants, clubs and other public places.
The fast rate of retail development was noted by 36 percent of Moscow residents and 38 percent of Petersburgers.

TITLE: Undercover Agent Serves As Witness in Trial of 12
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The prosecution presented its most intriguing witness yet during the trial of the 12 Other Russia activists Tuesday. An undercover agent, who reported to counter-extremism Center E on the activists’ meetings and protests, took the stand at the trial’s latest session.
Identified in court as Mikhail Sazonov, the witness testified from another room, with his answers heard in the courtroom. His voice was electronically distorted to “ensure his safety” in compliance with a motion made by Prosecutor Nadezhda Filimonova during Friday’s hearing.
Vyborgsky District Court Judge Sergei Yakovlev rejected a motion made by defendant Andrei Dmitriyev, chair of The Other Russia’s local branch, to verify whether or not the witness was the real Sazonov and whether he was alone in the room— without a Center E officer with him to prompt him.
The prosecution hopes to prove that the activities of the defendants — meetings, rallies or other forms of protest — were in reality the activities of the banned National Bolshevik Party (NBP). Most of the defendants were members of the party before it was banned for being extremist in 2007.
Sazonov claimed that he filled in a membership form on the Nazbol.ru website in March 2009 because “he was interested in knowing what the opposition was like.” After two meetings he said he went to Center E, whose address he found using the Yandex search engine, and was invited to cooperate with Center E by Officer Dmitry Gryaznov.
On Tuesday, Sazonov said he went to Center E because he realized that the NBP organization was banned. According to him, he went to one rally — Strategy 31, a rally in defense of the constitutional right of assembly, in late 2009  (he said he didn’t remember what month it was) and saw banned NBP flags there. 
However, Strategy 31 was launched in St. Petersburg on Jan. 31, 2010 by several opposition groups as a non-partisan campaign that insists it does not use party flags.
According to the indictment, Sazonov identified all of the 12 defendants in the 60 photographs shown to him during the investigation, but on Tuesday he managed to identify only four when the photographs were shown to him in his separate room. 
The defense believe Sazonov — who introduced himself to the activists as “Ruben,” according to Dmitriyev — was an undercover police operative from the very start, planted by Center E to report on the activists. He also recommended an apartment that had been equipped with surveillance cameras and microphones to the group for their meetings.
According to Center E documentation featured among the criminal case materials, the officers deliberately planted an undercover agent identified as “Citizen R” in the group with the aim of bringing the activists together in one place to get them to “reveal their illegal activities.” But despite similarities between him and the planted police agent, Sazonov denied he was “Citizen R.”
Sazonov also claimed he was not paid for his service as an undercover agent, which lasted for about 18 months, and used his own money rather than Center E’s to pay his membership fees.
Judge Yakovlev upheld Sazonov’s refusal to answer when asked whether he had worked with the police in the past or if he was currently working with any law enforcement agency, on the grounds that it was “personal information” that could compromise Sazonov’s safety.
During Friday’s session, Lyudmila Pedorych, a neighbor of defendant Boikov, was required by the court to speak. During the investigation, Pedorych said that her and Boikov’s former neighbor, identified only as Ira, described Boikov as a [supporter of former NBP leader Eduard Limonov] “Limonovist.” 
Speaking in court, Pedorych, who works as a cashier, said that the conversation took place in 2005 when she moved into a communal apartment on Gorokhovaya Ulitsa, where both she and Boikov live, and where Ira told her about the other neighbors.
Pedorych said she signed a document saying a search of Boikov’s room had been conducted without reading it, and then expressed doubts whether it was her signature on the paper. She said she never saw any of the buttons or leaflets allegedly found in Boikov’s room.
During the past two sessions, Judge Yakovlev repeatedly granted Prosecutor Filimonova’s motions and denied those of the defense.
The evidence in the criminal case filed by counter-extremism Center E includes items such as Strategy 31 buttons (the number “31” on a white background), an anti-fascist film festival poster and Limonov’s early novels, first published when he lived in New York and Paris in the early 1980s. 
During the first four sessions, many prosecution witnesses failed to confirm the accusations they had allegedly made during the investigation.
Dmitriyev, who faces from two to four years in prison for being an “organizer,” said that there was little hope that the discrepancies in the prosecution’s case would lead to acquittal.
“It looks like the trial is moving to a conviction; let’s hope it will be a suspended sentence,” he said Tuesday.
“The whole case is a large-scale police provocation and should fall apart. The judge is trying to make the trial look objective, but it is clearly biased toward the prosecution, with the defense’s motions being denied,” said Dmitriyev.
“The lawyers say it could be won if it were not politically motivated, but as it is, there’s not much to be done about it. I’d like to be wrong about that, but so far I am not very optimistic based on how the judge has been acting and how the trial has been progressing.”
The next session will take place on June 1.

TITLE: Tallinn Train Route Reopens
AUTHOR: By Olga Kalashnikova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A direct rail link between St. Petersburg and the Estonian capital of Tallinn reopened Sunday after a four-year break.
The train service between St. Petersburg and Tallinn was canceled in 2008 because of both technical and economic reasons, including insufficient demand. In the meantime, travelers have been able to reach the Estonian capital by car, bus or ferry (via Helsinki and Stockholm). 
During the last few years, however, the interest in traveling to Estonia has increased greatly. According to data from the Russian Travel Industry Union, the number of tourists traveling to Estonia is growing by 15 to 20 percent annually.
“Interest in Estonia is constantly growing. This is in part due to nostalgia among the older generation of Russians,” said Sergei Korneyev, vice president of the Russian Travel Industry Union. 
“Estonia also actively advertizes itself in Russia. Just think of the annual offers such as ‘New Year in Tallinn’ that can be seen everywhere. 
“Estonia depends primarily on St. Petersburg tourists, partly because of failed expectations from European travelers,” he added.
However, the Russian–Estonian border does not currently deal well with the heavy influx of tourists. 
“The more modes of transport there are to take people to Estonia, the better the situation is,” said Korneyev. “There are many people who are ready to travel by train. Although the train also has to stop for customs, it is more comfortable to sit on the train and wait for your passport to be checked than it is on the bus,” he said.
The journey on the new train takes about seven hours, slightly quicker than the journey by bus. The train leaves St. Petersburg for the Estonian capital once a day at 5:32 p.m. from Vitebsky Railway Station, and departs from Tallinn’s Baltic Station for St. Petersburg at 7:03 a.m.
The train has both first- and second-class carriages and a restaurant car and provides wireless Internet access. The train can seat up to 204 travelers. 
In spite of the competition posed by many daily bus services between Tallinn and St. Petersburg, GoRail, the new train’s operator, is confident that the new railway route will be profitable. The company also sees increased traveler numbers as having important social and economic significance.
“St. Petersburg is a large city that has become a center of economic and cultural life,” said Alar Pinsel, head of GoRail. “Interest in traveling between Tallinn and St. Petersburg has been increasing for a long time. That’s why today, four years after having closed the route, we have made the decision to reopen the rail link to serve passengers from both Estonia and Russia,” he said.
According to Korneyev, the popularity of the new train will depend on its ticket prices. The price of a one-way ticket starts from 25 euros ($31).

TITLE: 2 Shot Dead In Restaurant
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A criminal investigation has been opened into a fatal shooting that took place in a local restaurant, resulting in the deaths of two people Sunday night.
The shootout began in the courtyard of the Camelot restaurant at 27 Shosse Revolyutsii when an unidentified man approached the owner of the restaurant and shot him with a handgun, Interfax reported.
The victim fought back, snatching the gun out of the attacker’s hand and firing back at him. The attacker then regained the weapon, shot the victim several more times and fled the scene.
The victim’s brother chased after the attacker in his car, caught him and took him back to the scene of the crime. There both the victim and the attacker died from the gunshot wounds they had sustained.
The police have not yet determined whether or not the attacker was a hit man hired for reasons connected to the restaurant owner’s business activities.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Tokyo Route Begins</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — City residents and guests will once again have the opportunity to fly directly between St. Petersburg and Tokyo. Russia’s Transaero airline will fly to Tokyo’s Narita Airport once every other Thursday.
According to the St. Petersburg press service of the Russian Travel Industry Union, flights will start on June 21. The flight time will be 9 hours and 15 minutes.
Sergei Korneyev, head of the northwest branch of the Russian Travel Industry Union, said “Japanese tourists are important for St. Petersburg as a touristic center as they stay in the city for the longest period time and as a result spend more money,” Korneyev said.

<b>Actor, Teacher Honored</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — St. Petersburg actor Oleg Basilashvili and primary school teacher Larisa Listova were named honorary St. Petersburg citizens on Sunday, Interfax reported.
Forty St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly deputies voted for Basilashvili and 31 for Listova.
The current list of honorary St. Petersburg citizens includes 36 people, including President Vladimir Putin.

TITLE: 150 Detained at Anti-Kremlin Rallies
AUTHOR: By Alexandra Odynova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — About 150 people were detained Sunday as scores of people gathered for a series of anti-government demonstrations in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Police detained some 40 people outside the Mayor’s Office, where gay rights activists gathered to protest anti-gay legislation passed in several Russian cities and waiting for a vote in the capital.
YouTube footage from the rally showed the protesters — who also demanded the right to hold a gay pride parade — being approached by a group of radical Orthodox activists carrying crosses and icons and chanting “Stop Sodom!”
“I will not allow perverts to bring the wrath of God onto our city,” one gay rights opponent, Dmitry Tsarionov, told the gathering. He held a sign that said “Moscow is not Sodom.”
“I want our children to live in a country where a sin that so awfully distorts human nature is not preached in schools,” he said, The Associated Press reported.
Fierce arguing between gay rights activists and their opponents descended into violence, which ended with the police swooping in and detaining 40 people from both sides.
Another group of protesters organized a rally dubbed “White Defil&#233;,” calling for people to dress in white clothes and walk around Red Square. Several hundred people showed up, waving white ribbons, the symbol of the opposition.
The White Defil&#233; participants then walked to the Arbat, where about 100 people were detained, Kommersant reported on its website.
The Yabloko party, meanwhile, held a sanctioned rally near the Pushkinskaya metro station against a bill that would increase fines for illegal protests. A few party activists dressed in costumes resembling prison garb, Interfax reported.
In St. Petersburg, opposition activists Olga Kurnosova and Nikolai Bondarik were held by the police minutes before an anti-Kremlin stroll in the city center, Interfax reported. (See story, page 2.)
Separately, six police officers will be awarded free apartments as compensation for injuries suffered during a May 6 opposition rally in Moscow that ended in violence and some 450 detentions.
The four OMON riot police officers and two regular policemen will receive deeds for the apartments in Moscow, a police spokesman said Friday. Earlier, the police said about 30 officers had been injured in the clashes.
News of the free apartments sparked irritation from opposition-minded bloggers, who pointed out that hundreds of war veterans and people with special needs have been waiting for similar apartments for years.
Also Sunday, socialite-turned-opposition activist Ksenia Sobchak wrote on Twitter that she had been told that she will no longer host a Muz-TV music award ceremony June 1. Sobchak, who has hosted the ceremony for the past four years, said the decision came from top government circles and was in response to her support of the anti-Kremlin protesters.

