SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1720 (31), Wednesday, August 1, 2012
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TITLE: Meskhiyev Quits As City Culture Head
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Filmmaker Dmitry Meskhiyev, who served as the head of City Hall’s Culture Committee from November 2011, has resigned from his job amid speculation that his departure may have been prompted by the prosecutor’s office’s current investigation into the committee’s financial activities.
Meskhiyev himself said the sole reason for his departure was “an interesting job offer” that he felt he could not turn down. He declined to give further details.
Meskhiyev’s short tenure as head of the Culture Committee was marked by numerous conflicts with members of the local artistic community. Even his allies concede that he managed to make more enemies than friends during his period of state service.
For example, the official vigorously defended the merger between the legendary St. Petersburg film studio Lenfilm and the Sistema conglomerate.
The Vladimir Putin-backed plan was floated by Vladimir Yevtushenkov, president of the Sistema conglomerate, which has tentacles in industries as diverse as telecommunications, tourism, retail and oil. It calls for Sistema to take over Lenfilm, which the Finance Ministry valued at 105 million rubles ($3.5 million) in 2011, though some analysts consider the figure to be a knockdown price. The studio would then move to the outskirts of St. Petersburg.
But a group of independent filmmakers proposed in April that the studio be allowed to stay put, receive a cash infusion from the government, and regain access to its valuable archives, which were taken over by the Culture Ministry in 2002. They envision Lenfilm becoming a center of art-house filmmaking.
The first plan would create a partnership between Sistema and Lenfilm, which would merge with a production company in Yevtushenkov’s empire. The state would control 25 percent of the new enterprise, which would move to a new business complex on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. Yevtushenkov would turn the existing studio on Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt into a new business center and parking garage.
“What I want to say to the protesters is, ‘Stop panicking!’” Meskhiyev said back in April. “A merger between a studio that is essentially falling to pieces and a modern one is a good news story, not a tale of disaster.”
Yulia Strizhak, an adviser to St. Petersburg deputy governor Vasily Kichedzhi, said the city government strongly backs the merger as “the most rational solution.”
 “The studio will stay afloat, which is the most important thing,” she said. “Importantly, there is an investor who is eager to provide money for the studio’s development.” Yevtushenkov has not said what investment he would make in Lenfilm beyond the initial purchase.
Maxim Reznik, head of the Culture and Education Commission of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, believes that Meskhiyev’s departure was inevitable.
“I was amazed by Meskhiyev’s appointment in the first place, considering his ardent support of the Okhta Center [the controversial skyscraper that was due to be built by Gazprom as its local headquarters in the historical center of the city],” Reznik said. “Okhta Center was hugely unpopular among locals, and especially in cultural circles. So many people hated him for that attitude alone.
“Most importantly, Meskhiyev lacked tact and employed force in delicate issues such as theater reform,” he added. 
At the end of April, Meskhiyev offered Yury Butusov the job of artistic director at the Lensoviet Theater on one condition — that he stop all other work outside of this engagement. The director left City Hall flabbergasted. The proposal, he argued, was nothing short of serfdom, and his view received widespread support among his counterparts.
Meskhiyev also planned to introduce a new system for hiring artistic directors, executive directors and top managers of cultural organizations that receive funding from the city. Instead of a permanent employment contract, Meskhiyev wanted to offer them one-year contracts that would be reviewed at the end of the year — and then potentially replaced by three-year contracts — thus greatly increasing the dependency of employees on the state.
Even before joining the city government, Meskhiyev often made public statements that defended and supported City Hall’s policies.
In December 2010, when the city’s ex-governor Valentina Matviyenko found herself under an avalanche of criticism for failing to keep the streets of St. Petersburg clear and safe during massive snowfalls, Meskhiyev, at his own initiative, produced a statement of support.
Responding to an open letter sent to Matviyenko by the popular St. Petersburg actor Mikhail Trukhin, who accused Matviyenko of not respecting residents and urged her to resign, Meskhiyev defended the governor.
“I am surprised you put all the blame on Valentina Matviyenko,” Meskhiyev wrote in his blog. “The governor provided vast funds and resources to deal with the problem, and if too many local officials are unable to do their jobs, then they should be held responsible, not Matviyenko. The only thing that you can do by writing such a letter is irritate the situation.”
However, Vyacheslav Notyag, a member of the liberal Yabloko faction in the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, speculated that Meskhiyev’s departure could be connected with the investigation into the committee’s spending currently being conducted by the city’s prosecutor’s office.
Notyag himself sent a parliamentary inquiry to prosecutors in June, asking them to investigate spending on the May 9 Victory Day celebration. 
“No tender was held, and the assignment, worth 23 million rubles ($715,000) was simply assigned to Kramer&Co. production studio,” Notyag said. “Two other competitors did not meet the requirements set by City Hall, and so the order simply went to Kramer. Also, the festivities could not have cost more than 7 million rubles ($217,600). It looks like a corrupt scheme to me. I foresee a lot of work here for the prosecutors.”
City Governor Georgy Poltavchenko defended Meskhiyev and sent an official response to parliament in which he said that “there had been no financial mismanagement or abuse in organizing the celebrations of the May 9 festivities.” The prosecutor’s office has extended the duration of its investigation to Aug. 10.   
A replacement is yet to be announced for Meskhiyev. 


TITLE: Building Plans Upset Local Greeks
AUTHOR: By Luisa Schulz 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A new five-story business center and hotel complex due to appear next to the Oktyabrsky concert hall is causing consternation among the city’s Greek community as well as preservationists.
The design for the new building, set to be constructed on the former site of the hall’s ticket office, has already been selected and is currently being assessed by a state inspection. Protest against the center has been loudest from the St. Petersburg Greek community, which fears that the new project will obstruct the Ioannis Kapodistrias memorial located next to the ticket offices. 
Nine architectural studios took part in the tender to design the building. The project’s investor, Solo, invited representatives of preservationist movements such as Living City and specialists of the State Cultural Heritage Committee onto the jury in an attempt to broaden public support for the project. The winning design was that of AMM studio, headed by Yury Mityurev, the city’s former chief architect. According to the studio, however, his authorship was unknown to the jury during the selection process. They claim that the design was selected because it is in harmony with the surrounding buildings. 
This is a daring promise, as Grecheskaya Ploshchad (Greek Square, as the square in front of the concert hall is known) is already one of the city center’s oddest architectural ensembles. Surrounded by the neoclassical Children’s Hospital No. 19 and various eclectic 19th-century buildings, it used to be the setting of the Greek Dmitry Solunsky Church, which was adorned by multiple cupolas and was an emblem of the Byzantine building style in St. Petersburg. In a startling architectural metamorphosis, however, this building was torn down by the Soviets in 1961 and replaced by the concrete Oktyabrsky Concert Hall, a building that Joseph Brodsky, in a poem on that occasion, describes as an “ugly flat dash.”
Another item on the square’s architectural agenda during the last few years was the Greek Center, a business center located directly opposite from Oktyabrsky. The original early 19th-century three-story building was dismantled in 2007 and replaced by a glass cube behind a pseudo-restoration of the old facade. The new business center now to be built at 6 Ligovsky Prospekt is to achieve a similar synthesis between functional business space and architectural mimicry. Its architectural style is described by the studio as “classical.”
The idea to replace the ticket office pavilion with a multi-story building is not new, but had already been considered for about seven years. An earlier investor, Rolis, had already selected a project when the company had to be reorganized and the building rights fell to the management company Solo, which rejected the previous design. In 2011, Solo presented its present project to build a 4,305-square-meter building complex on the site. The first floor is to accommodate the ticket office, while the upper levels are to be divided between office space for concert hall staff and hotel space for visiting performing musicians. 
The major opponent of the project is the Petersburg Greek community organization Petropolis. Since their embassy church was destroyed, the only traces still recalling their nation’s impact on the area are the name of the square and the adjacent street, Grechesky (Greek) Prospekt. In 2003, when the city celebrated its 300th anniversary, the community saw a bit of a consolation, with a statue being erected to commemorate Ioannis Kapodistrias, a diplomat who served in Russia under Alexander I and who later became the ruler of Greece. Kapodistrias currently looks contemplatively out over Ligovsky Prospekt from a small round plaza surrounded by greenery on the corner of the park area leading to Ulitsa Nekrasova. 
Harlampy Apachidy, chairman of the city’s Greek community, fears that the statue’s view of Ligovsky Prospekt — and with it, people’s view of him — will soon be blocked. “If this project is carried out, the monument will turn into an awkward architectural appendix of the five-story building’s right wing, and will be blocked from view from the side of Greek Square,” he was quoted by Fontanka.ru as saying. 
The Petropolis community appealed to City Hall on June 22. The Greeks say they are not against the building project itself, they simply ask that efforts be made to preserve the visibility of the statue, for instance by transferring it into the middle of the square. So far, their appeal has gone unanswered.
Concern has also been expressed by the preservationist movement Living City, which is worried about the additional congestion the new complex would bring to the city center. “We think such a business center is totally unnecessary,” Living City speaker Antonia Yeliseyeva told The St. Petersburg Times.  
“There will be more people and more cars, the building cannot provide parking space for all those cars, and the city is already overcrowded.” 
Yeliseyeva expressed doubt that any changes would be made to the project, however. 
“It is of course bad for the city, but it is a legal St. Petersburg project.”
Greek Square is located in Heritage Protection Zone 1, where only the demolition of buildings is prohibited, while new constructions are permitted up to a certain height limit.
A Solo representative requested for questions to be emailed to her, but had not responded as this newspaper went to press. 

TITLE: Cyclists To Gather In Flash Mob 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A flash mob to call for more bike lanes to be introduced to St. Petersburg is planned to be held Sunday on Prospekt Lunacharskogo, located in a remote part of the Kalininsky District. 
The 4.5-kilometer section of Prospekt Lunacharskogo between Prospekt Kultury and Svetlanovsky Prospekt includes one of the very few officially designated bike lanes in the city. I-bike-spb.ru project, which aims to make St. Petersburg a more cycle-friendly place, has organized the Velostoyaniye (Bike Standing) flash mob to underscore the absurdity of a major European city having only one bike path “that fulfills any sort of transport function,” as the remaining half-dozen are located in parks or remote suburban areas. 
Organizers hope the flash mob will help urge City Hall to include more bike paths in its bicycle transport plan that is currently being developed, and participants in the event will be asked to sign postcard petitions to that effect. 
Cyclists are invited to ride up and down the bike lane on Prospekt Lunacharskogo on Sunday, Aug. 5 between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. for as long as their energy lasts.

TITLE: 8 Protesters Detained at Strategy 31 Rally
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Eight protesters were arrested during a Strategy 31 protest in St. Petersburg Tuesday, in the first rally in defense of the right of assembly since stricter rally restrictions were passed into law in the wake of mass protests against electoral fraud.
Maria Shariya, an activist with The Other Russia, held a sign reading “I don’t give a damn about your fines” and gave a brief speech while a policeman spoke over her using a megaphone, warning protesters to stop. 
“Russian residents will soon have no money to pay their fines, to pay their taxes, to pay for the education of their children,” Shariya shouted, trying to speak louder than the officer with the megaphone, who was threatening people with possible detentions and charges.
“Putin and his gang themselves are pushing people to protest against them, we can’t tolerate it anymore.”
As soon as she finished, she sat on the ground with seven other activists, who locked their arms together, and went on to chant, “Freedom of assembly — everywhere and always.”
Within seconds, the group was surrounded by the OMON riot police, who pushed the public and journalists aside, while another group of policemen started to separate the protesters from each other and carry them to an unmarked bus, holding them by their arms and legs. The activists continued to shout slogans such as “We want a different Russia” and “They don’t know what they’re doing” until they were all put on the bus and taken to a police precinct.
Unlike at previous rallies, there were no mass detentions in which large groups of people were surrounded by police, and no preventive arrests of activists approaching the usual Strategy 31 rally site near the Gostiny Dvor department store on Nevsky Prospekt.
The police did not arrest three older protesters — two men holding anti-Kremlin posters, and artist Yelena Osipova, who stood with two paintings she had made in support of the imprisoned women of the feminist punk group Pussy Riot, currently on trial in Moscow.
Several hundred came to the site, but most simply stood there, although an occasional copy of the Russian constitution or a white ribbon — a symbol of the movement for honest elections — were seen in the crowd. Some people applauded the police officers’ warnings by way of protest.
Early this month, Strategy 31 organizers in St. Petersburg said they would boycott “illegal rulings of the authorities,” and would be guided exclusively by the regulation of the Constitution.
According to The Other Russia, Strategy 31 organizers chose to drop the practice of applying to City Hall for a permit. The protesters reasoned that such applications had “lost all meaning” as the Constitution’s Article 31 — which guarantees the right of assembly — has been “effectively abolished.”
“No assembly of this type has been authorized since the time the Strategy 31 campaign started in St. Petersburg in January 2010,” the opposition party said in a statement.
City Hall officials explained that the maintenance work that always takes place at the rally site at 6 p.m. on the 31st day of the month was a “pure coincidence.”
But more frequently City Hall confined itself to “you will get in the way of pedestrians” and suggested that the rally be transferred to the remote Polyustrovsky Park.
The other reason cited for not applying for a permit was that under the new law on public assemblies — in effect since June 9 — signing a rally application endangers the organizers themselves. They can face hefty fines, from 10,000 to 20,000 rubles ($310-$620) or up to 40 hours of compulsory community service if they go ahead with an unsanctioned rally.
According to The Other Russia’s local chair Andrei Dmitriyev, the eight detained activists will be taken to court on Wednesday after being held in police precinct 76 overnight. He also said that the police claimed an activist ripped an officer’s uniform while being detained.
As usual, the protesters were charged with violating the rules of holding a public assembly and failing to obey police orders.
The organizers of a Strategy 31 rally on Triumfalnaya Ploshchad in Moscow, however, applied to the authorities to hold a sanctioned rally and were refused authorization. 
In Moscow, the police arrested around 50 people, including author and The Other Russia leader Eduard Limonov, who founded the Strategy 31 campaign in the Russian capital in July 2009, Limonov’s press secretary Alexander Averin said. According to Averin, up to 500 people took part.

