SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1723 (34), Wednesday, August 22, 2012
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TITLE: RECYCLE PAPER!
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Have you ever thought about how much paper you throw away every day? And how many kilos it adds up to per year?
Did you know that 100 kilos of paper is equal to one tree?
But now you can do your bit to save the planet.
On August 24, The St. Petersburg Times will be manning a paper recycling point, where anyone can come and deposit their waste paper for recycling.
There will be gifts for those who bring the most paper!
TITLE: City to Get Waste Points
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Three stations to collect hazardous waste will open their doors in St. Petersburg in September, the city’s Nature Use, Environmental Protection and Ecological Safety Committee said, Interfax reported.
The test project will be conducted in the city’s Pushkinsky, Frunzensky and Nevsky districts in September and October. They will be open every other day in the mornings and evenings.
In either November or December these stations will be moved to the Kalininsky, Primorsky and Vyborgsky districts.
The stations’ exact addresses are currently under discussion.
The cost of the three stations totals 2.6 million rubles ($81,000). It will cost four million rubles ($124,600) to service the stations over a four-month period.
The types of hazardous waste that will be accepted include mercury light bulbs, batteries, medical thermometers, chemical waste, car batteries, tires and various medicines.
TITLE: Court: Book Event Was ‘Unsanctioned Rally’
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The prosecution misrepresented a book launch event at the Russian National Library as an “unsanctioned rally,” the defendants said last week as the Trial of 12 opposition activists continues in St. Petersburg.
A technical specialist was summoned to the Vyborgsky District Court early last week where 12 activists of The Other Russia opposition party are on trial for organizing or continuing the “extremist activities of a banned organization” [the banned National Bolshevik party], but the specialist has so far failed to appear. The court has finished hearing prosecution witnesses and has moved on to defense witnesses.
A technical specialist is needed in order to shed light on the secret video recordings made in the apartment where the activists held their meetings. One of the questions to be answered is how the file information on the recordings — allegedly compiled over six months in 2009 — all show the same recording date: “01.01.2006.”
This was one of several grounds on which the defense called for the exclusion of most of the disks as inadmissible evidence.
Meanwhile, the court is looking into one of the many episodes of the activists’ detentions that the prosecution is using to support the charges that the defendants acted as activists of the National Bolshevik Party (NBP) — banned by a Moscow city court in 2007 as extremist — rather than of The Other Russia.
Defendant Igor Boikov, a published author, brought Nikolai Konyayev, a 62-year-old author and the editor-in-chief of Rus publishers, to testify on the matter. More than 20 people, including Boikov, were detained after Boikov’s book presentation at the Russian National Library on June 17, 2011.
Konyayev testified that he was invited to the presentation of Boikov’s debut book “A Life Lived Not in Vain” by the author himself as he had helped with the publication of Dagestan-born Boikov’s short stories in local literary magazine Avrora, where Konyayev worked as an editor.
“Boikov’s book is very relevant to us, it talks about life in Dagestan and Chechnya, it’s written vividly, and every speaker commented on the artistic values of the book, its relevance, and about the literary images it contains,” he said.
Konyayev said there was a 90-minute presentation and discussion of the book in a small room at the library that approximately 40 people attended. When he left the building however, after having spent ten minutes near a book stand, he was surprised to find an empty street with only police present.
“Usually, people stand in groups outside and talk after such events, but there was nobody,” he said.
It took a while for him and a reporter to find out that most of the public had been detained as they left the building and were already on a police bus.
Boikov said that the police detained younger members of the audience as soon as the public began to leave the building through the staff exit onto Sadovaya Ulitsa.
According to the prosecution, the activists held an unsanctioned rally near the library, demonstrating NBP flags and promoting the banned party’s extremist ideas. Prior police reports stated that the detained “used bad language in a public place.”
The prosecution claims that the “unsanctioned rally” was organized by defendants Andrei Dmitriyev and Andrei Pesotsky. Speaking in court, both said they were not present at the book presentation, had nothing to do with it and were “amazed” to find out that the investigators had named them as “organizers.”
Boikov said he was later acquitted by a court.
According to him, the authorities had initially wanted the library to cancel the presentation. He said that the library’s administration had told him that there had been calls from the police, who tried to convince the library that Boikov’s book presentation would really be a flimsy pretext for a presentation of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov’s anti-Putin pamphlet.
“Maybe the police were just making a kind of joke — they can’t be that stupid,” Boikov said Tuesday.
TITLE: Gay Law Used to Sue Madonna
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A group of right-wing activists in St. Petersburg has filed a $10-million lawsuit against Madonna, claiming that the pop star’s Aug. 9 concert promoted homosexuality and offended Orthodox believers.
The suit, which demands 333 million rubles ($10.4 million) in moral damages, was filed and accepted by the city’s Moskovsky District Court, Alexander Pochuyev, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, told Interfax on Friday.
He said the lawsuit targeted three parties: The singer, the venue and the firm Petersburg Music Industry, which organized the concert.
The nine plaintiffs in the case include the Trade Union of Russian Citizens, an ultra-patriotic organization led by writer Nikolai Starikov, and the nationalist People’s Council movement, according to Starikov’s website.
They argue that Madonna insulted Orthodox believers by trampling a cross and asking her fans to raise pink bracelets worn on their arms to show support for the gay community.
While Madonna did speak in favor of gay rights at the concert, the claim that she stepped on a cross at the concert had not been made before.
The report said the plaintiffs provided video evidence of their accusations. The footage had not been made public available as of Friday.
Pochuyev, the lawyer, refuted criticism that the lawsuit represents a step back to the Middle Ages by saying that the plaintiffs had chosen a “civilized and modern” way of defending their rights by suing.
“Nobody has burned anybody at the stake — there is no inquisition,” he told Interfax.
Earlier this year, St. Petersburg adopted a controversial anti-gay bill that stipulates fines of up to 500,000 rubles ($15,700) for the promotion of homosexuality among minors.
Vitaly Milonov, a municipal lawmaker from United Russia who authored the law, said after the concert that Madonna violated the ban and called for her to be punished.
Daria Dedova of the Trade Union of Russian Citizens told Interfax that her organization had asked prosecutors on Aug. 13 to punish Madonna and the concert’s organizers. Investigators have said they would look into the accusations, but no charges have been made public.
TITLE: Starbucks to Enter Local Market
AUTHOR: By Yevgeny Fyodorov
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: American coffee shop chain Starbucks is set to open in St. Petersburg this fall.
A source close to Monex Trading, which is developing the chain in Russia via a franchise, told the newspaper that cafes covering areas of 200 to 300 square meters would open in the Galeria, Piterland and Mega Dybenko malls.
A five-year rental agreement is at the signing stage, and the premises are already being prepared, along with signs and banners for the cafe’s opening at the end of this fall, said a source close to the management of Piterland.
The three malls tipped to house the coffee shop chain’s first outlets in the city are similar, but Galeria is notable for its prime location in the city center, with higher rental rates than the other two — about 4,500 rubles ($142) per square meter per month, compared to Mega Dybenko’s 2,000-3,000 ($63-$94) and Piterland’s 2,000 rubles, said Yekaterina Lapina, director of the retail real estate department of the Real Estate Research and Development Agency.