TITLE: Russia Accepts 210 Foreign Diplomas
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Diplomas from 210 foreign universities will now be acknowledged in Russia without additional state evaluation, according to a government order published Friday by Rossiiskaya Gazeta.
The government-approved list includes world-renowned top-tier schools as well as obscure midlevel ones in 25 different countries.
Britain’s Cambridge, Oxford and York universities and famous American institutions including Yale University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology stand with an assortment of U.S. state schools and outliers like Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Most of the selected schools are in North America: 66 American and 14 Canadian. Then comes Europe, with 28 in Britain and 61 in other European countries. Third is Asia, with 11 Chinese, nine Japanese and three South Korean.
The other universities on the list include eight in Australia, three in Israel, two in Brazil, two in New Zealand, two in Singapore and one in South Africa.
Apart from this new list, the state recognizes university diplomas from fellow former Soviet republics excluding Uzbekistan, and vice versa, reported Rossiiskaya Gazeta, an official mouthpiece of the Russian government.
A four-month bureaucratic procedure still lies ahead of graduates from other foreign universities who want their diplomas officially recognized in Russia.
In 2003, Russia signed on to the Bologna Process, which was launched in 1999 to create a unified system of higher education in Europe. But many Russian graduates who go to work abroad still must have their diplomas certified.
“This limits the opportunities for scientific and academic mobility by graduates from Russian schools,” Moscow State Institute of International Relations vice dean Alexandra Khudaikulova told Rossiiskaya Gazeta.
Signed by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, the new order fulfills a pledge he in 2009. Then-President Medvedev said foreign diplomas should be recognized in Russia to lure foreign researchers and entice Russian expatriates to return from abroad.
For a full list of the government-approved universities go to http://www.rg.ru/2012/05/25/obrazovanie-dok.html.

TITLE: Opposition Activists Ask For 50,000-Strong June 12 Rally
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Opposition activists have submitted an application to hold a rally June 12, asking Moscow authorities to approve the attendance of up to 50,000 people in a protest that may serve as the first test of a new rally law that could be approved as early as next week.
“We submitted a notice to City Hall about holding a ‘March of a Million’ event on June 12 in the form of a march and a rally. We’ll gather at 2 p.m., and the beginning of the procession is at 3,” Left Front leader Sergei Udaltsov wrote on Twitter.
The march is planned to start from the Belorussky Station and move along Tverskaya Ulitsa to end at Borovitskaya Ploshchad, Udaltsov said.
The first March of a Million event was held May 6 to protest the inauguration of Vladimir Putin. About 450 were arrested after clashing with police, and at least two dozen protesters and around 30 police officers were injured.
Federal lawmakers have been considering a bill that would greatly increase penalties for violating rules at rallies and could be ready in time for the June 12 event. The State Duma last week tentatively approved the bill, which would increase fines from 2,000 rubles to 1 million rubles (from $65 to $32,400), with penalties for organizers climbing from 5,000 rubles to 1.5 million rubles.

TITLE: Medvedev Appointed United Russia Chair
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev called for United Russia to be “rebuilt from scratch” at a convention that elected him party leader over the weekend.
But many old party hands also landed leadership posts at the convention, casting doubt on whether significant changes were in the offing.
Former State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov was appointed head of the party’s supreme council, while Sergei Neverov, a conservative known for his tough stance against opposition protests, was named head of the party’s general council.
Medvedev promised to reform the party by introducing primaries for mayors and governors and raising the share of lower-ranked members in the party’s ruling bodies by up to 20 percent.
The desire for change, expressed by many regional party members, has revealed problems in the mammoth party, known for lacking an ideological agenda and often used as a toothless force for senior leadership to push laws through the parliament.
“In private conversations, all of you have said it’s impossible to work like this and we don’t mean anything for the party,” Deputy State Duma Speaker Oleg Morozov said at a round table on the eve of the convention, shortly before being named head of the presidential administration’s department for domestic politics.
United Russia, which has held a parliamentary majority for a decade, has been accused of manipulating elections and harboring corrupt officials among its ranks. Critics have dubbed United Russia “the party of crooks and thieves.”
“Everything connected with United Russia I have spurned from my life forever,” former senior United Russia official Lyubov Sliska said by telephone when commenting on the party’s future.
But Sholban Kara-ool, a United Russia member who heads the Tyva republic, said he was excited that the party had a say in the formation of Medvedev’s Cabinet. “The party is really becoming the force that is forming the government,” he said.
But Medvedev’s promises for party reform were met with caution by Duma Deputy Vladimir Dolgikh.
“We need to develop mechanisms and people for it,” said Dolgikh, a United Russia member who held senior positions in the Soviet Communist Party.
The lack of new members that can assume leadership positions is visible in the composition of the party’s general council.
Among the few new people elected to the council was Valery Trapeznikov, a former Uralvagonzavod worker-turned-Duma deputy. He will oversee relations with trade unions.
Trapeznikov said party members should “unite to physically beat the party’s enemies,” referring to opposition leaders Alexei Navalny and Ilya Yashin, Kommersant reported Saturday.
Ural Mountain-based Uralvagonzavod became a support base for Putin during his re-election bid in March.
Former United Russia Deputy Sergei Markov said the party could have demonstrated a desire for change during the convention by proposing other candidates for the chairmanship alongside Medvedev.
He noted Medvedev would not have full control over the party. “The party remains the party of Putin,” he said.

TITLE: Hague and Lavrov Work to Smooth Over Syria Crisis
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — British Foreign Secretary William Hague on Monday became the first senior Western official to hold talks with the new Russian government, in what analysts labeled an initiative to prevent further deterioration of relations.
Hague discussed the Syria crisis and the upcoming Olympic Games in London and Sochi with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov before holding more Olympic-related talks in the White House, the British Embassy said.
London has sought to improve ties with Moscow, long frayed by the poisoning death of former Federal Security Service officer Alexander Litvinenko in London and demands from both sides to extradite suspects from Moscow and self-exiled Kremlin critics from Britain.
The talks on Syria went relatively smoothly, with Lavrov hinting that Moscow could increase pressure on Syrian President Bashar Assad to abide by the peace plan forwarded by United Nations and Arab League envoy Kofi Annan.
“Of course we are deeply worried that this plan is fulfilled in an unsatisfactory way,” Lavrov told a joint press conference with Hague, Interfax reported.
Lavrov also said he agreed with his British counterpart that leading states should make additional efforts to implement Annan’s plan. “We will work on this in the near future,” he said.
Hague said he and Lavrov agreed that the Annan plan was “the only hope for Syria to try to break the cycle of violence” and that London “will work closely with Russia in overseeing its implementation,” according to a transcript on the British Embassy website.
Russia has staunchly supported Assad in his 14-month assault on a pro-democracy opposition determined to oust him.
Lavrov reiterated Monday that Moscow was not taking sides, saying that both government and opposition forces were to blame for a massacre May 25 in the town of Houla that killed more than 100 people.
The foreign minister also criticized Arab countries’ argument that only regime change could solve the crisis by saying that this “raises doubts that they want to stop the violence.”
Observers said the talks offered an important signal because much of the Kremlin’s foreign policy is in limbo following the May 7 handover of the presidency from Dmitry Medvedev to Vladimir Putin.
“It’s good that it went without confrontation,” said Vladislav Belov of the Moscow State International Relations Institute, adding that Syria is a vital element of relations with the West.
Putin will make the first foreign visit of his new term May 31, when he heads to Belarus. That will be followed by short trips to Paris and Berlin on June 1.
The president will hold his first high-level talks inside the country Monday, when he hosts a summit with the European Union’s leadership in St. Petersburg.
The fact that afterward Putin is slated to visit the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, and then Beijing has prompted speculation that his foreign policy will give more attention to relations with Moscow’s allies in Asia than with the West.
Edward Burke of the Center for European Reform, a London-based think tank, said Britain was concerned about worsening ties after Putin’s return to the Kremlin.
“Hague is a pragmatist. … He does not like microphone diplomacy,” Burke said.
Burke added that these worries have grown since Putin canceled his visit to the Group of Eight summit earlier this month, “which sent a message that he is upset with the U.K. and the U.S.”
Putin instead sent Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to the U.S.-hosted summit at Camp David on May 18 and 19, explaining that he was too busy with forming the government.
But the British Embassy denied that Hague’s visit was prompted by such concerns, saying that it had been planned for a long time.
“It had been in the making since Prime Minister David Cameron’s visit” in September, an embassy spokesman said on customary condition of anonymity.
The spokesman also stressed the Olympic-related agenda, which included talks with Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak, Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko and the president of the organizing committee for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Dmitry Chernyshenko.
“They discussed cooperation on the Olympics and the lessons for Sochi,” he said.
When asked whether Hague had issued any formal invitation to Russian leaders, the spokesman merely said that “there is a warm invitation to all Russians to visit the London games.”
The issue made headlines over the weekend when jailed tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky suggested in a written interview with the Sunday Telegraph that London ban certain Russian officials from visiting Britain for the Olympics.
The selected officials are on a list compiled by opposition figure Garry Kasparov.
Khodorkovsky’s lawyers subsequently denied Russian media reports that their client had come up with his own list of officials to be banned.