TITLE: Boat Chef Detained After Frenzied Knife Attack
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A Nevsky district court ordered a former cook working on a river tour boat to be detained for attacking people with a knife near the city’s River Station, Interfax reported.
“While in detention the man said that he had a bag with explosives, which proved not to be true. Divers found his weapons at the bottom of the Neva River near the station,” the Northwest Transport Prosecution’s press service said.
The man is being charged with hooliganism.
The attacker rushed into a crowd of ship passengers with two knives while at least six ships were getting ready to depart on July 21. The man shouted, threatening people and wounding one of the passengers and a station security guard who tried to detain him. Another security guard injured the man with a rubber pellet gun. 
The attacker managed to throw the knives into the Neva before police arrived.

TITLE: City Institute Confronts Legal Nihilism in Russia 
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Portnova 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The legal nihilism rampant in Russia was once again the focus of discussion last week, as representatives of the city’s Institute for the Rule of Law set up by the European University in St. Petersburg presented its proposals for improving the country’s legal system.
The issue of judicial independence and a fair legal system has rarely seemed so topical. Two months ago, Sergei Tsepovyaz, a member of the Sergei Tsapok gang, was fined 150,000 rubles ($4,600) for plotting to cover up the murders of 12 people (including two children) killed in the Kransnodar region in 2010 in a case that shocked the nation. Meanwhile, the members of feminist punk band Pussy Riot, some of whom have young children, enter their sixth month in pretrial detention for singing a “punk-prayer” in the Christ the Savior Cathedral.
The research presented in the city on July 27 was the result of more than two-and-a-half years of work based on judges’ polls, interviews with the participants of trials, experts and judges (including almost 30 interviews with current and retired judges and chief judges), and analysis of available sentence statistic data. The survey covered six regions from different federal regions, including St. Petersburg. 
Vadim Volkov, supervisor of the Institute for the Rule of Law, said that his team had tried to analyze not the laws themselves, but the operating principles of the legal authorities and trials, as well as the subculture of trials in Russia.
“Everybody knows that Russian trials are not independent nowadays,” said Volkov. 
“During the holding of trials, we can see no sign of the separation of powers.” 
Some issues are likely to elicit more predictable trial outcomes than others.
Increasingly often, courts reject cases concerning electoral fraud, or grant almost every motion made by the public prosecutor’s office, according to Volkov. For courts, it is easier to accept the position already taken by the investigative committee, he said. 
“In 99 percent of such cases, courts issue a guilty verdict. We call this phenomenon the ‘guilty trend,’” said Volkov. 
Based on the results of the research, its authors identified four main factors that restrict the independence of judges: The influence of chief judges, which goes significantly beyond their commission; the non-transparent system of appointing judges; the influence of the public prosecutor’s office; and the excessive workload of the judges, which prevents them from considering all the details of cases.
Taking into account these factors, the researchers devised a series of measures that could gradually help to increase the independence of judges. First on their list is the reform of the concept itself of chief judges.
“It’s important to revoke the system of bonus payments, because currently, 50 percent of the judge’s salary depends on that,” said Kirill Titayev, senior researcher at the Institute for the Rule of Law. “The decision about the vacation or material compensation of the judge depends de facto only on the will of that particular court’s chief judge.”
The researchers also propose restricting the opportunity of accused parties to gain any influence on the judge. They suggest this could be done by prohibiting members of the security forces (in particular the public prosecutor’s office and the investigative committee) from taking part in the appointment of judges (for example, by entering collegiate bodies). 
Volkov said that the problem lies not in the personality of specific judges but in the overall existing judicial system. 
“We have created a system that — from the point of view of its organization, both formal and informal, and of its values and measures, the recruitment and career advancement of judges — can easily be manipulated,” he said. 
“All our suggestions lie on [Prime Minister Dmitry] Medvedev’s table, in the Public Chamber, in the presidential administration. Even if just 20 percent of them were approved, that would gradually bring about positive changes. 
“But full-blown judicial reform will be possible only after changes in the political situation in Russia,” he added. “For now, the existing political system has a vested interest in the existing (inefficient) legal system.”


TITLE: Activists Fight for Finnish Gulf
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Pavlova 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Almost 300 people gathered in the Dubki park in the neighboring town of Sestroretsk late last month to voice their protest against the reconstruction of the coast of the Gulf of Finland. Local protesters overtook the park wearing hats with slogans and carrying balloons to express their dissatisfaction with the high-profile city project. 
The city government’s controversial plan for the land reclamation project between the towns of Sestroretsk and Lisiy Nos is still a topic of conflict almost three years after the city government held a tender to attract investors. The company Severo-Zapad Invest won the rental contract for the 140-hectare territory on which to build a reclaimed land project. On Aug. 16 last year, then-governor Valentina Matviyenko signed a resolution on a 16-point infrastructure plan for the project, which stipulated the construction of gas pipelines, sewers, power lines, water towers and other utilities.
Locals are convinced that the project will do irreparable harm to the ecology of the Gulf of Finland and that the Kurortny area will lose its status as a recreational territory. 
“There is the potential danger that certain city constructions that are protected by law will be destroyed. The currents will change, and God only knows in what way,” said Anatoly Krivenchenko, leader of the Pure Gulf social organization. He urged people to remember the negative ecological effects, such as various plant species being destroyed and water pollution, experienced after the land reclamation project for the new passenger port on Vasilyevsky Island was implemented. 
However, a review carried out by the main government survey agency, Glavgosekspertiza, on the territories near Sestroretsk, found that the project would not have a negative impact on the environment. At least two public examinations of the waters of the Gulf of Finland were also carried out. All the results showed the same thing: Land reclamation will not reflect negatively on the area’s ecology.
According to Mikhail Cherepanov, the PR director of the investment company, all of the territory in question is in a terrible condition and needs to be improved. 
“We need to save this territory. This can be done by creating artificial land and a normal landscape, which would make this territory suitable to live on without harming the environment. During the implementation of the project alone the problem would be solved,” Cherepanov said in an interview with Ekho Moskvy.
In addition to the ecological question, residents foresee more problems emerging as a result of the project. According to the investor’s plans, the project will create 2 million square meters of real estate that will house 60,000 people, effectively doubling the population of the Kurortny district. This will add to the traffic flow on the Primorsky Shosse, which is already problematic. Severo-Zapad Invest representatives say that the city will solve this problem by expanding the highway and launching new suburban trains. 
Nevertheless, fighters for the purity of the Gulf of Finland are concerned that numerous trucks and cars on the town’s streets and the Primorsky Shosse will result in round-the-clock noise pollution, as well as dust, dirt and major traffic jams. Other town residents have expressed anxiety that illegal immigrants will be brought in to work on the project, and that people’s houses will be knocked down to make way for the project and its infrastructure. 
In February, St. Petersburg Governor Georgy Poltavchenko announced that the project was suspended until it could be proven that there would be no negative effects on the area’s ecology. In order to unfreeze the land reclamation project in Sestroretsk, Novatek, a natural gas producer affiliated with Severo-Zapad Invest, promised to spend 1 billion rubles ($31 million) as compensation for any ecological damage that might result. The main construction in the gulf area will begin in the summer of 2013.
The cost of creating the two islands, according to preliminary estimates, will total between 13 and 15 billion rubles ($404 and $435 million). The total cost of the project is estimated at 250 billion rubles ($7.8 billion). All infrastructure expenses will be paid for by the government.

TITLE: Karate Champion Kills Dog-Walker in Dispute
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A man was killed in the Krasnoselsky district of the city last week after a conflict arose over his dog.
On the morning of July 25, Sergei Dorin was walking his Staffordshire Terrier — a breed historically used for fighting — when Ruslan Merzlyakov, who was passing by with his six-year-old son, reprimanded him for walking his dog without a muzzle, saying that the dog could pose a threat to other people, Fontanka.ru reported.
In this case, however, the dog owner turned out to be more dangerous than the dog: Dorin took out a TT pistol and shot at his interlocutor.
The bullet narrowly missed both Merzlyakov and his son. 
Merzlyakov, a Leningrad Oblast karate champion, knocked his opponent to the floor, as a result of which the 42-year-old Dorin died soon afterwards of his injuries.
The police are now investigating whether the incident is to be qualified as criminal case. Merzlyakov called the police himself, but it is still to be determined whether the killing falls under self-defense and whether he acted on impulse.
The dog owner had already been charged twice with weapons trafficking. A search of his apartment after the incident revealed 49 pistol bullets and a grenade.
The dog fled during the shooting and has not been seen since.

TITLE: Zoo to Be Europe’s Biggest
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The new St. Petersburg zoo, whose construction is to begin next year, will be the biggest zoo in Europe.
The zoo, which will be made up of six islands inhabited by animals from different continents, is due to open in stages with its first islands (Eurasia and Southeast Asia) opening in 2015-2016, the press service of Intarsia, the construction company in charge of the project, said last week, Interfax reported.
Alexander Mironov, Intarsia’s chief architect, said that the project consists not only of the display areas where the animals will live, but also of a petting zoo, horse stables and a zoo theater where animal shows will take place.
However, former Leningrad Zoo director Ivan Korneyev, who is a member of the project’s working group, said the zoo theater could encounter problems.
“There is a certain ethical problem concerning the zoo theater because, according to the European Code, zoo animals can be used for educational purposes only and should not be made to perform acts that are not part of their natural behavior. This makes the idea of an animal theater questionable,” Korneyev said.
Work on the zoo’s infrastructure could begin as soon as in 2013, Mironov said. This year, 562 million rubles ($17.5 million) are planned to be spent on the project; last year 358 million rubles ($11.1 million) was spent.
The new zoo territory will cover 288 hectares, 200 of which will be park area that people can stroll around. It will be the biggest zoo in Russia and Europe.
Mironov said that as polar bears are the symbol of the Leningrad Zoo, they will receive special treatment at the new zoo and their enclosure will be significantly larger than those of other such bears in other zoos around the world.
The architects behind the zoo project decided to separate the animals from visitors by using more natural obstacles such as mounds of earth, ditches and other barriers instead of the traditional cages. The zoo will house approximately 310 different kinds of animals, many of which will be large-sized species.
The zoo is planned to be built near the Yuntolovo nature reserve and is based on a design created by Beckmann-N’Thepe, a French architectural company. 


TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Fountains Switched Off</b>
&#8194;ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A number of the city’s fountains were turned off in St. Petersburg during Russia’s Navy Day celebrations on July 29 and will not work on Paratroopers’ Day on Aug. 2. 
Among the fountains affected are those in the Alexandrovsky Park and those on Moskovskaya Ploshchad and Ploshchad Lenina.
Vodokanal, the company responsible for the city’s water supply, said it decided to take the measures due to the fact that local fountains are often misused and damaged during these celebrations.
On those days, naval sailors and paratroopers (both active and retired) often take dips in city fountains, not always in a sober state.
Vodokanal also warned that swimming in fountains is unhygienic, as the water used in them is part of a closed cycle and it is not changed for several weeks. 

<b>Dog Killer Fined</b>
&#8194;ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A local court ordered a military officer to pay a 30,000-ruble ($930) fine for shooting seven service dogs in order to avoid spending money on feeding them.
Yevgeny Mityashin, the former chief officer of a military unit, was found guilty of shooting seven dogs, six of which died and one of which was seriously wounded, the press service of the Main Military Investigation Department said last week, Interfax reported.
Mityashin was found guilty of the cruel treatment of animals leading to their death and injury.
Various breeds of service dogs lived on the territory of the military unit and were used to guard the area. For four months a female employee had reportedly fed the dogs out of her own pocket, and Mityashin was informed of this.
In order to avoid addressing the problem of the dogs’ food supply, Mityashin shot the dogs on the night of Aug. 27, 2011 after consuming alcohol.

<b>Street May Turn Musical</b>
&#8194;ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — One of the city’s streets may be named after the St. Petersburg singer Eduard Khil, who died in the city in June.
The idea of naming the street after Khil came from the leader of St. Petersburg’s Yabloko faction, Grigory Yavlinsky, and Chairman of the Legislative Assembly Vyacheslav Makarov. City Governor Georgy Poltavchenko supported the idea.
Poltavchenko said that at the next meeting of the street-naming commission, scheduled for the end of the year, they would consider naming one of the city’s new streets in the Vyborgsky district after Khil.
Khil, died in St. Petersburg on June 4. He was 77 years old.



TITLE: 2 Dead After Car Drives Off Bridge
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Two people were killed on Saturday night when the car in which they were traveling plunged from the raised Liteiny Bridge into the River Neva. 
The car drove through the barrier erected in front of the open bridge at about 3 a.m. and fell into the water.
The car was dragged out of the river up the Arsenal embankment on Sunday morning. According to ITAR TASS press service, there were two people in the car, who were both killed in the accident.
It was the second drowning incident in the Neva on the weekend. At around 9 p.m. Saturday, during the Navy Day celebrations, a man identified as Valery Ryabov, who was reportedly under the influence of alcohol, made a bet with a friend that he could swim across the Neva, Fontanka.ru reported. 
He was caught in a current near Palace Bridge, drawn under the surface and drowned. 
About six people jumped into the water to save him, but were unsuccessful. The body has not yet been recovered.




