SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1731 (42), Wednesday, October 17, 2012
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TITLE: New Tiger Reserve Opened as State Unveils $11Bln Environmental Program
AUTHOR: By Roland Oliphant
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW ¬— Environmentalists have welcomed the creation of a new nature reserve for Amur tigers in the Russian Far East as a key step toward preserving the species. 
The Sredneussurissky nature reserve, which Primorye Governor Vladimir Miklushevsky signed into existence Friday, connects two existing protected areas, creating a corridor between tiger populations on either side of the Russia-China border. 
The 72.7-hectare reserve contains coniferous and deciduous forest along the Russia-China border in Primorye's northwestern Pozharsky district. At its southern end, it also has wetlands that host important nesting groups for storks. 
Yury Damn, director of WWF Russia's Amur branch, welcomed the move as an "important step" but said more has to be done. 
"The next thing to do is ban commercial logging in the entire Pozharsky forestry zone and hand rights to people who harvest nuts there instead," he said in e-mailed comments. 
Environmentalists and commercial nut harvesters have regularly clashed with logging companies over access to tiger-inhabited forest in the Far East in the past several years. 
About 400 Siberian, or Amur, tigers are believed to survive in the wild, mostly in Russia's Primorye and Khabarovsk regions. Conservationists say one of the most serious threats the small population faces is genetic diversity, making safe links between breeding populations critical to their survival. 
The new tiger territory was established as the government unveiled plans to open 30 new reserves and national parks in the next eight years as part of a federal environmental protection program, which Natural Resources and Environment Minister Sergei Donskoi announced Thursday.
The 336 billion ruble ($10.9 billion) program for boosting environmental protection by 2020 will focus on four target areas: pollution reduction, biodiversity enhancement, improvement in environmental monitoring, and research projects in Antarctica. 
About 268 billion rubles will come from the federal budget, Donskoi said at a Cabinet meeting Thursday. 
While it is not clear where the remainder will come from, Donskoi did say he expected Vnesheconombank, Russian Technologies and the Skolkovo Foundation to contribute to the program by developing and commercializing resource-efficient technology. 
Targets set by Donskoi include reducing the number of cities with high or very high pollution by more than 60 percent and slashing the number of Russians living in unhealthy environmental conditions by 80 percent. 
Other goals include reducing the waste produced per unit of GDP and coming up with a conservation policy suited to deal with the impacts of climate change based on research in Antarctica. 
Industrial practices inherited from the Soviet era, when less than half of industry used any kind of waste-processing system, mean that 30 billion tons of unprocessed waste has been accumulated since the Soviet collapse, Donskoi said. 
The Natural Resources and Environment Ministry estimates that environmental damage costs Russia the equivalent of four to six percentage points of GDP annually.





TITLE: Radio Liberty Hiring New Team, Executive Says
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Radio Liberty is hiring dozens of staff to rebuild its operations in a modern multimedia format, a senior executive of the station's parent company Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty said Friday.
After moving to a new bureau in Moscow, Radio Liberty's staff is to number 40 to 50 people in both Moscow and Prague, Julia Ragona, Radio Free Europe's vice president of content, distribution and marketing, told The St. Petersburg Times.
That number is about half of the "close to 90 people" that the station employed in both cities until September, when more than 40 journalists were laid off in Moscow, reducing the local bureau to a staff of just 10.
Ragona said that the layoffs were necessary to build a "single team" with different skills that would focus on turning Radio Liberty into a digital multimedia outlet under its new director, Masha Gessen. Hitherto the station consisted of two separate teams for radio and online content, she said.
She reiterated that the station's budget would not be cut. Radio Free Europe, which is funded by the U.S. Congress and currently has an annual budget of $92 million, does not disclose individual financial details, but Ragona said that Radio Liberty remains the largest of its divisions.
Critics have accused the U.S.-funded broadcaster, founded in 1953 as a Cold War tool to influence opinion in the Soviet bloc, of abandoning many of its listeners. The staff cuts went hand in hand with the announcement that Radio Liberty will end its AM broadcasting next month.
Ragona admitted that a small and "dedicated" audience did use AM, but added that, especially in Moscow, the signal was so bad that it was "very painful to listen to."
Last week, Radio Free Europe's president Steve Korn told the St. Petersburg Times that the decision to abandon AM broadcasts was based on a federal law that forbids foreign control of broadcast licenses — prompting accusations that the broadcaster was caving in to Kremlin pressure.
Ragona pointed out that the law was in line with legislation in Western countries, including the United States, where foreigners are prohibited from owning terrestrial broadcasting licenses, which prompted Australian media tycoon Rupert Murdoch to obtain citizenship in 1985.
Russian broadcasters, first and foremost the Kremlin-funded RT Television channel, are limited to cable and satellite, she said.
Radio Liberty also explored taking on a Russian partner to circumvent the law, but a planned deal with Alexander Lebedev, who owns Novaya Gazeta and a number of Moscow radio stations, fell through because his licenses did not allow the content necessary for Radio Liberty, Ragona said.


TITLE: Investor Defies Safety Risks in Dagestan
AUTHOR: By Irina Filatova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MAKHACHKALA, Dagestan — A busy crossroad in the city center was full of masked camouflaged men who were stopping cars Friday for a security check. 
Armed with assault rifles, the men — who by all signs represented local police — spoke little while searching the vehicles, including the one with a St.Petersburg Times reporter, inside and out. 
The scene is typical for the capital of the restive North Caucasus republic, which has seen a massive death toll over the last decade because of rampant crime and political instability.  
However, the grim image of the republic doesn’t affect the confidence of some investors, who have been attracted to the region by tax breaks and other benefits provided by the government. 
In a recent example, Moscow-based firm IN-Invest has teamed up with a dozen Italian companies, including Evotek, to build an agricultural complex in the valley of the Sulak River, an ambitious project costing 14 billion rubles ($455 million dollars) that local authorities hope will become one of the biggest of its kind in the south of Russia. 
Dagestan President Magomedsalam Magomedov, who joined the companies implementing the project at the groundbreaking ceremony Friday, said that local and federal authorities are working on creating a favorable business climate in the republic. 
“We are trying to compensate the safety risks by providing tax breaks … This makes the region economically attractive for foreign investors,” he told reporters ahead of the ceremony. 
He pointed out that the republic’s investment portfolio includes a total of 74 projects jointly worth 230 billion rubles. 
Magomedov said that the new agricultural project, called AgroDagItaliya, will boost the development of the republic, where agriculture is a staple industry, and help create thousands of jobs. 
IN-Invest, which invests primarily in construction and agricultural projects, has contributed 23 percent of the project’s funding, with the remaining portion to be provided in loans by Russian banks, said Gadzhimurad Gadzhiyev, chief executive of AgroDagItaliya.
The complex will be built in three stages. The first one, a poultry farm, is to be completed by the end of next year, he said.
The second stage, which involves construction of a cattle farm, and the third one, construction of grain production facilities, are slated to be completed by 2018, Gadzhiyev told reporters after the ceremony.   
AgroDagItaliya will produce 50,000 tons of poultry and 650 million eggs a year, with 40 percent of the products to be exported. 
The company has signed preliminary agreements to export poultry to Armenia, Moldova, Poland and Luxembourg over the next 10 years, Gadzhiyev said.  
Russia plans to increase annual poultry exports to 500,000 tons by 2020 from 50,000 tons this year, president of the Russian Poultry Union Vladimir Fisinin said earlier this month. 
Russian poultry farms are expected to produce 3.5 million tons of poultry this year, and that figure might grow to 4 million tons by 2020, he told Interfax, adding that the increase in poultry output will result in the country fully meeting domestic demand and allowing for expanding exports.  
But it will take a while before Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization, which was widely expected to boost the country’s export potential, brings results. 
Exports “are facing difficulties so far,” as European countries remain wary of buying Russian poultry, Fisinin said without specifying the reasons. 
“We hoped that the European Union would buy [meat], that accession to the WTO would help to achieve this, but they are showing a cautious approach,” he said.





TITLE: Russian Rights Activist Granted Asylum in Estonia
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Estonia has granted political asylum to a Russian journalist and human rights activist who fled abroad more than two months ago, fearing prosecution over his criticism of the Russian Orthodox Church.
"Estonian authorities declared my criminal case politically motivated and recognized that I am being persecuted in Russia for my political views," Maxim Yefimov told the Agora human rights organization's Openinform news agency Friday.
Yefimov, who also received a three-year residency permit, said that he was the only Russian citizen to receive political asylum in the Baltic country this year and that rights organizations from Russia, Estonia, Sweden, Ireland and the United States had backed his application.
"Estonian President Toomas Ilves shook my hand and said that he was happy his country gave me temporary political asylum, since they respect freedom of speech in Estonia," Yefimov told Agora in writing.
Yefimov, who heads the Youth Human Rights Group of Karelia, fled the country at the end of July, shortly after local investigators charged him with inciting religious hatred over an article he published on his group's site. 
In the article, titled "Russia Is Tired of Priests," Yefimov likened the Orthodox Church to United Russia, calling the church a "ruling party" interested in money. 
Investigators had also requested Interpol issue a search warrant for Yefimov, who faced up to two years' jail time in Russia over the charges.


TITLE: City Authorities Deny Authorship of Controversial Brochure
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: ST. PETERSBURG – City authorities rushed to deny Friday that they had authored a controversial brochure aimed at labor migrants that has stirred a scandal in the northern capital.
The brochure, titled "The Labor Migrant's Guide," appeared on the official website of the St. Petersburg administration's Tolerance program Thursday, drawing criticism from bloggers for its depiction of the city's migrants as craftsmen's tools, including a putty knife, broom and paint brush, while locals appeared in human form.
City authorities pointed the finger at the Look at the Future nongovernmental organization, which they said designed and authored the project. 
Local officials even went as far as to provide the cell phone number of Look at the Future's head, Gleb Panfilov, in an effort to deflect bad press.
For his part, Panfilov said that his organization had carried out extensive surveys among migrants prior to publication to determine whether the information in the brochure was accessible to migrant workers. 
In comments carried by Interfax, he denied having received any complaints from migrants over the brochure's contents.
"These pictures haven't caused any negative emotions. In fact, choosing these pictures in the form of laborer's instruments, we didn't have migrants in mind, but simply helpers," Panfilov said.
Aside from the controversial images, the brochure contains information on rules for entering Russia, HIV prevention, labor regulations and a code of conduct in St. Petersburg.
In particular, the brochure's authors advise migrants not to wear their national dress, sports clothes, squat on their haunches (a tradition in Central Asia), or speak too loudly.
The brochure was published in four languages: Russian, Kyrgyz, Tajik and Uzbek.

TITLE: Opposition Governor Questioned in Moscow
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – Moscow authorities have questioned Kirov Governor Nikita Belykh on suspicion of misappropriating more than $3.5 million from a now-defunct opposition party and giving the money to a firm founded by protest leader Alexei Navalny, Vedomosti reported Thursday, citing an undisclosed police source.
Given that the leak about Belykh's questioning came a day after another protest leader, Sergei Udaltsov, was interrogated and had his apartment searched over suspicions that he was plotting riots, the events appeared to signal a renewed crackdown on political opposition.
Investigators from Moscow's economic crimes unit questioned Belykh earlier this month as part of a check into whether in 2007 he unlawfully paid 108.7 million rubles in Union of Rightist Forces funding to Navalny's now-defunct firm Allekt to advertise his party ahead of State Duma elections.
The firm's charter documentation allegedly did not include advertising services. Kirov region authorities have questioned Belykh on similar accusations, Vedomosti reported without saying when such questioning had occurred.
Neither Kirov region authorities nor those in Moscow had made an official statement about Belykh's questioning by late Thursday. Law enforcement representatives from both locales refused to comment to Vedomosti.
On Thursday, Belykh wrote on his LiveJournal blog that there were no legal violations in his party's campaign, adding that the Union of Rightist Forces had filed all financial reports with the Central Elections Commission and the Justice Ministry on time.
"If anyone remembers what the [authorities'] attitude toward the Union of Rightist Forces was at the time, you would have no doubt that if there had been any violations, they would have been found at one in 2007," Belykh wrote.
Navalny told Vedomosti that Allekt provided advertising to the party for a 5 percent commission and did not violate the firm's charter.
Police opened an investigation into Belykh at the request of the head of the Kirov regional legislature, Alexei Ivonin, who is a member of the ruling United Russia party.
Ivonin asked police to examine a hacked e-mail exchange between Navalny and Belykh in 2010, which was published by an anonymous blogger in October 2011. In one of the e-mails, Navalny reminded Belykh that the former leader of the Union of Rightist Forces owed him money.
After the publication of the e-mails, Ivonin soon asked regional police and other authorities to examine them, but local investigators dragged their feet in carrying out his request, he told Vedomosti.
At the time, Belykh denied on his Twitter account that he had paid any money to Navalny's firm, saying his party's advertising campaign had been canceled, Vedomosti reported.
The Kremlin may be trying to "weaken" how Belykh is perceived as a governor, a source close to the Kremlin told Vedomosti. 
Belykh's term expires in January, but according to an amendment that President Vladimir Putin  signed this month creating a single voting day for regional elections in September, either Belykh will be acting governor until that time or he will be replaced by another temporary governor until the election.
Although Belykh stopped his opposition activities in 2008 and was appointed governor three months later, he remains liberal-minded and is one of the few governors who are not members of the ruling party. Therefore, he may be the main competitor against a United Russia candidate in a gubernatorial election. 
But in the "governor survival rating" compiled by the St. Petersburg Politics Foundation and Minchenko Consulting in October, Belykh's chances of being re-elected were considered middling, ranked on the scale at a 3 out of 5. 
Belykh's popular support dropped after a mass brawl between Russians and Caucasus natives in the Kirov region village of Demyanovo in late June, the rating said. 
In the rating of most powerful governors released in October by Nezavisimaya Gazeta and the Agency for Political and Economic Communications, Belykh came in 79th out of 83.
On Wednesday, hundreds of people gathered in downtown Kirov to speak out against the governor over bad roads and poor road safety, the local edition of the Kremlin-friendly Komsomolskaya Pravda tabloid reported.
The police inquiry into Belykh may also be aimed at Navalny, who is a leader of the anti-Kremlin street protest movement in Moscow.
An anti-corruption lawyer, Navalny already has a criminal case pending against him in a Moscow court in connection with allegations that he stole property from timber producer KirovLes during his time as an adviser to Belykh.
The latest activity by regional police in regard to Belykh may be linked to the appointment in late August of the new regional police chief. 
The appointee, Sergei Solodovnikov, who was previously deputy head of the southern federal district police, opened probes in 2008 into Stavropol region leaders of the Just Russia party after they won regional elections. The probes allowed United Russia to regain control of the regional legislature, Vedomosti reported, without elaborating.
But it might well be that Solodovnikov was appointed in particular to deal with Belykh.

TITLE: Police Detain TNK-BP Executive Offering to Sell Kremlin Posts 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – Police said Friday that they had detained a senior executive at British-Russian oil company TNK-BP on suspicion of trying to sell sought-after positions in the presidential administration.
According to police, the executive offered to sell two businessmen the positions of head of the presidential administration's internal affairs department and deputy chief of staff for the presidential envoy to the Central Administrative District.
The executive made the offer in September and sought $3 million for each Kremlin post, the Interior Ministry said in a statement on its website.
Police detained the TNK-BP executive as he accepted more than 3 million rubles ($97,000) as a down payment for the positions. Unconfirmed media reports said that the detention took place up to two weeks ago in Moscow.
Investigators have opened a criminal case against the executive on charges of large-scale corruption, which carry a maximum sentence of 10 years' imprisonment.
While police did not name the detained executive, TNK-BP later identified him in an e-mailed statement as Igor Korneyev.
Police said Korneyev headed the oil company's government relations department, which TNK-BP confirmed by e-mail, although his name was not listed on the department's website Friday morning. 
TNK-BP stressed that Korneyev had only worked with them for three months “during which period he was learning the business and getting acquainted with the industry.”
“Igor Korneyev's arrest is not linked to his work at TNK-BP,” a company representative said, without elaborating on whether TNK-BP planned to fire Korneyev over the allegations.
Prior to his work at TNK-BP, which BP has said it will exit due to strained relations with Russian consortium AAR, Korneyev worked as the Irkutsk region's top economy official and deputy head of the regional legislature. 
He only left his post in Irkutsk's regional government in June.
Korneyev's former postings "allowed him to market himself as an influential person with extensive connections," police said.
But in fact, Korneyev “possessed no means of influencing personnel appointments in government structures, according to police.