Monex is already looking for staff for Starbucks in St. Petersburg. The HeadHunter recruitment website shows the company’s vacancies for roles including an operations manager for candidates with experience in the restaurant business to develop the chain, and for a recruitment specialist with experience in selecting baristas.
Starbucks, which has about 18,000 cafes in 60 countries around the world, opened in Russia in 2007, and has about 56 outlets in the Moscow region, according to the company’s website. The chain was due to open a cafe in the Leto retail and entertainment complex back in 2010, but changed its mind due to doubts over the mall’s appeal, said a source close to the company.
The Petersburg coffee shop market is quite saturated, and a new player could lure over consumers from other chains, said Andrei Petrakov, general director of Restcon restaurant consulting company. According to him, the average check at coffee shops in Moscow is 300 to 400 rubles ($9.40 to $12.60), and it could average the same amount in St. Petersburg.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Woman Buried Alive
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — City police are searching for a man who buried a woman alive in a local cemetery.
On Monday, police received a message that two injured women had been found in the city’s Victims of January 9 Memorial cemetery. One of them had had her arms tied up and was covered in soil, Fontanka.ru reported.
The patrol unit that arrived on the scene found only one woman in her mid-twenties. Doctors treated her for numerous bruises, scratches and a head injury. The woman said that an unknown man had attacked her, beaten her up and then buried her.
No information about the second woman is currently known.
Navy Move Underway
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Russia’s Navy Headquarters has almost completed its move to St. Petersburg, Navy Commander Viktor Chirkov said last week, Interfax reported.
“The headquarters have already been located in St. Petersburg for over a month. At the end of August all the equipment will be moved here,” he said.
TITLE: A World-Famous Punk Band With a 6-Song Oeuvre
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: Given how famous Pussy Riot has become, people are sometimes surprised to learn that the entire oeuvre of the female punk band is made up of six songs and five videos.
Badly recorded, based on simple riffs and scream-like singing, the feminist singers were dismissed by many critics and listeners as amateur, provocative and obscene.
But the performance and release of each song’s video mirrored important steps in the rise of the opposition movement that protested Vladimir Putin’s return to power as president.
The band consists of at least 10 members who always performed in balaclavas so the identities of only the three who were convicted are publicly known.
Here is a guide to Pussy Riot’s songs, including one released Friday just hours before the Moscow court sentenced three members to two years in prison.
“Release the Cobblestones”: The group’s first song and video were released on Nov. 7, the anniversary of the 1917 Revolution.
The song recommends that Russians protest upcoming State Duma elections and throw cobblestones during street protests because “ballots will be used as toilet paper,” the group said on its blog.
The song’s most quoted line says that “Egyptian air is healthy for your lungs/Turn Red Square into Tahrir,” the focal point of Egypt’s uprising that toppled President Hosni Mubarak in 2011.
The song’s video is compiled from footage of band members singing and twanging guitars from the top of subway and trolley cars.
The blog says the group was formed after its members “understood that after the Arab Spring Russia lacks political and sexual liberation, boldness, a feminist whip and a woman president.”
“Kropotkin Vodka”: Dedicated to Pyotr Kropotkin, a 19th-century prince and one of the founders of anarchism, the song advocates the “toppling of the Kremlin bastards” and “Death to prison, freedom to protests.”
It was videotaped during the band’s unannounced performances in posh restaurants and boutiques, during which band members use fire extinguishers to put out fires they have started.
The song’s video was released on Dec. 1, three days before the Duma elections, which triggered the largest civil protests in Russia since the Soviet collapse.
“Death to Prison, Freedom to Protests”: The song was recorded in mid-December, days after the first anti-Putin protests broke out.
The band performed the song on the roof of a pre-trial detention center where opposition leaders and activists were held.
“Protests in Russia, Putin Chickened Out”: The band’s breakthrough performance takes place in a part of Red Square where tsarist Russia once announced government decrees. During the performance, eight Pussy Riot band members were briefly detained.
“Mother of God, Cast Putin Out”: Before the stunt at Christ the Savior Orthodox Cathedral that led to Friday’s conviction, band members tried to play at Moscow’s Epiphany Church but were taken away by security guards.
The 41-second performance at Christ the Savior, during which five band members high-kicked, danced and kneeled, whispering “Mother of God, Cast Putin Out,” was interrupted by guards.
The Russian Orthodox Church’s initial response was mild.
An outspoken cleric known for his liberal views called it a “legal outrage” during Shrovetide week, when church tradition allows and even encourages carnival-like escapades and jokes.
But the band then released the video with an actual song — with screeching guitars and an angry chorus urging the Mother of God to become a feminist. The song also claims that Patriarch Kirill venerates Putin instead of God.
“Putin Lights the Fires of Revolution”: Pussy Riot’s latest song was played Friday afternoon by one of the band members who escaped arrest from the balcony of an apartment building that faces the Khamovnichesky District Court building where a judge was reading the verdict.
The balaclava-wearing young woman also threw out compact discs containing the song.
Hours later, the band’s supporters danced to it near the court building before police pushed them away, detaining several people.
The song mocks Putin for his alleged cosmetic surgery and urges him to marry Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.
The chorus says: Russia “takes to the streets to say goodbye to the regime.”
TITLE: Kremlin Opposition Fears Possible Split Over Pussy Riot Case
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — While the two-year prison sentences given to members of punk band Pussy Riot on Friday continue to mobilize unseen levels of outrage at the Kremlin in the West, the verdict could lead to a split in the country’s fledgling protest movement.
Few doubt that “Free Pussy Riot” will be a rallying cry at upcoming protests, but some anti-Kremlin activists are concerned that the jailing of the three radical feminists could spell the end of the unlikely scenes witnessed after the State Duma vote in December and the presidential election in March, when a coalition of tens of thousands of protesters ranging from ultranationalists to radical communists marched the streets of Moscow together.
Prominent opposition leaders fear that Orthodox activists and socially conservative communists could be alienated as a result of the Pussy Riot case.
“This is a clash of archaism and modernism and it cuts through all political layers,” veteran opposition activist Eduard Limonov told The St. Petersburg Times.
Limonov, a writer and the leader of the radical Other Russia movement, distanced himself from the mainstream support for the three young women by saying that “the hysteria about the case is very bad.”
He acknowledged that the case could lead to a split but said that he would do everything to prevent such a scenario.
“It is vital that all forces remain united instead of letting an unnecessary conflict happen,” he said by telephone. At the same time, he said he would not protest in support of the slogan “Free Pussy Riot,” saying he had “better things to do.”
Pussy Riot members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, Maria Alyokhina, 24 and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30, are certainly no darlings to the right-wing leaders of the opposition coalition.
“This was a predictable flop. Tolokonnikova, Alyokhina and Samutsevich are now political prisoners despite all their unacceptable actions and views,” Natalya Kholmogorova, a leader of the nationalist Russian Public Movement, wrote on her blog.
She blamed the government for turning “rowdies into heroes” fighting the regime by setting up the trial that ended last week.
“If they had just gotten a fine or 10 days in jail, nobody would have remembered them,” she complained.
Kholmogorova accused “Kremlin spin doctors” of trying to distract attention from President Vladimir Putin and elections.