TITLE: Putin Signs 3-Year U.S. Visa Agreement
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin has signed a landmark visa agreement with the United States, the Kremlin said Monday, allowing the long-delayed reform to come into force in September.
The Kremlin did not say when Putin had signed the agreement, but according to a scan on the official pravo.gov.ru portal, the document was dated July 28 — last Saturday.
To become law, the document needs to be published in the government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta, which is usually a formality.
But the new rules will come into force only 30 days after a final diplomatic exchange of notes takes place between officials from both countries.
Reached by telephone Monday, a U.S. Embassy spokeswoman said the agreement should be implemented by mid-September.
The agreement was originally supposed to enter into force last year, but it was ratified by the State Duma and Federation Council only this month after being held up by government bureaucracy. Under U.S. law, no ratification is required.
The new rules make three-year multiple-entry visas allowing a maximum stay of six months the norm for both tourists and business travelers, provided their applications are approved.
The new rules will be felt by Americans more than by Russians because U.S. consulates already give two-year visas to many successful applicants. However, first-time applicants will still be asked to appear for personal interviews, a practice not required by the Russian side.
The rejection rate for Russian applicants is roughly 10 percent, according to State Department figures.
The agreement also scraps the requirement of a written invitation from a host-country citizen or organization, something that has not been required by the U.S.
In a statement late Monday, the U.S. Embassy welcomed Putin’s signing of the agreement, saying that it would strengthen ties between both countries in the biggest segments of tourism and business.

TITLE: Navalny Faces 10 Years in Jail
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Alexei Navalny, a driving force behind massive protests against Vladimir Putin’s rule, faced a new criminal probe Tuesday on charges of theft that come amid a widening Kremlin crackdown on dissent.
Navalny rejected the charges, which carry a 10-year prison term if he’s convicted and follow the recent jailing of opposition activists and the passage of new repressive legislation.
The State Investigative Committee said Tuesday that it suspects Navalny of organizing a scheme to steal assets from a state timber company totaling 16 million rubles ($500,000). He was ordered not to leave the city. Navalny called the charges “weird” and baseless.
The probe against Navalny focuses on events from 2009 when he served as an adviser to a provincial governor. Investigators allege that he colluded with timber company officials to rob it. It follows a previous probe into similar allegations closed earlier this year.
Investigation Committee chief Alexander Bastrykin has recently chided a local investigator for closing that case.
Navalny targeted Bastrykin last week, claiming the chief investigator has obtained a Czech residency permit and bought an apartment in Prague. Bastrykin defended himself in an interview with the daily Izvestia, admitting that he bought the apartment but denying having the residency permit.

TITLE: Deputy  Seeks Media Ban
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A United Russia lawmaker has announced a bill that would ban the media from disclosing the ethnic backgrounds of suspects, victims and others when covering crimes and trials in what he calls an attempt to reduce racial violence.
Such a ban would reduce ethnic tension, State Duma Deputy Shamsail Saraliyev told Izvestia in an interview published late last week.
“Every day, the media report ‘Two Chechens killed a Russian; an Armenian attacked a Russian.’ Why is there such an emphasis on ethnicity?” he said.
Saraliyev, who served as press and information minister in his native Chechnya before being elected to the Duma in December, argued that this provokes ethnic conflict.
“There are no bad nationalities,” he said.
He said he would discuss the plan with voters before submitting a bill in the fall, but he predicted that 82 percent of the population of the North Caucasus would support it.
Experts rejected the initiative, saying that while a problem exists, it would be wrong to try to resolve it by stifling speech.
Indeed, police investigators often describe suspects as having a “Caucasus appearance.” 
Mikhail Fedotov, head of the Kremlin’s human rights council and co-author of the country’s media law, said the issue of whether news reports foment ethnic tensions should be addressed by the media industry, not the state.
“This is a matter for self-regulation and should be solved by the journalists themselves,” he said by phone.
Fedotov said that while some media organizations have ethical deficiencies, others have addressed them.
Natalya Yudina, of the Sova Center, a think tank that tracks racism and migrants’ rights, said the state could do better than introducing a media ban.
“It would be much more effective if they gave some support for organizations like us,” she said.
Yudina said Sova, which is registered as a nonprofit organization, currently gets no government grants and relies mostly on foreign funding.
Saraliyev’s initiative is not the first of its kind. In 2006, the United Russia-dominated Moscow City Duma pressed for a similar bill following ethnic rioting in the Karelian town of Kondopoga.
But the legislation was dropped after opposition from the Public Chamber and United Russia.


TITLE: Day 2 of Pussy Riot Trial in Moscow
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — One of the plaintiffs in the trial against female punk band Pussy Riot reluctantly accepted the apologies of the defendants for their performance at a Moscow cathedral as the trial entered a second day Tuesday.
Meanwhile, popular British writer Stephen Fry called on his more than 4.6 million followers on Twitter “to do everything to help Pussy Riot” and “pressure Putin” in connection with the trial, in which three young women face up to seven years in prison on charges of hooliganism for singing a song that contained obscenities and denounced President Vladimit Putin at Christ the Savior in February.
The three defendants — Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22; Maria Alyokhina, 24; and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 29 — have been under arrest since March.
The trial opened Tuesday in a courtroom in Moscow’s Khamovnichesky District Court that could accommodate only 10 journalists, leaving about 30 unable to attend the hearing, Interfax reported.
Later that day the hearing was transferred to Monday’s courtroom, the largest in the court, the news agency said.
The defendants asked the judge, Marina Syrova, to interrupt the trial because they hadn’t had enough sleep or food, Interfax reported. Syrova first rejected the request, citing medical references, which said the defendants were fit to attend the trial.
When the band’s lawyer Violetta Volkova threatened to ask for Syrova to be replaced, the judge promised to interrupt the trial so the defendants could eat and sleep.
On Monday the women said the venue for their impromptu performance might have been inappropriate, but they insisted that they had never been motivated by religious hatred, only a desire to persuade church leaders not to meddle in politics.
“If our passion looked offensive, we sincerely regret that,” Tolokonnikova said in a statement read by Volkova, in the courtroom.
Tolokonnikova called the band’s performance an “ethical mistake,” while another band member, Alyokhina, asked prosecutors to treat the infraction as a misdemeanor rather than a felony.
The trio pleaded not guilty to felony charges of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.
Hooliganism by itself is a misdemeanor that carries a 15-day jail sentence or a fine of up to 2,500 rubles ($80).
Valentin Lebedev, head of the Union of Orthodox Citizens, a group of church laity, dismissed the apologies as “a sophisticated form of hypocrisy,” Interfax reported.
Kirill Frolov, head of the Association of Orthodox Experts, an influential group of religious scholars, called the apologies “a typical attempt to avoid responsibility,” according to Interfax.
According to a transcript of an interview with Britain’s Times newspaper published Monday on the Russian government’s website, Medvedev said the band members would have faced “a more severe punishment … in some countries” than they might in Russia.
Another defense lawyer, Nikolai Polozov, expressed concern that Medvedev’s declaration that Pussy Riot would have faced harsher punishment in other countries was meant to pressure the judge to hand down the maximum seven-year sentence.

TITLE: U.S. Report Finds Religious Discrimination
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian authorities broadly respect religious freedoms, but some minority faiths suffer discrimination locally, a new U.S. State Department report said.
The International Religious Freedom Report for 2011, accessible on the State Department website, found that while the Russian Constitution guarantees the right to practice the religion of one’s choice, “laws and policies restrict religious freedom by denying some groups legal status and misidentifying their literature as extremist.”
Among the most significant charges against authorities’ religious tolerance, the report cited the use of extremism charges to target minority faiths and efforts to detain nonconforming believers or deny them access to places of worship.
Of Russia’s roughly 138 million people, about 100 million are Russian Orthodox believers, according to the report.


TITLE: Spanish Furore Poses Mighty Test for Bosco
AUTHOR: By Rachel Nielsen 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — As Spain’s leading athletes go in and out of the Olympic Village in east London during this summer’s games, they probably have a whole raft of questions on their minds. When do I have to show up for qualifying heats? How many more practices should I fit in? And why, Dios mio, do I have to wear this uniform?
Russian sportswear company Bosco Sport dressed the Spanish Olympic team for free this summer, and both the company and its Olympic outfits have been receiving tons of coverage in media outlets worldwide — though it might not be the publicity that the company had hoped for.
The subject of astonishment and ridicule, the Spanish kit ranges from the old-timey yellow jackets and long red skirts worn by its female athletes during Friday’s opening ceremony, to competition wear in a never-before-seen mix of cherry red, orange and canary yellow.
When the newspaper El Pais gave the Spanish public its first glances of the Bosco Sport uniforms, one reader said on the Spanish paper’s website that the warm-up suit looked like a costume for “a lion tamer.”
“It’s best if I don’t comment. Leaving that to others,” Spanish Olympian Saul Craviotto wrote on Twitter to caption a photograph of himself trying on his uniform at home this month. In the picture, the handsome sprint canoer wears a look of pained disbelief underneath a sports cap with an orange-red crown, a yellow visor and red embroidery resembling turkey feet.
He models bright red pants and a polo shirt covered with horseshoe-crab-shaped orange-red motifs. A yellow and red knapsack rounds out the outfit.
He was one of a handful of Spanish Olympic participants who have commented publicly on their dislike of the uniforms. Field hockey champion Alex Fabregas tweeted out a mock-enthusiastic photo of himself in uniform, saying, “There are no adjectives.”
For Bosco Sport, part of Russian fashion importer and retailer Bosco di Ciliegi, the Summer Olympics outfits aren’t just about what fans think as they watch a handful of matches from the stands or at home. Rather, the company’s long-term international expansion goals hinge in part on the impression of Bosco Sport formed during the games.
The founder of Bosco di Ciliegi, a company whose name is an Italian translation of “cherry orchard,” was skeptical of the negative reaction.
“Spanish people will be at the cash tills to buy our clothes,” Mikhail Kusnirovich told Bloomberg News. “I understand that for some Spanish fans they are unusual designs, but we have to be recognized very fast — you only have a few seconds on TV.”
Bosco Sport has stores in Russia, Ukraine and now Britain. According to Bloomberg, Bosco timed the openings of its first two stores in London with the London games.
Bosco Sport is already well-represented back home. It has stores here from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok, including about 10 shops in southern Russian cities and more than 12 stores in the Moscow area. In Ukraine, its stores number about 10.
Those markets can be attributed to the company’s close ties to both countries’ Olympic teams. Founded in 2001, Bosco Sport has designed the Russian Olympic uniforms since the Salt Lake City games in 2002 and will provide the outfits for the Russian teams in Sochi 2014 and Rio de Janeiro in 2016, Bosco says on its website.
Though the outfits for this summer’s Russian athletes have attracted some criticism, the uniforms are far more muted in style and color than Spain’s, and the criticism has been mild.
This summer, Bosco is also dressing Ukraine’s Olympic team, a relationship that began with the 2008 Beijing games. Bosco will outfit the Ukrainian Olympic teams and give “additional funds” for athlete training under an agreement that runs until 2017, the Ukrainian Olympic Committee says online.
In Spain, Bosco was a formal sponsor of the Olympians this year in addition to being the provider of its free uniforms, El Pais reported. The Spanish Olympic Committee has pointed to that financial aid — coming in a year when the Spanish economy has been reeling — to defend against the barrage of criticism over the uniforms.
Parent company Bosco di Ciliegi began and still operates as a Russian importer and retailer of luxury clothing and accessories, many of them from Italy. It runs stores for brands such as Emporio Armani and Hugo Boss, all in addition to its own Bosco Sport shops.
In Moscow, it has stores for these luxury brands in GUM and four other shopping centers, and it runs such stores in Milan, St. Petersburg, Samara and Yekaterinburg as well.
Bosco di Ciliegi also is the main owner of GUM, the iconic shopping arcade that sits across Red Square from the Kremlin. It became the principal shareholder of the GUM Shopping Mall OAO in 2005, Bosco di Ciliegi says online.
The company didn’t respond to e-mailed questions about its sales or expansion plans. But the track record of Russian clothing retailers suggests an uphill climb, in spite of any publicity, good or bad.
Only a small number of Russian consumer goods companies have made substantial inroads in markets beyond the former Soviet bloc, and that number is even smaller for clothing designers in particular.
Russian brands with followings overseas include Sinergia’s Beluga vodka, Russky Standart’s Russian Standard vodka and Baltika’s beers. Except for AFK Sistema, which runs the Detsky Mir children’s stores, there are no publicly traded Russian companies in the retail clothing sector, said Irina Prokopyeva, a consumer goods analyst at Alfa Bank.
Fashion brands have made limited forays into foreign markets. From 2000 to 2006, domestic brand Razu Mikhina appeared in stores in Italy, the United States, Britain, Japan and other countries, said Irina Lobachyova, deputy editor-in-chief at Cosmopolitan Magazine in Russia. Denis Simachyov also used to sell in Japan, the United States, Italy and the Middle East, but now the fashion line sells only domestically, she said.
Kira Plastinina, a brand offering short, frilly clothing for young women, entered the U.S. market in 2008, but its operation there filed for bankruptcy the next year, television station RT reported.
One of the rare success stories is Mikhail Panteleyev, who sells his designs in Britain, the Netherlands, Italy and other locations, Lobachyova said.
But the presence of Russian labels on foreign fashion racks is rare. Bosco’s attempt to form good impressions on the backs of Spanish athletes — literally — might be difficult given the tone of some press coverage.
Then there are the customers themselves that Bosco must win over.
“The uniforms are ugly, old-fashioned and uncomfortable-looking,” one poster wrote on the El Pais website. “I refuse to get one of these absurdities inspired by Soviet people’s fashion.”
Kusnirovich, however, is upbeat on the power of Bosco Sport’s Olympic image. At the presentation of the Ukrainian team’s outfits in Kiev this month, he said the Olympic kit “gives athletes a true sense of identity when they compete.”
In its press release, Kusnirovich was quoted as saying the team uniform “reminds them of the part that they play in Olympic history, and the history of their nation.”