TITLE: Amid Crackdown, Opposition Debates to Determine Leadership
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Kravtsova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – At midnight, the halls of the independent Dozhd television station at the former Red October chocolate factory were dark and empty, with only the "on air" sign lit up in red indicating that the channel still had something left to broadcast.
But the studio was not set up for your typical late-night show. The genre for the night's program was one that had lost much of its meaning in modern Russia: political debate.
While ruling party candidates in Russian elections generally avoid the confrontational format, anti-Kremlin activists have revived it with a series of contests pitting hardcore nationalists against social democrats, political celebrities against local organizers.
The ultimate goal? To help determine the makeup of a much-touted leadership council for the non-parliamentary opposition.
"The opposition's organizing committee was expected to produce a clear political position, but it was only in charge of organizing protest rallies," said Yury Saprykin, one of the debate presenters as well as chief editor of media holding Afisha Rambler and a former member of the organizing committee for protest rallies.
"Now a political organization can be born," he said.
Saprykin tried to cheer up the candidates, who five minutes prior were blithely smoking together in a nearby hallway but had gotten nervous in the studio.
The majority of the candidates in this debate, one of the final rounds, held liberal views: veteran opposition member Boris Nemtsov, environmental activist Yevgenia Chirikova, it-girl-turned-protest figure Ksenia Sobchak and journalist Filipp Dzyadko.
As a result, their discussion didn't have as much of the contrast, let alone the acrimony and intensity, of previous rounds, when nationalist Nikolai Bondarik lashed out at a liberal policy promoted by Nemtsov, and another nationalist, Kirill Barabash, insulted the liberal Dozhd station itself, calling it a national disgrace.
But the more centrist candidates were chosen by viewers to advance, perhaps signaling that the final council — elections for which are set to be held this weekend — will not be dominated by figures with militant views.
An expansion of efforts by the authorities to prosecute opposition leaders — including the opening of a criminal case against Left Front chief Sergei Udaltsov on Wednesday — could encourage more hard-line stances among the candidates, however.
Getting Organized 
The anti-Kremlin protest movement that emerged in December has been frequently criticized by both pundits and the ruling authorities for a lack of coordination and defined leadership. When President Vladimir Putin — whom the protest movement bitterly opposes — has been asked whether he would consider consulting with the opposition, he has said he doesn't know who exactly he would be negotiating with.
The Coordination Council is meant to address some of these perceived deficiencies, as well as to take a first step toward consolidating the motley collection of opposition activists that has taken part in street protests.
"All opposition activity has been reactive so far. The coordinating council will try to set its own political agenda and be an actor on the political scene," Leonid Volkov, head of the council's elections committee and an independent Yekaterinburg municipal lawmaker, said at a press conference earlier this week.
The 45-member body is set to function for a year, after which new elections will be held. The idea for the council was announced at a March of Millions opposition rally on June 12.
To ensure the representation of a range of opposition views, elections will distribute places on the council both to 30 candidates from a general list and to 15 contenders holding specific ideologies — five each for nationalists, "liberals" and "left-wing" activists. 
More than 200 people have registered as candidates. Some of them are running as members of one of 20 blocs, which include groups such as the so-called Progressive Bloc and the Green Bloc, while there are also independent candidates.
The specific functions of the council are yet to be defined, and it isn't clear how the body will be financed.
"All questions regarding the council's work will be decided by the newly elected deputies," Volkov said.
The committee's website describes the elections to the Coordination Council as a way to enfranchise citizens who feel that their views are not represented in the government. It indirectly refers to the disputed parliamentary vote in December that sparked major protests, which have since given birth to a wider movement.
"Currently, the overwhelming majority of Russian citizens have been deprived of political representation," the website says. "[But] political struggle should be the work of politicians."
"In the modern world a person has, as a rule, his own doctor, lawyer, travel agent, etc. In roughly the same way, the not-indifferent person who is interested in politics needs his own politician who will represent his interests not from protest to protest but all the time," it says.
Volkov said the first meeting of the council is planned for next week.
Some indications of the body's composition have been given in the debates, where candidates have had an opportunity to demonstrate their suitability for work on the council.
The contests have been held every weeknight since Oct. 1 starting at midnight. The final round, in which 20 candidates were chosen to participate by online voting following a qualifying round and semifinals, ended Thursday. A show summing up the debates' results and announcing the winners will be aired Friday night.
The winners of the drawn-out series of debates will not automatically be given spots on the council.
But Alexei Makarkin, vice president of the Center for Political Technologies think tank, argued that the process was valuable because it helped expose the public to a new generation of politicians and weed out candidates with outlying views.
Some observers doubted that any of the little-known hopefuls from the regions would progress far in the debates while facing big-name members of the Moscow opposition scene, such as anti-corruption lawyer Alexei Navalny and Solidarity activist Ilya Yashin. Some dark-horse candidates, such as biology professor Mikhail Gelfand, managed to make it to the finals, however.
Saprykin said that because the debates were open to every registered candidate, many who live outside Moscow and who had never been on TV before participated, some of them via Skype.
"Suddenly, new people have been discovered," Saprykin said.
Holding the Vote 
Nearly 160,000 voters had registered to take part in the elections by Thursday evening. Registration closed Thursday at midnight.
The elections, to be held Saturday and Sunday, will use only electronic ballots, although there will be physical polling places in more than 20 regions across Russia, including in Vladivostok, Barnaul in the Altai region, as well as at five sites in Moscow and three in St. Petersburg. There will also be voting stations in New York, Washington, Paris, Munich, Dresden, London and, bizarrely enough, the Prachuap Khiri Khan province in Thailand.
Voters will also be able to cast ballots online.
According to Volkov, 35 percent of the electorate is in the Moscow area, 10 percent in St. Petersburg, 40 percent in other regions of Russia and 15 percent in regions that cannot be identified by phone code and in foreign countries.
Volkov noted that the majority of voters are political activists themselves, while Pavel Salin, an independent political expert, pointed out that they are likely all active Internet users, something he said made the elections illegitimate.
"One hundred thousand to 150,000 active Internet users cannot choose candidates for the whole country," he said.
One of the main outlets for political activism following the growth in opposition sentiment over the past 10 months has been monitoring governmental elections, and the Coordination Council voting committee has invited observers to take part in these elections as well.
But some of the monitors will not be so sympathetic to the cause: Pro-Putin youth movement Nashi has announced that it will send observers to the elections.
Nashi commissioner Konstantin Goloskokov told The St. Petersburg Times that a source close to the elections committee told him of possible "carousels," a fraud method by which groups of voters cast ballots at multiple polling stations. The opposition said the practice was used by the campaigns of some United Russia candidates in December's parliamentary elections.
Goloskokov said he had sent a request to Volkov to send observers but hadn't received an answer.
Accompanying the elections this weekend will be two City Hall-sanctioned rallies in Moscow on Saturday and Sunday for up to 1,500 participants. Each rally will take place on Trubnaya Ploshchad, where there will also be voting stations.
Following the opening of a criminal case Wednesday against opposition leader Sergei Udaltsov, who is also a candidate in the elections, the rallies have the potential to draw an aggressive crowd.
The election budget of 3.3 million rubles ($107,000) is being funded by candidates' 10,000 ruble registration fees, private donations and 10 ruble registration payments by voters, Volkov said.
The elections' finances have become the subject of controversy after the Prosecutor General's Office initiated a criminal case Wednesday in connection with complaints by 64 people that 10,000 rubles had been stolen from each of them when they registered on the election committee's website.
Volkov told Dozhd that he believed the complaints were made by people who wanted to become candidates but whose applications were rejected. He said the committee did not have the people's bank account information and therefore could not yet return their registration fees.
Volkov alleged that the complaints were an attempt to deliberately spoil the elections.
Some believe that the council will face challenges bigger than legal problems, including that of building on the momentum of the protest movement, which some think is sputtering after the last rally in September drew a smaller crowd than past demonstrations.
Makarin said the council's efficiency would depend on how ambitious the protest movement would be.
"If it fades away, there will be more arguments within the council and its work will be ineffective," he said.

TITLE: U.S. Says 'Serious Military Equipment' on Syria-Bound Jet 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – The U.S. said that "serious military equipment" was found on board a passenger plane forced down by Turkish fighter jets during a flight between Moscow and Damascus last week and that it has spoken to Russia about it.
U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said U.S. diplomats have spoken with Russians both in Washington and Moscow about the cargo confiscated from the Syrian airline by Turkish authorities at the Ankara airport on Oct. 11.
"We have been in contact with the Russians," Nuland told reporters in Washington on Wednesday.
"As you know, we were pretty definitive publicly about our grave concern that this kind of activity continues, particularly by a Security Council member," she said, according to a transcript on the State Department's website.
Turkey has not given a public account of what precisely was found, while Russian officials have said that the cargo included radar parts that had dual civilian and military use but were completely legal.
But Nuland indicated that the cargo was more serious than what the Russians had suggested.
"We've had a pretty comprehensive account from the Turkish side of precisely what they found," she said. "But I'm going to leave it to them to share in public what they found. … We have no doubt that this was serious military equipment.
The plane incident has cast a chill on Russia's relations with Turkey, but Ankara, worried about the months of violent civil unrest in neighboring Syria, has dismissed the idea that the consequences will be long term.
President Vladimir Putin appeared to bristle over the plane incident on Tuesday, telling a state arms trade commission that no country could restrict Russia's sales of weapons.
"Only sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council can serve as a basis for limiting weapons supplies," Putin said. "In all other cases, nobody can use any pretext to dictate to Russia on how it should trade and with whom."
Efforts by some Security Council members to impose sanctions have been blocked by Russia and China.
Russia's policy line was reaffirmed by Deputy Prime Minister Dimitry Rogozin on Thursday. "No one can ever complain about Russia in this respect; weapons export controls in our country are stricter than in many other countries," Rogozin said, according to Interfax.
Russian officials, in turn, have accused Western countries of supplying weapons to the Syrian rebel army.

TITLE: Udaltsov Calls for Pickets Over Aide's Detention
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – Left Front leader Sergei Udaltsov, who investigators suspect of plotting mass riots on Russian soil, called on supporters to picket law enforcement agencies on Thursday in support of his assistant charged in the same case.
"We must struggle to free Lebedev," Udaltsov told Interfax on Thursday, referring to his aide Konstantin Lebedev, who investigators detained for 48 hours Wednesday and formally charged with preparing to organize mass riots a day later.
Lebedev denies his guilt and has refused to answer questions in connection with the charges, investigators said in a statement on their website. If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison.
Investigators had not charged Udaltsov as of lunchtime Thursday. 
Udaltsov said the pickets would take place outside city police headquarters at 38 Ulitsa Petrovka and the Investigative Committee building at 2 Tekhnichesky Pereulok. 
The pickets come as media reports said the opposition could delay elections to its Coordination Council scheduled for Saturday so as to hold a rally in support of Udaltsov and his colleagues.
"We originally planned to dedicate [a rally] to elections to the opposition's Coordination Council," Boris Nemtsov, formerly a deputy prime minister and now an opposition leader, wrote on Facebook.
"But now the main thing is stopping repression. And the slogan 'Hands off Udaltsov and his comrades' is most important."
Referring to events a day earlier, Udaltsov said Thursday that he was grateful to those who showed support while investigators were searching his flat and to others who waited for his release late in the evening from the Investigative Committee building, where he was being questioned. 
"My release is in large measure due to the efforts of these people," the protest organizer said.
On Wednesday, investigators announced that they had opened a criminal case against Udaltsov, Lebedev and Leonid Razvozzhayev, an aide to Just Russia lawmaker Ilya Ponomaryov, on charges of planning mass riots. 
While investigators quickly tracked down Udaltsov and Lebedev and led them away for questioning, investigators were unable to immediately determine the whereabouts of Razvozzhayev.
As evidence for their claims against the trio, investigators cited hidden-camera footage obtained by NTV reporters and included in the Oct. 5 broadcast of "Anatomy of a Protest 2," the latest mudslinging film by the channel known for attacking Kremlin foes.
NTV said that the footage showed the three opposition activists meeting with senior Georgian officials in the Belarusian capital, Minsk, in June and that during the meeting they received instructions on how to orchestrate riots.

TITLE: With an Eye on OECD, Russia Touts $20Bln Debt Write-Off
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – Russia has written off more than $20 billion in debt and contributed $50 million to the World Bank Trust Fund to support development projects in African countries, a senior Foreign Ministry official told the UN General Assembly, as Moscow steps up its quest to join the OECD.
Russia is an active participant in the promotion of education and health in Africa, contributing $42.9 million in 2008-12 to education in developing countries and $100 million to health projects fighting HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
"We strongly believe that it is possible to overcome all the barriers on the way to transform the continent into an area of security, stability and sustainable development on the solid basis of international law, African unity and solidarity," Vladimir Sergeyev, director of the Foreign Ministry's department of international organizations, told the assembly Wednesday, according to a transcript on the website of Russia's UN mission.
Russia's investment in African countries is another step in its push to join the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Membership requires commitments to more than 250 legally binding requirements developed by the OECD since World War II, supporting the IMF and World Bank's efforts to help developing countries avoid a buildup of debt and provide debt relief under the Heavy Indebted Poor Countries Initiative and the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative. 
In May, the Finance Ministry reported writing off the debt of the former African allies of the Soviet Union, thus demonstrating the ministry's commitment to international development.

TITLE: Magnitsky Case Goes to Strasbourg Court
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – The mother of Sergei Magnitsky, the anti-corruption lawyer who died in pretrial detention in 2009, has filed a complaint in the European Court of Human Rights.
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Natalya Magnitskaya by the Open Society Justice Initiative, a George Soros-founded human rights group, accuses Russian law enforcement agencies of manipulating the criminal justice system to silence her son after he exposed a $230 million tax fraud involving Interior Ministry officials.
"Sergei Magnitsky was wrongly detained and tortured because he unearthed evidence of grand theft at senior levels of the Russian government, then refused to back down," said James Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative and the lead lawyer on the case.
"Though Mr. Magnitsky's courage was unusual, his fate is not. His case shines a spotlight on the corruption and abuse which pervade Russia's justice system," he said in an e-mailed statement.
The complaint, filed Wednesday, says Magnitsky's death was the result of deliberate abuse while he was moved between five Moscow detention centers over the course of a year. It says he was persistently denied medical treatment for a life-threatening illness and was beaten by guards just before he died. 
The Kremlin human rights council uncovered the beating in a nonbinding report released last year. No one has been punished in connection with the death, although a prison doctor is currently on trial in Moscow on charges of negligence.
The Magnitsky complaint asks the Strasbourg-based court to rule that Russia has violated six articles of the European Convention on Human Rights, including denial of right to life, torture, unlawful detention, retaliation against whistle-blowers and failure to provide an effective remedy.
It was unclear when the court might hear the case.
In a separate development, British lawmakers have urged their government to disclose the names of Russians banned from entry into their country in connection with Magnitsky's death. Britain earlier acknowledged that it had banned an unspecified number of Russian officials.
"The government does not routinely publicize the identity of individuals denied a visa to enter the U.K., and it has resisted calls to make public any denial of visas to enter the U.K. for those who held responsibility in the chain of events which led to the death of Mr. Sergei Magnitsky," the House of Commons' Foreign Affairs Committee said in a report released Wednesday.
"However, we believe that, when used sparingly, publicizing the names of those denied entry on human rights grounds could be a valuable tool in drawing attention to the U.K.'s determination to uphold high standards of human rights, and we recommend that the government make use of it," it said.
The British call was praised by Magnitsky's former employer, Hermitage Capital, once Russia's largest foreign investment fund.
"The Russian officials who tortured and killed Magnitsky are hiding behind a cloak of impunity and secrecy," a Hermitage spokesman said in an e-mailed statement. "Making the visa ban list public is the first step towards accountability for their actions, and we are pleased to see the recommendations of the U.K. parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee calling on the British government to do this."
It's doubtful, however, that the government will make the sensitive list public.
The U.S. State Department also has a classified list of Russian officials banned in the Magnitsky case, and U.S. lawmakers have drafted legislation to ban any Russian official accused of human rights abuses.
The U.S. measures have kindled the fury of the Kremlin, which has accused the U.S. of trying to meddle in Russia's internal affairs and threatened retribution.