“In the short run they might have achieved this to a certain degree. In the long run, even those who find Pussy Riot extremely revolting won’t love the government more,” she wrote.
Analysts said the Pussy Riot affair might well damage the opposition.
Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a well-known sociologist who studies the country’s elites, said the impact will be twofold: It will radicalize those who want swift regime change while alienating nationalists and conservatives.
“Pussy Riot will harm them by taking away some of their moral high ground,” she said.
But Kryshtanovskaya said protest leaders would probably use the issue because they need something to unite their followers.
She argued that while the election fraud that inspired the mass protests in winter is fading from memory and corruption is too abstract, Pussy Riot might be a strong new issue.
“You need some fuel to light the fire,” she said.
State Duma Deputy Ilya Ponomaryov, a co-organizer of last winter’s protests, said that while the Pussy Riot members might well become “icons” if they remain in prison, the opposition should stay united by advocating more social causes.
“Nobody is interested in a split,” he told The St. Petersburg Times.
Ponomaryov, a member of the leftist Just Russia party, acknowledged that conservatives both to the right and the left of the political spectrum are likely to approve of the sentence for the Pussy Riot activists.
“In Russian society, the issue of minority rights is not regarded as very positive,” he said.
He argued that the momentum of the opposition should be kept alive by promoting more social issues like pensions, housing and education.
Meanwhile, Alexei Navalny, perhaps the most prominent protest leader and someone who has long courted nationalists for their support, said he felt compelled to stand up for Pussy Riot even though he risked alienating many of his backers.
Navalny told German weekly Der Spiegel in an interview published over the weekend that the band’s performance in Christ the Savior Cathedral was revolting but that their punishment was excessive.
“The girls only committed a minor violation, not a crime. They are no threat to society,” he said.
Navalny also denied that the protests had lost momentum, saying the opposition has defied critics in the past by repeatedly bringing tens of thousands of people to the streets. He said he intends to heighten the opposition’s legitimacy by holding a series of online primaries to elect a leadership council that will be tasked with making important decisions for the movement.
TITLE: Circassians Flee Syrian Strife For Russian Homeland
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NALCHIK — Natai Al Sharkas’ great-grandfather killed his Russian commanding officer and defected to the enemy.
The ethnic Circassian swells with pride at the thought of the century-old act.
Natives of what is now Russia’s Caucasus region, Circassians fiercely resisted the Russian tsarist conquest that ended in the 1860s after decades of scorched-earth warfare, mass killings or expulsions that some historians and politicians consider genocide.
The carnage forced many — like Al Sharkas’ ancestors — to seek refuge in what is today Syria.
Now, carnage in Syria is driving many back to their homeland.
This spring, Al Sharkas joined hundreds of Circassians fleeing war-torn Syria for this remote Russian region of soaring peaks and lush forests. In the coming months, thousands more are expected to arrive in Kabardino-Balkaria, a Caucasus province the size of the state of Maryland with a population of less than 900,000, two-thirds of which is ethnic Circassian.
“We are planning to stay here for good,” Al Sharkas, 35, said as he sat under fragrant fir trees at a Soviet-era resort hotel where many of the Circassian immigrants have sought shelter. “That’s the decision we made a long time ago and it’s been accelerated by the events in Syria.”
Circassians were widely dispersed in the Russian expulsions. An estimated 2 million live in Turkey, another 100,000 in Syria and other sizable populations are in Jordan and the United States. But their sense of ethnic unity remains strong and the pull of their homeland compelling.
Al Sharkas, which means Circassian in Arabic, used a network of family connections, along with Facebook, to find relatives in Kabardino-Balkaria and other parts of Russia. He encourages his Syrian relatives to follow him to the Caucasus, although now, because of the fighting, it hardly seems possible.
“They are trapped there as it is almost impossible to even leave their neighborhoods,” he said.
Assmat Yahya, a retired electrician from a Circassian village in the Syrian-controlled part of the Golan Heights, also found relatives in the Caucasus and plans to stay in Russia with his wife.
They left their seven-bedroom house in April after hearing that both opposition fighters and Syrian forces were approaching their town and now live in one of the cramped rooms in the hotel in Nalchik, the Kabardino-Balkaria capital.
“I’m here not because of the war, although it triggered the return,” the gray-haired 63-year-old said. “We want to live here with our relatives.”
But the newly arrived Syrian Circassians have run into bureaucratic hurdles in Russia.
Because Russia allows foreigners to stay for only three months without a residence permit, Al Sharkas and other Circassians from Syria recently had to travel to Abkhazia, a breakaway Georgian province that Russia recognizes as independent, to obtain entry stamps allowing them another three-month stay. Without residence and work permits, they will have to leave the country when their visas expire.
The arrival of thousands of refugees from Syria could add fuel to a growing movement to force Russia to recognize the 19th-century killing and expulsions of Circassians as genocide. Circassians are pushing the issue ahead of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, where Circassian fighters surrendered to tsarist forces in 1864. Circassians say some of the Olympic facilities are being built over mass graves of their ancestors.
“Sochi is our open wound,” said Vahit Kadioglu, head of the International Circassian Association in the Turkish capital, Ankara. “We expect recognition of the massacre from the Russian government.”
In 2011, the pro-Western government of neighboring Georgia recognized the killings and deportation of Circassians as genocide and called on the West to boycott the Olympics. Russian officials say the decision was motivated by political tensions between Russia and Georgia, which fought a brief war in 2008, and dismissed the claims.
“There was no genocide of the Circassians — it was a normal historical process,” said Valery Kuzmin, a Foreign Ministry ambassador-at-large responsible for the Sochi Games.
But the governor of the Russian province that will host the games has recently acknowledged the expulsions.
“This land has not belonged to the Russian Empire, it belonged to Caucasus nations, to Circassians,” Alexander Tkachyov, head of the Krasnodar region, said in early August. Krasnodar was once almost entirely Circassian.
Some 1,500 Circassians have returned to the Caucasus since the 1991 Soviet collapse, according to Circassian community leaders in Russia.
The region they have come back to is afflicted by violence, too. The Caucasus republics are plagued by an Islamic insurgency that spread from Chechnya’s separatist wars. A brazen 2005 raid of Islamists in Nalchik left 130 people dead, and Kabardino-Balkaria still experiences occasional small clashes.
Locals think that their arrival benefits Russia.
“They possess cultural values we lost in the Communist era,” said Vladimir Kaskulov, general director of the hotel chain in Nalchik that hosted more than 150 Syrians free of charge.
TITLE: Gang Victims to Get Help
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Three lawyers from St. Petersburg and Moscow have offered to provide their services for free to victims and relatives of those affected by crimes committed by Sergei Tsapok’s gang. The criminal gang was active in Russia’s Krasnodar region in the village of Kuschyovskaya between 1998 and 2010.
Moscow lawyer Yekaterina Romanova told reporters that she and two other lawyers from St. Petersburg had answered the victims’ request for legal help, Interfax reported.
“Until now the victims did not have any legal defense. They didn’t have a real lawyer or legal help. They did not understand if their rights were being violated or not and what rights they had,” Romanova said.