TITLE: Foreign Ministry Blasts American Ambassador
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Foreign Ministry assailed U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul for comments he made to students last week, saying the ministry was “utterly shocked” and that McFaul’s remarks went “far beyond the bounds of diplomatic etiquette.”
“[The] Ambassador’s job, as we understand it, is to improve bilateral ties, not to spread blatant falsehoods through the media,” the Foreign Ministry said on its English-language Twitter account late Monday.
In a statement on its site, the ministry said McFaul’s remarks to students at the Higher School of Economics represent a “deliberate distortion” of a number of key issues, notably the U.S. military airbase in Manas, Kyrgyzstan. The ministry said it took issue in particular with McFaul’s remarks that Russia “bribed” the Kyrgyzstan government to close the base, which the U.S. has used since late 2001 to support military operations in nearby Afghanistan.
McFaul reacted to the ministry’s statements on his Twitter account, saying his talk “highlighted over 20 positive results of the ‘reset’ that our governments worked together to achieve.” McFaul is credited as the main architect of the reset policy, which has seen an improvement in relations since a low after Russia’s 2008 war with Georgia.
McFaul, who in contrast with previous ambassadors has had a career focused in academia, also said he was “still learning the craft of speaking more diplomatically.”
Questions about Kremlin-funded English-language channel Russia Today flared up as well.
“It is difficult to understand why such a supporter of freedom of speech as McFaul decided to cast a shadow on the highly professional activity of Russia Today in the U.S. It would seem that he should be pleased with the appearance of additional sources of information for American citizens,” the ministry said in the statement.
McFaul denied that he opposed the channel, pointing to comments on Twitter days earlier in which he expressed support for the channel.
“Glad RT is on in U.S. Hope Russians have same attitude about U.S. activities here. We should all be for open societies,” he wrote.
But this was not the first time tensions have risen between McFaul and the channel. McFaul called out Russia Today in February for an op-ed in which an analyst claimed that the U.S. paid for prominent opposition activist Alexei Navalny to attend Yale, writing to Russia Today’s editor via Twitter and calling the claim a “lie.”
The statements by the ministry Tuesday mirror the highly critical coverage of the ambassador by Russian media since his arrival in January.
State-run television has repeatedly alleged that McFaul, an expert on democracy promotion and the author of several books about Russian democracy, was sent by the U.S. to foment revolution.

TITLE: ExxonMobil Pours Concrete for Phase 3 of Sakhalin-1
AUTHOR: By Howard Amos
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: VOSTOCHNY PORT, Primorye Region — The bottom half of what will be Russia’s biggest ice-resistant drilling platform looked like a gigantic upside-down table.
The 52,000 cubic meters of concrete and 27,000 tons of steel mark the beginning of the third phase of the Sakhalin-1 project operated by ExxonMobil, which anticipates peak annual oil production of 4.5 million tons by 2017.
For the U.S. oil major, the enormous Berkut platform is also a potential template for its lucrative exploration agreement signed last year with state-owned Rosneft to tap about 36 billion barrels of crude in Russia’s Arctic waters.
“The strategic global alliance with Rosneft is looking at exploration, development and production in different parts of the world, including the Kara Sea,” Glenn Waller, head of ExxonMobil in Russia, told reporters late last week outside Nakhodka, in the country’s Far East. “So, when I look at this platform … [I think that] it’s just the first, and there will be dozens of such platforms.”
The huge structure was officially presented in a ribbon-cutting ceremony last week for guests including local politicians, executives and the U.S. consul general in Vladivostok, Sylvia Curran.
The engineering and procurement contract was awarded in 2008 to Kverner, a Norwegian oil and gas construction company that has built similar concrete platforms in Norway, Spain, Canada and Australia. Bjorn Gundersen, a vice president at the company, described Berkut as a “mastodon.”
In the coming days it will be towed 1,800 kilometers to the installation point, the Arkutun-Dagi oil field in the Sea of Okhotsk, 25 kilometers off Sakhalin Island. Arkutun-Dagi will be the third field to come online under the Sakhalin-1 rubric, after Chayvo and Odoptu.
Drilling from Berkut is expected to begin in 2014. It has the capacity to produce 90,000 barrels of oil a day, which will then be pumped to Sakhalin-1’s nearby onshore facility at Chayvo. After processing, it will be transferred by undersea pipeline to the De-Kastri oil terminal on the Russian mainland, a hub for hydrocarbon sales to the Asian market.
Berkut will be the third drilling platform operated by Sakhalin-1. The offshore Orlan platform commenced drilling in 2006, while the land-based Yastreb rig last year set the world record for longest bore hole, 12,345 meters.
A consortium runs Sakhalin-1. Exxon Mobil and Japan’s Sakhalin Oil and Gas Development, or SODECO, have 30 percent each, India’s ONGC Videsh holds 20 percent, and the remaining 20 percent is controlled by Rosneft-affiliated companies.
It has not always been smooth sailing for the multinational project, which has seen public disagreements between ExxonMobil and the local administration. Sakhalin Governor Alexander Khoroshavin played a key role in disrupting the U.S. oil major’s investment plans in 2010.
“He abuses us sometimes, but we love him and he does really support us,” ExxonMobil’s Waller said of Khoroshavin last Friday.
But both ExxonMobil executives and local officials were keen to emphasize the Russian input into Berkut’s construction for guests and invited reporters last week.
Of the 44 companies employed on the project, 37 were based in the Far East, said Alexander Levintal, deputy presidential envoy to the Far Eastern Federal District. 
Most of the high-level management roles and particularly sophisticated technical tasks however were not sourced locally.
In addition to ExxonMobil’s oversight role and the contract awarded to Oslo-based Kverner, the upper part of the platform is being built in Korea. It will be shipped to the drilling site by special barge next year.
And while two small concrete factories were built alongside the dry dock to supply the construction of Berkut, reinforced German concrete had to be imported for the parts of the rig most vulnerable to ice.
The platform, which is to be installed at a water depth of 33 meters, is built to resist magnitude-9.0 earthquakes and 18-meter-high waves, said Bill Hillner, ExxonMobil’s construction site manager.
The design of the Berkut was not altered after the Kolskaya drilling platform sank last year while under tow in the Sea of Okhotsk during a winter storm at the cost of 53 lives, executives said.
The conditions for towing the Berkut are completely different, and there will be no men on board, they added.
Buoyancy for the 160,000-ton structure is provided by a 12-meter-deep space in the base below the platform’s legs, where the air content can be regulated remotely to “sink” Berkut once it reaches the drilling site.
The legs themselves are hollow and contain piping, through which the extracted oil will flow. The rig’s expected service life is 50 years.
With an average depth of 128 meters, the Kara Sea, where ExxonMobil and Rosneft have agreed to explore and produce oil, could be a site for both concrete and floating rigs.

TITLE: Shareholders Quarrel, TNK-BP CEO Quits
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian tycoon Mikhail Fridman on Monday unexpectedly announced his resignation as chief executive of TNK-BP, a sign of rising tensions between shareholders at the Russian venture of British company BP.
TNK-BP, which is owned in equal parts by BP and a group of Russian billionaire shareholders known as AAR, said in a statement that Fridman is due to step down as CEO and chairman of the board in 30 days. It did not specify the reason, but BP’s representative in Russia, Vladimir Buyanov, cited “personal reasons.”
Fridman is considered one of the most influential people in the venture. He has been at TNK-BP’s helm since 2009 and was to head it through 2013.
TNK-BP has been plagued by shareholder conflicts since it was formed in 2003, and Fridman’s appointment as the chief executive three years ago looked like a sign of reconciliation between two rival groups of shareholders.
But those tensions seemed to resurface last year, when a potentially huge deal BP was hoping to sign with Russian state-owned firm Rosneft to extract oil in the Arctic broke down after AAR blocked it, claiming BP should be pursuing such deals through TNK-BP.
A source close to the Russian shareholders told the Associated Press on Monday that Fridman resigned because the equilibrium between BP and AAR’s investors has been lost and can no longer be maintained. The source, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue, said TNK-BP management “was not prepared to work in an environment of constant pressure and mistrust from BP’s side” and that “BP has lost the trust and credibility of AAR.”
The source claimed that BP has attempted to interfere directly with decision-making at TNK-BP by threatening the management with legal action if their decisions are not approved by BP.
The source, however, insisted that AAR is committed to its investment in TNK-BP and did not contemplate selling its stake.
TNK-BP’s board of directors hasn’t met since December and has been unable to replace two directors who resigned in December. Without a quorum on the board, the company was forced to cancel plans of distributing dividends.
The company said that while it searches for a replacement for Fridman, it will be run by “a group of executives who hold powers of attorney related to their areas of responsibility.”
BP sought to play down the importance of Fridman’s resignation, saying he was not involved in day-to-day operations. Buyanov said BP has pledged to work with AAR to appoint a replacement “as soon as reasonably possible.” AAR did not comment on the matter.
TNK-BP’s shares on Moscow’s MICEX stock exchange dipped immediately after the announcement but recovered later to hover 1.3 percent higher than Friday’s close, in line with the market.