TITLE: United Russia Deputy Suspected of Unlawful Business Activity
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – The Investigative Committee said Monday that it suspects a United Russia deputy of involvement in unlawful business activity, a month after an opposition lawmaker was stripped of his seat in parliament while facing similar allegations.
Investigators said in a statement Tuesday that a probe concerning the entrepreneurial activities of Alexei Knyshov revealed that he has been involved in managing multiple construction businesses while in office.
It is legal for Duma members to own companies, but they cannot profit from them or take part in their activities directly.
In September, senior Just Russia party official and fervent Kremlin critic Gennady Gudkov was stripped of his deputy seat by the Duma after the Investigative Committee said it had evidence that he had taken part in a board meeting at the Kolomensky Stroitel construction company. Critics said the decision was punishment for Gudkov’s outspoken opposition views.
Investigators allege that Knyshov is the registered owner of 12 businesses, including two construction companies based in his native Rostov region in southern Russia. They said Knyshov also managed two of them until late December.
Knyshov was elected to the Duma in parliamentary elections held on Dec. 4.
The Investigative Committee also said Knyshov was an owner of the Slovakia-based company Inbister until August. 
A website for the company says it produces metal pipe and other metal products.
“A procedural decision will be made regarding the pre-investigation inquiry,” the statement said, adding that the Prosecutor General’s Office and Duma Speaker Sergei Naryshkin would be sent the findings and decide how to proceed.
Knyshov, a rank-and-file member of the Duma Construction and Land Use Committee, said the allegations against him are groundless. “The information is 100 percent wrong,” Knyshov said, contending that one of the Rostov companies cited by investigators was shut down in 2004.
Knyshov was one of several deputies being investigated for alleged business ties by Just Russia Duma Deputy Dmitry Gudkov, the son of ousted former Deputy Gennady Gudkov.
Along with low-profile lawmakers, Dmitry Gudkov’s list contained a number of United Russia party heavyweights, including Vladimir Pekhtin and billionaire Andrei Skoch.
Dmitry Gudkov began his investigation into the possible ownership of assets by United Russia deputies soon after the ruling party threatened to strip his father of his deputy seat on similar allegations.
But Dmitry Gudkov said Tuesday that he is against removing Knyshov from the Duma without a court order.
“If they want to sacrifice Knyshov in response to the nonjudicial revenge on Gennady Gudkov, they will not achieve their task,” Gudkov told Russian News Service radio Tuesday.
Gudkov was the first lawmaker ever to be ousted from the Duma without having been convicted of a crime.
Senior Communist Party Deputy Sergei Obukhov said he doubts that the ruling party, which has a majority in the Duma, will act against Knyshov. 
“They might make noise, but I don’t think actions will be taken,” he said.
Meanwhile on Tuesday, two former members of the Just Russia Duma faction, Vladimir Mashkarin and Vadim Kharlov, became independents, bringing the number of deputies not with a party faction to seven, Interfax reported.
The change means that United Russia and their frequent ally the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party can form a two-thirds majority, or a so-called constitutional majority, together with the seven pro-Kremlin independent deputies.

TITLE: Legendary Cruiser That Played Role in Bolshevik Coup Decommissioned
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: ST. PETERSBURG – A legendary naval cruiser that played a symbolic role in the Bolshevik coup of 1917 was officially retired from military service Tuesday.
The cruiser Aurora, built during the reign of Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II, had become a symbol of the Bolshevik Revolution after it issued a blank shot signaling the start of the storming of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, the seat of the provisional government, in Oct. 1917.
The Aurora was decommissioned from the Navy on Tuesday and turned over to the Central Naval Museum, the Rosbalt news agency reported Tuesday, citing unidentified military officials.
Naval officers who were serving on the ship, which had been functioning as a de facto museum, departed from the cruiser, leaving only a civilian crew on board, the news agency said.
The changing of personnel on the ship was the culmination of a long-standing conflict between the Navy and local legislators, who protested the decision by Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov to take the ship out of service and transfer it to the museum.
In September, local Communist Party lawmakers wrote a letter to President Vladimir Putin  asking him to intervene in the situation to prevent the cruiser from being decommissioned. Putin forwarded the letter to Serdyukov, according to media reports.
Some former Aurora servicemen said the historic ship, which took part in battles against Japan in Russia’s war with that country in 1905, won’t survive without regular maintenance by a military crew. “Without a trained military personnel, the Aurora might fall into a state of disrepair in less than a year,” said Denis Sherba, a former sailor on the ship, RIA-Novosti reported in August.
Putin has not spoken publicly about the case, but he is known to have a negative attitude toward the Bolshevik Revolution, having once called the Bolshevik peace with imperial Germany in 1917 a “betrayal” of national interests.
In June 2009, the Aurora hosted a party thrown by the magazine Russky Pioneer, owned by billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, that was attended by prominent businessmen and government officials. The party touched off a scandal among State Duma deputies, who accused Prokhorov of tarnishing the symbolic ship.

TITLE: Judge Summons TV Presenter
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The established Moscow film critic and TV presenter Kirill Razlogov may be summoned to testify at the Trial of 12 after one of the prosecution experts was dismissed by the Moscow City Court as “unqualified.”
The defense of The Other Russia activists on trial for alleged “extremist activities” has demanded that Razlogov appear in court as the director of the Russian Institute of Cultural Studies to testify about his employees, Vitaly Batov and Natalya Kryukova.
Batov and Kryukova produced highly debatable “expert reports” supporting the investigators’ claims that the men on trial acted as the banned National Bolshevik Party (NBP), rather than legally within The Other Russia, the party that dissident author and political activist Eduard Limonov launched after the NBP was banned.
According to the defense, the two witnesses made their conclusions on questionable grounds and without relevant qualifications, yet their testimonies may lead to prison sentences for the defendants, some of whom face up to three years and some up to two years in prison if found guilty.
Meanwhile, the Moscow City Court last week dismissed Kryukova’s expert report in a different trial and refused to hear her testimony as an expert, referring to her “incompetence.”  
On Tuesday, lawyer Gleb Lavrentyev asked Judge Sergei Yakovlev to enter upon the record in the Trial of 12 the Oct. 10 issue of Kommersant daily newspaper with a report about Kryukova’s Moscow dismissal. Yakovlev declined, arguing that the article represented the reporter’s personal opinion.
The investigation turned to the Moscow-based Batov and Kryukova, who have a reputation for being able to find traces of extremism in any materials with which they are presented, after an original local expert concluded that the video recordings secretly made at the group’s meetings by the counter-extremist Center E in 2009 and presented on 27 DVD discs failed to link the group to the NBP.
The defense asked the court to exclude the Socio-Humanitarian Expert Report and the Psychologist Linguistic Expert Report by Batov and Kryukova after the Oct. 2 hearing at which the two were present.
According to defense lawyer Olga Tseitlina, the experts are not qualified to carry out such research, having no qualification or licenses to conduct any research for the court. Kryukova is a math teacher and Batov is a psychologist and cultural studies scholar. 
Kryukova and Batov claimed that the research was carried out on behalf of the Russian Institute of Cultural Studies, which is a state-sponsored research institution, but Tseitlina said that the organization had no authority to conduct such research either. 
According to the institute’s charter, she pointed out, the organization can only conduct expert analysis of social projects for the Culture Ministry, but not of evidence for a police investigation or court.
Tseitlina also found that Batov and Kryukova’s reports included unreferenced sections of text taken from Wikipedia and from Andrei Fateyev’s monograph “Enemy Image in Soviet Propaganda in 1945-1954,” widely available on the Internet.
She questioned the “psycho-hermeneutics” methodology used by Batov, who admitted at the Oct. 2 hearing that it was his own invention and was not accepted by his fellow researchers. The reports made no mention of scientific methodology used as required by the law, thus making it impossible to be reexamined by different experts.
According to Tseitlina, Batov and Kryukova’s testimony indicated that, in contravention of the law, the experts had used additional materials, such as the NBP’s manifesto and National Bolshevik websites, that were not provided by the investigators.
“By collecting material on their own authority, Batov and Kryukova showed their interest in getting results desirable for the investigation, having done everything they could to prove the guilt of the defendants in committing the actions they were charged with, hence they cannot be considered independent,” Tseitlina concluded.
At the Oct. 9 hearing, Judge Yakovlev neither accepted nor rejected Tseitlina’s motion, saying he had sent an enquiry to director Razlogov, asking him to give a detailed report on the qualification and authority of the experts. The defense lawyers said Yakovlev had done so without consulting them, and they insist on seeing Razlogov in person in order to put their own questions to him as well. 
Yakovlev declined the motion for the time being, saying, however, that it could be raised again after receiving a reply from Razlogov.

TITLE: Abuse of Medvedev On City Visit Irks Governor
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — City Governor Georgy Poltavchenko said he was upset by the behavior of some St. Petersburg residents who jeered the cortege of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev during his visit to the city last week.
“When the prime minister and I drove along the streets of our honored city, the majority of drivers honked their horns at us and people standing along the roadside raised certain fingers — to somebody who had come to solve the problems of his native city, our native city,” Poltavchenko told reporters of the Baltic media group, web portal Fontanka.ru reported.
“In that situation I felt ashamed. I felt ashamed not even as his subordinate or his colleague, with whom he has worked for some time, but rather as a St. Petersburg resident. People of other cities might do similar things as well. But I’ve never seen such open vulgarity.” 
The governor dismissed the idea that such behavior toward representatives of authority could be a reaction to the way the authorities behave toward citizens.
“That shows a complete absence of St. Petersburg mentality,” Poltavchenko said. “It’s a matter of upbringing. That is a matter not for the authorities but for families. People behave the way they were brought up to by their parents,” he said.
During his business trip to St. Petersburg, Medvedev was also present at the official laying of the keel for a new generation LK-24 icebreaker for the Rosmorport Federal State Unitary Enterprise, and took part in the official handover of new research ship the Akademik Treshnikov to meteorologists. Once launched, the ship will allow Russia to continue studies of the Pacific sector of the Antarctic, where research work was cut short at the end of the 1980s, RIA-Novosti reported.
Medvedev also drove along the new section of the city’s toll road, the Western High Speed Diameter.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Drunk Cop Kills Man</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The head of the criminal investigation department of a local district police station was detained after he hit and killed a pedestrian while driving under the influence of alcohol Saturday.
The policeman hit the man, who was reportedly crossing the road in an area where there was no pedestrian crossing, in the city’s Krasnogvardeisky district, at 3.30 a.m. 
A police patrol that happened to be in the area and witnessed the accident stopped the car and detained the driver. Document checks revealed that the driver was Sergei Kudryavtsev, head of the criminal investigation department of the Leningrad Oblast’s Vsevolozhsk district, Interfax reported.
Tests showed the presence of 1.2 milligrams of alcohol per milliliter in the driver’s blood, a level that correlates to a medium degree of alcohol intoxication, police said.

<b>Fines for Demolition</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — City Hall supported the initiative of City Governor Georgy Poltavchenko to increase fines for the demolition of historical buildings, Interfax reported this week.
Andrei Kibitov, Poltavchenko’s press secretary, said under the new rules companies would be fined 60 million rubles ($1.9 million) for the demolition of a building classified as historic, while individuals would be fined 15 million rubles ($500,000).
The proposal will be submitted for consideration by the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly in the near future, Kibitov said on his Twitter account Monday.
Poltavchenko raised the issue of toughening sanctions for demolishing historical buildings at a government meeting in September. After the controversial demolition of the city’s historic Rogov House on Sunday, Aug. 26, Poltavchenko suggested introducing a ban on the demolition of buildings on weekends and holidays.

<b>Helipads for Hospitals</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Two more hospitals in St. Petersburg are to be equipped with helicopter landing pads, the city’s Transport and Transit Policy Committee said, Interfax reported on Monday.
The engineering research on helicopter pads for the city’s Alexandrovskaya and Yelizavetinskaya hospitals is to be completed by the end of 2012. 
The city is currently completing work on landing pads for the Dzhanelidze Emergency Medical Research Institute and for City Children’s Hospital No.1.

<b>Jobs Through Friends</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Thirty-six percent of Russians got their current jobs thanks to connections with family and friends, and 52 percent would turn to friends and relatives for help if they lost their job, according to a survey carried out by the Obshchestvennoye Mneniye (Public Opinion) foundation, Interfax reported.
The survey showed that 14 percent of Russians got their jobs thanks to their relatives, and 11 percent through job advertisements in the media. A minority of people — only five percent — said that their former employers, colleagues or state services had helped them. Job websites had been helpful to only four percent of respondents, and only one percent had found a job through a recruitment agency.  

<b>Adopt a Pet at Exhibit</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — An exhibit of stray animals from the Rzhevka animal shelter will be held at the Burevestnik cultural center at 38 Ulitsa Podvoiskogo on Oct. 20 from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.
About 100 stray cats and dogs will be hoping to find new owners at the event titled “The Way Home 4,” the shelter said. People willing to adopt a pet will be able to do so for free. All the animals have been neutered and vaccinated.
The animals will only be given away after individual interviews with would-be owners, who must have their passport with them. 
Beside regular pets, the exhibit will also feature so-called “problem” animals and handicapped ones that also need owners. People who may not need a new pet but wish to support the shelter can do so by bringing donations for the shelter. A list of things Rzhevka needs can be found at the website http://dogs-rzv.spb.ru

TITLE: U.S. And Russia To Speed Up Deliveries
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Russian and U.S. postal services have agreed on measures designed to speed up the delivery of American parcels to Russia.
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has promised to solve the issue of improving postal logistics from the U.S. to the Russian Federation at the earliest possible date, the press service of the Russian postal service Pochta Rossii said in a statement last week.
The agreement is the result of a bilateral Russian-U.S. meeting between Alexander Kiselyov, general director of Pochta Rossii, and Patrick Donahue, head of USPS. Kiselyov and Donahue met at the 25th World Postal Union Congress.
The leaders discussed the matter of postal safety and how to streamline customs procedures in order to improve the quality of postal service between the two countries.
The majority of parcels that arrive in Russia from abroad come from the U.S. In 2011, parcels from the U.S. made up 36.4 percent of all the postal packages arriving in Russia. U.S. Internet stores are very popular among Russian customers.
Currently the majority of parcels from the U.S. pass through Moscow, which leads to overloading at Moscow’s international postal exchange center and accordingly affects delivery times.
Kiselyov said it was necessary to distribute postal flows between other postal exchange centers that would be ready to receive parcels from the U.S., including places such as Pulkovo Airport in St. Petersburg, and Vladivostok.
The Russian side also recommended that the U.S. consider the option of preliminary sorting of mail by postal code into correspondence meant for addressees in Russia’s Siberian and Far East regions, and mail meant for European Russia and the Urals. Such measures would facilitate the optimization of the sorting process and delivery times, it said. 
“The postal exchange between our countries shows stable growth. Russia is the only country among our partners where we annually observe a seasonal rise in parcels sent from the U.S. The issue of developing the logistics system will be worked out in the near future,” Donahue said.

TITLE: Hotel to Open Under Hermitage Name
AUTHOR: By Alla Tokareva
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: The State Hermitage Museum has spawned a hotel of the same name.
The Hermitage Hotel will open at 10 Ulitsa Pravdy in the near future, according to the hotel’s website. The company has obtained the rights to the name, which belongs to the museum. The Hermitage signed a memorandum with International Baltic Investment Company (MBIK) regarding the partnership, and a corresponding contract is now being drawn up, said Larisa Korabelnikova, the museum’s press secretary, who declined further comment.
Malik Babayev, MBIK’s general director, did not disclose the terms of the deal with the museum. The Hermitage will likely enter into a license agreement with the hotel for the temporary use of its trademark whilst reserving all rights to it, said Yekaterina Smirnova, a lawyer at Kachkin and Partners. She estimated the cost of using the trademark at between 1 and 7 percent of the hotel’s annual turnover.
The site was originally due to host the first Swissotel-managed hotel in St. Petersburg, but this plan has now been postponed. The hotel chain’s former partner is currently completing the construction of The Hermitage Hotel.
Swissotel Hotel & Resorts and MBIK have decided to halt negotiations on their partnership, the hotel chain’s communications director Eva-Maria Penser told Vedomosti. She said that “Swissotel is still seeking an opportunity to open a hotel in St. Petersburg.” The company currently manages 29 premium hotels in cities including Moscow and Sochi.
MBIK and Swissotel signed a contract in the summer of 2010 regarding the management of a five-star hotel; MBIK had been carrying out reconstruction work on a former workers’ social club located at 10 Ulitsa Pravdy for this purpose. The property was purchased for $4.1 million, with overall investment in the project totaling $25 million; it will be about seven years before investors see a full recoupment of their money, Babayev said two years ago. A loan from the International Bank of Azerbaijan was attained for the project’s funding, he said. The company planned to open a hotel with 120 rooms by Jan. 1, 2011.
According to data from Interfax’s market and corporative analysis section SPARK, half of MBIK is owned by Babayev, while the other 50 percent is owned by and Stroikorporatsiya OKSMI. Babayev declined to comment Wednesday, mentioning only that “there are a lot of questions surrounding this project.” According to Penser, the respective parties could not settle on an international agreement as to the hotel’s management.
Negotiations stopped definitively about three months ago, said a hotelier familiar with the situation. He said that the main stumbling block was the investor’s inability to guarantee the standards set by Swissotel. It is difficult to adapt an already constructed building to new standards, the source told Vedomosti. Whether or not the investor will manage the hotel independently, Babayev did not say.
It will be a challenge for the developer to find a new partner: International hotel operators impose very high demands on sites they agree to service, and these demands are much easier to meet during the planning stage, said Yevgeniya Tuchkova, a senior consultant at Colliers International St. Petersburg. She said that the process of selection, planning modifications and negotiating of a new contract could take about a year. The standard fee for international operators amounts to 3.5 percent of the hotel’s yearly earnings; in the event that the projected figures are surpassed, further payment of between 7 and 12 percent will be made, said the expert.