Romanova said that due to reasons that “everyone understands,” local lawyers in the Krasnodar region did not want to take part in the case involving the Kuschyovskaya gang.
“The Krasnodar region is probably not a safe area for the legal defense of victims in the Tsapok case,” Romanova said.
Romanova said the defense would ask the court to give it time to study the 478 volumes of the case.
The lawyers have agreed to do the work for free because they believe that “the victims and families affected by such an outrageous case should not be left without help,” she said.
Romanova said she knows the victims and has visited Kuschyovskaya.
The case involves about 30 victims.
The gang was active in the village between 1998 and 2010. Members of the criminal group reportedly killed at least 19 people, including children.
Six people have been accused of committing the crimes, including the alleged leader of the group, Sergei Tsapok, a businessman and an ex-deputy of the district council. He is accused of multiples crimes, including 18 murders.
Tsapok and the others have been accused of murder, attempted murder, false imprisonment, rape, robbery, illegal possession of firearms and participating in a gang. The maximum sentence they face is life in prison.
The investigation found that members of Tsapok’s gang murdered 12 people, including three young children, in a farmer’s house on Nov. 4, 2010. Soon afterwards, the members of the gang were detained and police were able to link them to a number of serious crimes the gang had reportedly committed earlier.
TITLE: Putinism Is the Only Religion That Matters
AUTHOR: By Garry Kasparov
TEXT: There was shock, if no real surprise, at the verdict against Pussy Riot on Friday. Despite whispers of leniency, I never doubted that a conviction and prison term would result. Not because they violated anything in the Criminal Code, which, as of this writing, is still freely available on the Internet. No, Pussy Riot’s actions were hateful toward religion only in breaking the First Commandment of today’s Russia, “Thou shalt not take Putin’s name in vain.”
This commandment has replaced the more famous original set of Ten Commandments in Russia. No one observing the Kremlin would believe there is any prohibition against theft or murder. No visitor to a Moscow courtroom would guess that bearing false witness is forbidden. The only statute that matters is that there is no god but Putin, no acceptable religion but Putinism.
Patriarch Kirill was wise enough to see the advantages of putting faith at the service of the KGB roots he shares with Putin. Unlike in Iran, where the imams run the show behind the curtain, here Putin uses the Russian Orthodox Church to impose his repressive rule in the classic Byzantine tradition. Kirill ordered his religious institution to support Putin. When a sacred space is used for political purposes, you should expect others to come to pray for the Virgin Mary to drive Putin away, even in the most extravagant fashion.
I went to the Pussy Riot trial Friday to watch the tragic farce unfold, but the Moscow police decided to make me a part of it. Unable to gain entry to the packed courtroom, I was outside speaking with a group of journalists when I was abruptly carried off by police to a waiting bus. I don’t think I have been lifted and carried away like that since I was acclaimed as the new world chess champion oh so many years ago. As we jostled through the crowd, I repeatedly asked the police what I was being charged with, but if they had been told, they were not inclined to share this information. They only repeated the word “order,” over and over.
The officers were more than willing to share their fists with me, however, as I found out when I attempted to exit the police bus. It was not in my mind to escape through a deep phalanx of police. I had been seized illegally and merely wanted to learn the charge against me. Instead I was tackled, beaten and dragged back into the bus, where the physical abuse continued. All of this is well-documented, which is the only piece of good fortune I can claim. I was still sitting in the police station with other arrestees when the police headquarters told the media that they were planning criminal charges against me for assaulting a lieutenant named Ratnikov, whom they alleged I had bitten.
I am by no means a vegetarian, though as I am turning 50 next year I have had to cut back on red meat on my doctor’s advice. I can say with certainty that were I to acquire a taste for human flesh, the way Bengal tigers are said to do, I would never bite anyone under the rank of general.
On Monday, I returned to the same local police station for an interview, armed with photos and video footage of the assault from every possible angle. It is ironic that all this evidence must first be used to clear me of an absurd charge and only then used in my own charges against the officers who beat me. The captain recorded my testimony of the day’s events. I was shown the report of the officer I supposedly assaulted, which states the intent to open a criminal investigation. I left the station not knowing if and when they will take this next step. While under Damocles’ sword, I am preparing my own legal actions against the police. The first is for the illegal arrest and physical assault, and it names two of the officers who signed my arrest report. The other suit will be against Lieutenant Ratnikov for libeling me with his assault allegation.
I had a few interesting chats with police officers while in custody Friday. None of them could look me in the eye when I asked if they really thought I was chanting anti-Putin slogans when I was arrested. It would be unfair to say that every member of the security forces is a brainless thug. After all, these are people smart enough to enter the only growth industry left in Putin’s Russia. Our scientists and engineers are leaving in droves — so quickly that soon we may not have enough of them to maintain the creaking Soviet infrastructure on which we still depend. Perhaps this is all part of the plan by Putin and Kirill to lead us boldly back to the ancient days of the all-powerful Inquisition. I await the addition of courses on blacksmithing and tanning hides to the Moscow State University curriculum.
Several of the police admitted that they did not think Russia was headed in the right direction, and I take hope in these admissions. Putin has made it clear he will not hesitate to create a new gulag with a new generation of political prisoners. If and when the time comes, he will not hesitate to give the order to pull the trigger, to spill Russian blood to maintain his power. Many lives, therefore, will depend on the men whose fingers are on those triggers. Will they kill their compatriots for chanting, for marching or for wanting nothing more than to express the human need for freedom?
Before I was released, one police officer told me he had been stumped by a clue in the day’s crossword puzzle. “Who,” he asked, “was the sixth world chess champion?” “Mikhail Botvinnik,” I answered. “He was my teacher, and today was his birthday.” Botvinnik was also the first Soviet world champion and has long been known by another name in the chess world: the Patriarch.
Garry Kasparov, a former world chess champion, is the chairman of the United Civil Front.
TITLE: FROM A SAFE DISTANCE: Fomenko’s Death Is This August’s Tragedy
AUTHOR: By Alexei Bayer
TEXT: The worst calamities tend to befall Russia in August. It’s been called the month of disasters, but it is rather a month of shrinkage. It seems that every August, Russia is diminished — in size, reputation and stature — both in the eyes of its own citizens and internationally.
In August 1991, a failed coup by Communist hard-liners reduced the Soviet political police and its repressive apparatus to paper tigers, while also setting in motion the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The financial crisis of 1998 put an end to hopes that Russia could reform its economy, and, in retrospect, the appointment of Vladimir Putin as prime minister a year later did the same for the country’s political system.
Since then, August disasters have poked holes in the notion that Russia has a functioning police and government. August 2008 saw an army that had once crushed Hitler celebrate the defeat of tiny Georgia. In 2010, peat fires burning out of control turned Moscow, quite literally, into a vision of the apocalypse.
Now, a kangaroo court has put three members of punk group Pussy Riot away for two years, confirming that Russia’s justice system and religious establishment are a bunch of buffoons.
But perhaps the greatest loss was the death, at 80, of theater director Pyotr Fomenko. Along with nonagenarian Yury Lyubimov, Fomenko was the brightest light of Russian theater and one of the last symbols of an era.