TITLE: Russians Flock to London Area
AUTHOR: By Lena Smirnova 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Hampstead Heath is a popular real estate destination for wealthy Russians who are wary of central London.
On one of the highest points of London, surrounded by serene ponds and historic architecture, is a real estate alcove for wealthy, and often secretive, Russian buyers.
Luxury property in north London, like the homes in the scenic Hampstead Heath area, has become increasingly popular among Russians who prefer to pass on the intense competition for central trophy addresses in favor of secluded suburban homes.
While Russians who are making their first purchases in the London real estate market usually look for central locations, those who are familiar with the city are more interested in luxury properties in the suburbs, said Yelena Yurgeneva, regional director of residential real estate at Knight Frank Russia & CIS.
“Right now, Russians are not only looking at London as a shopping destination but also as a city to give their children a good education,” Yurgeneva said.
St. John’s Wood, Highgate and Hampstead Heath are particularly popular among Russian buyers. The northern neighborhoods are historically well-known among Russians for their proximity to Highgate Cemetery, the burial site of Karl Marx and former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, though now, locals Sting and Elton John are probably the area’s more sought-after neighbors.
“They like the proximity of the [Hampstead Heath park]. They like the green space and that they can buy a decent-size plot of land there,” said Simon Edwards, director at Savills Hampstead office. “It’s the closest to London as you can get.”
Russians bought almost all of the big houses that Savills sold in the area over the past 10 years, Edwards said.
Yet despite the concentration of Russian residents and landmarks in north London, the areas still can’t be called tight-knit Russian communities. Russians who settle in Hampstead Heath can be secretive about their move, said Trevor Abrahmsohn, founder of Glentree International real estate agency.
“Some want things to be very visible. Others want total anonymity,” Abrahmsohn said.
Edwards could not name Savills’ Russian clients, but he said they are household names in their home country. Russia’s richest man, Alisher Usmanov, and footballer Andrei Arshavin are among those who live in the Hampstead area.
Abrahmsohn said Russians interested in these luxury suburban properties are usually in their mid-40s and 50s, with an international outlook, a fancy for glittery decor, and wives who are “beautiful and 10 years younger than them … at least.”
Glentree International currently has about 10 properties that would appeal to Russian buyers. One such house, the Villa at Caenwood Court, has a swimming pool, gymnasium, sauna, 24-hour concierge and direct access to Hampstead Heath park. The property, which is selling for &#163;4.5 million ($7 million), has already received interest from Russian buyers.
Wealthy buyers from Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Poland, Iran, Egypt, Nigeria, India and China also figure prominently in the Hampstead area.
“Russians are similar to the Nigerians and Middle Easterners,” Abrahmsohn said. “They like ornate living.”


TITLE: Official Calls for Laws on Land Ownership to Be Amended
AUTHOR: By Irina Filatova 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The privatization of state-owned lands proposed by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev will allow for more efficient use of land plots, but a clear mechanism for selling those lands needs to be created, an Economic Development Ministry official said Monday.
The existing legislation should be amended “as soon as possible” for the government to put the plots up for tender, said Andrei Ivakin, head of the property department at the ministry.
Privatizing state-owned land is primarily aimed at the more efficient use of those land plots, rather than just cash injections into the federal budget, he said at a news conference, RIA-Novosti reported.
About 92 percent of the country’s territory is owned by federal or local government, Ivakin said, adding that those lands include forest territories that are not liable to privatization.
Last week, Medvedev called for state-owned lands to be put up for sale, a measure that he said would help improve the investment climate.
The initiative is questionable, because sale to private investors might result in land remaining idle, as happened to the lands of former collective farms that had been privatized after the collapse of the Soviet Union, said Oleg Repchenko, head of real estate portal IRN.ru.
In one example, he said, landlords of agricultural plots in the Moscow region “own hundreds of thousands of hectares, and these lands are not in use at all.”
Setting higher taxes for idle land plots would help solve the problem, as owners would have to use them in order to not overpay, Repchenko said.
The government intends to push forward legislative initiatives that would allow idle lands owned by private investors to be taken away and put up for tender in order for those plots “not to collect dust,” Ivakin said.

TITLE: Why Putin Wants to Punish Pussy Riot
AUTHOR: By Georgy Bovt
TEXT: Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has made his second public statement regarding the Pussy Riot case. His first comment was in an interview to five Russian television networks in April. He said that in carrying out the stunt at Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral, the members of Pussy Riot got exactly what they wanted — popularity.
Medvedev offered his second comment on the issue in an interview with The Times of London, published Monday. He quipped that “the young women were lucky” to be tried in Russia. Their fate would have been worse in other countries, he said. What other countries was he referring to? Considering that the Pussy Riot trio is facing up to seven years behind bars — an excessive penalty for hooliganism by any Western standards — perhaps only the Taliban would give them a worse sentence for committing similar acts.
The behavior of the authorities seems irrational. Why are they making an initially absurd scandal even more ridiculous?
By initiating a Middle Ages-style witch-hunt against three young women, the Russian Orthodox Church has caused irreparable damage to its reputation in the eyes of the educated class. Meanwhile, nationalists and religious radicals support the church’s campaign. Puzzled and perturbed by the actions of church and government officials, intellectuals and cultural figures even wrote a collective appeal in defense of the three girls. Their petition was ignored.
The text of the prosecution’s indictment was also from the Middle Ages, repeatedly citing church decisions that were originally adopted from that era. And finally, many observers following the case have concluded that the young women are not being tried for committing the political sin of calling for President Vladimir Putin’s resignation, but for blasphemously committing indignities in a Christian holy place. They are de facto being tried for violating “religious statutes” that do not even exist in the Criminal Code and have no place in a country that is defined as secular in the Constitution.
Interestingly enough, if Pussy Riot members had committed the same crime during the Russian Empire — clearly a more conservative era when the church played a more prominent official role in government — they would have faced a sentence of only three to six months.
There is another version of events that suggests the authorities are using the Pussy Riot case to drive a wedge between liberal and conservative opposition camps that had, until now, considered joining forces in the anti-government mass protest movement. Liberals believe that the Pussy Riot members should have been released long ago, while nationalists argue that the women smeared traditional Russian values with their blasphemous act and deserve harsh punishment. If the authorities orchestrating the case against Pussy Riot had hoped it would have this divisive effect, they played their cards correctly.
But I am an advocate of simple explanations regarding the actions of Russia’s political elite. In most cases, the simpler the interpretation, the more closely it reflects reality. Russia’s leaders lack the vision necessary to strategically plan multiple steps into the future. At best, they can manage one or two moves, but more often their actions are knee-jerk reactions to events and do not reflect complex, strategic maneuvering.
In many respects, the state’s crackdown on Pussy Riot is meant to send a strong signal to the nationalists in Russia. This strategy is driven by a belief among Putin’s ruling elite that the Soviet Union collapsed because leaders were unable to cope with a rising nationalist mood in the country. Accordingly, ethnic and religious conflict is considered the worst threat facing Russia today. This explains why Putin reacted with such speed and decisiveness to the nationalist riots in Manezh Square two years ago. In his view, nationalist and religious radicalism are interconnected, and he will use harsh measures to nip them in the bud.
This might explain the harsh treatment toward Pussy Riot. The authorities reason that if they release the women or give them too light a punishment, dozens of copy-cat provocations will be carried out in churches, synagogues and mosques across the country, leading to internal strife and a possible meltdown of the Russian state. Although there are many underlying causes behind Russia’s interethnic and inter-regional conflicts that can only be resolved through complex and multifaceted efforts, the authorities have traditionally favored implementing quick, punitive and repressive measures over long-term solutions.
In fact, they apply the same approach to many other areas of public life as well. This is why I think the verdict in the Pussy Riot case will strike the liberal and educated segments of Russian society as being unnecessarily cruel.

Georgy Bovt is a political analyst.

TITLE: inside russia: Middle Class Fleeing Putin’s Russia
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina 
TEXT: Blogger Alexei Navalny has accused Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin of concealing real estate and business interests in the Czech Republic.
But this is par for the course these days. Many Russians have purchased homes and apartments in Eastern Europe over the past few years. And besides, Bastrykin’s Czech apartment is inexpensive by Moscow standards.
The larger and broader problem is that more than 100,000 people are leaving Russia every year, and the revelation that the head of the Investigative Committee bought property abroad — “just in case” — is a bad sign any way you look at it.
Practically all of my acquaintances are leaving. If they can manage their businesses from abroad, it is easier for them to leave. In addition, they relocate their parents abroad if they can afford it.
And it’s not only the young people who are leaving. One middle-aged man I know works 24/7 to earn $3,000 per month. His eyes lit up when he told me how his wife and children would be living in a small house in Brittany where the schools are better, and the food and clothes are better quality and less expensive than in Russia.
I am talking here about middle-class emigration. They’re spending most of the money they earn here on real estate overseas. The reason is simple: The prospect of six or 12 more years under President Vladimir Putin has made Russia unfit for habitation.
People are leaving because no matter what they do in Russia, they cannot escape the unhealthy and dangerous conditions here.
Yes, many can buy apartments and furnish them, but every day they must step out of their apartments and confront grungy entryways that reek of urine. And even if you can build a 5-meter-high fence around your luxury home on Rublyovka and send your kids to school with a private driver, you can’t escape Russian lawlessness. A reckless government official or mafia boss speeding through traffic could easily plow head-on into your car and walk away scot-free.
People are leaving because they cannot live in Putin’s Russia. The country is no longer suitable for habitation. It has become a Third World country in terms of infrastructure and personal safety. Russia lacks normal schools, hospitals and universities. Every interaction with government bureaucracy inevitably entails bribes and unbearable paperwork and frustration.
And the people in power who brought the country to this pathetic condition tell us that we have problems because “Russia is surrounded by enemies” and “the West doesn’t like us.”
Apparently, it’s those evil Westerners who flooded Krymsk, cause Moscow’s endless traffic jams and force government officials to take bribes.
But ordinary Russians have begun to ask the same question that Navalny asked: If the West is so bad, why did Bastrykin buy an apartment there? And why does Putin’s friend and oil billionaire Gennady Timchenko hold Finnish citizenship and live in Switzerland?
I have no problem with the man who struggles to earn enough money to send his family to France, or the businesspeople who earn their fortunes here and live abroad. But I do have a problem with the countless number of government officials who are destroying this country and blaming the West while buying luxury homes in Europe and the United States.

Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.