TITLE: New Taxi Service for Smartphone Users Launches in City
AUTHOR: By Yelena Minenko
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A new service that allows city residents to order a taxi using a smartphone application was launched in St. Petersburg on Thursday.
First launched in Israel, GetTaxi aims to simplify the process of ordering a taxi, and is also represented in the U.S. and U.K. In March 2012, the service began operating in Moscow. 
 “The GetTaxi app automatically detects your location and shows all the cabs available in the area,” said Shahar Waiser, founder and CEO of the company.
“When you place an order, you know exactly who will pick you up, because the driver’s name, photo, phone number and car information appear on your screen right away,” he said. 
The city’s taxi industry has plenty of potential for growth, market analysts say. According to the St. Petersburg Association of Taxi Transport, the size of the market is hard to measure, because of the large shadow sector — in busy locations, around 80 to 90 percent of journeys are made using illegal taxi drivers or so-called “gypsy cabs.” 
“Illegal drivers exist because people need them — they arrive faster and their prices are cheaper,” said Waiser. 
The main idea of his service is to make traveling by taxi fast, cheap and safe at the same time.
GetTaxi unites registered drivers into one network accessible to everyone who has the app installed on their phone. 
“GetTaxi doesn’t compete with existing taxi parks and transport companies,” said Waiser. 
The company installs special devices in cabs that help the drivers to receive orders directly from customers, which they can respond to during periods when they have no orders for their own companies. 
The cost of a GetTaxi trip is 310 rubles ($10) for the first 20 minutes, and subsequently 10 rubles ($0.32) per minute. At night and on public holidays, prices are higher — 350 ($11.30) then 13 rubles ($0.42) respectively. There are only three fixed prices — 450 rubles ($14.50) to and from any train station at any time, 700 rubles ($22.50) to the airport, and 900 ($29) from the airport. 
It is not clear whether these tariffs represent good value, because traffic jams and road works add to journey times, but the fixed prices are commensurate with the tariffs charged by most other taxi companies. 
Commenting on the service’s viability, Yury Veikov, vice president of the Russian Association of Taxi Transport, believes that in order to survive, GetTaxi will have to adapt to the current state of the city’s taxi industry. 
“Our taxi market has developed on the principle that one usually knows the cost of the journey in advance. GetTaxi uses another, less convenient system,” said Veikov. 
One of the biggest complications is that St. Petersburg is the only Russian city with a population of more than a million without its own local law on taxis.
“The service needs improvement and adaptation to Russian legislation, because there is a difference between the terms ‘information mediator’ [such as companies like GetTaxi] and ‘carrier.’ What the city needs is the latter,” said Veikov.
Another expert on transport, civil activist Alexander Kholodov, took a skeptical view toward the new taxi service.
“The drivers working for GetTaxi will abuse the system — instead of taking you directly to the place you have named, they will drive around to get more minutes on the meter, especially with customers unfamiliar with the city,” he said. 
Other potential users expressed faith in the project and said that they plan to use it. Blogger Alexei Goncharenko tested the service in Moscow. 
“We had a misunderstanding with the driver over the address, and that made him very angry, which just shows that not everyone is cut out to work as a taxi driver, but on the positive side, we paid 700 rubles ($22.50) for a journey that would cost 1,500 rubles ($48.40) with other companies,” he wrote.
Attempts to test the service in St. Petersburg have so far proved difficult. On Saturday night in the Central district (one of the two districts covered by the service so far) there were only three cabs registered with the service working, and all of them were busy for a long time, making it impossible to place an order.

TITLE: City’s Residents Urged to Donate Blood
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: This fall’s Blood Donor Week began in St. Petersburg on Monday, Interfax reported.
Blood Donor Week is held in the city every year to replenish local blood banks after the summer months, which traditionally see a low rate of blood donation. Many hospitals, including Cancer Center, are desperate for blood and its components, the National Social Help Center said.
On Thursday, Oct. 18, young St. Petersburg residents will hold an event called “I care!” near Moskovskiye Vorota metro station to raise public awareness about the problem of the lack of blood donors in Russia. Activists will hand out leaflets before going to give blood.
On Saturday, Oct. 20, the City Blood Transfusion Station will open its doors for St. Petersburg residents who aren’t able to donate blood during the working week. This year’s Donor Week will be the last one, as beginning in 2013 the National Social Help Center will launch a new large-scale project to promote blood donation.
“Next year we’re planning to introduce donor propaganda on a new level and we’re currently devising a whole range of various events that we hope will attract a lot of people,” the organizers said.

TITLE: EU Airline Crews Facing Visa Regime Ultimatum
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The crews of some European airlines will need visas to enter Russia as of Nov. 1 if the European Union does not scrap its visa policy for Russian officials, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said late Sunday in Luxembourg.
The declaration marked an escalation in the longstanding spat between Moscow and Brussels over a visa facilitation agreement.
“We have warned [our EU] partners that if we cannot sign an agreement in October, their airlines must obtain multiple-entry visas for their crews,” Lavrov said after an official dinner with European counterparts, according to a ministry transcript. 
EU officials quickly rejected Lavrov’s ultimatum and said the union would not back down, making it highly unlikely that the dispute would be resolved anytime soon.
“We ask Moscow to initiate the facilitation agreement without a waiver for service passport holders and with exemptions for air crews as foreseen,” EU delegation spokesman Soren Liborius told The St. Petersburg Times on Monday.
Brussels and Moscow have haggled for more than a year over an agreement that would introduce longer-term multiple-entry visas for businesspeople, journalists and staff of nongovernmental organizations.
The talks stalled last fall, when Moscow threatened to opt out of an accord exempting airline crews from visas after European negotiators refused to lift visa requirements for Russian government officials, who hold a special non-diplomatic passports known as “service” passports.
EU officials have argued that entitlement to such passports is too loosely defined and the documents have no uniform equivalent in EU countries. Russia responded by offering to restrict the agreement to biometric service passports.
Lavrov argued Sunday that there are currently 15,000 biometric service passports in Russia, versus 150,000 service passports in the EU.
“We’re ready to introduce a visa-free regime for all service passport holders, on a reciprocal basis,” Lavrov said Sunday. He added that the EU included service passport holders in a recent visa agreement with Ukraine.
But EU officials were adamant that the issue was not negotiable.
Delegation spokesman Liborius argued that the visa facilitation agreement could have been signed last December had Moscow not insisted on a waiver for service passport holders.
“They chose not to grab the low-hanging fruit, which would have made life easier for millions of travelers on both sides,” he said Monday by telephone.
The impending visa requirement for air crews would only affect 11 EU countries that have not already signed bilateral agreements with Russia on the issue.
Those countries include Finland, Belgium, Estonia, Latvia, Portugal, Greece and the Czech Republic, according to Liborius.
Belgian carrier Brussels Airlines, which flies daily from the Belgian capital to Domodedovo, confirmed Monday that the airline had been informed of the potential changes and was now making preparations.
“The task is very big, especially given that our crew members only stay in the airport transit zone,” company spokeswoman Wencke Lemmes-Pireaux said by telephone from Brussels. She said crew members would need business visas that require official invitations from the Federal Migration Service.
The spokeswoman added that Belgium does not make reciprocal demands from Russian crews. “We very much hope for a solution, either bilateral or on the EU level,” Lemmes-Pireaux said.
Latvian carrier Air Baltic, which flies from Riga to Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad, also confirmed that it would be subject to the visa rule.
“We will do everything to ensure that our passengers won’t notice anything,” company spokesman Janis Vanags said by telephone from Riga. He stressed that this included ticket prices.

TITLE: Politkovskaya Inquiry Finishes
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Investigators announced Tuesday that they have wrapped up a second inquiry into the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and charged five suspects with murder and illegal possession of weapons.
“The investigative team has collected enough evidence to draw up an indictment,” Vladimir Markin, the official spokesman for the Investigative Committee, said in a video published on the committee’s website.
A lawyer for Politkovskaya’s family, Anna Stavitskaya, said she doubted that the case would go to court any time soon, predicting that it would take at least six months for the trial to start, Ekho Moskvy radio reported.
Politkovskaya, a Kremlin critic who wrote for Novaya Gazeta and exposed corruption and human rights abuses in Chechnya, was gunned down Oct. 7, 2006, inside the elevator in her apartment building in central Moscow.
The five suspects in her death are the brothers Rustam, Ibragim and Dzhabrail Makhmudov, Sergei Khadzhikurbanov and Lom-Ali Gaitukayev.
Investigators believe that Gaitukayev, acting under orders of an unidentified mastermind, organized a group in 2006 that included the other suspects and former police officer Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov, who has testified against the suspects and will be tried at a separate trial. After the group was formed, the suspects obtained weapons, received the address for Politkovskaya’s apartment building from Pavlyuchenkov, and prepared for the killing under the supervision of Khadzhikurbanov, the Investigative Committee said in a statement.
This is what happened Oct. 7, 2006, according to investigators: Ibrahim Makhmudov saw Politkovskaya driving home that Saturday afternoon and reported her movements to his brother Dzhabrail, who in turn relayed the information to Rustam, who entered Politkovskaya’s apartment building and waited for her to arrive. When Politkovskaya got into the elevator, Rustam Makhmudov shot at her several times with a pistol, which he abandoned at the scene, and then fled.
The motive for the killing remains unknown.
Alexei Mikhalchik, a lawyer for one of the suspects, said they would seek a jury. “Of course, we will submit a motion that the case is to be considered in a jury trial,” Mikhalchik said, Interfax reported.
The defense apparently hopes that a jury will be more lenient to the suspects after a jury acquitted all defendants in an earlier trial in the Moscow district military court. The Supreme Court overturned that acquittal and ordered a new investigation and trial.
Politkovskaya’s relatives said Tuesday that the investigation was far from over, noting that none of the suspects was the mastermind.
“These are not all of the suspects, and it is too early to speak of the investigation’s completion,” Politkovskaya’s son Ilya said, according to Interfax.
He said his family was disappointed by the lack of progress in establishing the identity of the mastermind. At the same time, he welcomed the idea of a jury trial.

TITLE: Russian Activists Criticize Nobel Prize Decision
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian human rights activists expressed dismay at the news that the EU will be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
“First they give [it] to Obama, then to the European Union. Who is next? Maybe the Shanghai Cooperation Organization,” veteran campaigner Lyudmila Alexeyeva quipped to Interfax, referring to a regional security watchdog dominated by Russia and China that is widely seen as ineffective.
U.S. President Barack Obama won the prize in 2009, triggering widespread criticism because he had been in office for only nine months then.
Observers and bookmakers had said ahead of Friday’s announcement of the 2012 prizewinner that the Nobel Committee could choose to highlight human rights issues in Russia with the award.
Instead, the committee announced that the prize would go to the European Union for promoting unity on the Continent, in what was seen as an attempt to boost morale amid an abiding debt crisis in member states.
Alexeyeva, who co-founded the Moscow Helsinki Group in 1976 and turned 85 this summer, has been tipped as a potential winner numerous times.
She said that she was not offended by the committee’s choice but that it would have been “colossally helpful” if the prize had gone to a Russian activist. She recalled that receiving the 2009 Sakharov Prize from the EU had given her a great deal of encouragement.
“The Norwegian Nobel Committee could have played just such a role. Sadly, it would not do it,” she said.
Alexeyeva’s comments were echoed by fellow rights campaigner Svetlana Gannushkina, who said the decision was “simply laughable.”
Gannushkina, who has also been nominated several times for the prize for her work with Chechen refugees, told Interfax that the prize had been “depersonalized” by going to a bureaucratic structure like the EU.
“The Nobel Committee could have asserted the principles of peace and democracy by giving the prize to those who have worked in this field for many years and now need support,” she said.
She also said the decision failed to send a strong signal to the EU, which she said has become “rather indifferent” to human rights and related issues in past years. “They should wake up,” she said.
Anna Sevortian, the head of the Moscow office of Human Rights Watch, said that by giving the peace prize to the EU instead of to a nongovernmental group or to political prisoners, the Nobel Committee continued to lower the Peace Prize’s significance.
“I would not say it discredits the prize, but it is certainly getting less important for people,” she told The St. Petersburg Times.
In a rare show of harmony, a senior pro-government lawmaker joined the rights campaigners in criticizing the choice.
“In my opinion [it] should have been awarded to major public figures for their bravery and nonstandard actions,” said Alexei Pushkov, chairman of the State Duma’s Foreign Relations Committee and a member of the pro-Kremlin United Russia faction, Interfax reported.
“To award it to an organization for its overall achievements looks unconvincing to me,” Pushkov said.

TITLE: Medvedev Declares War On Smoking
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on Tuesday pledged to take a tough stand on smoking and tobacco as the government is set to consider an anti-smoking bill.
In a video address posted on his blog, Medvedev announced that the government was presently “at war against smoking.”
A bill drafted by the Health Ministry is set to be considered by the government before the end of the month and will contain significant steps to counter smoking in the country, including a ban on smoking in public places.
According to Medvedev, 44 million Russians are smokers, a figure corresponding to roughly one-third of the population.
The country is currently the second-largest market for tobacco in the world, surpassed only by China.
Medvedev stated that smoking had increased dramatically since the early 1990s, most notably among women and young people.
The country’s appetite for tobacco consumption carries a toll, Medvedev said, noting that that Russia loses almost 400,000 people annually from smoking-related ailments, a number comparable to the population of the city of Tver.
The bill envisions a ban on smoking in public places to be effective from Jan. 1, 2015, and would severely curtail the sale and advertising of tobacco.
In addition, Medvedev announced his intention of raising tax duties on tobacco to a “meaningful level” as to further discourage smokers.
Medvedev said 80 percent of citizens, including two-thirds of smokers, support his fight against smoking.