In the Soviet Union, the theater was the most effective platform for independent thinking and artistic freedom. The dissident movement was isolated, the typewritten works of literature known as samizdat reached only a handful of readers, and a KGB crackdown in the second half of the 1970s jailed or pushed abroad most dissidents, along with nonconformist artists and writers. Cinema, television and newspapers were tightly controlled, and literature was severely censored.
Theater, on the other hand, was small-scale enough to be able to sometimes fly under the radar of ideological monitoring. It became the only place where artistic experimentation could survive and where art could comment on Soviet political realities even while presenting such approved Russian classics as Gogol’s “Inspector General” and Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard,” as well as works about the Bolshevik Revolution such as John Reed’s “Ten Days that Shook the World.” Lyubimov’s small, cozy Taganka Theater was a cult in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Its sold-out audiences sat on the edge of their seats, eagerly catching incandescent Aesopean allusions to contemporary reality tumbling from the stage.
Fomenko’s first production, the 1967 staging of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s “Mystery Bouffe” in Leningrad, had just three performances before being banned by the city’s party bosses. Yet after a period of official disfavor, Fomenko was allowed to go back to work. Only in the theater could such an independent and uncompromising artist attain national fame in the Soviet Union.
The Soviet theater was very different from the way theater developed in the West in the 20th century. Its political message and its role in society far transcended anything seen in Western Europe, Britain or the United States. Its artistic flowering was the result of special circumstances that made the theater the conscience of the Russian intelligentsia.
Today, the theater seems unlikely to play a significant part in the nascent Russian protest movement. It has been replaced by the Internet and social networks. With the death of its last remaining major directors, the Russian theater seems even more destined for a decline. Never again will it bring together like-minded people thrilling at the sight of the artist outwitting the censor.
Alexei Bayer, a native Muscovite, is a New York-based economist.
TITLE: Local support for Pussy Riot
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The two-year sentences a Moscow court handed down to three young women from the feminist punk group Pussy Riot have sparked waves of protests and indignation around the world.
The members of Pussy Riot have already been imprisoned for nearly six months and have been dubbed “prisoners of conscience” by Amnesty International.
The verdict was condemned by governments, human rights organizations, artists and ordinary people around the globe.
Despite the decision to send the women to prison for two years, Pussy Riot reacted with a new song and video — “Putin Lights the Fires of Revolution” — only hours after the verdict.
In Russia, the main protest took place in Moscow, as hundreds came to the Khamovnichesky District Court, where the verdict was announced at 3 p.m. on Friday. There was also a sizable protest in St. Petersburg.
In Moscow, police arrested about 60 people outside of the court where the verdict was read, including former chess world champion Garry Kasparov as he spoke to the press. Kasparov was beaten by police officers and later accused of biting a policeman.
OMON special force police also entered the premises of the Turkish Embassy in order to arrest a protester who had climbed onto the fence and donned a balaclava.
“I came because I am concerned about this situation and I am very sorry that there are so few people protesting,” said Marina Granatshtein, 30, who stood near Gostiny Dvor on Nevsky Prospekt with a sign reading, “The Pussy Riot trial is an embarrassment to Russian society.”
“There are a great number of people protesting against this monstrous, Kafkaesque trial on the Internet and in their own kitchens, but very few people are taking to the streets, which is a pity.”
A middle-aged woman in glasses struck up a conversation with Granatshtein, arguing that Pussy Riot had chosen the wrong place for their protest. The woman deliberately positioned herself to obstruct Granatshtein’s poster from passersby.
“We Russians respect our traditions. That’s why we are the only nation that has preserved some of its spirituality,” she said, remarking that Granatshtein was not ethnically Russian.
“How did you reach that conclusion?” Granatshtein asked. “I can see it from the way you look,” the woman replied. “You’re all enemies of the people,” she said as she left, citing the Stalin-era term.
Granatshtein, who identified herself as a journalist writing about animal issues, said that despite a hostile reaction from several passersby, the majority had reacted positively.
“This was the third woman to react in such a way, but before that everyone was smiling and supportive,” she said.
“This idea that all Russian people have united against Pussy Riot, that everybody has been insulted [by the performance they gave in the Moscow church] is not true. This is simply the version enforced by the state media.”
Two to three hundred protesters came to the Field of Mars, the garden in central St. Petersburg whose centerpiece is a memorial to revolutionaries killed by the Tsar’s troops in February 1917.
The activists held posters supporting the imprisoned women and waited for the verdict, while tweets and news from the courtroom in Moscow were announced through a megaphone.
Some cited the New Testament on their posters (“I desire mercy, not sacrifice”) or compared Jesus, who asked for people to forgive each other, to the Russian Orthodox Church’s Patriarch Kirill, who said that “attempts to justify blasphemy of such a degree are unacceptable.”
Other posters read “Art will defeat the Inquisition,” “You don’t frighten us” and “Clergymen should remember 1917,” although most simply had the phrase “Free Pussy Riot” written on them in both Russian and English.
One sign compared the Pussy Riot trial to the Beilis trial in imperial Russia in 1913, during which Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Kievan Jew working as an accountant at a brick factory, was falsely charged with “ritual murder.” Another poster compared it to the Dreyfus trial in France.
“They are connected because of the public reaction caused by the Dreyfus affair then and the Pussy Riot trial now,” said Yelena Smirno, 24, who was holding the sign.
“I came here because I believe that Pussy Riot’s performance was not hooliganism, a mistake or simply an attempt to draw attention to their art, but a well thought-out political protest, which caused the reaction that they wanted it to cause,” she said.
“It’s similar to what happened with the Dreyfus affair: Everybody split into Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards. The group of people who supported Dreyfus were contemptuously called ‘so-called intellectuals,’ just as they call Pussy Riot ‘so-called contemporary artists,’ ‘so-called intelligentsia,’ ‘so-called dissidents.’ And the Dreyfus supporters said, ‘We’re not ‘so-called intellectuals,’ we’re the real thing.’”
Smirno said she was a historian and philosopher, specializing in the cultural connections between Russia and France.
“I came to support the three young women of Pussy Riot, who have been unjustly imprisoned for nearly six months,” said Tatyana, 29, a university lecturer. She did not give her last name.
“I think that their punishment is huge and baseless, I support the feminist ideas they expressed in their performance. I think it’s important, the way they stirred society, and this song can’t be suppressed or killed. That’s why I am here, and this is the least that I can do for them today.”
Margarita Saakova, a poet from Stavropol, in the south of Russia, recited a poem titled “To Pussy Riot.”
“Have you noticed how thin the air has become?” the opening line read.
“We followed [the art trend] actionism and Pussy Riot long before the church performance, as well as the Voina art group, which Pussy Riot branched off from,” said Saakova, 22.
“When they were detained, it was a shock. How can people be detained for art? They did not do anything illegal. According to Russian law, they can’t be prosecuted at all, especially not under the criminal code.”
“The conviction effectively puts a ban on art in Russia,” said Anton Gubanov, a 23-year-old poet, also from Stavropol.
“I think that the Pussy Riot performance was an artistic act. Putting a ban on art in Russia is a shortcut to the concentration camp. The verdict is a triumph of religious superstition. It’s the same superstition that created the Inquisition, which burned great scholars in bonfires, and caused Islamist bombers to blow themselves up and fly into skyscrapers.”