TITLE: The Pussy bandwagon
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: With more and more Western musicians — from Red Hot Chili Peppers to Peter Gabriel and Sting — showing their support for Pussy Riot, the female punk-rockers who have found themselves behind bars for an anti-Putin performance in a Moscow church in March, Russian musicians are being criticized for not showing enough support.
The trial against members of Pussy Riot opened in Moscow’s Tagansky District Court on Monday.
Last week, a Pussy Riot support committee — featuring opposition activists and artists — was established in St. Petersburg with the aim of holding benefit events in the city beginning in early September.
Televizor’s Mikhail Borzykin and the Electric Guerillas’ Vadim Kurylyov are so far the only musicians on the committee, which includes opposition activists Olga Kurnosova and Mikhail Yeliseyev, journalist Dmitry Gubin, actors Andrei Devotchenko and Larisa Dmitriyeva and film director Andrei Nekrasov.
However, the committee said it hopes that the number of musicians on the committee will increase, referring to international support for the cause and an open letter calling for the release of the women, who have been held in custody for nearly five months despite having young children. The letter has been signed by artists and musicians including Mashina Vremeni’s Andrei Makarevich and Akvarium’s Boris Grebenshchikov, who had earlier been criticized for their support of the Kremlin.
Kurnosova and Yeliseyev organized several rock shows and rallies featuring rock performances, including an open-air concert called Rock for Freedom in August 2008.
The infamous “The Other Song” concert, which was due to be held in February 2008, was canceled by the now-defunct ROKS Club, which argued that the club was designed to hold purely musical concerts and did not want to host any political events. The musicians suspected that the club had received a call from the authorities.
In an unexpected move, the Pussy Riot committee organizers addressed St. Petersburg venues asking them to hold an event due in early September. Venues often cancel politically-charged events out of fear of being shut down by the authorities.
“Clubs are always under scrutiny and pressure,” Borzykin said.
“Even before our most recent concert a month ago, the club’s management said they had received a call from the FSB (Federal Security Service) warning musicians to be more cautious and not to say anything that could cause them to be prosecuted under the law. This was an attempt to intimidate the musicians. 
“Such attempts to gain control happen all the time. But we need some breakthrough with somebody independent taking on the responsibility of holding such a concert.”
Even if bands manage to hold protest concerts, they tend to do so in a secretive way, which does not help much to promote the cause.
Few heard about a punk concert in support of Pussy Riot that was held last month at a local bar on Dumskaya Ulitsa on July 20, the day before the court prolonged the detention of the imprisoned women by six months.
Advertised on a Russian social network and attended by about 50 fans, bands spoke out about the cause from the stage and dedicated songs to the imprisoned women, but no posters were to be seen, while a sign on the door described the event as a “private party.”
According to the frontman of anarcho-punk band Electro Zombie, who identified himself only as Alexander and who organized the concert, venue managers are so afraid of anything political taking place that when the band put an anti-Putin leaflet on the wall for its recent concert in another bar, the group was immediately approached by the bar’s management, who demanded they take it down. He also said the organizers wanted to avoid a possible attack from Orthodox radicals.
During the past few years, most opposition-themed cultural events have officially been canceled due to alleged roof leaks or fire safety violations. Although the authorities deny playing a role, insiders insist they are the ones behind the cancelations.
Borzykin says the organizers hope to hold a bigger concert, featuring some well-known acts, to be held on either Sept. 1 or 2.
“The situation is aggravating and something should be done immediately; it’s not clear what will happen to the girls if they are sent to a [prison] camp,” he says.
“This rampant obscurantism is well-organized. It’s fed by the church but commissioned by the political leadership. They started this war deliberately. That’s why we should have some organization on our part. It’s interesting even as a social experiment — to create a public structure to confront the attack of clerics and the authorities.”
Borzykin said that arresting the women for the song “Holy Mother of God, Drive Putin Away,” which criticized the Orthodox Church’s Patriarch Kirill for his outspoken support of then-presidential candidate Vladimir Putin and his United Russia party, was a desperate move by the Kremlin.
“It’s just another application of the ‘divide and rule’ principle that they use for any situation,” he says.
“It looks like they are running out of ammo and are ready to use the smallest conflict to split society and recreate the atmosphere of a civil war. If you watch television, you get the impression that people want to live in a time before Peter the Great. They declare a small war and distract the public’s attention, while continuing to steal and lie.
“People who think otherwise should not feel they’re alone, that’s what all the letters and the committee are for.”
In July, a campaign for the release of the women, who were named as prisoners of conscience by Amnesty International, reached its height.
The band Faith No More offered the remaining Pussy Riot members the stage to make a statement about the cause during a Moscow concert, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Anthony Kiedis put on a Pussy Riot T-shirt when performing in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and Franz Ferdinand dedicated its song “This Fire” to the imprisoned women when performing at the Afisha Picnic open-air festival in the Russian capital.
In Moscow, Kiedis and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ bass player Flea as well as Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos took the time to write letters to the imprisoned women, which were delivered to the detention center by the imprisoned Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s husband Pyotr Verzilov early last week.
Last week also saw Sting join the cause.
“It’s appalling that the musicians from Pussy Riot could face prison sentences of up to seven years in jail. Dissent is a legitimate and essential right in any democracy and modern politicians must accept this fact with tolerance,” Sting was quoted as saying on Amnesty International’s website.
“A sense of proportion — and a sense of humor — are signs of strength, not signs of weakness. Surely the Russian authorities will completely drop these spurious charges and allow the women, these artists, to get back to their lives and to their children.”
The trial prompted Finnish jazz pianist Iiro Rantala to cancel his Moscow concert. ‘I don’t want to perform in a country where free speech is at medieval levels,” he told Finland’s national broadcaster Yle last week.
On Monday, support came from British musician Peter Gabriel, who wrote his own letter to the women.
“Nadya, Katya, Masha, you have the right to make your own prayers — from the heart,” he wrote. “I hope you will be released very, very soon. We are all watching.”
Pussy Riot supporters also appealed to Madonna asking her to show her support when she performs in Moscow and St. Petersburg next week.
Unlike their Western counterparts, most Russian leading bands, however, appear uninterested or as if they don’t want to take any risks by supporting Putin’s foes.
According to London-based activist Andrei Sidelnikov, three Russian and Ukrainian mainstream rock bands declined to support Pussy Riot at a London concert on Saturday. 
On Facebook, Sidelnikov said he brought Free Pussy Riot T-shirts and asked Mumiy Troll frontman Ilya Lagutenko, Igor Sukachyov of Garik Sukachyov i Neprikasayemiye and Oleg Skripka of the Ukrainian band Vopli Vidoplyasova to wear them during the show, but all three declined. 
Skripka, whose band frequently performs in Russia, was quoted by Sidelnikov as saying that backing Pussy Riot was “dangerous,” even though the musician was one of the key figures during the Orange Revolution protests in his hometown of Kiev in 2004-2005.
“I didn’t really think they would agree, so their refusal was ultimately predictable,” Sidelnikov wrote. 
“The only surprising thing was the reaction of Ilya Lagutenko, who categorically refused not only to speak, but asked the organizers to ensure that I didn’t appear close to him under any circumstances — that there be no photographs in which he could be shown next to the slogan.”
Pussy Riot held several unsanctioned protest performances in unlikely places starting in October 2011, including in the metro, on the roof of a trolley bus, in a boutique and next to the detention center where protesters against electoral fraud were being held.
Until the surprise arrests of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich in March, their best-known performance was the one held on Red Square in January.
For the video of what the group described as a “punk prayer” — which featured their appearance in church — the three members were arrested in March and charged with hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. They have already spent nearly five months in a detention center. If found guilty, they face up to seven years in prison.


TITLE: Creative trinity
AUTHOR: By Natalya Smolentseva 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Work by Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse and Joan Miro went on display in the city last Friday — at a photo gallery. Yet none of the artists were photographers. What, then, connects the artists and why is their work on show at the Rachmaninov Garden photo gallery?
There are some who deny that photography is a true art, while others consider graphics to be the predecessor of monochrome photography. The “Stars of the School of Paris” exhibit hopes to give visitors a chance to make a connection between the two branches of art. 
“We wanted our visitors to draw a parallel between [graphics and photography], in order to exert an aesthetic and artistic influence on viewers,” said Yury Gurchenkov, director of the Rachmaninov Garden gallery. The graphic works we see here are no doubt art, but can monochrome photography also be considered a piece of art?”  
The period known as the School of Paris was the time during the first half of the 20th century when Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism were born. It was then that artists from all over the world moved to Paris, the center of artistic life at the time. Frenchmen, Spaniards and Russian immigrants arguably made the most significant contribution to the development of the School of Paris. Following this thought, the exhibit comprises pieces by France’s Matisse, Spain’s Miro and the Russian Empire’s Chagall. 
Matisse was the leader of the Fauvists. The aggressive freedom of color in his paintings illustrates the desire for self-expression on the one hand and an attempt to escape from the reality of revolution and war on the other. Much of his art has no comprehensible subject; the subjects are lines or spots or colors. At the Rachmaninov Garden gallery, visitors can see some of Matisse’s nudes, including the “Blue Nudes” series made using the decoupage technique.
The Russian-Jewish artist Chagall, who found his second homeland in Paris, is represented at the exhibit by his illustrations for Nikolai Gogol’s novel “Dead Souls.” In the etchings made for the French art dealer Ambroise Vollard, characters such as Sobakevich, Korobochka and Chichikov — well-known to all Russian schoolchildren — can be recognized. The etchings on display at the exhibit were printed on Japanese paper and were the first of 418 done by Chagall. His works seem pure and childish, and have the same fairytale quality to them as many of his iconic paintings. 
In this respect, Chagall anticipated Surrealism, which is also represented at the exhibit in the colorful lithographs by Miro, whose influence from Paul Klee and Vasily Kandinsky is clear. Miro’s works are testament to his skills not only as an artist, but also as a decorator. 
The idea for the photo gallery’s latest exhibition was proposed by art historian Vladimir Nazansky. The modest exhibition consists of 24 works.  
“The presence of such leading names in our gallery is really a great event,” said Gurchenkov. 

The “Stars of the School of Paris” exhibition runs through Sept. 30 at the Rachmaninov Garden photo gallery, 5 Kazanskaya Ulitsa. M. Nevsky Prospekt / Gostiny Dvor. Tel. 312 9558.

TITLE: the word’s worth: Coming to terms with deadlines
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy 
TEXT: Ñðîê: term, duration, deadline

According to the great etymologist Max Fasmer, when ancient Russians wanted to cut a deal, they said something like ñúðåêó, which meant “I agree.” Ñúðîêú was what they agreed to — ñîãëàøåíèå (agreement).
Unfortunately, Fasmer is silent on whether these ancients shook hands, bumped foreheads or just celebrated the deal with some home brew.
In any case, over time ñðîê has narrowed in meaning. It is no longer the agreement, but just part of it — its duration or the moment the agreement is up. And the notion of agreement itself has become abstract or disappeared altogether.
Today, ñðîê is any kind of time period, like ñðîê àðåíäû (term of rental agreement), ñðîê äåéñòâèÿ äîãîâîðà (period of contract validity), ñðîê õðàíåíèÿ ïðîäóêòà (product shelf life) or ñðîê ñëóæáû îáîðóäîâàíèÿ (equipment service life).
It’s the word used to describe a term in office: Ìåäâåäåâ ðåøèë íå èäòè íà âòîðîé ñðîê (Medvedev decided not to run for a second term). It’s also the word used to describe a jail term, which is the source of endless puns, particularly in newspaper headlines: Ëîíäîíöû äàëè ìýðó Äæîíñîíó âòîðîé ñðîê (Londoners sentenced Mayor Johnson to a second term).
But ñðîê can also refer to the moment a contract is up or a piece of work is due. Here there is a lot of linguistic variety. For example, you can say ê ñðîêó (by the deadline) or â ñðîê (in the time period), both of which mean “on time.” Ñòðîèòåëè ñäàëè îáúåêò â ñðîê (The builders finished the structure on time).
When a client asks me to do a translation, I always ask: Êîãäà êðàéíèé ñðîê? (When is the deadline?). The answer is often, of course: Â÷åðà (Yesterday).
Deadlines are often described in the plural in Russian, even if you are talking about just one: ß íå óñïåâàþ ïî ñðîêàì! (I can’t meet the deadline!) Ìû âûïîëíèëè ðàáîòó â íàïðÿæ¸ííûå ñðîêè (We finished the work on a really tight schedule). Â êðàò÷àéøèå ñðîêè is what Americans call ASAP. Ìû ãàðàíòèðóåì äîñòàâêó ïèñüìà â Àìåðèêó â êðàò÷àéøèå ñðîêè (We guarantee postal delivery to America in the shortest time possible).
When a job is really urgent, you can call it àâðàë or àâðàëüíàÿ ðàáîòà. The origins of the word àâðàë might surprise native English-speakers. Most Russian dictionaries assert that it is a corruption of the English “over all” and state that this phrase is shouted on a ship to mean “all hands on deck.” Oddly, in all these dictionaries “over” is defined as íàâåðõ (up, above), yet no English nautical dictionary I can find supports this.
More authoritatively, in movies when a ship hits rough water or is under attack, the captain never shouts “Over all!” Even Fasmer is rather reticent on this topic, but he does cite the Dutch “overal” (defined as “everywhere”) as the source. Given that Peter the Great founded the Russian Navy after his Dutch adventure, this sounds more likely to me.
In any case, when your boss or client shouts “Àâðàë!” it means, “Get cracking!”
When I ask a translation client — in a squeaky, pathetic voice — Ýòî ñðî÷íî? (Is it urgent?), I’m always happy to hear: Íåò, íå ñðî÷íî (No, it’s not urgent). Íå ãîðèò (There’s no hurry; literally “it’s not burning”). Òåðïèò (It can wait). Áåç ñïåøêè (No rush). Êîãäà ïîëó÷èòñÿ (Whenever you can).
I’ll bump foreheads over that kind of deal any day.

Michele A. Berdy, a Moscow-based translator and interpreter, is author of “The Russian Word’s Worth” (Glas), 
a collection of her columns.

TITLE: talk of the town
TEXT: As Olympic fever sweeps the planet, there are those glued to the TV screen, anxiously following their team’s progress, and then there are those who just cannot manage to feel even the slightest interest in sport. No matter how indifferent you feel to the Games themselves, the Olympic offer at the Hotel Astoria is enough to get anyone feeling warm and fuzzy about female wrestlers and men jumping into sandpits. 
The Astoria has teamed up with Brown’s Hotel in London, which along with the Astoria belongs to Rocco Forte Hotels, to bring some dangerously delectable cocktails from The Donovan Bar at Brown’s to the Astoria’s Kandinsky Bar for the duration of the Summer Olympics. The classic cocktail recipes brought especially from the hotel in Mayfair, which was known for being the favorite place to stay of Sir Winston Churchill, include the Box Brownie, Sidecar and Paradise. 
The refreshing drinks are available at the Kandinsky Bar through Aug. 12.
For those more interested in getting some exercise than watching the champions battle it out, the city has plenty of summer options. The sun is back in town, and this means the return of outdoor yoga and dance classes on the grass at New Holland island. The entrance to a 90-minute class costs 350 rubles, and no pre-booking is required. At 3 pm. Thursday there is a free lesson in body ballet from Isadora dance school. Thursday is also Yoga Day at New Holland: Starting at 7 p.m., Full Moon Yoga begins, complete with Indian cuisine and free master classes. At midnight, join in a group meditation under the guidance of yoga expert Vinay Menon. For details, check www.newhollandsp.ru.
Open-air dining in the city now has a fresh new twist with the arrival of Besedki restaurant on the local dining scene. Located in the President Hotel in the town of Zelenogorsk on the outskirts of St. Petersburg on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, Besedki (Pavilions) offers bookable pavilions as well as tables. Each pavilion seats four or five people and is perfect for a family get-together. The cuisine is as close to a typical dacha barbecue as possible.
Food from a little further afield will be featured in September’s edition of the Chef’s Discovery project, which will bring the flavors of South Africa to St. Petersburg. Last month’s incarnation of the gastronomic project saw St. Petersburgers treated to a dinner from Italy’s Michelin-starred chef Giancarlo Morelli, the man behind Osteria del Pomiroeu. Hosted by Mansarda restaurant, the dinner became a triumph of Morelli’s philosophy — state-of-the-art home-cooking in which regional products take center stage. The Italian maestro came to the city armed only with Modena balsamic vinegar, olives and olive oil. The menu he created at Mansarda consisted of Parmesan ice cream on top of onion pie, green nettle risotto with deer carpaccio, scallops with eggplant and tomatoes and veal fillet served with white cabbage cooked with sour cream and honey. The strawberry semifreddo served with cappuccino sorbet that crowned the meal could safely be declared iconic.