TITLE: High-Speed Train Between Capitals to Cost $35.1Bln
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A high-speed railway project between Moscow and St. Petersburg is ready for realization, said Vladimir Yakunin, head of Russian Railways.
When the new route opens, which is planned to coincide with Russia’s hosting of the 2018 World Cup, the trip between Moscow and St. Petersburg will take just 2.5 hours.
According to the company’s estimations, by the 2018 World Cup the passenger flow between St. Petersburg, Moscow and other cities in which World Cup matches will be held including Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan and Yekaterinburg, will total 8.6 million people, the Internet news website Fontanka.ru reported.
The tender for the construction and operation of the new high-speed railroad will be announced in September. The results of the tender will be announced in 2013 while the construction is to be completed in 2018.
Over five years the builders of the new railroad will lay down 658 kilometers of new rails specially made for trains that travel at speeds of 400 kilometers an hour. The distance currently covered by high-speed Sapsan trains in 3 hours 45 minutes will subsequently be cut down to 2.5 hours. Yakunin said the new road would be the primary way to transport fans to the 2018 World Cup. 
The new high-speed road between Moscow and St. Petersburg will cost 1.125 trillion rubles ($35.1 billion). At least 70 percent of that sum will come from the state budget, while 30 percent is to come from a private investor, Fontanka reported. 
In total Russian Railways plans to spend 2.5 trillion rubles ($78 billion) on the high-speed railway program between 2012 and 2020, extending high-speed routes beyond the country’s two capitals. The total distance of Russian’s high-speed railway could reach 4,300 kilometers by 2020. 
It is not yet clear where exactly the high-speed trains will arrive and depart from in St. Petersburg. Deputy-Governor Sergei Vyazalov said at a meeting of the Transportation Council in April that the Moscow Railway Station was not ready to receive such large passenger volumes. To solve the problem, Vyazalov suggested altering the station’s regional train routes, as well as some long distance trains, rerouting them to Ladozhsky and Baltiisky railway stations. He also proposed building a new terminal for high-speed trains. The new railway station would not be located in the city center, but near one of the metro stations on the outskirts of the city.
The building of a new train station, however, is not only considered more expensive, but could also lead to the collapse of the city’s traffic infrastructure in the southern part of St. Petersburg. The city plans to make a decision concerning what to do with the new trains by the end of this year, Fontanka reported.

TITLE: Worldwide Web Poses Challenge To Russia’s TV Viewership
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: For the first time ever, the number of Internet users took the lead over television in Russia in April. 
Yandex website became the new leader on the Russian media market, outstripping the country’s leading Channel 1 TV station, Vedomosti newspaper reported.
In April, Yandex had 19.1 million users a day while Channel 1’s viewers totaled 18.2 million a day.
Yandex and Mail.ru have almost caught up with Channel 1 on a weekly scale as well. The biggest lead Channel 1 got over websites was in its monthly number of viewers. At least once a month 41.4 million people watch Channel 1, which is 8.2 million people more than use Mail.ru and 8.7 million more than use Yandex. 
Overall the gap between the number of those who watch TV and those who use the Internet in Russia is getting smaller. In April, 30.5 million Russians used the Internet daily while a million less of them watched TV.
The major advantage TV still holds over the Internet is the amount of time people spend using it. For instance, the average viewer watches TV for more than an hour a day, while on average users visit Yandex for only 10 minutes a day.
In 2011 Yandex made 20 billion rubles ($628 million), NTV — 20.7 billion rubles ($650 million) and Channel 1 — 28.8 billion rubles ($904 million).

TITLE: There’s Just One Nationality — Mathematician
AUTHOR: By Victor Davidoff
TEXT: “Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.”
This quote from Albert Einstein is a very convenient explanation for the surge of nationalist sentiment in Russia. Post-Soviet Russia, age 20, is a young country. The migration and demographic shifts that we are seeing today are unprecedented in Russia’s history. For the first time, foreign languages are heard on the streets of the country’s ancient towns, and Moscow has turned into a Babylon inhabited by many nationalities and every race on Earth.
This influx of migrants from other cultures naturally provokes mixed reactions from the local population. Russian society is polarized between two extremes — those who welcome migration and cultural diversity as beneficial and those who protest it with signs demanding “Russia for Russians” and want the migrants deported.
But Einstein’s metaphor leaves out one factor — the state. The Russian government hasn’t done a very good job of creating a melting pot. On the contrary, whenever it has gotten involved in interethnic conflicts and tension, its ham-fisted police methods have been far more destructive than conciliatory. This was the case in Chelyabinsk, where the police sent requests to schools asking for a list of students of “Caucasus nationality” along with their addresses and parents’ names. They requested this information for both Russian citizens and noncitizens alike.
The director of Math School No. 31, Alexander Popov, responded by publishing the request on the Internet. And his official reply to the police was bold: “In response to your request, in our school there is just one nationality — mathematician.”
Popov’s refusal to comply with the police request was most likely justified, since it might contradict current legislation, in particular the law “On personal information.” But the response on the Russian blogosphere was explosive, garnering Popov both copious praise and aggressive insults. An anonymous blogger commented on Popov’s blog on the Komsomolskaya Pravda site: “Popov, take your family and go to the Caucasus. You’ll get vaccinated against tolerance! The local wogs will slit your family’s throats while you stand by saying, ‘Don’t yell, dear, be tolerant.’”
Bloggers and posters who supported the police request generally cited the problem of ethnic crime. And it’s true that criminal groups from the Caucasus have largely defeated Slavic crime syndicates. But even Sherlock Holmes couldn’t find a connection between crime and a Chelyabinsk high school that is considered to be the third-best math school in Russia. According to the Begin Group, which studies educational institutions, in the last eight years 81 students from the Chelyabinsk school have won the Russian Math Olympiad. Popov says his graduates are now studying in universities all over the world — in the United States, Europe and Israel. “It’s the job of us teachers to protect our children from adult stupidity,” he said in an interview to Moskovskiye Novosti.
Popov is known in Chelyabinsk for his rather eccentric teaching methods, and this isn’t his first run-in with the authorities. After a teacher in his school allowed police officers to interrogate a fifth-grader in class, Popov publicly threatened to challenge the teacher to a duel.
It is coincidental that Popov’s latest controversy took place during the nonstop protest actions in Moscow. But the actions of the protesters, angry over electoral falsifications, and the actions of Popov, defending the law protecting citizens’s rights against the state’s infringement of their privacy, have the same root source. There is a new generation of Russian citizens. They no longer believe in the centuries-old maxim that the government is always right. They believe in the principles of the rule of law.
This is what motivates environmental activists who are defending a forest from illegal destruction, students fighting to preserve historical buildings and demonstrators reading the text of the Constitution regarding the right to assembly to OMON riot police threatening to beat them with truncheons. For these activists and protesters, the law isn’t just a piece of paper. They are ready to defend what’s actually written in the document. They aren’t afraid to stand up to the state, be it police officers or the infamously venal court judges who pass sentences without considering any of the defense’s arguments and facts.
Zakhar Prilepin, a writer who is critical of the current regime, wrote on his blog, “We’d be priceless if even 1 percent of the population of Russia was like Popov.” One percent is probably not enough, but the trend is clear. The Russian people who for centuries silently bore every violation of their rights have become more active in defending their fundamental rights. And judges, officials and the leaders in the Kremlin ought to know that by now.

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

TITLE: FROM A SAFE DISTANCE: Why Russia’s Mafia State Is So Inefficient
AUTHOR: By Alexei Bayer
TEXT: In “The Godfather,” author Mario Puzo describes criminal boss Don Corleone’s organization as a highly centralized money-making machine. The Godfather is the CEO of an underground business empire, a kind of shadowy Henry Ford who collects all the money and makes all the decisions.
In reality, large criminal enterprises are divided into semi-autonomous crews who have their own territory or specialty and are grouped around a middle-level boss. There are constant rivalries and struggles for influence in which thugs make alliances and seek support from higher-level mafiosi.
As business entities, criminal enterprises are hugely inefficient. The global drug trade, estimated at $300 billion annually, has produced no lasting fortunes. Everything is squandered or lost. Efficiency is achieved by establishing and following rules, but criminals are lawless by nature. The notion that mafia thugs live by a special “thieves’ law” is a legend. For example, Godfather Vyacheslav Ivankov, murdered in Moscow in 2009, was himself the worst offender against the law’s most-sacred precepts.
Over the past 12 years, Russia has become a full-fledged mafia state. One day, historians will chart its exact structure, but it seems clear that it consists of several large families headed by President Vladimir Putin’s close associates and loyal oligarchs. Alongside them, countless crews of siloviki, bureaucrats, gangsters and affiliated businessmen work on their own, their networks varying from local to nationwide.
A friend recently had her car stolen. She reported it to the local police and soon got a call from a man, who, using the description of the car she had given the cops, demanded ransom. On the web, she discovered that it is a common racket. The usual result is that the victim loses the car and the money paid in fake ransom. She tried calling internal affairs investigators at the Moscow police, but they hung up on her.
A mafia state, by definition, cannot function efficiently. Laws are fundamental to all states, and even tyrannies rely on a set of rules. Since there are no rules in a mafia state, even minor decisions require complex deals that involve negotiating among various gangs and their conflicting interests. Agreements hold only as long as there is muscle to enforce them. The state is a tool of those who have the muscle, but a criminal can turn into a victim at a moment’s notice.
Because all decisions are a trade-off, once something is decided it is very hard to change. The case of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky harms Russia’s national prestige and Putin’s personal reputation. Yet the thugs involved in this crime can’t be brought to justice because this would infringe on some gang’s interests.
But a mafia state contains the seeds of its own demise. In 2011, $84 billion of capital fled Russia, and another $33 billion was taken out of the country in the first quarter of 2012, even though the Russian economy is growing and the rest of the world is in a downturn. This money mainly belongs to bureaucrats, siloviki and other mafiosi. These beneficiaries of the mafia state don’t trust their own system, nor do most of them want to live in Russia.
There is a famous anecdote about the late John Gotti, the head of the notorious Gambino mafia family in New York. He once bragged to an old, respected mafioso that he had “made” his son — that is, his son had become a full member of the mafia. “I’m sorry to hear that,” the old man replied.