He said that he and Saakova had arrived in St. Petersburg as tourists, but came to the Field of Mars to support Pussy Riot when they learned about the rally.
The police stopped any attempts protesters made to wear Pussy Riot-style colored balaclavas, citing the new law on public assemblies, which forbids protesters from covering their faces. But no arrests were made.
Meanwhile, a concert in support of Pussy Riot was announced last Monday in St. Petersburg. According to the organizers, it will feature DDT frontman Yury Shevchuk (solo or with the band), Televizor, PTVP, the Electric Guerillas and Gleb Samoilov. It is scheduled for Glavclub’s summer stage on Sept. 9.
“It will be in support of Pussy Riot and other political prisoners,” said Televizor frontman Mikhail Borzykin, who co-organized the event.
According to Borzykin, a dozen more bands from St. Petersburg and Moscow want to participate, but the final lineup has not yet been set. Boris Grebenshchikov, founder of the seminal local rock band Akvarium, declined to participate despite previously signing a letter of support for the group.
TITLE: Sensational snapshots
AUTHOR: By Luisa Schulz
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A woman veiled in black enfolds her wounded adult son in her white-gloved hands, burying his head in her chest. This picture was taken during the demonstrations in Sanaa, Yemen, against president Ali Abdullah Saleh last October and is the winner of the World Press Photo contest 2012, the most important journalism photography contest of the year. As a figurehead, it introduces the other laureate photographs, which are on show in Petersburg at Loft Project Etagi from Aug. 24 through Sept. 16.
The selected photos are not only documents of the previous year’s events, they are windows into the personal worlds hidden behind them.
“What the jury was saying was, really this is about the people,” jury chair Aidan Sullivan said in an official video talking about the Arab Spring and about the jury’s decision process.
“They were looking for something that reflected all of the turbulence, of the turmoil but at the same time was an intimate moment, a personal moment, that showed how it affected the people.”
The Arab Spring is also a popular subject in the remaining 56 photographs, selected from over 100,000 submissions, as was last year’s devastating tsunami in Japan. Expressive Arab faces, ships stranded on buildings and debris dominate the visual vocabulary. The 55th contest also features themes such as Afghanistan, the massacre carried out by Anders Breivik in Norway last summer, evicted Americans and an Alzheimer’s patient, as well as sex workers, the feminist Ukrainian protest group Femen and prison cells in Ukraine.
Included in the gallery of selected photos are also several images captured in Russia. The first prize in the Sports stories category went to Alexander Taran, who photographed Strelka fighters behind the old Krasnoye Znamya factory in St. Petersburg. Strelka is Russian street fighting with no time limit, ending only with a knockout or surrender. Taran’s monochrome study traces the fight from the pre-match cash prize offer to the floor — the title photo focusing in on the eyes and forehead of a fighter looking into viewers’ eyes as if into his opponent’s.
Meanwhile, residents relaxing on the steppes of Moscow suburbia are the subjects of Alexander Gronsky’s pictures. By fine-tuning the contrasts between industry, tower blocks, human presence and nature, he manages to capture an idyll in the midst of tower block settings, coming in third with his work “Pastoral” in the Daily Life category.
Another first prize was awarded to Rob Hornstra, who captured pop singers and entertainers in restaurants along the Sochi Riviera in the south of Russia, and was victorious in the Arts and Entertainment category.
Hornstra’s motivation was a search for the Russian identity, which he explored by focusing on the variety of interiors and roles adopted by the singers. “But what’s Russian style? That’s the question that I’m actually asking in this series,” he said in an interview published on the World Press Photo website.
A rather extraordinary image captured in Russia is that of a polar bear making its way down a picturesque cliff in the Arctic archipelago of Novaya Zemlya in search of bird eggs, photographed by Jenny E. Ross. Polar bears, which usually hunt for seals from ice floe platforms, run out of their natural menu when ice floes melt in the summer, making the animals particularly vulnerable to climate change.
“World Press Photo 2012” is on display at Loft Project Etagi from Aug. 24 through Sept. 16 at 74 Ligovsky Prospekt. M. Ligovsky Prospekt. Tel. 458 5005. www.loftprojectetagi.ru.
TITLE: in the spotlight: Sobchak no longer top model material
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
TEXT: Last week, the sultry model girlfriend of footballer Cristiano Ronaldo was hired to replace Ksenia Sobchak as the judge of “Russia’s Next Top Model” after the channel got cold feet about Sobchak’s political protest activities.
“A model should also be a role model,” the channel hinted in its trailer for the show, which is an official remake of “America’s Next Top Model.”
Irina Shayk, whose full surname is Shaykhlislamova, comes from a village in the Chelyabinsk region in the Urals. She has said her father was of Tatar origin, which is why she has strikingly dark coloring.
Shayk models for lingerie and swimwear brands very successfully. She also seems to spend a lot of her free time lying on beaches and yachts, as WAGs will do. She has not done any Russian television presenting before and is rarely over here, but it sounds as if she could be perfect for the job.
Sobchak scooped the news on her Twitter. She added an implicit warning that her replacement should stay clear of politics.
“I wish her luck and only to talk about fashion — otherwise there could be problems,” she wrote.
It does seem unlikely that Shayk would start spilling out political views while eyeing budding models on the catwalk. In any case, she has proven her reticence by never talking about her relationship with the Portuguese footballer Ronaldo.
One of her conditions for doing the show is no questions about her personal life, Life News wrote.
In an interview with Muz-TV, she vowed to concentrate on “positive notes” in the show, whose new season starts in September.
She also gushed about the joys of being in Russia (temporarily).
“It’s really nice to come back to your country where everyone speaks Russian and where they’ll step on your foot in the bus,” she said, adding that she even took a nostalgic ride on a trolleybus “because we don’t have them in America.”
The replacement must be a bitter pill for Sobchak, not to mention a minus in her bank account.
The channel chief fired Sobchak “muttering something about it being the wrong format,” she wrote on Twitter.
She walked away from her lucrative Dom-2 reality series on TNT last month and wrote on her blog that she seems to have been barred from mainstream television.
She was asked to go on the endless Fort Boyard game show by one of the big channels, only for the editor to call back to apologize and say he didn’t realize she was on the “black list,” she said.
Ludicrously, Sobchak said she has even been cut from Mult Lichnosti, the topical animated comedy on Channel One that has some soft-edged satire. The last show with her seems to have been the episode aired on April 15. In the episode, the animated Sobchak weeps about being excluded from Channel One and moans that she will be stuck on TNT.
Sobchak is not penniless anyway. She still has Sobchak Live on Dozhd TV, which Forbes magazine estimated earns her around $10,000 per month.
But investigators have refused to hand over the more than $1 million in cash they found in her safe while raiding her apartment over the May 6 opposition protest. They are saying it must be examined as evidence for a tax probe.
“The world economic crisis could not shake the Sobchak business model, but politics very well could,” Russian Forbes magazine wrote in July.
On the upside, she made U.S. Harper’s Bazaar posing — bizarrely — in a wedding dress in Manhattan for an interview titled “From Party Girl to Putin’s Threat.