TITLE: President of the vampires 
AUTHOR: By Nellee Holmes 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Movie director Timur Bekmambetov has been responsible for some of the Russian film industry’s major post-Perestroika hits, including “Night Watch” (2004) and “Day Watch” (2006). 
Those films gave Bekmambetov his big break in Hollywood with “Wanted” (2008) and this summer’s “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” both of which carry Bekmambetov’s trademark visual fireworks. 
Bekmambetov met up with The St. Petersburg Times in New York to talk about his latest directorial effort, the historical-horror mash-up “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” one of the most anticipated movies of the summer. Co-produced by Tim Burton and based on the novel of the same name by Seth Grahame-Smith, it tells the secret history of America’s 16th President (played by Benjamin Walker) and his crusade to destroy the undead and their slave-owning helpers.
<i><b>Q: How do you relate to Lincoln?
A:</b></i> Lincoln didn’t allow the bad guys to do to the United States [what happened to the Soviet Union]. He kept the country solid, and I went through Perestroika, which for me [meant that] I lost the country I loved. I live in Russia but I grew up in Kazakhstan, which [back then] was one country. Now they’re different independent states. For me it’s a drama and trauma because I still feel that this country ought to be united.
<i><b>Q: Did you feel under particular pressure making a movie about an American historical figure?
A: </b></i>No pressure. It was challenging. To begin this kind of project you have to be a bit irresponsible, because if you’re too serious you will never make it. Can you imagine, for me — a Russian director — to make a movie about Abraham Lincoln, it was quite risky but I was brave and I did it. I had to make because it’s absolutely unique, nobody had made anything similar before, nobody had made a vampire movie about a real historical figure and nobody makes them in 3D, and nobody had enjoyed 19th-century America in 3D. There were enough elements to make this movie unique, and for me, vampire movies are genre movies, they must be grounded. They must be based on reality. It’s the only way that it works, like even “Twilight” and “Night Watch.” It’s a unique genre of movies because they are based on the real world. Vampires are next to you. It’s your classmate, it’s your neighbor in “Night Watch” and it’s your president. Everybody has a five-dollar bill with his portrait in their pocket. 
When I began I had no idea how to finish it. I felt that I had something very valuable in my hands and I felt a huge responsibility because it’s not a Marvel superhero, it’s a real man and it’s the real history of the country, and if you do something wrong, you could even destroy the country because the country rests — every country, every nationality rests — on two or three names and if you destroy this legend then the whole country could fall apart like what happened in the Soviet Union — we made a lot of jokes about Lenin and Stalin and the country just disappeared.
<i><b>Q: Why did you make it a 3D movie?
A:</b></i> I think it’s really important that you have a chance to be there in 19th-century America and to really feel the world, to be next to Lincoln, not to look at him through a spyglass like 2D but just really to be with him. I was surprised how much more emotional and dramatic scenes are in 3D. I mean, because jumping and action scenes have their own logic, because his weapon was an ax, and when you’re fighting a vampire with an ax, the distance is crucial: If you miss by one inch you will probably die. The 3D format enables you to feel the distance. It’s not like a machine gun; here you are fighting and you really need to feel the distance and it gives you the emotional connection with a character. That’s what I discovered, but most important for me is that 3D is like a theater. You know, theater is more emotional than cinema because it’s happening right next to you. They are three-dimensional, they are real, and that’s what I found in 3D movie, 3D language — you really feel that Lincoln is next to you, and you feel him, and I think that’s more important.
<i><b>Q: Is it true that Tom Hardy and Michael Fassbender were considered for “Abraham Lincoln” at one point? 
A:</b></i> I really like Tom and I really like Michael Fassbender. But at the end of the day it was clear that only Ben Walker could be Lincoln because, well, we have a Lincoln. Ben Walker was perfect. Nobody knew who he was here, and he’s a totally believable professional actor, a genius, and most importantly, he’s a Lincoln as a person, his personality — I think that’s who Lincoln was. He is very honest, very elegant, with an unbelievable sense of humor. Dark and melancholic sense of humor.
<i><b>Q: How has your Russian-Kazakh background helped you to become an American director?
A:</b></i> I believe that it would have been impossible for me to make this movie without my background, without people behind me. I had a great, unbelievable American crew, but part of the crew was my friends from Russia, just like on “Wanted”. That’s very important for me, because they are unique people. For example, my wife is a costume designer. She designed the costumes for the movie. 
There is a fresco history of vampires done by Alexander Petrov, a great Russian animator who won an Academy Award for “The Old Man and the Sea” (1999). He made it — he is a friend of mine and I called him and said “Alexander, can you help me on my movie? I want to animate a fresco,” and he said, “Yeah, we’ll do it,” and he made this masterpiece.
There is a previz studio in Moscow, it’s a secret lab I have. Nobody has anything like it. It’s a group of people who can previz the action scenes before I make them; I can create the action scenes in animation form first and put virtual cameras, cut, make sound effects and everything. I do it before I shoot. It’s really, really helpful. I have an unbelievable guy from Kazakhstan, Igor, who created all the fighting techniques. He’s a fight choreographer. He is an unbelievable kung fu master and he helped me a lot. I have a CG studio in Moscow. They did all the vampire transformations. The vampires have very interesting eyes; you feel there is an effect. They invented this technique. They created all the blood in the movie. I mean, they made maybe a third of the movie. CG was made in Russia and for me it’s not just courtesy to my past; it’s essential. I need people who will follow me not because it’s their business but because they are on my team.
<i><b>Q: What was the first movie you saw? 
A:</b></i> It was a Russian musical that I saw when I was two years old; I really remember that moment and the movie theater, I even remember the short — in Russia there was a short before the movie. There was a five- or 10-minute short and I remember it was an animation about a barber’s shop and an elephant.
<i><b>Q: What does being a Hollywood director mean to you?
A:</b></i> First of all, Hollywood means I can work with the best people like with Caleb Deschanel who shot “Abraham Lincoln.” With John Myhre, our production designer who made “Wanted.” He’s a two-time Academy Award winner. And to work with the composer Danny Elfman on “Wanted” and with Henry Jackman on “Lincoln,” I mean, it’s the opportunity to work with the best people. But most important is Hollywood’s distribution system. It’s an opportunity to make movies for the whole world, and not just for one country.



TITLE: in the spotlight: A busty ray of light
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas 
TEXT: Last week, a new star rose on NTV television, spreading fear throughout the land.
It was Sveta Kuritsyna, 19, the member of a pro-Kremlin youth group who famously babbled in a comment to a journalist that the Putin era was great because “we have started to dress more better.”
He then posted her gushing comment full of other unlikely assertions on YouTube, and it took off like a rocket. More than 2 million people have watched it by now, and her slogan was picked up ironically by protesters.
I read that the reporter who posted the videos was mortified with guilt about ruining her life. But judging from the program, Kuritsyna was even a little proud of her Internet fame and people recognizing her, and he really had no grounds for concern.
Kuritsyna, from the textile town of Ivanovo, was speaking as a member of Nashi’s Stal, or Steel, division. Its members are known as “smelters.”
She came across as different from most Nashi members, who are monosyllabic and blank-eyed, at least with journalists at events. Rather plump and with long, dark hair, she has dark, naive eyes.
Izvestia newspaper wrote in December that she was taking bookkeeping exams and lived in a hostel on the edge of Ivanovo. It photographed her sitting on a metal bunk bed next to a peeling wall but typing on a laptop that it said was bought on credit by her parents.
Her mother is a seamstress at a linen plant.
It did not go into her love life, but she said her favorite men are Vasily Yakemenko, the founder of Nashi, and Vladimir Putin.
Before joining Stal, she had a dalliance with the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia.
The show, which started Saturday, is called “Luch Sveta,” (Ray of Light) after her nickname, Sveta.
Enthusiastically, she “interviewed” celebrities in a show with the conceit that she herself had come to make her way in Moscow and was learning about life in the big city and trying to get a regular series on NTV.
It makes sense since most Russian dramas are about provincial girls coming to conquer Moscow.
She collapsed giggling after bumping into pop producer Iosif Prigozhin.
“I was lost. I couldn’t think what to ask,” she said later.
Then that nice weatherman from NTV warned her it could be a one-off show.
“What if they kick you out after the first show?” he asked skeptically.
“That was fun,” she said undauntedly as the brief master class ended.
Then she went to a lame awards ceremony where some Russian celebrities including her former favorite lawmaker, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, were given prizes of bed linen.
At the party, she homed in on television presenter Anfisa Chekhova, known for her impressive display of cleavage.
“Maybe I too can get into show business using my breasts,” she mused, no slouch in this department herself. Well, I suppose there may be a vacancy or two now that Ksenia Sobchak has been blacklisted.
“You just have great breasts. I have always admired them. Can you tell me the size?” was her opening line to Chekhova.
Chekhova’s makeup froze over a little as she said, “That’s not a tactful question.”
To create some tears, NTV set Sveta up in a situation where police hassled her over her lack of registration and confiscated her passport — realistic enough, probably.
“Sveta passed the baptism of fire,” the channel intoned.
She also met pop producer Bari Alibasov, an interesting character who collects toilets and periodically rejuvenates the lineup of a boy band called Na-Na, which started in the 1980s.
“You have really striking, expressive breasts,” he said, examining her assets in a low-cut dress. “You need to exploit them to the max.”
The show was the highest-rated Saturday night show in Moscow, Izvestia reported.


TITLE: The Dish: Wide open space
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: <b>Skylight</b>
A restaurant named Skylight could very reasonably be expected to be found on the top floor. We were therefore somewhat surprised to be escorted to a wide white staircase leading to the second floor of the newly opened Crowne Plaza St. Petersburg Airport hotel.
The hotel has been operating for only a few months, and everything is pleasantly shiny and new. As much as the existing Pulkovo international airport, with its pigmy size and shortage of facilities and services, is an embarrassment for Europe’s fourth-largest city, the Skylight restaurant is a delightful experience. Its contrast with the small and ever-overcrowded airport itself could not be greater.
This vast restaurant, which can accommodate nearly 230 diners, felt airy and full of light on a sunny day. In St. Petersburg, it is hard to plan a lunch in a panoramic restaurant, in the sense that the weather can always render the panoramic part null and void at the last minute. We were lucky, and spent a Saturday afternoon gazing at arriving and departing planes from the venue’s ceiling to floor windows. With large white designer lamps, a winter garden at the center of the room and stylish minimalist furnishings, the restaurant clearly did not save on design.
The restaurant was not packed, but did not appear deserted either — a handful of tables were occupied by couples and cheerful-looking youths, most of whom seemed to be hotel guests.
The compact menu features a winning selection of dishes for a transit dining experience. Russian cuisine, represented by beef Stroganoff and borshch, is fused with European bestsellers, such as Caesar salad, Mozzarella and tomato salad and minestrone soup. 
The cranberry and vodka salmon (380 rubles, $11.80) was a winning arrangement of soft and juicy marinated salmon rolls resting on creamy avocado salad and sprinkled with cranberries. The presence of alcohol in the berries was sublime, and the light, fresh dish was declared a successful treatment of the fish.
The shellfish soup (410 rubles, $12.80) was a transparent yet gorgeously aromatic broth with hearty chunks of salmon and whitefish, as well as king shrimps and mussels. The chef succeeded in making the broth rich in flavor while low on fat. No large oil drops were spotted in the soup — the plight of so many takes on broth in Russia, where oily soups often wrongly appear to be taken as a sign of the cook’s generosity.  
The seafood theme continued with shellfish curry (650 rubles, $20.30), a sweetish, mild variation of the dish, perhaps adapted to Russian tastes. Crayfish and bits of salmon blended with tomato pulp and zucchini in the thick curry sauce. Braised lamb (490 rubles, $15.30) was another success — fresh lamb of this quality is rare in town. Chunks of lamb soaked in red wine sauce were served with roasted eggplants, bell peppers and tomatoes.  
Skipping dessert is the tough part at Skylight. The enticing dessert trolley, with its artfully designed mini-masterpieces, was hard to resist. The waitress offered a choice of four mini-cakes or a full-size dessert. We went for the former, and chose a selection of two portions of lemon mousse topped with fresh berries, and two portions of cherry and chocolate mousse (280 rubles, $8.70). Lightly prepared and creamy, they made the perfect finishing touch to the meal, without making the lunch too heavy, as often happens when midday dessert is involved.
The classy restaurant compares more than favorably with similar venues in other Russian cities, including some of Moscow’s airport establishments, which are often something of a Soviet-era canteen experience. An enjoyable overnight accommodation experience for a transit passenger can become an important factor in determining whether or not they return to a city that they originally visited for business. The service was friendly, discreet and not at all intrusive. Skylight is a fine example of the fact that Russia has begun to overcome its cavalier and indifferent attitude that has for many years been damaging its hospitality and dining industries.