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

TITLE: Skyline surfing
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg will now have its own BalconyTV, the international daily online viral music show that features bands, musicians and other variety acts on balconies around the world. 
The St. Petersburg page is already present on the BalconyTV web site, which boasts over 20 million video views, and will start being updated with material this Friday.
BalconyTV St. Petersburg was founded by musician Seva Gakkel, formerly cellist in the seminal rock band Akvarium and the pioneering TaMtAm Club founder. The long balcony where the show will be filmed runs around an apartment on the seventh floor of a building on the Petrograd Side, and was provided by ballerina and film actress Sofya Skya. Along with Gakkel, Skya will introduce the opening video when it appears on the Balcony TV website Friday.
During the launch party Sunday, material from which will be used to compile the opening video, Markscheider Kunst — one of the city’s best-loved bands — performed its Latin-tinged song “Babushka.” 
The eight-member band — Gakkel’s friends from the TaMtAm era in the 1990s — performed, complete with percussion and brass section, colored by the evening sun on a classic white night, and sounded crisp and fresh in the open air high above old rooftops. 
Gakkel said he came across BalconyTV by chance while surfing the web three or four years ago.
“I just followed a link, then another link… I don’t do that too often, but I watch live performances by bands that I don’t know in different situations,” he said. 
“Then all of a sudden I found myself on [the] BalconyTV [website] watching the flash mob they did to the song ‘Always Someone Watching’ by a band called Alan Alda. It was on a balcony, lower than this one, maybe on the third floor, and there were couples dancing to the song. I liked the band’s music and tracked it down, and started visiting the site once in a while.
“At that time there were two balconies, in Dublin and Hamburg. Then I saw that a third balcony had emerged in Camden, London, and I began to get intrigued by the idea.”
Until December 2011, Gakkel was the art director of the St. Petersburg branch of the Moscow club Chinese Pilot Jao Da, which he quit due to differences with the then manager after working there for about two years.
“On the one hand, I had to look for a job, but at the same time I felt that I had to do something, to get involved in some process that doesn’t exist in the city and that would capture me. I’ve always been a supporter of all things D.I.Y., low-fi, unplugged, etc., and I saw that there was no such thing in the city and I could try to do it.”
By that time, BalconyTV existed in about 30 cities around the world. 
“Balconies emerged in almost every European capital, on both coasts of the U.S., in Mexico, India and Thailand — and in [the Russian city of] Kostroma,” Gakkel said. 
“It fired my ambition; I’d been observing it for so long and I should have been the first [in Russia], according to the logic of things I have done over the years. And suddenly I saw that I had missed the boat. I got in touch with the guy in Kostroma and he told me, ‘I am just about to come to St. Petersburg, I think maybe we should launch BalconyTV there.’ I thought ‘How is that possible? The guys from Kostroma will come and start doing it here?’
“I got motivated and started looking for balconies, and almost immediately I met Sofya — who’s the daughter of my good friend Alexandra Arzhakovskaya from many, many years ago — by pure chance in Moscow and told her this story. She said, ‘I have an apartment that’s being renovated and I don’t know when work will finish.’ I came here, saw it and thought ‘My God, I haven’t seen this type of balcony in this project; they were either tiny balconies or large open terraces, where they set up drums, a backline and so on.”
For Gakkel, BalconyTV is interesting as an alternative to the music industry and club scene.
“Working in a club for two years, I came across the dispiriting situation of the clubs being to some extent rivals, even Fish Fabrique, Zoccolo and Griboyedov, which have the same music direction and are on very good terms with each other, but are forced to compete,” he said.
“There are certain ethics. For instance, a band can’t perform too often. If they arrange a concert at one club, it’s impossible to play at another club the same weekend, because people will only go to one place or half of them will go to one place and half will go to another. It’s a business, and there are a lot of nuances to be taken into account. But I wouldn’t like to get involved in it.
“The main thing for me is to clearly understand what I’m spending my time on. You have to do something that will lead to something else, that will help to develop some direction or some trend. And I see this quality in BalconyTV.”
The advantage of BalconyTV St. Petersburg is that its location is outside the club scene, even if a couple of local venues do have terraces.
“This is a territory that is neutral, abstract, independent from the trend that exists in the city at the moment,” Gakkel said.
According to Gakkel, the benefit of unplugged performances lies in the fact that musicians who are perfectionist about the sound quality during concerts agree to casual performances on the balcony without demanding exhausting soundchecks.
“[The attitude is] ‘It sounds OK, let’s go!’ as was demonstrated by Markscheider Kunst today,” Gakkel said.
“It’s interesting for me. First of all, they’re my old friends, it’s nice for me that we’re launching this project with a performance by this band in particular, because it’s dear to me from some of my old adventures.”
Gakkel said he would consider inviting Markscheider Kunst for a full-fledged performance, beyond the context of the launch party.
“There are not so many things like that on the Internet, and they could be united in some niche,” he said.
“BalconyTV lets people visit the portal just to see what’s happened there, say, in the past month — either young bands and new names or bands you already know and are interested in. For instance, I came across The Buzzcocks performing on the tiny balcony in Dublin and Nouvelle Vague performing as a duo on the balcony in London.”
Gakkel said that through his involvement with BalconyTV, he has found that a team of old friends and young musicians whom he met as the art director of Chinese Pilot Dzhao Da has quickly formed. 
“This is my know-how,” he said.
“I never hold any casting sessions or job interviews. It’s not a job, it’s a way of spending time, but one that demands a colossal expenditure of time.”
With Alexander Senin, a television presenter and former drummer with bands Kofe and Petlya Nesterova, as program director, Gakkel’s crew includes a number of young volunteers who act as camera operators and sound engineers.
Danila Kholodkov, drummer in the young local band Shokalsky Revenge, is the presenter.
Apart from the presentation video featuring Markscheider Kunst, test performances that have been filmed by several acts a day on Sundays since early May were shot in one take to comply with BalconyTV’s rules.
“We have been waiting for good weather; we signed an agreement with Stephen O’Regan, the project’s producer, and at last received confirmation this week with a date set for our opening show,” Gakkel said.
BalconyTV was founded in Dublin in June 2006 by filmmaker Stephen O’Regan and musicians Tom Millett and Pauline Freeman. O’Reagan and Millett shared an apartment and started hosting the show from their balcony there.

<i>BalconyTV St. Petersburg will be launched at www.balconytv.com on Friday, June 1.</i>

TITLE: A mirror of modern life
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Looking at one’s reflection in the mirror can be a most sobering sight. This is certainly the case with British director Graham Vick’s daring production of Modest Mussorgsky’s opera “Boris Godunov,” which premiered on Friday, May 25 at the Mariinsky Theater.
The idea that every nation gets the government that it deserves may sound insulting to some, yet if voters themselves would reflect upon this idea, the chances of getting a decent government would increase greatly, no matter how bad things may seem at the start.   
An imposing-looking broad-shouldered man in a silver suit digs out the Monomach’s Cap — the symbol of the Russian throne — and in a somewhat shaky gesture, puts it on his head, waving away the assistance offered by a servant. Russian rulers are not in favor of formalities. It is no coincidence that in Vick’s production, the coronation scene effectively becomes a self-coronation, and this triumph of blatant cynicism hits the mark perfectly. No matter what the regime: Monarchy, Communist autocracy or “managed democracy,” Russian rulers do not seem to need any outside help in reaching the throne. After all, didn’t Putin and Medvedev ultimately crown themselves, with the voters being reduced to dummies?  
Vick stops short of ridiculing Russia. Rather, the director acts akin to a surgeon, carefully and meticulously exposing the many absurdities and peculiarities that are key to the reality to which the country is so accustomed. From the boyars’ WAGS draped in furs and oversized sunglasses to the police officers surreptitiously accepting backhanders from illegal immigrants, the action on the stage of the Mariinsky represented a microcosm of Russian life. It would be fair to call the production politically charged, although the director explores the subject in multiple dimensions. The characters that we see on stage bear the habits, dress style and manners that surround us in real life. A young cleaner in a striptease bar — where the runaway monk Grigory Otrepyev is partying — looks stealthily around before making a few seductive moves. The girl clearly dreams of changing her job — unlike the dancers themselves, by contrast. The Holy Fool resembles a hybrid of a hipster bohemian — not dissimilar to some members of the crowd during the recent protests in Moscow — and the flamboyant businessman and founder of the Yevroset holding, Yevgeny Chichvarkin, who was in the habit of hanging around business forums in brightly colored sneakers and T-shirts.  
Mariinsky star bass-baritone Yevgeny Nikitin creates a very complex and charismatic Boris. There is nothing in his powerful rendition of the role of a misanthropic freak, which is what too many directors make of Godunov. Rather, this is a highly intelligent and willful leader who has made too many deals with his conscience, which begins to bleed as profusely as some of the tsar’s victims. Do modern Russian leaders ever feel remorse? This question, which bothers hundreds of thousands of Russian people — and, let us be honest, quite a number of people outside of the country — remains unanswered in Vick’s production. Yet the show makes a competent enough warning to the more shameless members of the ruling elite that if one’s ascent to power is laid with corpses and injustice, rest assured that a bill from hell will be sure to arrive.
In other words, if you abuse your conscience on a regular basis, one day it will rebel. Boris’s last moments are engulfed in anger — his governed failed to appreciate any of his efforts — and remorseful hallucinations, in which the tormented tsar even mistakes his own horrified son for the murdered Prince Dmitry. 
No less bitter are the scenes of mass protests — the demonstrators numerous but disorganized — that are violently dispersed by the riot police.
The atmosphere of hypocrisy and double standards reaches its climax in the finale that sees Godunov making a speech in a hall closely resembling the State Duma. As the ill-fated monarch suffers a heart attack and begins to fall, no helping hand is offered. Rather, the crowd starts to retreat quietly from the scene. The slow agony continues in the already empty hall, with the tsar’s young son desperately trying to get help. A television crew muscles in to document the ruler’s final breaths. One habit that Russia’s governed appear to have learned from their governors is being unceremonious: A mournful procession bearing wreaths covers the dying tsar with flowers before he has even taken his last breath, ignoring his plea “I am still alive.” 
Mariinsky Theater Artistic Director Valery Gergiev chose Mussorgsky’s original 1869 version of the opera, which has a strong rebellion theme and focuses on Boris’s inner drama, which initially frightened critics. The Mariinsky symphony orchestra delivered a magnificent performance on Friday, sensitive to both Mussorgsky’s score and Vick’s interpretation. The rapport with the director’s take on the piece was remarkable, resulting in an intense and suspenseful drama, full of tension. Vick’s admirable courage received a strong backing from Gergiev and his musicians, bringing audiences one of the most thought-provoking and emotionally captivating shows the city has seen in some time.