TITLE: the word’s worth: Virtuous Vocab
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: Ñìèðåíèå: humility
Afew years ago I decided that a look at the ñåìü ñìåðòíûõ ãðåõîâ (seven deadly sins) would be culturally enlightening and personally edifying. So I slogged through ãîðäûíÿ (pride), àë÷íîñòü (greed), ïîõîòü (lust), ãíåâ (anger), çàâèñòü (envy), îáæîðñòâî (gluttony) and óíûíèå (despondency, sloth), discovering all the interesting words and ways to be a Bad Person in the view of Russian culture.
Russian culture also has strong ideas about being a Good Person. Russian has a long list of äîáðîäåòåëè (virtues), a lovely word that was originally a calque from the Greek and meant “good deeds.”
Often certain virtues are listed as the opposites of particular sins — something like spiritual antidotes to bad behavior and qualities. At the top of the list are ãîðäûíÿ (pride), perhaps the worst of the sins, and its opposite — ñìèðåíèå (humility) — probably the greatest of the virtues.
To the modern ear, ñìèðåíèå and the verbs ñìèðèòü (to humble, subdue) and ñìèðèòüñÿ (to resign oneself to something) sound like they might have originally meant ñ ìèðîì (with peace). But language specialists insist that the root of the word was not ìèð (peace) but ìåðà (measure). One armchair etymologist interprets the original meaning this way: Ñìèðåíèå — ýòî çíàíèå ñâîåé ìåðû, óìåíèå ñîðàçìåðèòü è îñîçíàòü ñâîå ìåñòî â ìèðå (Humility — it’s knowing your measure, the ability to compare and acknowledge your place in the world).
That might be a bit of folk etymology, but it’s close to religious and philosophical definitions of ñìèðåíèå that dominated the Russian moral and cultural landscape for centuries. Ñìèðåíèå is ñêðîìíîñòü äóõà (modesty of the spirit); ñîçíàíèå, ÷òî ñîâåðøåíñòâî, ê êîòîðîìó ÷åëîâåê ñòðåìèòñÿ, îñòàåòñÿ áåñêîíå÷íî äàëåêèì (the recognition that the ideal a person is striving toward remains infinitely far away); or ðàñêðûòèå äóøè äëÿ ðåàëüíîñòè (opening your soul to reality).
This lofty cultural value seems to have become one of the casualties of change over the last century in Russia. In everyday speech, the word is often used more narrowly. Ìèëèöèîíåð ïðèâ¸ë â ñìèðåíèå ðàçáóøåâàâøèõñÿ õóëèãàíîâ (The policeman got the unruly hooligans under control).
Of course, language and culture change, and there’s nothing you can do about it. But it’s too bad. It would be nice if a few more people had old-style humility (ñìèðåíèå), and a few less people were forced to resign themselves (ñìèðèòüñÿ) to an inevitable and often unenviable fate.
Michele A. Berdy, a Moscow-based translator and interpreter, is author of “The Russian Word’s Worth” (Glas), a collection of her columns.
TITLE: THE DISH: Teatr
AUTHOR: By Luisa Schulz
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Playing with food
Stepping into Teatr, a new restaurant-cafe next to the Theater Estrady, guests may be caught by the prickling discomfort sensed when entering a restaurant that is almost completely empty. At nine in the evening, there were only two other diners, who had tucked themselves away in one of the corners of the single rectangular room. The white interior with excessive stucco and trendy chandeliers dragging down the high ceilings did not help to ease the cool atmosphere. If the cafe resembles a theater, it is only because guests themselves feel as if they are entering a stage.
Polite waitresses stood around a little superfluously, trailing diners’ every gesture like spectators of an intimate play. In the high, echoing room, filled only by low but not very soothing chill-out-music, they could follow every word of people’s conversations, even from afar. On the upside, this means that the staff can be addressed from anywhere in the whole room. This strategy was used to request an English menu, which the servers brought immediately, though it turned out to be only a drinks menu — rather unhelpful as not only was there no wine on offer, but no alcohol at all was available, as the restaurant opened in May and has not yet obtained a liquor license.
The menu options were of a more colorful variety, ranging from borsch to gazpacho, from Polish zander to beef Stroganoff, from panna cotta to a berry cocktail. The prices — between 450 and 690 rubles ($14.10 to 21.60) for a main — were as lofty as the interior. A disappointment for vegetarians is that all hot dishes on offer contain either fish or meat. A consolation was the summer menu, which featured cold soups and salads that were as original as cold spinach with a fruit sauce.
An advantage to being such lonely diners in the restaurant was that the dishes were served swiftly. The champignon cappuccino soup (320 rubles, $10) had an interesting spumous consistency and was a whirl for the mouth, though the aftertaste was less refined. The gazpacho (290 rubles, $9), was nicely decorated with herbs and a Grossini bread stick, and slid down the throat more like tomato juice with a pinch of onion and pepper.
An arriving plate that held what resembled rosy beige-colored marshmallows with a kraken-like, undulating array of sauce traces turned out to be the salmon and zander medallions served with a vegetable puree and wine sauce (450 rubles, $14.10). The medallions had an agreeable unobtrusive taste, but were slightly dry, and the salmon and zander flavors were disappointingly hard to detect, as was the wine in the sauce. The vegetable puree, on the other hand, was delectable and a larger portion of it would have certainly been appreciated. A more guarded alternative turned out to be a simple salad with yogurt sauce (290 rubles, $9) that the vegetarian in our party reverted to given the lack of meat- and fish-free mains.
For want of alcohol, the dishes ended up being accompanied by fruit cocktails (ginger-lemon and strawberry-pineapple, both 150 rubles, $4), which dominated the counterpoint with the savory courses, as they were bursting with glucose. The desserts were the late denouement of the dinner at Teatr. Not only were they served to us when the restaurant had officially already closed, but the panna cotta and berry cocktail with vanilla ice cream and wine had a fine, discreet taste that smoothed out the former imbalances and enabled us to leave the restaurant almost appeased.
Although the restaurant resembles a playhouse overcharged with stucco and chandeliers, the costumes of the dishes were nicely decorated.
Had it not been for this panopticon effect of the vacuous room, and had indeed some of the neighboring theater’s actors dropped in, as an employee said they sometimes do, the experience might not have been too bad.
TITLE: Businesses Encourage Hiring Disabled Workers
AUTHOR: By Jonathan Earle
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Yury Sidorov was afraid he wouldn’t find a job after he lost the use of his legs in a car accident five years ago.
“I thought employers wouldn’t take me seriously. I thought people would treat me like an outcast and everyone would feel bad for me,” the 28-year-old said.
Sidorov had reason to worry: Eighty-four percent of Russians with disabilities, 3.5 million in all, are unemployed, according to government figures, and activists say that figure is an underestimate.
But with the help of a local NGO, Sidorov landed a job as an accountant at KPMG, an international auditing firm.
His story highlights a growing trend of companies in Russia hiring people with disabilities.
They say it’s not about charity; it’s about the bottom line. Inclusive hiring increases the quality of their applicants and creates a more cohesive staff and more nuanced solutions for customers, they argue.
Their market-based approach could do more to bring people with disabilities into the workforce and society than decades of government subsidies and quotas.
The obstacles to employment for people with disabilities in Russia are many and often start quite literally at the doorstep.