TITLE: Putin Hails United Russia Win as Mandate
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky and Alexander Winning
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin said Monday that voters had shown their trust in the way the authorities are governing by choosing United Russia candidates in regional elections Sunday.
“For me, these election results were not surprising. I consider this one more step confirming voters’ intent to support the current institutions of power and the development of Russian statehood,” Putin said at a meeting with Central Elections Commission head Vladimir Churov.
The results served as a wake-up call to the opposition, which played down United Russia’s wins by pointing to low turnout and alleged violations but also acknowledged its poor performance.
Prominent anti-Kremlin figures put forward various ideas on how to react, with some declaring the need for renewed street protests while others emphasized the need to hone campaign strategies to improve outcomes in future votes.
The results of almost 5,000 regional elections held Sunday were largely one-sided in favor of United Russia, particularly in the showcase gubernatorial votes, the first to be held since 2005, after they were abolished by Putin.
Ruling party candidates won all five governor races, with margins of victory ranging from around 40 percent to more than 60 percent.
The most prominent opposition candidate running in an election Sunday, environmental activist Yevgenia Chirikova, placed second in the mayoral vote in the Moscow region town of Khimki, losing to acting Mayor Oleg Shakhov, who was backed by United Russia. Chirikova gained about 17 percent of the vote to Shakhov’s 47 percent. Former federal environmental inspector Oleg Mitvol placed third with just over 14 percent.
In elections for regional legislatures, the ruling party gained more than 50 percent of the vote in five of the six regions where voting was held — in the far eastern Sakhalin region, the Krasnodar region, the Penza region, the Saratov region and the Udmurtia republic — and garnered 45 percent of the vote in North Ossetia-Alania, about 20 percent more than the second-place party, Patriots of Russia.
Some opposition politicians said the results were due in part to what they described as low turnout.
In the gubernatorial races, turnout ranged from about 37 percent in the Amur region to almost 60 percent in the Belgorod region, a range that elections chief Churov praised at his meeting with Putin, describing it as “up to 50 percent and above.” Turnout was about 27 percent in Sakhalin and from 41 to 50 percent in the other five regions voting for regional legislatures.
Maverick opposition leader Vladimir Milov said those turnout levels undermined United Russia’s triumph.
“The level of support for the party of power is still low, so it can achieve victory only with low turnout,” he said.
Other anti-government leaders complained of unfair campaigning conditions and violations during voting, allegations that independent vote monitor Golos echoed.
“We have not moved [forward] one iota from the critical situation with the virtual absence of real competition and the absence of real elections in Russia,” Golos director Lilia Shibanova said at a news conference Monday, Interfax reported.
“Unfortunately, the situation is worsening in regards to both the legal norms and the attitude of the elections commission to observers’ civil activism,” she said.
Golos found the most problems in the Saratov, Ryazan, Krasnodar and Altai regions, according to the news agency.
Hundreds of reports of ballot-stuffing, “carousels” or repeated voting at multiple polling places by groups of voters, and other violations were reported to Golos during Sunday’s elections. The Central Elections Commission said Monday that the few dozen violations reported to it could not have an impact on the results.
Opposition leader and former State Duma Deputy Gennady Gudkov called Sunday’s votes “pseudo-elections,” saying the way they were run would push people to protest.
“United Russia and the current regime are destroying the mechanisms for a civilized transfer of power and are forcing people into the streets,” Gudkov, the senior Just Russia party politician, said in a statement Monday.
Suren Gazaryan, an environmental activist from the Krasnodar region, shared a similar opinion on Twitter.
“I finally lost all illusions of having honest elections with today’s authorities,” Gazaryan said.
Gazaryan, who was running on the party list of the liberal Yabloko party, didn’t get elected to the regional legislature. He said the vote was manipulated in favor of United Russia candidates.
But Gazaryan’s views on the opposition’s participation in elections were challenged by Yabloko leader Sergei Mitrokhin, who said the party election strategy was to win “island by island.”
“You have to have patience,” Mitrokhin told The St. Petersburg Times on Monday.
Mitrokhin also said that smaller territories allowed for tighter control over election procedures by observers, and he pointed to party victories in two small cities, Pervouralsk in the Sverdlovsk region and Elektrogorsk in the Moscow region.
Other opposition parties gained isolated wins in local elections but lost by large margins to United Russia in the regional legislative votes.
Support for the Communist Party hovered between 8 and 18 percent in the regional legislative elections. The nationalist Liberal Democratic Party and A Just Russia failed to exceed the minimum threshold to gain seats in North Ossetia, Penza, Krasnodar and Saratov.
The Patriots of Russia party, founded in 2005 after splitting off from the Communist Party, turned in a rare impressive performance in North Ossetia, drawing 26 percent of the vote for regional legislators. The party’s Ossetian branch is headed by former United Russia member Arsen Fadzayev, a wrestling champion who is popular in the republic.
But Patriots of Russia can hardly be called an opposition party, as it is a member of the All-Russia People’s Front, a loose union of public groups and political structures that backs Putin.
The liberal-leaning RPR-Parnas party won legislative seats in the city of Barnaul, in the Altai region, where party co-leader Vladimir Ryzhkov, who is from the city, has strong ties.
Analysts and political leaders in part blamed a lack of fresh faces among the opposition for United Russia’s dominance in the elections.
“People who didn’t vote are tired of both the authorities and the opposition. They are looking for new faces and new ideas and don’t see them,” said political expert Pavel Salin, who called Sunday’s results a “serious failure” by the opposition.
Salin cited the example of the main opposition candidate in the Bryansk region gubernatorial race, Communist Party hopeful Vladimir Potomsky, a businessman from the Leningrad region with no ties to Bryansk. “The main thing that worked against him was the fact that he was an outsider,” Salin said.
He also said the authorities have made it difficult for new players to emerge, noting the nearly nonexistent vote totals for newly registered parties such as the obscure Cities of Russia and Green Alliance, led by Mitvol.
“Those parties are spoilers, since the authorities have especially prolonged the registration of real opposition parties,” Salin said.
Senior United Russia party leader Andrei Isayev also criticized the opposition for lacking strong challengers, naming Yevgenia Chirikova as the only recognizable anti-Kremlin candidate to run.
“The main force bringing [voters] to elections is the opposition,” Isayev said in comments carried on the United Russia website. “It rounds up its supporters to change the situation, and if it is active, the authorities’ supporters also come out to confirm their choice.”
“The turnout was low in places where the opposition was not able to put forward impressive candidates or interesting programs,” he said.

TITLE: Singing Granny Finds Father’s War Grave
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — To find her father’s World War II grave, Natalya Pugachyova had to become a celebrity.
She is one of the Buranovskiye Babushki, a group of singing grandmothers who ended up second at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest with their catchy tune sung in the Udmurt language, a distant relative of Finnish.
As the oldest and smallest member of the group, the 76-year-old Pugachyova became a star of the pan-European contest, whose millions of devoted fans love its kitschy fun.
Her newfound fame helped her find the grave of her father, who disappeared while fighting the Nazis in 1942.
At a news conference, she mentioned her father, Yakov Begeshev, who disappeared when she was 6 years old.
The last letter her family received from him came during a battle in the Voronezh region, south of Moscow, that he described as being so fierce that he was unlikely to survive.
Nearly 27 million Soviet soldiers and civilians died in World War II, and tens of thousands are still listed as missing. War enthusiasts roam the forests and swamps of western Russia in search of the remains of soldiers and the aluminum dog tags that identify them.
Nina Geryusheva of the Federal Court Marshals Service branch in Udmurtia said its volunteers set out to find Pugachyova’s missing father. After a lot of phone calls and official requests, they were able to identify the mass grave where he was buried.
“She was surprised to say the least,” Geryusheva said by telephone.
Russian state television showed Pugachyova’s visit over the weekend to the village of Malaya Vereika in the Voronezh region, where she saw her father’s name among those engraved on memorial walls at the mass grave.
“I even sobbed,” Pugachyova said. “So many years, so many winters, I didn’t know.”
Pugachyova brought a handful of soil from her mother’s grave to mix with that of her father’s, and she took a handful back to do the same at her mother’s grave.

TITLE: Medvedev Petitions For Reduction in Red Tape
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Monday that federal and regional government agencies shouldn’t demand any more paperwork from investors than existing rules call for.
Medvedev made the statement at an annual meeting of the Foreign Investment Advisory Council, which brings together representatives of about 40 major multinational corporations present in Russia.
“It’s necessary to state the principle that they can’t require documents that haven’t been directly stipulated,” Medvedev said, responding to one of the speeches at the event, Interfax reported.
The report didn’t say whose speech Medvedev was reacting to.
He also called on the foreign business community to press governments in Europe and the United States to work for a further easing of visa rules. Russia’s goal is to have no visas.
“There are a number of states inside the European Union that block free travel,” he said. “I think it’s unfair and short-sighted.”
He said progress had been made in visa relations with the United States, but it wasn’t “as obvious as we would like it to be.”
Medvedev reiterated that the goal of the ongoing privatization program is primarily to change the economy’s structure rather than fill the budget.
Procter & Gamble chief executive Robert McDonald spoke of the need for Russia to develop roads, more actively promote high technology and make sure the plan to improve customs services doesn’t stay on paper, Vedomosti reported on its website.

TITLE: Promsvyazbank Scraps $500M IPO
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Promsvyazbank abandoned a $500 million listing in London and Moscow late Monday due to weak investor demand for one of Russia’s biggest privately owned lenders.
It is the second time in four years that the bank, which is controlled by billionaire brothers Alexei and Dmitry Ananyev, has failed to see through IPO plans.
“We’re disappointed that we haven’t completed the transaction,” Promsvyazbank president Artyom Konstandian said in an e-mailed statement.
“We will review this decision when market conditions improve and investor valuation expectations are more in line with those of Promsvyazbank management and shareholders.”
Russia’s 10th-largest bank had timed its IPO announcement to ride the euphoric wave created by Sberbank’s successful $5.2 billion listing last month. Its failure indicates that the opportunities for raising capital on international markets for Russian companies may have been overstated.
Giant mobile operator MegaFon is eyeing a $4 billion London listing later this year.
About 20 percent of Promsvyazbank was offered to investors, with global depositary receipts valued at between $10 and $12, Vedomosti reported.
Management said that recent meetings with investors had created new options.
“Promsvyazbank has received interest from third parties outside the scope of a capital markets transaction that it would like to take time to consider,” the bank said in a statement.
And analysts said that it could yet be third time lucky for Promsvyazbank.
“It is a shame that another addition to the limited universe of Russian banking equities has been put off,” Sberbank CIB analysts said in a note to investors Tuesday.
“But this IPO perhaps comes a little bit too early in terms of persuading investors to buy into a turnaround story at an early stage of that process.”

TITLE: inside russia: How to Make Putin’s Promise a Reality
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: President Vladimir Putin recently promised to create 25 million new jobs by 2020. His loyal subordinates have proposed initiatives designed to make his promise a reality.
First came a proposal by Senator Tatyana Zabolotnaya from the Primorye region that would make it compulsory to register the nearly 5 million bicycles in the country. With 250 workdays per year, that averages out to registering 20,000 bicycles per day.
Let’s suppose that 10 people would work in each new bicycle registration office — clerks, accountants, janitors and, of course, lots of security guards — and that they would register 10 bicycles per day, one every half hour plus 45 minutes for lunch. Right there you’ve got 20,000 new jobs staffed by loyal Putin and United Russia supporters who know that if the president leaves office, their cushy jobs will go with him.
The next proposal came from Maxim Ksendzov, deputy director of the Federal Mass Media Inspection Service. He proposed banning the use of public Wi-Fi networks for people under 18. Considering that Wi-Fi will soon even be installed in the Moscow metro, enforcing this rule would require the creation of a special agency and the efforts of workers who would patrol stores and shopping malls, handing out fines to juveniles using Wi-Fi. Such an agency would be enormous, swelling the ranks of Putin’s already bloated bureaucracy by at least 100,000 jobs.
Vitaly Milonov, a deputy in the St. Petersburg legislature from United Russia who introduced an anti-gay law in that city, came up with an even better initiative. He suggests testing all of the country’s teachers to find possible pedophiles among them. This is no small task considering that there are 1,360,000 teachers in this country.
Testing for pedophiliac tendencies is a serious matter — far more serious than registering bicycles. Each testing office would require psychologists, sex therapists, accountants, secretaries and, of course, lots of security guards. Since each psychologist would test no more than a handful of teachers per day, it comes out to nearly 1 million people working around the clock to save Russian children from predatory, pedophilia-inclined teachers.
In addition, there are 341,000 college professors. And what about instructors at vocational institutes, as well as kindergarten and nursery school teachers? What’s more, children are also at risk from school security guards. Then there is the latent threat from orphanage staff, nannies, and a child’s own parents, aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents.
Simply put, every person in Russia must be tested for pedophilia, including the psychologists doing the testing. Otherwise, just imagine what would happen: A pedophile might get onto the testing board and approve pedophiliac teachers.
While they’re at it, why not register other forms of transportation besides bicycles — even shoes? That should create another 5 million jobs. Authorities could issue serial numbers for shoes and subject them to technical inspections like electronic goods. After all, every winter countless Russian women face great danger when they step outdoors onto icy sidewalks wearing high heels.
That’s good for another 25 million high-tech jobs with each worker receiving a government-issue computer and Internet connection. This would make Skolkovo look like the minor leagues in terms of boosting innovation. And most important, all of those workers would vote for Putin because they know that any other leader would drop them from the government payroll the moment he assumes office.

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

TITLE: Aeroflot to Sell Stake in Aerofirst
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Aeroflot is selling its majority stake in Aerofirst, which runs duty-free shops and The Irish Bar at Sheremetyevo Airport, as it divests itelf of noncore businesses.
The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service has approved the sale of Aeroflot’s 66.67 percent stake to Ridis Holdings, Vedomosti reported Monday.
It is unclear how much Ridis paid for the stake, although a source at Aeroflot told the paper that Ridis had beaten several rivals’ bids for the stake at the auction, but did not say who the competitors were.
When Aeroflot acquired an additional 33 percent stake in Aerofirst from Sheremetyevo Airport in 2009, the retailer was valued at $49.2 million.
The sale is in line with Aeroflot’s policy of divesting non-core assets to concentrate on the airline business.

TITLE: Petersburg Residential Real Estate Recovers
AUTHOR: By Nadezhda Zaitseva
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: St. Petersburg’s residential real estate construction sector, which saw a decrease of nearly 40 percent on the previous year in the first half of this year, is once again nearing last year’s level. 
In the first nine months of this year, 1.4 million square meters of residential real estate were launched in the city, 4.1 percent less than by the same time last year. In the first half of the year, the volume of accommodation built — 541,400 square meters — was 38 percent less than in the previous year.
The sluggishness of the authorities caused by the procedure for approving planning projects is not reflected on the market, said Andrei Tetysh, chairman of the board of directors of the Real Estate Research and Development Agency (ARIN). 
As a rule, the second half of the year sees the lion’s share of new construction completed, and the year’s results will likely be comparable to last year’s (2.7 million square meters), said a representative of Setl Group. Setl launched 55,000 square meters in the Vena complex in the third quarter, and plans to build another 110,000 square meters by the end of the year. 
Etalon Group developer plans to launch most of its properties in the final quarter, said Anton Yevdokimov, the group’s financial director, via the company’s press service.
About 1.9 million square meters of residential real estate have gone on sale since the beginning of the year, said Andrei Veresov, general director of the Novy Peterburg group of companies. 
According to data from Peterburgskaya Nedvizhimost real estate company, in the first nine months of last year, 1.8 million square meters of accommodation was launched in the city. 
Since the beginning of this year, prices have risen by 8.6 percent to an average of 83,000 rubles ($2,674) per square meter, said Veresov.
According to data from Etalon, the average price of residential real estate in the third quarter of this year rose by 9 percent compared to the same period last year, up to 74,000 rubles ($2,384) per square meter. 
Future active growth on the market may be hindered by the large volume of basic “economy-class” housing on offer in buildings being constructed in areas just outside the city, said Vasily Selivanov, general director of Legenda Intelligent Development.

TITLE: Rogozin Visits India for Talks
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin is in India for a three-day visit to discuss ways to intensify trade, review nuclear liability issues and firm up the agenda for a meeting between the countries’ leaders, the Indian Asian News Service reported.
On Monday, Indian External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna and Rogozin co-chaired a session of the India-Russia Intergovernmental Commission on Trade, Economic, Scientific, Technological and Cultural Cooperation.
Rogozin will also call on Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and co-chair the India-Russia Forum on Trade and Investments with Commerce and Industry Minister Anand Sharma.
Bilateral trade increased to $8.8 billion last year. The two sides are looking to raise that total to $20 billion by 2015.
During the talks, the two sides are expected to discuss issues relating to application of India’s civil nuclear liability law to units III and IV of the Kudankulam nuclear power plant.
In July, the countries signed a protocol in Moscow for Russia to construct units III and IV. Russia has agreed to extend export credit amounting to $3.4 billion.
Russia contends that the civil nuclear-liability law should not apply to these units because the agreement on them predates the 2010 civil liability law and could be seen as being grandfathered by the original 1988 agreement.
But India has made it clear that its national law is paramount and cannot be subverted. Moreover, New Delhi believes that making an exception for Russia would amount to diluting its civil nuclear law, which would encourage the U.S. and France to seek similar exemptions.
If the liability issues are resolved, a final agreement on units III and IV could be signed during the visit.