<i>“Boris Godunov” next plays on Tuesday, June 26 at the Mariinsky Theater, 
1 Teatralnaya Ploshchad. Tel. 326 4141. www.mariinsky.ru</i>

TITLE: the word’s worth: Asking for trouble
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: Ïðîâîêàòîð: plant, rabble-rouser, troublemaker, provocateur

One of my favorite new language toys is Google’s Ngram Viewer, which lets you — in highly technical Googlese — “search lots of books” to find the frequency of a word or phrase. This is a helpful tool for translators who are trying to choose a word in English that matches, more or less, its Russian equivalent in frequency of usage.
Take, for example, ïðîâîêàòîð and provocateur. They are both originally from Latin and mean a secret agent who foments violence or encourages commission of a crime, although the Russian word can refer more generally to anyone who incites enmity or causes trouble. When I’m sitting in my kitchen shooting the breeze with my friends, I have occasionally used the word ïðîâîêàòîð. But “Pass the salt and don’t be a provocateur”? You didn’t hear it from me.
Because language use is so individual, I checked ïðîâîêàöèÿ-ïðîâîêàòîð and provocation-­provocateur on the magic Ngram, searching from 1500 to 2008, its latest search year. Not surprisingly for anyone who knows history, in Russian ïðîâîêàöèÿ usage peaks in the 1930s, jumps up a bit in the early 1950s and then starts heading up off the charts in the 21st century. Ïðîâîêàòîð has a huge peak in the late 1930s and a minor one in the late 1990s.
In English, provocation frequency peaked in the late 1700s and then has gone straight downhill since then. Provocateur usage jumped up in what looks like the World War II years and then had a tiny bump in the 1980s before heading south.
In other words, translating ïðîâîêàòîð as provocateur and ïðîâîêàöèÿ as provocation may be technically correct in many contexts, but today the English words are marked and unusual in a way that the Russian words are not.
So how the heck do you translate all these ïðîâîêàöèè and ïðîâîêàòîðû that everyone is talking about today?
Sometimes I like to change the noun ïðîâîêàöèÿ into English verb phrases, particularly in everyday contexts. When a guest around the dinner table raises a topic guaranteed to get everyone’s blood racing, in Russian you might say: Ýòî ïðîâîêàöèÿ. Íå ðåàãèðóéòå. (He’s just trying to get a rise out of you. Don’t react.) But this also works with more official pronouncements: Îí çàÿâèë, ÷òî ïîïûòêà ïðîðâàòü ïîëèöåéñêîå îöåïëåíèå — ñïëàíèðîâàííàÿ çàðàíåå ïðîâîêàöèÿ. (He said the attempt to break through police lines was planned ahead of time to provoke a violent reaction.)
Sometimes, however, you don’t have to fiddle with the grammar, particularly if the word ïðîâîêàöèÿ is modified with an adjective. Ïñåâäî-èçáèåíèå Òèìîøåíêî — ýòî ïîëèòè÷åñêàÿ ïðîâîêàöèÿ, êîòîðàÿ áûëà ðàçðàáîòàíà ñîðàòíèêàìè (The pseudo-beating of Tymoshenko is a political provocation arranged by her associates).
When translating ïðîâîêàòîð, I think provocateur only works well in certain historical contexts. Ãàïîí: ðåâîëþöèîíåð èëè ïðîâîêàòîð öàðñêîé îõðàíêè? (Father Gapon: revolutionary or agent provocateur for the tsarist secret police?)
Otherwise, I try to stick to more commonly used words and phrases. Êèäàëè êàìíè íå äåìîíñòðàíòû, à ïðîâîêàòîðû (Stones weren’t thrown by the demonstrators, but by plants in the crowd.)  òîëïå ïîëèöåéñêèå ïðîâîêàòîðû íà÷àëè áåñïîðÿäêè (Undercover police operatives in the crowd started the riot).
In less politically fraught circumstances, ïðîâîêàòîð might be a troublemaker or someone trying to get your goat. Íå îáðàùàé íà íåãî âíèìàíèå! Îí ïðîñòî ïðîâîêàòîð (Don’t pay any attention to him. He’s just goading you.)
Calm down and pass the salt.

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

TITLE: Behind the scenes
AUTHOR: By Kristen Steagall
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: We download their music and become familiar with their voices. We would recognize them on the street and we envy their swagger. But what do we really know about our favorite musicians? After this weekend, hopefully a little bit more. 
The Beat Film Festival, which will take place from Thursday, May 31 through Sunday, June 3 at Dom Kino movie theater, will screen six documentaries featuring some of the most famous names in music: Talking Heads, Bob Marley and A Tribe Called Quest, to name a few. This will be the first year the Beat Film Festival, which was founded three years ago in Moscow, will be presented in St. Petersburg.
The six documentaries to be shown vary greatly in both subject and form — from punk rock dads to an Icelandic grandmother and 16mm film to Hollywood big budget. 
“We have made this year’s program very accessible and audience-oriented knowing that we will be bringing it to other cities apart from Moscow,” said Alyona Bocharova, the festival’s executive producer. 
“It revolves around big names, both in terms of music and film.” 
By screening internationally renowned films that are rarely shown in Russia, the Beat Film Festival hopes to inspire Russians. Organizers hope audiences will gather inspiration from the films and start creatively capturing the music being produced right at home.
The pride of this year’s festival is the film “Marley,” by Oscar-winning director Kevin MacDonald. The film, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, examines both the personal and artistic life of Bob Marley. Using countless never-before-seen archives and interviews with Marley’s wife Rita, and with several of his 12 children, the film offers a definitive account of the man who became a revolutionary legend for people all over the world. 
Two documentaries featuring punk music — “The Other F Word” and the Russian-language documentary “Fuck Fuck” — will also be shown. “The Other F Word,” produced by Morgan Spurlock, the brains behind “Supersize Me,” takes a thought-provoking look at how some of our most famous punk rockers — Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea, and Rise Against’s Tim McIlrath to name a few — reconcile their status as the ultimate anti-authoritarians with their roles as the ultimate authoritarians: Fathers.  
“Fuck Fuck,” an intimate documentary about the local ska punk group Leningrad, is the first Russian-language film to be featured in the Beat Film Festival. 
“We were also interested in developing the local scene, and so this year we really wanted to show a Russian film,” said Bocharova. 
“We found a really good one, ‘Fuck Fuck,’ about Leningrad…It’s smart and funny.” 
The fifth film to be shown is “Meeting People Is Easy,” directed by Grant Gee. The renowned documentary follows the influential British group Radiohead, the musicians behind classic albums such as “Kid A” and “The Bends” as they embarked on their 1998 world tour after the release of their third studio album, “OK Computer.” 
“Radiohead is a band that has never performed in Russia but has a huge following here,” said Bocharova. 
“The film is about…how a small band turns into a worldwide celebrity band. They perform at Glastonbury, receive a Grammy, and tour the world from Barcelona to various cities in Japan. The film, however, is not a story of fame, but rather about the other side of fame — how [singer] Thom York and other members of the band struggle with their stardom and responsibilities and the discomfort that it brings.” 
This year marks the 15th anniversary of the film’s release.
“Beats Rhymes and Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest” by Michael Rapaport is a raucously fun hip hop documentary about one of the most influential and game changing American rap groups, A Tribe Called Quest. It is a must-see for any hip hop lover. 
“Anton Corbijn Inside Out,” on the other hand, is about the more stoic Dutch photographer and music video director Anton Corbijn. Corbijn, who is known to be an intensely private person, has been photographing and working with some of the most public figures for years. In this film, some of his most famous subjects like Bono and Lou Dobbs share their insights on the man behind the lens. 
The first film to be shown as part of the festival, “Grandma Lo-Fi: The Basement Tapes of Sigr&#237;dur N&#237;elsd&#243;ttir,” is perhaps the most endearing of all this year’s selection. The Icelandic-Danish film, shot on Super-8 and 16mm film, focuses on a retired Icelandic woman who started writing music at the age of 70. Within seven years, she had recorded 59 albums and more than 600 songs and quickly became a cult hit in Iceland. Icelandic director Krist&#237;n Bj&#246;rk Kristj&#225;nsd&#243;ttir, also known as the singer Kira Kira, will introduce the film on Thursday and host a short Q&A session after the screening. Immediately afterward, Kira Kira will perform at Taiga creative center — located at 20 Dvortsovaya Naberezhnaya — for the festival’s official opening party. 
The entry fee is 300 rubles ($9.40) for those with “Grandma Lo-Fi” ticket stubs and 400 rubles ($12.50) for others.

<i>The Beat Film Festival runs from May 31 through June 3 at Dom Kino movie theater, 21 Karavannaya Ulitsa. M. Gostiny Dvor / Nevsky Prospekt. Tel. 314 5614. For a full schedule of events, visit www.domkino.spb.ru.</i>

TITLE: Divas and demonstrators
AUTHOR: By Peter Leonard
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BAKU, Azerbaijan — Sweden’s Loreen clinched the top spot at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest at the weekend with her dance hit “Euphoria,” pushing aside competition from a sextet of Russian grannies and a Serbian balladeer.
Juries and television viewers from across Europe awarded Loreen a total of 372 points, handing her an easy win in an event that ended in the early hours Sunday in host country Azerbaijan. Sweden will take over hosting duties next year.
Russia’s Buranovskiye Babushki, a group of six elderly ladies, garnered much public affection for their cute onstage presence and choreographed baking, but couldn’t quite match Sweden’s more contemporary offering.
Zeljko Joksimovic, a Eurovision regular from Serbia, came in a distant third with his slow and stripped-down “Nije Ljubav Stvar.”
Engelbert Humperdinck, 76, took the stage Saturday night for the United Kingdom, 45 years after he first got international attention crooning the hit “Release Me.” He came a dismal second-from-last with just 12 points in the 57-year-old competition viewed by some 125 million people worldwide and hailed by its legion of devoted fans as harmless, kitschy fun that allows Europeans to forget their differences — and economic troubles — for at least one night.
As last year’s winner, oil-rich Azerbaijan hosted the annual competition, having invested hundreds of millions of dollars in preparing for the event, presumably hoping it would serve as a public relations coup and mitigate misgivings about its poor democracy and human rights record.
Loreen, a 28-year-old Swede of Moroccan-Berber descent, was the favorite even before the final. Her song “Euphoria” even stands a chance of fair international commercial success — it’s already topped the Swedish charts for six weeks and gone platinum five times.
The winner is picked by juries and television viewers across the continent, so a broad appeal is deemed key to success.
Other contenders included Italy’s Nina Zilli and her lively ode “Out of Love” and Romania’s entry Mandinga, a band fronted by sultry vocalist Elena Ionescu, with their brash attempt at exotica “Zaleilah.”
The host country, a comparatively little-known former Soviet republic, has dug deep to make sure it’s also a star.
The new Crystal Hall concert venue, a light-bathed arena on a point jutting out into the Caspian Sea, cost $134 million to build and was put up in a speedy eight months. Countless more millions were deployed embellishing the capital, Baku, and buying a huge fleet of brand new London-style taxis.
Such profligacy aroused concerns about the spiraling costs involved in holding the contest in times of austerity.
“At the moment, if the costs are growing more and more every year and it needs to be more splendid, there are countries that would have huge difficulties, especially with financial situation in Europe at the moment, in organizing it,” said Annika Nyberg Frankenhauser, media department for the European Broadcasting Union, under whose auspices Eurovision is held.
Amid the glitz, antigovernment activists held a number of protests in the week running up to the final, seizing on the opportunity of the increased international media presence to draw attention to what they describe as the government’s authoritarian style of rule.
On Friday, police quickly shut down a small flash mob near the competition venue, roughly dragging away dozens of demonstrators and stuffing them into waiting buses, at least of one which bore a Eurovision logo.
Three demonstration participants were sentenced to jail terms of five and six days on Saturday, while 17 others were fined 20-25 manat ($25-32).