Although accessibility improvements have been made in recent years, Moscow remains a hazardous and often inaccessible city for people with visual or physical impairments.
Most buildings aren’t wheelchair-accessible, and most sidewalks aren’t equipped with special grooves for the visually impaired.
Combined with potholes, ice in the winter and cars roaming the sidewalks, it’s enough to persuade many people with disabilities to stay home.
“The metro, apart from a few new stations, is completely inaccessible,” said Sidorov, who drives to work.
The other barriers to employment are primarily psychological. In the Soviet Union, “disabled” meant “unemployable,” and people with disabilities were seen as wards of the state to be pitied and taken care of.
This mentality has in part led to misconceptions that make employers reluctant to hire people with disabilities to this day, activists say.
At a recent roundtable, Yelena Arefyeva, chairwoman of the Business and Disability Council and HR director for DPD, a parcel delivery company, said that contrary to popular belief, people with disabilities are no more likely to take sick leave or be less qualified.
Also, they rarely require expensive infrastructure upgrades such as ramps and special lavatories. As for the supposed safety hazards, she said, people with disabilities are often the most safety-conscious.
“Seventy percent of public bus drivers in Finland are hearing-impaired. Their accident rate is practically zero compared with other drivers,” she said.
Natalya Isakovskaya, of media communications firm Vivaki, said people with disabilities are among the most positive, responsible, open and goal-oriented in her company.
“Lyosha Smirnov is always the first to turn on his computer. … Ksyusha Sukhareva inspires us with her optimism and liveliness. Maxim Tolstikov teaches us to think abstractly and focus on the end result,” she said in e-mailed comments.
No special training is required to help other employees adjust to having co-workers with disabilities, she said.
Employees at the Clifford Chance law firm’s Russian office had “no trouble” integrating people with disabilities, country manager Katie Clarke said in e-mailed comments.
Again and again, company representatives returned to the fact that hiring people with disabilities improves the overall quality of incoming staff by enlarging the applicant pool.
“We’re coming up against a shortage of highly qualified and motivated workers. If we exclude people with disabilities from this pool of talented, dedicated, strong personalities, we’re reducing the options available to our company,” said Yelena Timakova, an HR manager at KPMG.
Clifford Chance, Vivaki, KPMG and a handful of other companies are members of the Business and Disability Council, which helps promote inclusive employment.
The council sponsors the annual “Path to Careers” competition, which helped Sidorov get a job at KPMG two years ago.
Path to Careers prepares upperclassmen and recent graduates with disabilities to enter the job market, tutoring them on resume writing, interviewing and other skills and connecting up to 20 finalists with potential employers.
“The skills are simple, but these things are hard to do when you’re worried about how you’re being perceived,” Sidorov said. “I became convinced, as a result, that there’s nothing scary about being in a wheelchair.”
The program was created with the help of Perspektiva, one of the few NGOs in Russia that promote inclusive employment. It has placed more than 600 applicants in companies since 2003.
Council members stress that inclusive employment isn’t about being kind, it’s about accepting exceptional employees regardless of their disabilities.
“We don’t create special jobs for people with disabilities,” Arefyeva said. “When a job opening appears, we interview people with disabilities as well as people without them.”
This is not to deny the human benefits of inclusive employment.
People with disabilities need jobs to become full members of society, and their presence in the workplace helps break down stereotypes generated by years of separation.
“People with disabilities especially need work, not just to pay the rent, but as a way of entering society,” Yevgenia Voskoboinikova, a Dozhd TV host who uses a wheelchair, said in an e-mail. “It’s an awesome feeling to know you’re bringing value to society. … It makes going to work feel like going to a holiday celebration.”
Denise Roza, Perspektiva’s director, said the government still doesn’t recognize that it’s better and cheaper to promote inclusive employment than to pour millions of dollars into quotas, subsidies and special businesses for people with disabilities.
Under a 2011 government framework on disabilities policy called “Accessible Environment,” the government will set aside 950 million rubles ($28.6 million) per year through 2014 on special businesses, typically overseen by national societies for the blind, deaf and disabled.
The All-Russia Society for the Blind, which runs workshops countrywide producing everything from paintbrushes to furniture, won an additional 57 million ruble ($1.8 million) grant in 2010 and 64.8 million rubles ($2 million) in additional funds in 2011.
Perspektiva, the other winner in 2010, received 3.6 million rubles ($111,000).
Perhaps as a gesture of gratitude, the group quickly joined President Vladimir Putin’s All-Russia People’s Front, a confederation of pro-Kremlin NGOs, in May 2011.
“It’s not our fault that other all-Russia organizations can’t present more attractive programs,” Vladimir Vshivtsev, acting president of the All-Russia Society for the Blind, said when asked about why his group frequently won annual grants in addition to its yearly budget allotment.
Vshivtsev said that despite the federal subsidies, the society is a net contributor to the budget, with its 158 businesses across the country paying more than 1.4 billion rubles ($42 million) in taxes in 2011, he said in an e-mail.
The society had created 2,319 new jobs between 2006 and 2010 and planned to create 211 this year, he said.
While he lamented the labor status of people with disabilities, Vshivtsev said “Accessible Environment” and its predecessor showed the “serious attention” of the government.
“You have to keep in mind the number of social obligations that the government has, as well as the unstable global economy,” he said.
Vshivtsev said employment in private companies isn’t realistic for many people with disabilities, especially the severely disabled and the visually impaired.
Two visually impaired protesters at a demonstration in early July said private companies would never hire them because of their disabilities.
Even after their City Hall-funded call center was shut down, leaving them without work, paychecks and working documents, Yury Boldin and Yury Milchakov said government-backed businesses were their only hope.
Mikhail Terentyev, a wheelchair user and State Duma Deputy who sits on the Labor and Social Policy Committee, also defended the government’s efforts, citing a new requirement that all buildings be handicap-accessible starting Jan. 1.
He said a more effective incentives system — businesses are currently eligible to receive between 30,000 rubles ($900) and 50,000 rubles for hiring a person with disabilities — would be part of the solution, but he cautioned that the government alone couldn’t undo years of negative stereotypes.
“Businesses need to understand that if a person with disabilities comes to them for a job, that person has already overcome incredible obstacles. A person with that kind of drive is the best type of employee,” he said on the sidelines of a roundtable on inclusive employment.
It remains to be seen whether the government will strengthen inclusive employment efforts now that Russia has ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities, which establishes a regular reporting regime for tracking the country’s progress on the issue.
Mikhail Novikov, employment program director at Perspektiva, said,“only rich countries can afford not to boost employment.”
“People with disabilities who don’t work are a burden on the country’s resources. They receive benefits and pensions at the expense of working people,” he said.
According to the International Labor Organization, the exclusion of disabled persons from the workforce may cost countries between 1 and 7 percent of GDP as a result of lost productive potential, the cost of disability benefits and pensions and implications for their families and careers.
But while the wheels of government bureaucracy slowly turn, the onus of hiring people with disabilities will continue to lie with companies.
“Employers have the choice to look at people with disabilities just as they would at other people,” Sidorov said. “They shouldn’t have mental barriers against people with disabilities. … Try hiring one. Give that person a chance to show his or her value.”