TITLE: Clean Sources of Tap Water in Short Supply
AUTHOR: By Rachel Nielsen 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — When Moscow officials recently banned swimming in half of the city’s outdoor bathing spots because of high levels of microbes and chemicals, the news underlined a perpetual worry: That the water here leaves a lot to be desired.
For most residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg, the most populous and cosmopolitan cities in the country, that concern typically isn’t over a swim in a local pond but the water coming out of the kitchen faucet.
The ban announced this last Friday for five of Moscow’s water recreation sites highlighted what even federal officials acknowledge: There is a lot of cleaning that has to happen between the water’s origin and the tap.
What’s more, consumers distrust the government’s claims, dislike the taste of tap water and buy or boil much of their drinking water, an approach that isn’t entirely without cause.
The federal government’s latest report on water reservoirs and tap water indicates that seriously contaminated water supplies are intensively — and successfully — cleaned by the time they reach apartment buildings and consumers. Interviews with environmental experts, however, suggest that decrepit pipes in those buildings and excessively dirty reservoirs make the drinking water situations in both Moscow and St. Petersburg less than optimal.
“Providing the population with quality drinking water is one of the top problems facing government policy on maintaining the health and improving the quality of life for Russian citizens,” the Federal Consumer Protection Service said in its most recent annual report on public health conditions nationwide.
Even the head of the Federal Consumer Protection Service himself — the nation’s top public health official — doesn’t drink water from the tap.
When Gennady Onishchenko responded to a reporter’s question about what type of water he consumes, he said he drinks “only tea brewed with water from a water cooler.”
“It’s possible to drink straight from the tap, but if your budget allows, find a good [brand of] drinking water in the stores that works with your needs and health,” he told Komsomolskaya Pravda in an interview published in August.
<b>Mixed Messages</b>
Sending mixed messages about the safety of drinking water, Onishchenko said in the same interview that “in Moscow, water from the tap is some of the best in Russia and, I assure you, better in quality than tap water in European countries.”
One of the nation’s leading researchers on the quality of drinking water has a similar view.
Rufina Mikhailova, a top laboratory scientist at Moscow’s Sysin Institute for Human Ecology and Environmental Safety, has said Russian tap water should be boiled before drinking to eliminate problems related to the chlorination used by many water treatment plants. St. Petersburg, however, no longer uses that method.
Yet Moscow’s water rates well overall, she said. “In Moscow, tap water meets the Russian Federation’s modern hygiene standards and the World Health Organization’s recommendations for almost every indicator — microbial, parasite, radiological and chemical,” Mikhailova told Gastronom.ru in November.
The federal report doesn’t say what chemical or biological contaminants were in the affected samples. Researchers with environmental groups in St. Petersburg and Moscow contacted for this article also didn’t know about the contaminants in detail, and the Sysin Institute’s Mikhailova wasn’t available for an interview.
Yet, based on Mikhailova’s previous interviews and other articles in the Russian press, problem substances can include excess chlorine from the process of cleaning water supplies through chlorination, Giardia and other microbes that wreak havoc in the intestines, and excessive iron.
From high levels of microorganisms to excessive chemical contamination to just poor taste, the tap water in the two cities is an ongoing public health issue. Both environmental experts and the Federal Consumer Protection Service suggest that a major part of the problem is literally at the source of the water itself.
In the service’s last annual report on public health, published in July 2011 and analyzing 2010 conditions, there is a worrisome picture of water sources for Moscow and St. Petersburg drinking water.
In Moscow, all six of the city’s surface-level sources of water failed to “meet the requirements in the law due to a lack of sanitary control zones,” the report said. In addition, close to 70 percent of the samples from the water system’s sources exceed hygienic norms by 1 1/2 times. That actually was an improvement from the previous year, 2009, when peat bogs burned outside of Moscow and the figure was about 86 percent. It also was a substantial improvement over 2008, when the figure was 77 percent.
Mosvodokanal, the Moscow city government unitary enterprise that provides tap water, cleans the water supply and runs the waste water and sewage systems for the capital, declined to answer questions submitted in writing about its own figures for water quality in both reservoirs and tap samples. It also declined to describe complaints that it has received about water quality.
It did say it has an extensive system of water supply for Moscow’s estimated 13 million inhabitants, with 14 “regulated reservoirs.” It didn’t name the bodies of water that feed into Moscow’s water supply, but according to various reports, there are six ground-level bodies of water with that role, including the Khimki reservoir that stretches from northern Moscow, near the Vodnoi Stadion and Rechnoi Vokzal metro stations, into the Khimki section in the Moscow region.
Mosvodokanal also said in its reply that it operates four water-sanitation plants and 8,400 kilometers of sewage networks.
<b>In the Northern Capital</b>
St. Petersburg also has a mixed record. In the federal public health report, St. Petersburg, with its infamous infestation of the Giardia parasite in its water supply that causes diarrhea and upset stomach, was one of the worst-performing regions in the country for “microbiological” contamination of water supplies, with 36 percent of samples exceeding standards by 1 1/2 times. Only Chechnya, with a similar figure, and Karachayevo-Cherkessia, where more than 50 percent of samples exceeded standards, performed worse.
Famous victims of St. Petersburg’s water include the composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky, who reputedly died from cholera after drinking unboiled water there in 1893.
In St. Petersburg, the Neva River is full of the Giardia parasite, which can cause moderate symptoms such as diarrhea to full-blown illness requiring serious medical treatment. For years, visitors to the Northern Capital have been told to avoid the tap water: Don’t drink it, eat salads washed in it, use ice made from it, brush your teeth with it or even gargle in the shower.
Now, with the implementation of more-modern treatment systems, the water quality has improved, according to St. Petersburg Vodokanal, the company that runs both the water sanitation and supply systems and sewage systems for the city.
Citing the Federal Consumer Protection Service, Vodokanal spokeswoman Natalya Ipatova said in a written response to questions that “drinking water in St. Petersburg is safe.”
While acknowledging that almost all of the city’s supply — 98 percent — comes from the Neva River, the company says it takes ardent measures to clean it. Giving up liquid chlorine treatment in 2009, it now uses ultraviolet radiation, she said.
In addition, the city has measures in place to prevent contamination. “Today in St. Petersburg, 94 percent of the waste water is cleaned,” Ipatova said.
According to the federal report, Moscow and St. Petersburg actually performed well on tap water. It highlighted the cities as two of six areas in the country — the others were the Kemerov region, North Ossetia, Kabardino-Balkaria and the republic of Altai — “in which there was a successful situation with supplying water of good quality.” It also praised a fix in 2010 to Moscow’s system for delivering hot water, which comes from a centralized municipal source for most of the city’s buildings. That was a positive sign given that 31 areas of the country where the agency took samples failed to obtain an average score on sanitary and chemical standards.
Seasonal weather conditions — especially the spring thaw — also can worsen the water supplies to the point where local water treatment plants can’t cope.
This May, as huge amounts of melted snow and ice filled the country’s sewage system, Onishchenko actually advised the public to drink only bottled water or boil tap water, Interfax reported.
<b>The Source of the Problem</b>
To have quality tap water free of contaminants, the water must be protected at the original sources, said Ivan Blokov, an environmental campaign manager in Greenpeace’s Moscow office. “You can never clean or purify water to the extent that you can meet all of the standards,” he said. Instead, industrial, agricultural and construction pollution should be removed from the areas that feed into the water sources.
The contamination levels in the country’s supplies increased substantially after perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1985, for example, about 15 percent of the samples drawn from drinking water sources exceeded regulations, and that year “was one of the top industrial years for the Soviet Union,” Blokov said. By comparison, the state’s figure for 2010 was 28.9 percent, he said.
He trusts the figures published by Federal Consumer Protection Service officials because “their pay doesn’t depend on the outcome of the tests.” He acknowledged, however, that it is possible that the reports could come under political pressure.
The poor test results of the water supplies is an environmental red flag, Blokov said. “It’s already a bad signal,” he said, comparing the compromising of water stocks with bad meat sold at the market. “You don’t want any contamination,” he said, even if it will be treated before use.
It is possible for consumers to improve the water that comes out of the faucets, but only to a certain extent. Boiling will kill off microorganisms, and experts ranging from the Sysin Institute’s Mikhailova to travel experts suggest boiling the water from one to 10 minutes. Removing chemicals from the water can be a more difficult matter, however.
Activated carbon filters will remove some chemicals. Yet store-bought filters or systems for the home aren’t guarantees, said Sarah Bell, a senior lecturer in environmental engineering at University College London.
An expert on urban water systems, Bell said that the filter, the type of the chemical — whether it is toxic or radioactive — and the concentration of the chemical all affect how much of the substance can be removed from tap water, if at all. It is a challenge even for municipal water systems with expensive technologies to take out all of the contaminants, she said, and a home filter ranks far below those systems in complexity.
What’s more, “one of the problems with doing anything on a household basis is the level of control and the level of monitoring,” Bell said. That means that a sudden surge in microorganisms or chemicals might render the filters less effective or useless and that variations are unmonitored, unlike in a treatment plant, where samples are taken.
The cleanliness of the water supply, or lack thereof, is a major issue in maintaining a good system. “Anything that’s polluting the environment is polluting the water and polluting the water supply,” Bell said.
<b>‘Not Doable’</b>
It is much easier to prevent pollution from entering the watershed than to remove it from the drinking supply, she said. “That comes down to legislation and enforcement,” she added.
“You have to protect the whole catchment” for the supply, she said. Livestock and their wastes, the agricultural industry and its pesticides and fertilizers and industrial sites all should be kept separated from the supply, as should waste water.
In addition to the original water supplies and the treatment plants, plumbing in apartment buildings also has an effect on the taste and cleanliness of what comes out of the faucet. Dilapidated apartment blocks sometimes have pipes that haven’t been replaced for decades, seeping chemicals and sometimes adding microorganisms into the water.
Nikolai Rybakov, executive director in St. Petersburg for international environmental group Bellona, said that water all throughout Russia is contaminated as it flows through a building’s plumbing systems.
Individual consumers have their own views on tap water. Sergei Sergeyev, for example, is not a fan of water from the faucet.
“Drinking it in Moscow is not doable,” he said as he was hanging out with friends outside a fast-food joint near Pushkin Square on a recent evening. Because of the taste, “drinking from the tap isn’t worth it,” he said.
Instead, the 28-year-old musician likes to buy Shishkin Les, a domestic brand of bottled water.
That’s also the brand preferred by Pavel Voronin, who was headed down the street with teenage friends. Voronin’s family uses a water cooler at home.
Sasha Belaya, paying for a cup of tea at a kiosk on Tverskaya Ulitsa, sheepishly admitted that she drinks straight from the tap. Both the 19-year-old and her 20-year-old co-worker Vera Lazurenko said their workplace provides a cooler for employees.

TITLE: City Celebrates Pivotal Battle of Klyastitsy
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: On Aug. 1, 1812 Russia gained its first and crucially important victory during the Napoleonic wars. The Battle of Klyastitsy in Belarus changed the whole course of the 1812 military campaign, and laid the foundation for future victories. The French army sought a breakthrough that would allow them to enter St. Petersburg. The imperial capital was already preparing for a temporary relocation — and the victorious outcome of the Battle of Klyastitsy meant that the move was no longer necessary.
Russia is as proud of its victory in 1812 as it is about combating Hitler during World War II. Accordingly, the scale of the anniversary festivities this month will be grand. It is usually the Battle of Borodino that is associated with Russia’s victory during the Napoleonic wars, but this year, historians are seeking to draw attention to the Battle of Klyastitsy, which was essential in changing the course of the war.
The celebrations in St. Petersburg will begin on Aug. 1 with a memorial service at Kazan Cathedral. Four officers killed during the battle were St. Petersburg natives.
The State Hermitage Museum is organizing an exhibition of Peter von Hess’ painting “The Battle in Klyastitsy,” devoted to the historic battle that is often forgotten.
“The meaning of the Klyastitsy victory cannot be overestimated,” said Ivan Shakhovskoi, a member of the public council aiding the State Commission for the Preparation of the Celebrations of the Russian Victory in the Patriotic War of 1812. “Danger was literally in the air, and the preparations to evacuate the capital were serious. Even the Bronze Horseman had been packed up, put in a wooden crate and was ready to be moved away from the city. The battle lasted for three days, and Tsar Alexander I praised Field Marshal Pyotr Vitgenshtein as ‘the man who rescued Russia.’”
Vitgenshtein led the Russian army in Klyastitsy. His former estate, located in the village of Druzhnoselie on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, is now in very poor condition, which Alexander Margolis, chairman of the St. Petersburg Association for the Protection of Historical Monuments, branded as nothing less than “Russia’s national shame.”
“What was originally the Vitgenshtein family vault, designed by a fine Russian architect, is now a rundown public toilet,” Margolis said. “I am ashamed that I have to tell you this kind of thing.”
No restoration plans were announced as part of the festivities. Memorial services, exhibits, battle reconstructions and marches will be at the heart of events. 
At noon on Aug. 1, a ceremony will be held before the opening of the exhibit at the Hermitage where military marches will be performed by a brass band.
“We take the 1812 anniversary festivities as yet another reminder that the important events that change the course of history are often the result of the efforts of individuals,” said Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the State Hermitage Museum. “Being in the army has always been an honor for a Russian man. Military history makes up an integral part of Russian culture. At the same time, it is an open secret that the military profession has lost a lot of its former prestige, and the army barracks in St. Petersburg are becoming short of recruits. It would be worth it now, at the height of the festivities, to remember that the recruits were once an important feature in the city portrait of St. Petersburg.”
Musicians from the Tavricheskaya Cappella symphony orchestra will perform a program of military marches at the Pavlovsk museum estate, also on Aug. 1, at 5:30 p.m.
“The 1812 campaign played a special role in the history of Pavlovsk,” said Vera Dementiyeva, director of the Pavlovsk museum estate. 
“The famous Rose Pavilion was built especially to host Tsar Alexander I after the end of the war. We have the important mission of highlighting the role of Russian women in the 1812 Napoleonic wars. Empress Maria Fyodorovna was a renowned philanthropist. She left a diary in which she described her daily routine during the war, which involved a great deal of admirable charitable work. We will prepare a special exhibition inspired by the contents of the diary. The display, which will feature a number of items that will be shown for the first time, is scheduled to open in September.” 
More events will take place later this year at the Museum of the History of St. Petersburg, the Central Naval Museum and the Military Museum of Artillery. 

TITLE: Has Moscow Improved for Foreign Tourists?
AUTHOR: By Kevin O’Flynn 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Moscow city wants more tourists and has started implementing a plan to make life simpler and easier for the foreign visitor. The capital says it has put up new signs in English, sent out volunteers to help tourists, launched a call center, a new website and PR campaign, introduced new souvenirs such as memory sticks and set up tours on double-decker buses.
Vedomosti newspaper asked The St. Petersburg Times’ Kevin O’Flynn to take a tour around the city and see how things have changed.