TITLE: THE DISH: Little Italy
AUTHOR: By Shura Collinson
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: <b>Family values</b>
While Italianskaya Ulitsa certainly did not get its name from being home to a wealth of Italian restaurants and could hardly be described as the city’s Italian district, new trattoria Little Italy, which opened on the street in March, is certainly doing its best to live up to its name. 
First impressions are particularly encouraging, as the restaurant — appropriately housed inside a building designed by the Italian architect Carlo Rossi in 1820 — has managed to capture that rare and powerful asset: The distinctive smell of a genuine Italian eatery. The aroma of strong, fresh coffee mingled with baking pizza and a secret blend of other tantalizing flavors spills out of the door onto the small outdoor seating area, luring in passers-by. 
In the first, brightly lit room, the tables are placed close together and the Italian atmosphere is enhanced by the loud chattering of the clientele, who include some real live Italians — also an encouraging sign. 
Another Italian tradition being kept alive and well at Little Italy is the emphasis on family. The good news is, if you want to take your kids out with you, the trattoria has a special children’s menu. The bad news is, if you were hoping for a night off from screaming kids, this is not the place. Italian love for bambinos plus the Russian habit of allowing them to stay up until all hours results here in boisterous children dashing between tables and shrieking at the top of their lungs long after midnight (in a city where many restaurants stop serving food at 11 p.m., Little Italy represents a very welcome new option for peckish night owls).
The interior design is a thematic mixture of Italy old and new. The latter is provided by a chic counter plated in diminutive red shiny tiles, while the former is represented by a Venetian theme, with Gothic arches, shutters and classic Venetian signs such as the ubiquitous “Per Rialto” decorating the walls, alongside figures dressed for the carnival and in plague masks. The effect is somewhat kitsch, but none the worse for being so. In a back room, chefs can be seen rolling out pizza bases in the open kitchen.
The Italian classics on offer include pizza, pasta and risotto selections, as well as a range of soups, appetizers and meat dishes. Beef Carpaccio (320 rubles, $10) contained a fairly modest portion of meat served on a bed of arugula and Parmesan flakes. The meat itself was first-rate, but the arugula was surprisingly served without any dressing. This was, perhaps, one of several oversights on our waitress’ part, as other tables appeared to be supplied with oil and vinegar.
Little Italy, as one would expect of an authentic Italian trattoria, is quite vegetarian-friendly. Caesar salad (250 rubles, $7.80) can be ordered with chicken (for an extra 70 rubles) or, as it indeed should be, without, and was faultlessly executed, with plenty of sauce and some laudably fresh, crisp lettuce.
Another classic Italian dish, lasagna (320 rubles, $10), was beautifully proportioned. It is a sad fact that in local restaurants, this dish all too often arrives with piping hot edges and a tragically lukewarm middle. This, thankfully, was certainly not the case at Little Italy. The only regret was that the portion was not a little larger. In this respect, however, the vegetarian pizza (290 rubles, $9) saved the day. Generously topped with red and green bell peppers, zucchini and mushrooms, the dough was thin and perfectly crisp — at this point in the meal, we expected nothing less — and it was of course big enough for sharing.
If there is one area in which Little Italy could up its game, it is the service. While certainly not unpleasant or unhelpful — a bottle of Valpolicella Cielo (1,100 rubles, $34) that had just begun to sour was exchanged for a new one without any difficulty — our waitress was simply rather absent much of the time when she was needed. No new silverware was brought out with the mains, nor were there any condiments or serviettes on the table. They were, however, readily available on the counter, and this is perhaps where the boisterous bambinos could come in handy for running errands — if only they could reach.

TITLE: A Land of Volcanoes and Geysers
AUTHOR: By Julia Phillips
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: PETROPAVLOVSK-KAMCHATSKY — In a corner of this huge country, at the very edge of the world, the Kamchatka Peninsula juts 1,500 kilometers into the Pacific.
Eight thousand kilometers east of Moscow, Kamchatka is an incredible place. It holds such titles as the highest recorded density of brown bears on Earth, the only geyser field in Eurasia and the tallest active volcano on the continent. For decades the peninsula was shut by the Soviet government to protect its local military assets, but the Soviet collapse caused this region to open, bringing in waves of outsiders.
Perestroika prompted a massive exodus from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Kamchatka’s capital city, which more than half the peninsula’s population calls home. Nearly 100,000 people have left since 1992. The city therefore appears much as you’d expect a slowly emptying military outpost to look with cracked cement buildings, icy streets and abandoned bunkers tucked into hills.
Still, visitors keep flowing into Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.
“Twenty years ago there were three travel agencies here. Now there are more than 100,” said Tamara Tatushkina, the region’s former top tourism official. A range of agencies offer helicopter flights to the world-famous Valley of the Geysers. Adventurous winter athletes also board Kamchatka’s helicopters for a chance to heli-ski, descending as many as eight different peaks in a single day.
Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky is surrounded by nature parks, state reserves and sanctuaries, so this small city of 179,395 has become a jumping-off point for investors and tourists eager to explore the region’s untouched wilderness.
While the military maintains a strong presence in the city, commercial fishing has emerged as Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky’s chief industry. Kamchatkan rivers, where one-quarter of all Pacific salmon spawn, are leased to private companies, and laws against fish poaching are strictly enforced. Markets here are filled with tubs of caviar. Kamchatkan salmon is rightly famed for its deliciousness, and any visitor to the peninsula quickly develops a taste for its pink meat.
The peninsula is also exploring its potential for energy production. Russia’s first geothermal electric station was established here in 1966. As befits a region bubbling with constant thermal activity, Kamchatka has created a network of geothermal power plants that now satisfy up to 30 percent of local electricity needs, and it has plans for more work. In October, Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko signed an agreement with Iceland to cooperate in the design and construction of additional geothermal plants in Kamchatka, and recently the peninsula’s government presented power plant investment opportunities to South Korea.
Local legend holds that the raven-god Kutkh created Kamchatka when he dropped one of his feathers into the sea. Although these days you’re most likely to encounter Kutkh as a carved wooden souvenir in a regional gift shop, Kamchatka, with its glaciers, geysers, and 130 volcanoes, still seems like a place where gods could walk. Humble as Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky may seem to an outsider’s eye, it serves as the gateway to a peninsula rich with indigenous heritage, Soviet legacies and natural wonders.
<b>What to do if you have two hours</b>
Slip on your most comfortable shoes and take a stroll around the city’s historical center. Stand first at the shore along Ozernovskaya Kosa Ulitsa. This stretch gives you a view of Avacha Bay, with a local fishing port to your right and an outlet to the Pacific Ocean on your left. Across the bay are the lights of Vilyuchinsk, a closed military settlement.
Walk along Ozernovskaya Kosa past the statue of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky’s namesake Saints Peter and Paul until you reach Lenin Square. Here, you’ll see the faces of the local administration building and the city’s recently renovated theater. Continue on Leninskaya Ulitsa, make a right onto Ulitsa Krasintzev, and begin climbing up Nikolskaya Hill. At its peak, you’ll find a row of cannons, several monuments commemorating local military history and the best view of the bay in the city.
Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky’s Regional Museum (20 Leninskaya Ulitsa; +7 4152-42-18-82) has plenty to offer any history buff. Founded in 1911, the museum holds relics of the peninsula’s past, with special attention given to Koryak, Chukchi, Even and Itelmen objects. An afternoon in the regional museum gives city visitors a rare chance to value these indigenous groups’ contributions to Kamchatka.
<b>What to do if you have two days</b>
Summer in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky is brief but gorgeous. In warm weather, get a new perspective on the city by joining an Avacha Bay boat tour, which lasts about three hours. This will give you the chance to view up close the iconic Three Brothers, a set of sheer cliffs standing in the water. Legend has it that these huge rocks are actually the forms of three men who long ago chose to save their people from a tsunami by guarding the mouth of the bay.
Athletes will find whole worlds to explore inside the city’s borders. Strap on your skis and hit the slopes at Krasnaya Sopka (13 Strelkovaya Ulitsa; +7 4152-42-38-21). The hill’s four ski trails, each more than a kilometer long, tip so drastically toward the ocean that you may feel you’ll slide right into the bay at the bottom.
For exhilaration of a different sort, visit the Lesnaya cross-country ski base (50 Severo-Vostochnoye Shosse; 
+7 4152-29-27-69), which offers 42 kilometers of trails through the forest at the city’s edge. Try not to blink as local skiers blast by.
<b>What to do with the family</b>
Make sure to visit the Puppet Theater (42 Ulitsa Maksutova; +7 4152-42-68-48; kamteatr-kukol.com), an establishment beloved by local children. Handcrafted puppets and passionate performers make every performance come alive. The theater features its own enchanted telephone, through which young audience members can speak to such Russian cultural icons as Ded Moroz and Baba Yaga.