TITLE: Small Towns Face Budget Battles They Can’t Win
AUTHOR: By Rachel Nielsen
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: In a recent comedy sketch show, a police officer forks over the pay raise that he hid from his wife after she hears President Vladimir Putin announce the increase on TV.
“Vladimir Vladimirovich,” the policeman mutters on the “6 Kadrov” television show, “thank you for raising our salaries, but did you have to tell everyone about it?”
For municipal governments, more information about pay raises would be welcome. Small cities and towns typically find out about such budget changes at the same time as the public, making their planning process a complete nightmare.
The unpredictability of federal decrees is just one of the stark budget problems faced by Russia’s municipalities, and it is outlined in a new report from Standard & Poor’s. The international ratings agency scored the country’s municipal system as a five, with one being the strongest rating and six the weakest.
The report listed 10 factors dragging down the score, ranging from meddling by federal and regional governments, to unstable sources of funding from regional and federal coffers, to the process of forcing localities to balance budgets rather than replace dying transit and housing.
Among the most serious concerns raised by S&P is the twofold problem of small towns lacking the tax base to support themselves and regional governments paying for those towns by diverting surplus revenues from major regional cities.
“About 70 percent of local government revenues come from regional governments, which deprives [the towns] of any incentive to develop their own business climate and infrastructure,” said Karen Vartapetov, the primary credit analyst for the report.
Big cities drive regional economies but are forced to share their profits with small cities and towns rather than reinvest them, Vartapetov said by telephone.
Moreover, the municipal problems are damping municipalities’ credit ratings, Vartapetov said. That in turn increases the towns’ costs of borrowing money, potentially adding to the problem of insufficient funds.
Overall, only 5 percent of local budgetary funds are coming from local taxes. Meanwhile, the share of local budgets derived from earmarked grants — that is, regional donations to their budgets — has grown from about 10 percent in 2002 to roughly 40 percent in 2012, S&P concluded from federal treasury data.
S&P assesses creditworthiness in five municipalities in the country, with Ufa receiving BB-, Dzerzhinsk getting B, Surgut landing BB+ and both Nizhny Novgorod and Novosibirsk rated BB.
In Nizhny Novogord and Novosibirsk, each with more than 1 million people, grant funding from the regional government rose from 25 percent to 30 percent of the city budget in the early 2000s to more than 50 percent for the 2011-12 fiscal period, Vartapetov said.
S&P assigns a credit rating of BBB to both Moscow and St. Petersburg.
In terms of municipal public finance practices, Russia’s score of five places it ahead of Ukraine and Belarus, which S&P rates at six, but behind countries such as the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary, which come in at three.
Vartapetov said unpredictability is actually increasing. Towns rarely can make budget projections beyond one year, even though those are “absolutely critical for urban development,” he said.
In a prime example, the president and prime minister raised schoolteachers’ salaries 30 percent in the middle of last year, and though increased federal grants to the regional budgets covered some of the outlay, localities were still left holding the bag.
Galina Kurlyandskaya, general director of the Fiscal Policy Center, said increasing the local tax base is under discussion. The idea of collecting municipal revenue from local sales taxes has largely been scrapped, while a proposal for assessing local taxes on real estate is on the table, she said.
On the upside, the legal framework for writing budgets, collecting revenues and making outlays has become more detailed in the last decade, according to the report, published Monday in Russian.
There are also limits on municipal deficits and debt, resulting in “very low” debt levels.
Alexei Altyntsev, deputy director of the Moscow-based Institute for Public Finance Reform, said municipal governments are publishing significantly more fiscal information than they were even five years ago.
Altyntsev, who agreed with many of S&P’s assessments, said many towns face budget drama because of conflicts between the popularly elected mayor and the city manager, an unelected, appointed executive.
In its report, S&P said the growing number of city managers nationwide “undermines the link between voters and public managers.”
“Weak links between the public and civil servants tend to undermine the accountability and predictability of local policies,” it wrote.
In Russia, some cities and towns have city managers who are in charge of the local government and mayors with largely ceremonial functions, while others have only mayors with actual executive power.
Citing the Regional Development Ministry for last year, the ratings agency said more than 30 percent of all municipal governments had city managers. Among regional capitals, that figure was 60 percent.

TITLE: Provincial Cities Attract Developers
AUTHOR: By Lena Smirnova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Moscow-based retail property developers are showing more interest in building shopping malls in regional capitals as well as next-tier cities with populations of less than 1 million.
That is in stark contrast to attitudes of just a few years ago, when investors listened to proposals to build in not-so-distant cities like Kaluga and Yaroslavl with skepticism.
“Is there life beyond the Moscow Ring Road?” they would ask, said Alexander Obukhovsky, director for business development at Knight Frank real estate agency.
Knight Frank conducted a study on retail real estate in Russian cities that have a million or more residents and found that interest in the regions is on the rise.
Chelyabinsk, Perm, Krasnoyarsk and Volgograd are newcomers to the scene, but since developers will go there with prior experience, it is expected that retail properties will emerge quicker than in the “pensioner” cities of Yekaterinburg, Samara, Kazan and Rostov-on-Don, where many shopping malls were built more than 10 years ago, said Olga Yasko, Knight Frank’s regional analytics director.
It is not only the large cities that are getting more shopping mall space. Smaller cities with populations under 1 million, such as Ulyanovsk and Tolyatti, are also attracting big developers like Tashir and Finstroy. The developers have gone as far as Barnaul and Surgut, but this is where their enthusiasm runs out. Anything farther is usually considered too remote.
The Far East is one area that has been beyond the scope of interest of established retail developers. However, that is expected to change as new properties open in Khabarovsk, Ulan-Ude, Chita and Vladivostok in the next two to three years.
“Just five years ago, Irkutsk seemed like a place that you couldn’t work in professionally,” Yasko said. “There was a distinct boundary. You could go up to Yekaterinburg, but not further.”
Retailers will have a good pick of newly opened properties for the next one to two years if they’re looking to set up in Nizhny Novogord, Ufa, Volgograd and Yekaterinburg, said Anton Korotayev, head of retail consulting at Jones Lang LaSalle.
But for now, there is a dearth of quality retail space in Perm and Krasnoyarsk.
Although it has been named one of Knight Frank’s “newcomers,” Perm still lags behind in terms of shopping mall space among cities that have a million or more residents. The city will reach only 150 square meters of shopping mall space per 1,000 residents within the next year, as compared with more than 400 square meters per 1,000 residents in Nizhny Novgorod, Jones Lang LaSalle said.
Krasnoyarsk shapes up better in terms of retail real estate. Korotayev expects that it will have about 220 square meters per 1,000 residents within the year.
Kazan is one of the success stories among regional cities. Despite a boom in shopping mall developments in 2005, the city continues to draw in new investments.
The international student sports championship that Kazan will host next summer is one of the reasons for its energetic real estate development, Korotayev said. The government is investing in the city’s infrastructure, and this is also helping to draw in investors and retailers.

TITLE: Govt Mulls Tax Breaks In Far East
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Russian government is talking about setting up economic zones for the processing of timber and fish in areas next to China, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said after IMF meetings in Tokyo, Interfax reported.
“We are considering the establishment of similar economic zones in areas next to Chinese land to set up processing, especially of timber and fish, to attract investors with beneficial taxation measures,” he said.
He spoke of bringing investors to Siberia and the Far East and encouraging the development of these regions.
“The government’s task is to consolidate labor resources and establish a production base,” he said.
One option under consideration to encourage investment in these regions is tax breaks.
“We will hold a special meeting of the State Council on developing the Far East,” Siluanov said. “One issue is giving preference to greenfield projects, that is, those producers that will start from scratch in the Far East.”
It could be that various taxes will not have to be paid for the first few years of a project’s implementation, such as regional and local taxes, as well as profit tax, he said.
“At the Finance Ministry, we are compiling proposals on how to free these investors from paying profit tax … determining terms and authorizing parties,” the minister said. “It could be the governor, or the ministry itself can approve tax benefits for a specific investor.”
Siluanov said more funds are being channeled into financial development institutions like Vneshekonombank and the Russian Direct Investment Fund so that more resources go to the Far East.

TITLE: Regulation Planned For Sochi 2014 Hotel Prices
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Economic Development Ministry has published a draft decree on state regulation of hotel prices for the 2014 Olympics and Paralympics in Sochi.
It foresees a maximum daily rate of 14,000 rubles ($453) for the most expensive room in a five-star hotel, down to 2,936 rubles in one and two-star hotels.
Such prices were stated in Russia’s original application to host the games, said Sergei Korneyev, head of the tourism department at the Culture Ministry. The prices were set by an expert committee, which considered hotel prices in Sochi and rates in cities that were competing with Russia to win the right to host the Olympics.
Hotel rooms in Sochi are now much more expensive, according to hospitality managers there. A five-star hotel room for 14,000 rubles per night is basically “at cost” said Maxim Slipkin, deputy general director of Grand Hotel and Spa Rodina.
Price caps for luxury hotel rooms are ludicrous, Penny Lane Realty general director Georgy Dzagurov said. 
“I have visited all the Olympic games since Turkey in 2006 and seen that the cost of high-end rooms exceeds $1,000 per day,” he said.
Dzagurov said that regulation will facilitate scalping and that it would be fairer to allow developers to be the ones to earn more.

TITLE: Migration Bill Benefits Execs
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Economic Development Ministry has published a draft bill developed by the Labor Ministry that will liberalize migration legislation concerning foreign executives as a result of the country having joined the WTO, Kommersant reported Saturday.
The proposed changes affect senior managers and highly qualified specialists, which are termed “key personnel of commercial organizations” in the bill.
The document proposes that executives who worked in their companies for more than a year on the territory of a WTO member country can work in senior management positions in Russian legal entities and — as an expansion on existing legislation — their daughter companies and representative offices.
The draft legislation foresees some limitations, like a maximum of five foreign executives per legal entity, and two for banks. Overall, the bill copies many provisions of similar rules that were introduced to attract foreign specialists to Skolkovo, including a minimum salary threshold of 2 million rubles ($62,500).

TITLE: The Politics of Intolerance
AUTHOR: By Victor Davidoff
TEXT: More than a century ago, Russian writer and former political prisoner Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged upon entering its prisons.” Today, that assertion continues to be valid, but the brutalities of the recent past have shown that civilization should be judged by more than its attitude to just one minority group of prisoners.
On the evening of Oct. 11, a group of about 20 people in masks broke into a Moscow gay- and lesbian-friendly club called 7freedays, where they were celebrating their annual coming-out party. The attackers apparently knew how the club’s alarm system worked. They immediately held a gun that fired rubber bullets at the barkeep, who was the only person with access to the police panic button. The attackers started breaking the furniture and beating up the clientele. More than 10 people were wounded, four of whom were hospitalized. Shards from broken glasses damaged one woman’s eye. The police were called after the attackers left, and they arrived at the club, located in the center of Moscow, only after 30 minutes.
Unfortunately, attacks on gays have become as much of a national trademark as St. Basil’s Cathedral. The first attacks on gay clubs took place in the mid-2000s, and since then gay activists have been regularly beaten up whenever they try to hold a gay-pride parade. Even foreign activists have been hurt when they have come to support their colleagues. Volker Beck, a deputy in the German Bundestag, was roughed up right on Moscow’s main street, Tverskaya Ulitsa, across from the mayor’s office. As gay activist Nikolai Alekseyev wrote on his LiveJournal blog, “Not one person in Russia has been held accountable for homophobic crimes, and the people who attack gay parties know that very well.”
There are, however, other opinions. Vitaly Milonov, a deputy in the St. Petersburg legislative assembly from United Russia, is co-author of the notorious law forbidding “promotion of homosexuality.” He blamed the incident in the club on gay people themselves. He said in an interview with Snob.ru, that the incident was the “result of the obnoxious, crude and permissive behavior of the gay community. … What other reaction could there be when, in response to democratic actions, they run around like jackals at consulates, beg for another grant and write letters demanding that the authorities be punished? This is a warning to the gay community so that they don’t forget that they live in the Russian Federation, a country with a healthy historical and cultural legacy.”
Sergei Rybko, a Russian Orthodox priest, spoke out more forcefully. “The Holy Scriptures instruct us to cast stones at all those guys with nontraditional orientation. As long as that scum is not banished from Russian land, I completely agree with people who are trying to cleanse our homeland of them. If the government won’t do it, then the people will,” he said an interview with Pravoslaviye i Mir (Orthodoxy and the World). He added that he regretted that because he is a priest, “he couldn’t take part in actions of this sort.”
To be fair to the Russian Orthodox Church, not all priests agree with Rybko. Archpriest Roman Bratchik, while not defending gays, considers the incident to be contrary to the main precepts of the faith. “Sodomy has existed in all eras, and we condemn this phenomenon,” he wrote in Pravoslaviye i Mir, “but I would like to remind people that Sodom and Gomorrah weren’t destroyed by people but by angels sent from God. The attackers only bring harm to Christian teaching. They won’t create a country that lives a ‘life of piety and purity’. With those methods they can only create a fascist country.”
These words ring out like an alarm bell. Laws against “promoting homosexuality” — whatever that means — and the de facto absence of protection for gay people fostered by law enforcement agencies threaten everyone. This is a direct attack on the Constitution, which declares that all citizens are equal. And if you take away that cornerstone of equality, tomorrow the attackers might appear in a synagogue or the office of an opposition party. And then who could stop them from going out on the street and beating up anyone with different hair color or anyone they simply don’t like?
In the Middle Ages, every witch hunt involved repression of Jews. In the 21st century, gays are the new Jews. They are visible, disliked by many in society and a very convenient target for fascists of all stripes. Countries with repressive political regimes are usually noted for their intolerance of homosexuality. This might be a good time to recall the famous words of Pastor Martin Friedrich Niem&#246;ller, a prisoner in a German concentration camp: “First they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak out.”
For Russians, who have suffered from such harsh repressions so many times, it might be a good idea to inscribe these words above every doorway — as a reminder.

<i>Victor Davidoff is a Moscow-based writer and journalist who follows the Russian blogosphere in his biweekly column.</i>

TITLE: Underground icon
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The city’s club scene has passed through some drastic changes since the 1990s, but Griboyedov club — which celebrates its 16th birthday this week — has remained one of its best loved historic hangouts.
Griboyedov first emerged amid the ruins of Ligovka — the largely neglected area close to St. Petersburg’s infamous Ligovsky Prospekt — in October 1996, and was run by Dva Samolyota, the band that at the time was one of the trendiest in the city and responsible for many art initiatives on the local club scene.
In addition to Dva Samolyota, every decent local band — including Tequilajazzz, Kolibri, NOM, Kirpichi, Markscheider Kunst, Prepinaki and Leningrad — performed there.
Griboyedov was commemorated alongside fellow alternative club Fish Fabrique in an early Tequilajazzz song. The two clubs contest the title of St. Petersburg’s oldest surviving club. 
Fish Fabrique was launched in 1994 and had its heyday in a different location on 10 Pushkinskaya Ulitsa, before moving into its current location in 1998. Griboyedov, however, has remained at one and the same site since its opening on Oct. 18, 1996.
“I am glad for them but they were a bit underhand about it,” said Mikhail Sindalovsky, the former Dva Samolyota drummer and Griboyedov’s co-founder.
“When Moloko [underground rock club] had to move to a different place, it renamed itself Zoccolo, it’s more honest that way. [With Fish Fabrique], the former owners parted ways; they moved to a different place but still kept the name.”
Griboyedov, whose full name is Culture Club Griboyedov, was — and to an extent remains — an unstoppable creative process, featuring exhibits and art shows as well as concerts and DJ sets. 
The club is named after Alexander Griboyedov, the author of verse comedy “Woe From Wit,” whose profile appears on the club’s logo. Oriental motifs in the club’s interior design pay homage to the author, who was the Russian ambassador to Persia, where he was killed when a mob stormed the Russian embassy in Tehran in 1829.
The interiors were mostly designed by theater artist and interior designer Mikhail Barkhin.
Originally, Dva Samolyota started out as art directors before the opening of their own club Griboyedov. The group spent several months organizing events at Nora (Burrow), a basement dance club in the former Sever movie theater. 
“It was Petrovich (Alexander Fomin), the drummer with the band NEP, who somehow got the former film theater,” Sindalovsky said. 
“They made a concert hall out of the main room, a smaller club called Gora (Mountain) in place of the former projectionist’s booth and there was a basement called Nora, which we helped to renovate. One day Petrovich met [Dva Samolyota bassist Anton] Belyankin and said, ‘Would you like to be in charge of culture programs at this Nora?’ Anton came to us, we discussed it and decided to get involved. “
But after a few months, the team of bartenders who owned the place thought they could manage on their own. However, its popularity declined and Nora soon folded.
The historic movie theater was demolished in 2006 to make way for the new Obvodny Kanal metro station.
“It seemed that it lasted for a long time, but now I realize that we were there for less than six months,” Sindalovsky said.
“We got money from what was made at the door and used it to pay bands and DJs, but at some point they made us pay for cleaning and the sound system,” Sindalovsky recalled.
“Then they said, ‘Dva Samolyota walk around drunk all the time, there’s no sense in having them, we know all the DJs and bands ourselves,’ so laid down such conditions for us that we would inevitably leave. But at that time our friends had already found this location for Griboyedov, and we haven’t stopped since then.”
Griboyedov’s location, a Soviet-era bunker, was not entirely original — due to the techno club called Tunnel that formerly existed in a similar bomb shelter on the Petrograd Side — but was still a novelty.
“It was a time when you could rent a bunker, and this one belonged to the Bolshevichka clothes factory, which is now defunct,” said Sindalovsky.
“It was rented for 49 years, but was bought out long ago. The permits for construction [of a restaurant above ground] were obtained later.”
Sindalovsky is the only Dva Samolyota original member who has remained with Griboyedov, with his job title as “general producer.”  He is also a shareholder in the club.
Despite having settled in Tel Aviv, Israel, two years ago, he continues to work on developing the club via Skype or during his visits. 
Belyankin and Dva Samolyota’s keyboard player Denis Medvedev have since drifted apart, with Belyankin co-founding the popular indie bar Datscha in 2004 and then moving on to launch Fidel and later two more bars.
Mikhail Yegorov, the guitarist with the band Kolybel, is now in charge of the club’s music program.
In 2003 and 2007 Griboyedov was subjected to raids by assault rifle-armed OMON riot police, which left some clubgoers beaten and humiliated. During a 1997 raid, members of the public were driven out of the bunker and forced to lie down in the snow around the club.
“They used to come and hit the person who opened the door on the head with a rifle butt, charge in and shout ‘Down on the floor, bitches,’” Sindalovsky said.
“They used to beat everybody who thought about it for too long with rifle butts. But when we generated some publicity [about the raids], they stopped making people get down on the floor.
“The last time I saw them was about five years ago. They came with sniffer dogs, video cameras and some women, and behaved in a more humane way. They asked to switch off the music, put everybody against the wall and checked to see if anybody had drugs or was underage. They didn’t seem to find anything bad.”
Although the name Griboyedov can be translated as “mushroom-eater” and can be seen as a reference to the hallucinogenic mushrooms that grow in the forests near St. Petersburg and that were very popular at the time, Sindalovsky insists that the club was strictly anti-drug.
“I heard that drug-dealing was burgeoning at dance clubs at that time,” Sindalovsky said.
“We were strictly alcohol-based, it’s always been more profitable and safer for us. People who turn up in an altered state of mind are turned away at the door. We like people to arrive sober and happy and get drunk at our place.”
In 2006, Griboyedov’s bunker expanded to feature Griboyedov Hill, a restaurant with a stage for jazz and quieter concerts, which was later augmented with an outdoor summer bar.
The downstairs concert room can hold between 200 and 300 but sometimes attracts more, according to Sindalovsky. “Up to a thousand people can pass through the club during a party, with people coming and going,” he says.
Sindalovsky, who compiled a series of CD compilations called Griboyedov Music, featuring the most interesting bands that have performed at the club, continues to follow the local music scene, but is not too impressed by its current state.
“When something emerges — projects such as 5Nizza or Krovostok, or at some point Mumy Troll and Zemfira — people start talking about it, no matter if you like it or not,” he said. 
“A friend gives it to you, you hear it on the radio, it’s played at a caf&#233; or somebody sends you a link on the Internet. It’s gone totally stale now for some reason. I thought that maybe it was just me being callous, but I’ve asked young people, and it’s the same [with them]. But I am talking about St. Petersburg. Maybe the home of underground and rock and roll culture has moved somewhere else, to some different places.
“I think that first of all, any creative work, be it musical or visual, stems from the difficulties of life,” he said.  “At least people can get a job and rent an apartment now.”
Sindalovsky argues that a new local music explosion is possible if the situation deteriorates.
“But it will be done by young people, not by old farts,” he says.
“I think that’s normal. There have been many young punks who became monsters, made money and died in due course.”
Sindalovsky says that the mentality of aspiring musicians has changed since Griboyedov’s early years. 
“I haven’t heard any interesting new names for a long time, it’s mostly commercial projects,” he said. 
“All the musicians want to make some dough, they start a project and want to sell it. If it’s a good group, they’ll tell us ‘we don’t want to play in such a small room’; if it’s a bad group, we don’t need them. They have a problem with goal-setting in their creative work and life in general. If people decide to devote themselves to music and don’t have any other job, they struggle.”
Some of the older bands that started out at Griboyedov and have become popular since then are also reluctant to play at the club for low fees.
“Take [ska-punk group] Leningrad. It emerged in 1997, I witnessed it with my own eyes,” Sindalovsky said.
“Seryoga [Leningrad’s frontman Sergei Shnurov] used to come to every gathering with a guitar and sing. They would come to other people’s gigs and say, ‘Can we play a song? We’ve written a new one.’ They were bursting with enthusiasm. Try to call the respected Sergei Shnurov now and ask him not even to perform but merely to come to a birthday party and toast the club from the stage. He’ll say, ‘I’ll come,’ but he won’t. Nobody is interested in anything except money.” 
The club scene itself has changed irreversibly with the opening of large venues such as Glavclub, Zal Ozhidaniya, Kosmonavt, Avrora and A2.
“They take a calculator and work it out,” he said.
“To bring such-and-such a band we need to sell such a number of tickets for such a number of rubles. They multiply the figures and see whether they can afford it or not. If we invite that band to perform at our club even at an afterparty, they say: ‘We can’t, because the 200 people who will come here [to Griboyedov], will not go there [to the large club], and we won’t make the money we want.’ It’s the musicians themselves who say this.”
Dva Samolyota will perform at the club’s birthday concert, although with only one original member, Anton Belyankin, on vocals and bass.