<b>New signs in English</b>
If you stand at the start of Tverskaya Ulitsa and look away from the Kremlin, the only street sign that says anything in English is one showing the way toward Sheremetyevo Airport and St. Petersburg, a hint, perhaps, to leave now before it’s too late. There is a stand alone map of Manezh Square on one side of Tverskaya with English listings of the square’s sites, the Manezh Central Exhibition Hall, Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the kind of sight a man travels thousands of kilometers to see — the Institute of Asia and Africa. At the bottom of the map are the words “Emergency Call Center for Tourists.” Unfortunately, there is no telephone number.
Heading down into the underpass that leads to Manezh Square and the Kremlin, one of the more difficult of Moscow’s underpasses to navigate through, there are no directions in English, although plenty of no smoking signs. Luckily, there are two policemen, one portly Russian, one Caucasian standing together, friendship of the peoples in action. “Where is Red Square?” I ask in English.
“Yes,” says the one who is not smoking, pointing behind him to the stairs that lead the wrong way.
That said, if you look carefully when walking through the streets, there are more street signs in English than there were before — part of the city program, but not enough to make life much easier for tourists.
Volunteers wearing T-shirts with the words “Welcome to Moscow” and “Can I help you?” are wandering around on Red Square and the Arbat.
Sadly, no volunteers could be seen on a tourist trip round town. In the future, city authorities say, a stand will be set up for them so that they will be more visible. As Moscow, unbelievably, has no tourist center, it makes sense to have a temporary center for now near the Kremlin with professional tourism workers and volunteers, rather than just volunteers wandering the streets aimlessly.

<b>Tourist call center</b>
A call center could be a very good idea, but judging from a few calls they may need some lessons from a concierge and a list of basic info for their operators. The woman who answered the call spoke decent English, and was even quite friendly, but the first question — “What time does the Kremlin open?” — immediately flummoxed her, and she put me on hold to presumably google the answer, look it up in a guide book or pop out down the road to ask at the Kremlin. She got the answer right but failed on the next one when asked “When can I see Lenin?” by just repeating the same times for the Kremlin opening.
As any Lenin lover knows, the former Bolshevik leader has idiosyncratic opening hours and perhaps more importantly, he’s definitely not in the Kremlin. She also couldn’t give me the right price for visiting the Kremlin, saying the cheapest price was 700 rubles ($21) rather than 350 rubles. The call center number 8 800 220 0001 is only for Russian speakers; you are asked to ring a different number, 8 800 220 0002, to get the foreign language one.
A second call had the operator speaking in a thick accent explaining that a ticket to the Armory cost 70 hundred rubles. It took him seven minutes to get the right price for entry to the Kremlin, but he did say, “Have a good time in Russia!” at the end. The call center also says it offers four other languages although the French and the Chinese options were rerouted to the English operator.
Promotion: A new website has been launched and promotion clips are now being shown on international channels.
The website Travel2Moscow, which to be fair is still in testing mode, has an English language version that is obviously simply translated from Russian. It is correct most of the time but very literal and clunky, as if the site were talking to small children. When talking about Vorobyovy Gory, the site gushes: “The breathtaking view will make you feel like flying, and you will certainly wish to come to Moscow again.”
It also babbles at times. After advising visitors to take up any chance to eat in a Russian’s home, it notes, “In addition, in Russia, men and women eat at the same table.”
The latest Moscow city promotion video, which has been running on some international television channels, also suffers from stilted text as an English man and woman inanely talk about Moscow as some clich&#233;d views of the city are shown.
“Did you know that you can get there easily nowadays?” the woman on the video says at one point as if the Iron Curtain had fallen just the week before.
As the extravagant interior of the Kremlin is shown, we hear this dialogue: Man: “Is that gold?” Woman: “Oh, please. You’re such a child. Of course it is.”
<b>Hostels, new cheaper accommodation</b>
Moscow city is experiencing a hostel boom with dozens of new places opening up in the last couple of years. The booking site Hostels.com lists 51 hostels in the city and there are noticeably more backpackers in the city than before. Most of the hostels are in the center, although Hostel Museum Red Star deserves a special mention, as it is one of the cheapest — prices start at 390 rubles ($12) — and the kitschiest, with rooms that mix traditional Russian designs and Futurama. It is in Biberevo though.

<b>Souvenirs</b>
The souvenir stands around Red Square remain for now filled with the usual unhappy mix of matryoshka dolls, fur hats and unfunny T-shirts featuring Lenin giving the finger. There seems to be little innovation so far, although the Cheburashka T-shirt that says “Will hug for an orange” did raise a smile. There was no sign of any Lenin memory sticks. The company, Heart of Moscow, does have some cute if not cheap souvenirs — T-shirts with old Soviet photos on them, toy models of Moskvitch cars — but none of their style seeps into the places around Red Square.
A woman selling dozens of maps on Red Square had only one English map, a standard trick in Moscow, so a visit to the nearest hotel and a friendly concierge provided one.

<b>Double-decker tour buses</b>
If anyone sees one, please let me know.

TITLE: Outage Cripples India
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW DELHI — About 600 million people lost power in India on Tuesday when the country’s northern and eastern electricity grids failed, crippling the country for a second consecutive day.
 The outage stopped hundreds of trains in their tracks, darkened traffic lights, shuttered the Delhi Metro and left nearly everyone — the police, water utilities, private businesses and citizens — without electricity. About half of India’s population of 1.2 billion people was without power.
India, however, has an unofficial power grid in the form of huge numbers of backup diesel generators and other private power sources. That kept electricity flowing in everything from private residences and small and large businesses to hospitals and major airports.
Manoranjan Kumar, an economic adviser with the Ministry of Power, said in a telephone interview that the grids had failed and that the ministry was working to figure out the source of the problem. The northern and eastern grids cover 11 states and the capital city of Delhi, stretching from India’s northern tip in Kashmir to Rajasthan to West Bengal’s capital of Kolkata.
The failure happened without warning just after 1 p.m., electric company officials said.
“We seem to have plunged into another power failure, and the reasons why are not at all clear,” said Gopal K. Saxena, the chief executive of BSES, an electric company that services South Delhi, in a telephone interview. It may take a long time to restore power to north India, he said, because the eastern grid has also failed, and alternate power sources in Bhutan and the Indian state of Sikkim flow into the east first.
About two hours after the grid failure, power ministry authorities said some alternate arrangements had been made. “We are taking hydro power from Bhakhra Nangal Dam,” in northern India, said Sushil Kumar Shinde, the power minister, in a televised interview.
India has struggled to generate enough power of its own to fuel businesses and light homes, and the country relies on huge imports of coal and oil to power its own plants. But supply and demand may not explain away this week’s grid failures, power executives said.
The failure on Tuesday affected roughly twice as many people as the massive power outage the previous day, when the northern power grid failed and left more than 300 million people without power for several hours. No official reason for Monday’s failure has been given, although some local news reports pointed fingers at state governments, which were overdrawing power.
That assessment is too simplistic, Saxena, of BSES, said. There are controls in place on India’s electricity grids that override an outsized power demand. “We have one of the most robust, smart grids operating” in the world, he said. It would “not be wise” to give an assessment of what happened at this time, he added.
Institutions without a private backup system were shuttered. All trains stopped in the Delhi Metro, which carries nearly 2 million passengers a day. Trains were pulled to the closest stations using battery back up, and then evacuated, a spokeswoman for the Delhi Metro said, and the stations have been locked. “We had never anticipated such a thing,” the spokeswoman said.
A trade body, the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India, or Assocham, said that Monday’s power problem “totally disturbed the normal life and has severely impacted the economic activities.”
“While on the one hand it is a pity that over 26,000 megawatts of power stations are idle due to the non-availability of coal, on the other one grid failure has brought the system’s collapse,” said the group’s secretary general D.S. Rawat, noting that “the entire power situation at present is headed for disaster.”


TITLE: Gaffes Don’t Concern Romney Strategist
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WARSAW — At the end of a rocky foreign tour, senior campaign strategist Stuart Stevens said he was confident that Mitt Romney’s strengths as a candidate would matter more to voters than any controversial comments made on his trips to Britain, Israel and Poland. Romney has been criticized for talking to a group of donors in Israel about the role culture plays in the economic success of different countries. He made the remarks after noting the disparities between Israelis and Palestinians. Last week, Romney was flogged by Fleet Street when visiting Britain for questioning whether London was ready for the Olympics.
But Stevens, in a briefing for the media traveling with Romney, said neither comment would matter to voters. “I don’t think that will go down in history as very important,” he said. “I think that the public is very good at discerning what’s important and what’s not important. I don’t think they give equal value to all things, and I think the people focus on what they find important and what is relevant to them in their lives.” Stevens said the tour, which he called “a great trip,” has helped U.S. voters learn more about where Romney stands on issues. He added that it is very easy to imagine Romney being president because of his stature, background and accomplishments.
Candidates often tour Europe so they can try to demonstrate to voters that they are statesmen with the ability to deal with foreign countries, as presidents do. The recent criticisms of Romney did not change that, Stevens said. “He has a tendency to speak his mind and to say what he believes and whenever you do that, there will be those that disagree with you and there will be those that agree with you,” he said. “I think people like that. I think that this idea that you have to not speak your mind is something that’s not very appealing to people.”
Regarding the Palestinian comment in particular, Romney advisors noted that the GOP presidential candidate has talked about the economic disparities between other neighboring countries in the same context, including the U.S. and Mexico, and Chile and Ecuador. They also note that he wrote about the subject in his book.
Speaking to Fox News’ Carl Cameron in Warsaw, Romney said the media “are far more interested in finding something that is unrelated to the economy, to geopolitics, to the threat of war ... they’ll instead try and find something else to divert from the fact that these last four years have been tough years for our country.”

TITLE: Humanitarian Problems Grow in Besieged Aleppo
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEIRUT — Humanitarian conditions have grown even more dire in the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo with activists reporting dwindling stocks of food and cooking gas and only intermittent electricity supplies Tuesday as droves of residents flee 11 days of intense clashes between rebels and regime forces.
Government helicopters pounded rebel neighborhoods across Syria’s largest city and main commercial hub. Activists said the random shelling has forced many civilians to flee to other neighborhoods or even escape the city altogether. The UN said late Sunday that about 200,000 had fled the city of about 3 million.
“The humanitarian situation here is very bad,” Mohammed Saeed, an activist living in the city, told The Associated Press by Skype. “There is not enough food and people are trying to leave. We really need support from the outside. There is random shelling against civilians,” he added. “The city has pretty much run out of cooking gas, so people are cooking on open flames or with electricity, which cuts out a lot.”
He said shells were falling on the southwestern neighborhoods of Salaheddine and Seif al-Dawla, rebel strongholds since the rebel Free Syrian Army began its assault on Aleppo 11 days ago.
The United Nations has expressed concern over the use of heavy weapons, especially in Aleppo, while the Syria’s neighbors in the Arab League have issued even stronger denunciations.
“The massacres that are happening in Aleppo and other places in Syria amount to war crimes that are punishable under international law,” Arab League Secretary-General Nabil Elaraby said following a meeting in Cairo at the League’s headquarters.
The official Syrian news agency said government forces were pursuing the “remnants of armed terrorist groups” in Salaheddine and inflicting heavy losses. President Bashar Assad’s authoritarian regime regularly refers to opposition fighters as terrorists.
But the rebels denied that the government has succeeded in penetrating the neighborhood with its tanks.
Rebels have captured a number of government tanks in operations against army positions outside the city, including the town of al-Bab and the village of Anand. Saeed said they planned to use them in future operations.
The taking of Anand has also opened the road to the Turkish border, where the rebels get many of their supplies and manpower. It is also the main escape route for refugees streaming out of Aleppo.
Many of those who have fled may be taking refuge with relatives in the countryside, remaining inside Syria, while others reached the camps inside Turkey.
“The helicopters were hurting people because the regime couldn’t enter the neighborhoods, so they were shelling from a distance with helicopters and artillery,” said Mohammed Nabehan, who had fled Aleppo for the Kilis refugee camp just across the border.
He said the humanitarian situation in the city was serious and there was little food.
According to the Turkish prime minister’s office, there are some 44,000 Syrian refugees being sheltered in tent cities and temporary housing in camps along the border. While Turkish authorities say they have yet to see a massive upsurge in refugees from Aleppo, they are prepared to house up to 100,000.
Jordan, for its part, has also begun building a tent camp to house refugees along the border — something it was initially reluctant to do for fear of embarrassing Syria by calling attention to its refugee problem. But with 142,000 Syrians having already fled across the border, according to the Jordanian government, they needed to create the facilities to house them all. Jordan said this week that up to 2,000 new refugees are arriving daily.


TITLE: Wind, Rain From Offshore Storm Batter Philippines
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MANILA, Philippines — Fierce wind and heavy rain from a slow-moving, offshore typhoon battered the Philippines again Tuesday, killing at least 10 people, displacing 145,000 others and briefly scaring authorities when it veered onto a direct path toward the archipelago.
Typhoon Saola later shifted to blow away from the Philippines after lashing Manila and two-thirds of the nation since Sunday.
“The typhoon was making a U-turn for three hours and that gave us a scare,” said Benito Ramos, who heads the country’s disaster-response agency. “But we’re still keeping a close watch.”
Saola, which has sustained winds of 120 kilometers per hour and gusts of 150 kph, was blocked by a high-pressure area that forced its slight veer to the west, according to Manila’s weather bureau.
One of the victims was a 64-year-old woman who was hit by a landslide early Tuesday after she climbed on her roof to fix a leak while rain pounded the northern mountain town of Itogon, officials said. Most others drowned or were hit by falling trees or debris.
Coast guard, police and villagers were searching for four fishermen who have been missing in Mindoro Occidental province south of Manila.
The wild weather whipped up by Saola was compounded by a separate storm that lashed Manila late Sunday and early Monday. It flooded low-lying areas and pushed two empty barges into the Tondo slum, destroying dozens of huts. Residents had already evacuated the area because of the storm and were spared injury.
Ramos said 145,000 people have fled from their homes into government evacuation centers and houses of relatives.
Authorities had to release water from two major dams in the north because of the heavy rains dumped by the typhoon, which has a massive 700-kilometer (435-mile) wide rain band.
Saola is the seventh of 20 typhoons and storms expected to batter the Philippines this year.