<b>Nightlife</b>
Kamchatka’s Theater of Drama and Comedy (75 Leninskaya Ulitsa; 
+7 4152-42-02-94; kamteatr.com), founded in 1914, offers a variety of plays ranging from Russian classics to contemporary works. The theater was remodeled only two years ago and now treats its well-turned-out audiences to a new facade and retooled sound system.
The recently opened nightclub Ikra (2 Prospekt Pobedi; +7 4152-34-34-44; vk.com/kamikra) boasts European-style furnishings, a glossy dance floor and a pack of security guards who enforce strict face control at the door. A few drinks deep, you’ll swear you’re in Moscow.
Local bards perform on Friday and Saturday evenings at Zelyonaya Kareta (1a Solnechnaya Ulitsa; 
+7 4152-33-71-11). Spend a few hours listening to original acoustic compositions while treating yourself to some traditional Russian cuisine at the club’s cafe.
<b>Where to eat</b>
Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky’s proximity to Korea, China and Japan has brought dozens of restaurants specializing in high-quality Asian cuisine to the city’s streets. Local government officials frequent Korea House (26 Leninskaya Ulitsa; +7 4152-41-11-93), which offers authentic dishes at extravagant prices. Dinner for two costs about 4,000 rubles ($135).
More budget-conscious visitors should try Chzhen (4 Ulitsa Lukashevskovo; +7 4152-23-06-66) for Eurasian fusion. The pork shank comes highly recommended. Dinner for two costs about 2,000 rubles.
<b>Where to stay</b>
Hotel Avacha (61 Leningradskaya Ulitsa; +7 4152-42-72-01; avacha-hotel.ru) is located in the city center and convenient from every bus line. It’s recognized as the city’s top hotel. Renting one of its 94 rooms, which range from standard to luxury, will run you from 3,800 rubles to 25,000 rubles ($130 to $850) a night.
Hotel Petropavlovsk (31a Prospekt Karla Marksa; +7 4152-25-25-25; petropavlovsk-hotel.ru) was the first hotel in the region to be awarded three stars. Prince Philip, the duke of Edinburgh, stayed here during his visit to Kamchatka. Rooms run from 5,000 rubles to 12,000 rubles ($155 to $375) a night.
<b>Conversation starters</b>
Mention either the state of the roads or the price of the groceries. Despite an election-year campaign to repave city streets, most roads are in disrepair — harsh winters and constant earthquakes do little to maintain smooth asphalt. And due to the peninsula’s isolation, food prices soar to reflect high import costs. Bringing up either of these two constants of life in Kamchatka is sure to get you into a long discussion with any local.
<b>How to get there</b>
There are no direct flights to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky from St. Petersburg. Travelers will most often need to connect in Moscow where they can take a nine-hour flight with Aeroflot or Transaero to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky Airport (+7 4153-19-95-61; airport-pkc.ru). From St. Petersburg the full travel time is at least 12 hours — often more. A round-trip fare costs between about 9,000 and 35,000 rubles ($280 to $1,100) depending on the season.
The airport is located 30 kilometers from the city. Take an hour-long bus ride to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky’s center for 40 rubles ($1.25), or save time by taking a taxi for 1,000 rubles ($31) or more.
<hr />
<b>Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky</b> 
Population: 179,395
Main industries: Fishing, energy, 
mining, manufacturing
Mayor: Vladimir Semchyov
Founded in 1740
Interesting fact: Kamchatka’s eastern coast, where Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky is located, is one of the most seismically active spots in the world. During the 
last century, it has seen 13 earthquakes that ranked more than 7 on the Richter scale.
Sister cities: Kushiro City, Japan; Sevastopol, Ukraine; Unalaska, 
Alaska, U.S.
Helpful contacts: • Mayor Vladimir 
Semchyov (14 Leninskaya Ulitsa; 
+7 4152-42-40-38; dumapk.ru); • Oksana Gerasimova, head of the Kamchatka government’s investment and enterprise department 
(1 Ploshchad Lenina; 
+7 4152-42-56-59; kamchatka.gov.ru).
<b>Major Businesses</b> 
• Akros (43 Shturmana Yelagina Ulitsa; +7 4152-24-37-17; akros.ru) is one 
of the three largest fishing 
companies in Russia.
• Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky Trade 
Sea Port (+7 4152-43-41-00; 
port.kamchatka.ru) is centrally located and open year-round.
• Kamchatgazprom (19 Pogranichnaya Ulitsa; +7 4152-41-00-94; gazprom.kamchatka.ru), the local branch of energy giant Gazprom, extracts oil and gas throughout the Kamchatka region.

TITLE: Endurance in Sport and Business: Sir Rocco Forte
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: <i>As the city’s Hotel Astoria celebrates its 100th anniversary this year, its owner, Sir Rocco Forte, talks to The St. Petersburg Times about combating Sicilian bureaucracy, learning from wasted opportunities, storming out of a fencing competition and his plans to conquer Moscow and New York.</i>

Forte excels in activities that require endurance, and this is illustrated by both his phoenix-like career in the hospitality industry, and by his passion for marathons, cycling and triathlon. 
Forte, 67, is executive chairman and principal shareholder of Rocco Forte Hotels, the luxury hotel group he founded in 1996 that currently includes Hotel de Russie in Rome, Brown’s Hotel in London, The Balmoral in Edinburgh and Hotel Savoy in Florence, as well as St. Petersburg’s own Hotel Astoria.
The Rocco Forte name has become synonymous with the elegance that characterizes every property in the collection.
Hotel Astoria’s list of high-profile guests is impressive and includes former French President Jacques Chirac, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, former U.S. President George W. Bush, designer Paco Rabanne, baritone Placido Domingo, tenor Luciano Pavarotti, and actors Alain Delon, Jack Nicholson and Gwyneth Paltrow.
Forte was formerly chairman and chief executive of Forte Group, a company founded by his father, Lord Charles Forte, back in 1934. During that time he was responsible for more than 800 hotels, 1,000 restaurants and almost 100,000 employees in 50 countries. In 1996 the Forte business was acquired in a hostile takeover bid by Granada, and since then has been broken up.
Forte looks back on old times with calm and confidence. 
“What I regret is that it was a very fine company, with potential to become an even better company, one of the world’s dominant hotel chains,” he said. “But it disappeared from the scene because the people who bought it broke it up and sold it for less money than they paid for it. So it was a completely wasted opportunity.” 
Is there anything he would do differently?
“I really wish I had started ten years earlier, because the market situation was so much more favorable,” he says, giving the only sigh that escapes for the duration of the conversation. The hotelier knows that a loss does not necessarily mean the end.  
“What I most respect myself for is that I never really gave up,” Forte said.
A late start has its advantages, one of them being experience, and Forte has made the most of the frustrations of the past. Middle East hotels are now lining up for the hotel management services of Rocco Forte Hotels. This year saw the opening of a hotel in Abu Dhabi, while in the next three years, the company is set to manage two hotels in Egypt (in Cairo and Luxor) and one in Jeddah. Forte is also looking to expand the hotel group and add addresses in Europe to the 13 existing properties.
“The concept is to cover the major cities in Europe, although I am also seriously looking at New York,” Forte said. “My attention now is on Moscow, Milan, Venice and Paris. Obviously, I have to take opportunities as they come along, and sometimes I need to wait for them. For instance, I waited six years to get a hotel in London, and London is one of the most important cities for me.”
Creating Rocco Forte Hotels and starting from scratch was something that several observers were rather doubtful about, yet Forte had the confidence to start anew, the wisdom to ignore the skeptics, and the right hunch to start with The Balmoral, which formerly belonged to his father’s empire.  
Serious international recognition followed a few years later, with the purchase in 2000 of the Hotel de Russie in Rome, the group’s most luxurious property.
One successful test of endurance in which Forte triumphed was a stand-off with Sicilian bureaucracy over the building of a golf resort in Verdura, which the hotelier has described as a nightmare that came at a price of 130 million pounds ($204 million).
“Sicily is a different world,” Forte said of the experience. “It is almost as if in Sicily they do not want things to change.” This may sound at first uncannily like conservative St. Petersburg bureaucracy, which many locals feel is impossible to surpass, but Forte’s experience suggests otherwise.
“They have ten times more civil servants in Sicily than they have in Lombardy, and it is continuous,” he explains. “I found a piece of land along the coastline; part of it was listed as a protected area from an environmental point of view. So I had to deal with the local government, the regional government and the local Green party, which was quite justly described as something of a Taliban by the head of an environmental party in Rome, and all of them had something they objected to.” 
Forte held more than 70 rounds of negotiations with the landowners, and nearly gave up. But the golf resort that he built on a stunning stretch of coastline — which features two identical 18-hole championship courses designed by Kyle Phillips — is unique in Italy, and the hotelier has essentially turned a desert into an oasis.  
With an impressive background in fencing and triathlon, Forte takes his sports almost as seriously as he approaches his business, and his achievements in this sphere have earned him well-deserved respect.
Forte’s aquaintance with triathlon happened by sheer chance. Back in the 1980s, he enjoyed competing in marathons — he is a regular at the London Marathon — and has always been a running enthusiast.
Then, while holidaying in Scotland, where he was grouse shooting with his friends, Forte damaged his Achilles tendon, which made running out of the question. Forte did not succumb to gastronomic indulgence, however, but got himself a bike. It was on one of his cycling trips that he stopped at his Balmoral hotel, where the deputy manager suggested that Forte join him at the forthcoming London triathlon competition. 
Admittedly, the competitive businessman took part in the contest just because he wanted to complete it in a faster time than the Balmoral manager — which he succeeded in doing — but he loved the challenge of endurance events, and has been a triathlon enthusiast since.
In his twenties, Forte was a fencing champion at Oxford University, with a high chance of joining Britain’s Olympic team. He gave up suddenly in a fit of rage when he felt that the judging in one of the qualifying heats was unfair.
“What happened was that back then, the judges relied solely on their eyes to count the hits, whereas now this problem doesn’t exist: Everyone uses electric sabers, which means that all hits are automatically registered,” he said. “The judges missed some of my hits, and I was beside myself. 
“Of course I was stupid to leave; I didn’t realise that the same system would give me an advantage when I competed on the other side,” Forte admits.
The chance to join the Olympic team may have been lost forever, but as the Rocco Forte Hotels story shows, dealing with prejudices and converting passion from a destructive force into a fuel that drives a business has become something of an art in which Forte excels.