<i>Griboyedov’s 16th birthday party will take place at 2a Voronezhskaya Ulitsa at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 18. Dva Samolyota, Multfilmy, La Minor, Markscheider Kunst, Kirpichi, Kolybel, Gruppa L’ETO, Psikheya, Mister Maloy Limonady, Figa, Prepinaki Canoe and Simba Vibration will perform. www.griboedovclub.ru</i>

TITLE: Crisis management
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — Fifty years after the Cuban missile crisis, the U.S. National Archives has pulled together documents and secret White House recordings to show Americans how President John F. Kennedy deliberated with advisers to avert nuclear war.
A new exhibit, “To the Brink: JFK and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” opened Friday to recount the showdown with the Soviet Union. While the recordings have been available to researchers for years, this is the first public replaying of Kennedy’s recordings of tense conversations about national security from the Oval Office and Cabinet Room.
In the fall of 1962, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev ordered a secret deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba that were soon detected by U.S. spy planes. On Oct. 16 that year, Kennedy was briefed on photographic proof of the missile sites being developed.
U.S. officials determined from the size of the images that the medium-range missiles would be able to reach Washington, Dallas, Cape Canaveral, Florida, or other sites within 1,600 kilometers of Cuba, likely within minutes. Soon after they learned of longer-range missiles that could reach most of the country.
Kennedy’s team debated how to respond but agreed the missiles would not be tolerated.
The ensuing standoff with Khrushchev over 13 days became “the most dangerous moments the world has ever faced, either before or since — the closest we came to nuclear destruction,” said historian and journalist Michael Dobbs, who helped preview the National Archives exhibit.
Both Kennedy and Khrushchev had made mistakes leading to this point, Dobbs said. Khrushchev had gambled by deploying nuclear weapons so far from the Soviet Union on the U.S. doorstep. And Kennedy fumbled his first major foreign policy crisis at the Bay of Pigs with the failed effort to topple Fidel Castro. The Kennedy administration’s campaign called Operation Mongoose to overthrow Castro triggered a dramatic reaction from the Soviets.
The archives display some once-secret documents for the first time, including diplomatic cables in Russian with Khrushchev’s signature as he traded secret messages with Kennedy and personality sketches of Khrushchev and Castro by the CIA. Khrushchev is described as “an obtuse, rough-talking man” but shrewd and as having “a touch of a gambler’s instinct.”
There were also emergency plans developed for White House staff in case of an attack on Washington. One special assistant to the president was directed to go to Camp David in rural Maryland in such an event.
“You don’t really have to be an expert or Cold War historian to grasp the stark human drama that this story really is,” said Stacey Bredhoff, curator of the Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston and organizer of the exhibit.
The story from 50 years ago also could be a lesson for the future.
“I think one thing that this exhibit points out is that a nuclear confrontation can happen and it almost did happen. This happened almost 50 years ago, and it ended well,” Bredhoff said. “But what we cannot take for granted is that these events can get beyond the control of leaders.”
The archives lay out the crisis in chronological order with sounds of heated debates in the White House over whether to respond with military force. As Kennedy leaned toward a blockade order to prevent Soviet ships from sending more military supplies to Cuba, some military advisers thought it a weak response. Still, he prepared for the worst.
A draft speech was prepared that began, “This morning, I reluctantly ordered the armed forces to attack and destroy the nuclear buildup in Cuba.” It was never delivered.
As the blockade went into effect, Soviet ships approached, along with submarines, leading to tense moments. Kennedy ordered small “depth charges” to be fired from U.S. ships to encourage the submarines to surface. What he didn’t know was they were carrying nuclear-tipped tactical missiles and came close to using them.
“One of the things that struck me … was the extent to which the president of the United States didn’t really know and didn’t fully control what was happening on the ground,” said Dobbs, who has written a book on the crisis. “He didn’t know that the Soviet Union had 42,000 troops on Cuba, ready to resist an American invasion.”
On Thursday, the National Archives and Kennedy Library released more than 2,700 pages of material from the Robert F. Kennedy papers that are newly declassified, including documents related to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Library director Tom Putnam said they include the attorney general’s notes from national security meetings during the crisis and drafts of a memo he sent to the president after meeting with the Soviet ambassador.

<i>The exhibit is on view in Washington until February and then moves to Boston’s Kennedy Presidential Library in April.</i>

TITLE: TALK OF THE TOWN
TEXT: Parisian chic has arrived in St. Petersburg! The legendary French beauty salon <b>Lucie Saint-Clair</b>, which boasts Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Adjani, Patricia Kaas and Eva Longoria among its top-flight clientele, has opened a franchise in Russia. 
Located at 2 Tverskaya Ulitsa, the local Lucie Saint-Clair has virtuoso hairdressers who are coached twice a year by Parisian stylists from the brand’s own school. 
“Style is beyond fashion, and it is essential for our hairdressers to be able to listen to and understand clients, to be able to create a unique image for them,” said Bernard Sagon, president of Lucie Saint-Clair, who was in the city for the salon’s opening.
Lucie Saint-Clair founded her first salon in the early 1970s, and enjoyed immediate success, with the Rothschild family and Jacqueline Kennedy becoming her clients. She went on to win an international name and recognition for herself. In 2005 she was awarded the prestigious Legion D’Honneur award by then-French president Jacques Chirac for her contribution to the development of the beauty industry.
Another highlight for St. Petersburg’s high society last week was the opening of a <b>Philipp Plein</b> boutique at 153 Nevsky Prospekt, near the Alexander Nevsky monastery. 
Germany-born, Switzerland-based Plein’s rock style and glam clothes have become a fashion legend. Known for his use of the skull motif, almost all his designs are made from black fabrics or leather with metallic accents or rhinestones. 
“We create a fusion of dreams and reality, of Italian craftsmanship and luxurious, loud design,” Plein said of his fashion house at the opening of the local boutiqe. 
“Philipp Plein stands out from the crowd,” he added. 
The new boutique sells both women’s and men’s clothing, from hats, shoes and bags to modern classics and biker jackets. The store itself is simple yet sophisticated: White walls provide a plain backdrop to a Murano glass chandeliers with Plein’s trademark skulls, while one huge diamante-studded skull sculpture glitters at the center of the boutique. 
For four days, and for four days only, from Oct. 17 to Oct. 20, the <b>miX</b> restaurant at the <b>W Hotel</b> on Voznesensky Prospekt is going to be treating guests to delights created by star chef Christophe Martin, who’s been flown in especially for the occasion.
Martin works at La Bastide de Moustiers, a four-star hotel and restaurant in Provence created by the legendary culinary genius behind miX itself, Alain Ducasse.
For his culinary tour of St. Petersburg, Martin has created special menus for lunch and dinner with the aim of introducing diners to the sunny cuisine of La Bastide. Both menus feature seasonal ingredients.
Martin’s visit is part of the Guest Chefs in miX founded by Ducasse in April of this year when he himself celebrated the restaurant’s first year at the W. Stay tuned: Next up, in November, will be a star chef from Las Vegas.

TITLE: the word’s worth: It cuts both ways
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: Ïóòü: road, rails, path, way, route

It’s a road! It’s a path! No, it’s super word: ïóòü!
OK, so I exaggerate. But ïóòü is one of those wonderful Russian nouns that requires a dozen English words to translate and ranges in meaning from the very concrete to the broadly metaphorical.
At the concrete end of things, ïóòü is a road: Ïóòü èä¸ò âäîëü ðåêè è çàòåì ââåðõ â ãîðû (The road goes along the river and then up into the mountains).
And it can mean the railroad used by trams or trains: Ïåðåõîäèòü òðàìâàéíûå ïóòè äàæå â ðàçðåø¸ííîì ìåñòå — îïàñíî (It’s dangerous to cross the tram tracks even on the designated crosswalks.)
Or it’s any kind of route, path or way, like øåëêîâûé ïóòü (silk route).
Ïóòü is also a kind of stand-in for a voyage, so when someone is heading off somewhere, you can wish him ñ÷àñòëèâîãî ïóòè (have a good trip), or the slightly old-fashioned â äîáðûé ïóòü! (happy trails!)
On the metaphorical end of things, ïóòü is a path in life or a way of doing something. Îí ïðîø¸ë ïóòü îò ïðîñòîãî ñîëäàòà äî ãåíåðàëà (He worked his way up from a simple soldier to a general).
Russians love to talk about ïóòè ðåøåíèÿ ïðîáëåì (literally “ways of solving problems”), which in English are often rendered much more laconically. Ãëîáàëüíûå ïðîáëåìû ñîâðåìåííîñòè è ïóòè èõ ðåøåíèÿ might be rendered: Today’s Global Problems and Possible Solutions.
There are lots of ïóòü expressions and idioms, like íàì íå ïî ïóòè, which means “we’re not going the same way,” either literally or figuratively. In a car it means “I’m not going that way.” In a divorce court, it means: “It’s time to split up.” 
When you run into a friend unexpectedly on the street, you might exclaim: Êàêèìè ïóòÿìè! (What are you doing here!)
If you’re in business and your strongest competitor in widget production has just gone bankrupt, you can rub your hands together and shout: Ïóòü ñâîáîäåí! (Smooth sailing ahead; literally “the path is free”).
When you’ve either messed up or taken a career detour, you can say: Ñîø¸ë ñ ïóòè (I got side-tracked, I went off base).
But if you are moving in the right direction, you can announce: ß íà ïóòè (I’m on my way!).
Ïóòü is used in the instrumental case ïóò¸ì to describe the way something is done: ìû ðåøèëè ïðîáëåìó ëåãàëüíûì/ìèðíûì ïóò¸ì (We resolved the problem legally/peacefully). Âñ¸ ïóò¸ì is a nice philosophy of life.
It can mean doing things properly, the way they should be done: Ìû ñ íåâåñòîé ðåøèëè âåí÷àòüñÿ. Âñ¸ ïóò¸ì! (My fiancee and I have decided to have a church wedding — do it up right.)
Or it can just be a slangy way of saying that things are going great: Êàê äåëà? Âñ¸ ïóò¸ì! (How are things? Fabulous!)
Ïóòåâîé is the adjective from ïóòü and refers to anything related to a trip or road, like ïóòåâûå ðàñõîäû (travel expenses). The variant ïóò¸âûé is slang for something cool or fabulous, like ïóò¸âûé ïàðåíü (cool guy). The negative form, íåïóò¸âûé, is said of someone who is a goof-off or screw-up. Íå çíàþ, ÷òî äåëàòü — äî÷ü âûõîäèò çàìóæ çà òàêîãî íåïóò¸âîãî ïàðíÿ! (I don’t know what to do — my daughter is engaged to such a bum!)
But you never know: ïóòè ãîñïîäíè íåèñïîâåäèìû (God moves in mysterious ways).

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

TITLE: True love, Georgian-style
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Kind-hearted, sentimental and overweight, Helga is desperate for a baby. She pins her last hopes on a trip to Georgia, where, as she learns, it is impossible to be ignored by men. 
“All it takes is to get yourself to Georgia, and a man will find you,” — these words sound so promising, and Helga packs her bag for a week-long trip to Tbilisi.
The story of Helga’s conception quest is at the heart of a new film, “Love With An Accent,” that has just started screening at Formula Kino. Directed by the Georgian filmmaker Rezo Gigineishvili, the film interweaves several unrelated romantic threads that all revolve around Russian-Georgian love stories. The separate plots are united by the simple message that love overcomes the most incredible obstacles, that it requires patience and tolerance, and that it miraculously brings luck in the most hopeless situations.
The first storyline to be shot was the story of Merab (Merab Ninidze) — a middle-aged man who is a criminal hiding from the law in an apartment — and Nadya (Nadezhda Mikhalkova), a young and pure Russian girl who lives in the house opposite. The connection between them is a little boy, Zuki, who is learning to play piano. The couple’s first outing — to Zuki’s concert — ends with Merab’s sudden arrest. It is not clear from the film how long he will have to serve in jail, but the director does not omit to show us the smiling Nadya meeting him at the gates upon his release. No doubt, this scene will appeal to male prisoners across the globe.
“Perhaps the most surprising thing during the filming was that regardless of the location where we were shooting, everyone wanted to contribute, to sort of look after us, and offered us help, be it bringing food or carrying pieces of furniture,” said Archil Gelovani, the film’s producer. “There was a special atmosphere around the movie, a very happy and very inspiring mood. There was always a crowd of people watching what we were doing. ”
Gigineishvili compared Georgian hospitality with opening a jar filled with treasures that never seem to end. 
“The character of people varies incredibly depending on the region of the country, but the friendliness just never seemed to evaporate,” he said of his native country.
The shooting resulted in more than 90 hours of material made during 60 days of filming. Editing it was an additional challenge. The goal was to reflect the Georgian character in a natural environment, while emphasizing the romantic “love knows no borders” aspect.
The trip of poor Helga (Anna Mikhalkova, Nadezhda’s sister) seems doomed from the start. The heroine simply oozes misfortune. Helga takes a camcorder with her in order to document her relentless quest for a potential mate. Toward the end of the story, the list of her failures — she tries football matches, jogging routes, cafes and wine parties, all in vain — is as long as the Kartlis Deda (Mother Georgia) statue, to whom the tearful Helga addresses her plea, is tall. Happiness finally comes in the form of the hotel porter, who not only successfully completes the impregnation mission, but even leaves Georgia to live with Helga.
Gigineishvili said the main principle of making the film was first to see the characters in real life, and then move the action into an environment that was interesting for the filmmakers.
“One of the script writers recalled that he had been exchanging letters with a guy who was hiding somewhere, trying to escape from the law, and was so exhausted by such a miserable existence that he was actually relieved when he was eventually caught,” the director said. “We liked the sound of that idea, and we wanted to develop it: We thought, let’s make this guy a romantic type, who falls in love with an innocent girl who is living next door. This is how the story of Merab and Nadya was born.”
The story of Helga, in comparison — especially with its happy ending — does not sound realistic when described in words. This sort of story, sadly, rarely has a fairytale ending. Yet on screen, it seems only natural that the plump, clumsy and long-suffering optimist should eventually get her well-earned family. 
“This storyline could have just as well been a silent movie,” the director said. “What we looked for was a kind of improvisation on a given theme, and Anna Mikhalkova did brilliantly.”
The subplot about the penniless Russian Nikita (Nikita Yefremov) and his sparrow-sized Georgian fianc&#233;e Tina (Tinatin Dalakishvili), who comes from a wealthy family, raises associations with the runaway movies that have always been so popular in Hollywood: A couple in love is on the run from the armed strongmen sent by the girl’s angry father. Along their way, they meet the cynical swindler Misha (Misha Meshi), who is so touched by the genuine romance that he sells his silver belt, inherited from his grandfather — and perhaps the most expensive item in his possession — to buy plane tickets for Nikita and Tina. The armed heavies get to the airport just in time to break Misha’s nose and a couple of ribs, but too late to stop the lovers.
Perhaps in an effort to give more ground to the otherwise rather rose-tinted look at love, the director has incorporated into his film a storyline about a bitter nouveau riche divorce. The utterly neurotic, 40-something Filipp (Filipp Yankovsky) is breaking up with his glamorous and bitchy wife Sveta (Svetlana Bondarchuk). The two experience a re-start in Georgia, where they are shooting an advertisement. The couple discover they still have feelings for each other when Filipp survives an adventure that begins when he falls off a rock into a mountain river. He ends up filling in as a temporary replacement for the Russian fianc&#233; of a Georgian woman who lives in a remote village, where the tough-looking residents are governed by the concept of blood feud.
The storylines in “Love With An Accent” are no more believable than any miracle, yet they all appear amazingly natural. And the happy finale of every subplot would make a perfect toast at any Georgian get-together like those featured prominently in the film. The mood of the film is sure to make even the most introverted soul a little more sociable — and eager to see for themselves whether there are really so many nice people out there, in Georgia or anywhere else.

TITLE: THE DISH: Ginger
AUTHOR: By Alastair Gill
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: <b>Ginger con fusion</b>
Fusion as a concept is rather like the EU — on paper, it sounds like a recipe for multicultural harmony, but give it time and the cracks begin to appear in the utopian wallpaper.
New Japanese restaurant Ginger, part of the Ginza Project restaurant group, is not technically a fusion restaurant — its menu is strictly devoted to cuisine from the land of love hotels, bullet trains and karaoke, but with the interior design, Ginza has fallen into a familiar fusion trap.
This is a restaurant that has no idea what it wants to be. If it were possible to subject restaurants to psychoanalysis this one would be moaning on the psychiatrist’s couch with a serious case of schizophrenia, and it’s all down to some frankly bizarre design decisions. 
True, the d&#233;cor initially makes a good impression, coming across as bold, confident and quirkily variegated, and creating the unusual atmosphere of a cross between a Spanish bodega, an Asian noodle house and a 1970s hotel restaurant. 
However, the longer the meal went on, what had initially seemed to be an originally-woven interior tapestry of diverse elements began to unravel, as the disparate influences began to accrue in a potpourri of increasingly confusing discord.
Tree stumps under the washbasins, farmyard animals on the bathroom tiles, a forest of ropes hanging from the ceiling, a constellation of spherical glass fish tanks dangling from chains above the open kitchen, blue goat heads mounted on white tiles — what do all of these things have to do with Japan? What do these things have to do with each other? Why is there a delicatessen counter in the hallway outside selling sausages and meat, with Castilian hams hanging above it? Why is one corner of the restaurant ruined by a giant advert for Ribeye, the Ginza establishment next door (even this is confused — the slogan reads “Sushi, sushi and once more sushi!”)? 
It is difficult to resist the thought of the designer at his drawing board, coming up with idea after idea, none of which he was willing to discard, resulting in a surreal concoction that even Dali would have struggled to emulate.
The music was no exception: What began as an eclectic but enjoyable trip from the ’50s to the ’70s and back via Frank Sinatra, Motown and Californian surf music soon spiraled into the musical equivalent of a trip to the dentist — think breathy lounge jazz covers of hits by the likes of Modern Talking, Ace of Base, and Bon Jovi. Nobody should have to suffer a lounge-jazz cover of Brother Louie or It’s My Life — not at the dinner table, not anywhere.
And it had all begun so well, as courteous waitresses led us past Japanese chef Gunji Hiroyuki’s open kitchen, where white-coated men sliced fish with the precision of surgeons, and invited us to choose a table. This was not tricky — firstly, because the restaurant seats only 40, and secondly, because 38 of those seats were still available on a Sunday evening.
The starters whetted our appetite with their subtle simplicity. The eel avocado sarada (690 rubles, $22.25) was a light lettuce and watercress salad with strips of warm eel lacquered in teriyaki sauce, while the ebi gyoza soup (390 rubles, $12.60) was an aromatic miso broth of firm mange tout, wakame seaweed and dumplings bursting with fresh shrimp.
Other highlights included the tataki (590 rubles, $19) — bite-sized morsels of soft baked scallop spiked with ginger and green onion — and the shrimp sashimi (350 rubles, $11.30), served on a bed of ice with lime and wasabi.
The kamo sushi of fried duck with mustard and teriyaki sauce and the yaki mongo octopus sushi with plum sauce (each 190 rubles, $6.10) stood out for their novel combinations of flavor and texture, and the tempura shrimp rolls (690 rubles, $22.25), coated with luscious masago caviar, were another big hit.
The drinks at Ginger are as pricy as the food: Half a liter of Maisel’s Weisse beer costs 420 rubles ($13.50), while a 0.25-liter bottle of Acqua Panna water will set you back a shocking 290 rubles ($9.35), and even a pot of “hormone-stimulating” ginseng tea costs 250 rubles ($8). Wine begins at about 2,000 rubles ($65) a bottle.
Ginger is probably aiming to be a place where serious sushi aficionados can indulge their pleasure far removed from the soulless halls of the city’s large sushi chains, and they have done a sterling job with the food, which is excellent. The high prices mean that you’ll have to spend a lot not to leave hungry though.
But when it comes to fusion, great ideas don’t always work in practice. Just ask the Europeans.

TITLE: A Town of Wolves and Protestants
AUTHOR: By Guennadi Moukine
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: TAMBOV — Not many foreigners know of Tambov, but if you mention the city to a Russian, you’re bound to get the answer “Tambovsky volk tebe tovarishch,” loosely translated as “Tambov’s wolf is your friend.”
Sarcastic in the past, the phrase refers to the large number of wolves that once lived in the forests around this city 480 kilometers southeast of Moscow. The term “Tambovsky volk,” widely used in both movies and Russian folklore, has become an endearing nickname that locals like to be known by.
The wolf has become a de facto mascot for the city. Its picture is on everything you can possibly imagine — or at least this is how it feels. The wolf is featured on buildings, paintings, T-shirts, cars and, of course, bottles of vodka.
Tambov’s wolf, however, is only a minor detail associated with this ancient city, established in 1636.
Moscow envisioned Tambov as a fortress to protect it from Crimean Tatars, but no historical evidence exists that it ever served its original purpose. Instead, with its rich, black soil and strategic transit position between Moscow and the Black Sea, the city soon became an important trade center for the region.
With the arrival of communism, local entrepreneurs lost their farms, businesses and possessions. That led to a civil uprising under the leadership of Pyotr Tokmakov, a former Army officer, and Alexander Antonov, the chief of staff of one of the rebel armies at the time. The uprising is widely known as the Tambov Rebellion, or Antonovshchina. Locals managed to drive away the Communists and return the farmland to peasants, although only for a short time. This period was captured in Andrei Smirnov’s “Zhila-Byla Odna Baba” (Once Upon a Time There Was a Woman), which was named best Russian movie at the Nika Awards in 2011.
At the other end of the social spectrum, Tambov is believed to be the birthplace of the Russian Protestant movement. In the early 1600s, about a century after Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany, a group of peasants in Tambov started a reformation of their own. They refused to obey the Russian Orthodox Church, fought against icons, and organized their own church hierarchy.
Calling themselves Molokany, mainly for their practice of defying the church by drinking milk during Lent, they were deemed heretics by the tsar and severely persecuted and exiled from Russia. Current-day Baptists and other Protestant denominations in Russia trace their roots back to the Molokany.
On the cultural side, Tambov is strongly associated with Sergei Rachmaninov, a great Russian composer of the past century. He spent a number of summers in Ivanovka, his family estate near Tambov, where he wrote a number of his earlier masterpieces. Every four years, the city holds the International Rachmaninov Competition of Young Pianists (www.rachmaninov.ru/cp.htm). The competition includes public recitals, and prominent international pianists play at the final performance.
Then there is Gavrila Derzhavin, a great poet who became the governor of Tambov in 1785. His legacy includes schools, a drama theater, a printing house and the first newspaper published outside Moscow, Tambovskiye Izvestiya. The Tambov State Drama Theater, on Lenin Square, has become a significant landmark.
These days, Tambov attracts many people from various corners of Russia and other former Soviet republics because of its proximity to Moscow and amazingly rich soil. Some people move their whole family here to start a new life growing tomatoes, while others build a house or buy a dacha as an investment.

<b>What to see 
if you have two hours</b>

A walk along the riverside is a great way to spend a couple of hours and really get a good feel for the city. Start at the main park, Park Kultury, and head south toward the Dynamo stadium. Look out for the golden onion domes of the Orthodox churches and enjoy a cup of coffee or even a serving of shashlik at one of the numerous cafes along the way.
Finding the park is easy. Buses travel directly to the park and to the Dynamo stadium from virtually every part of the city, including the train station and the airport. A one-way bus ticket costs about 10 rubles ($0.30).

<b>What to do 
if you have two days</b>

Art galleries, museums, concerts, shopping or a picnic in the forest — the choice is yours.
The Tambov Regional Museum (3 Derzhavinskaya Ulitsa; +7 475 272 6313; tambovmuseum.ru), which traces the history of the city, has an interesting history of its own. The museum occupied the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral, the oldest Orthodox church in the region, from 1929 through 1991. But with the Soviet collapse, it moved to its current location, an attractive pre-revolutionary building with columns. Some of the exhibits feel crowded for lack of space, but the museum boasts an impressive collection of artifacts and taxidermy, all historically related to places in and around Tambov.
For paintings, check out the Art Gallery (97 Sovietskaya Ulitsa; +7 475 272 6458; tambovart.ru), which has a collection of original works by Russian painters such as Ivan Aivazovsky and Semyon Shchedrin.
Don’t miss the central market (21 Kommunalnaya Ulitsa; +7 475 272 6444; bazar-tambov.narod.ru), where you can pick up a local bargain, toys for the kids or other gifts for people at home. Most prices are clearly marked, but be mindful of pickpockets because the place is usually extremely busy. Walk east along the Kommunalnaya mall toward Lenin Square. This is where the most popular souvenir and jewelry shops are.
If you have time for a picnic, take a taxi to the prigorodny les (suburban forest). It’s only a 10-minute drive from the city center, and you can relax in an idyllic clearing where the forest meets the river.

<b>What to do with the family</b>

If you are traveling with the family and don’t know any locals, it is best to stay in town. Visit Park Kultury, which offers rides and attractions for all ages.
The Tambov Puppet Theater (15 Internatsionalnaya Ulitsa; +7 475 272 1158; kukla-tambov.ru) is popular with local children. Founded in 1930, the theater has an amazing collection of puppets.
To really fit in with the locals, check out fishing spots along the Tsna River in the city limits and in the rural areas. However, it is advisable to go fishing with a local acquaintance or at least with someone who speaks Russian. The inability to carry on a conversation with a fellow fisherman may lead to disaster, spoiling a perfect evening. Some people may see a foreigner as an easy target and an opportunity to express their nationalistic views in colorful and somewhat salty language.

<b>Nightlife</b>

Classical music concerts, theater and movies are the most common types of recreation in Tambov. The city also has clubs and nightclubs, of course, but many of them are associated with excessive drinking and are generally considered unsafe.
Check a local newspaper for the day’s concerts at the Rachmaninov Institute (59 Sovietskaya Ulitsa; +7 475 272 5220; rachmaninov.ru). The concert hall at the institute has amazing acoustics and is popular with prominent pianists and chamber orchestras.
The Tambov State Drama Theater (15 Internatsionalnaya Ulitsa; +7 475 271 9580; tambovdrama.ru) is one of the oldest theaters in Russia and is renowned for its rich entertainment program every season. Check its website to see what is playing during the current theater season.
TambovConcert, also known as Filarmonia (5 Derzhavinskaya Ulitsa; + 7 475 272 0010; tambovconcert.ru), is the main venue for classical music and Russian pop shows. Concerts are performed nearly every weekend, so there are good opportunities to see a classical performance in a charming setting.

<b>Where to eat</b>

In Tambov, people love spending time outside, but not many of them go out to eat. In the past, the few local restaurants were associated with the rich, excessive drinking and substandard food. Now, new restaurateurs and owners of cafes and bars are trying to win people’s trust by presenting safe establishments. The new restaurants are family-friendly and often smoke-free.
Restaurant Ultra (164 Sovietskaya Ulitsa; +7 475 256 5756) has a great atmosphere, an enticing menu and polite staff. It’s one of the restaurants that the local elite dine in with their families or use for business meetings. In the words of one local businessman, “You can eat anything here.” This is a good place for a night out. A dinner of Arizona chicken, a succulent chicken breast with mushrooms, or steak in red wine sauce will cost between 400 and 1,000 rubles per person without alcohol.
Going out with locals? Be prepared to give up your right to choose your meal. It is not uncommon for everyone around the table to order the same dish. A common restaurant-table discussion revolves around the question “What are we going to eat?” Having agreed on a dish, everyone orders the same thing.
Cafe Italiansky Dvorik (Italian Quarter) is a popular Western-style cafe-restaurant on the upper floor of the Festival Park shopping mall (1 Bulvar Entuziastov; +7 475 263 3934). With formal dining tables and comfortable leather couches, it is a great venue for a light lunch of caesar salad or gourmet pizza or a cup of coffee. Free, unrestricted Wi-Fi is available.
There are more great places to eat. Make sure to ask locals for a recommendation, or check a list online. 

<b>Where to stay</b>

Good hotels are not something Tambov is known for. Just as there have been multiple attempts to fix the roads, the pressure is also growing on the hospitality industry to improve the city’s image.
Hotel Derzhavinskaya (4 Ploshchad Lva Tolstogo; +7 475 248 3500; tambov-hotel.ru) is situated along the main city street, Sovietskaya Ulitsa, and is the most popular place among foreigners. Prices range from 1,600 rubles ($51.60) for a single to 7,600 rubles ($245) a night for a VIP room. The hotel also offers a visa support service — a formal invitation document that is required to obtain a tourist visa from overseas.
If you like to go for bike rides in natural surroundings, try Hotel Spartak (13 Lunnaya, prigorodny les; +7 475 272 1441; hotel-spartak-tambov.ru), which is in the forest near the city. The hotel, with rooms ranging from 1,500 to 2,500 rubles ($48-80) per night, offers bicycles for rent and a cafe with some of the best shashlik in town.

<b>Conversation starters</b>

Ask people where the phrase “Tambovsky volk tebe tovarishch” came from. Everyone has a story. Ask them if there are still wolves in the forest now.
Show an interest in the unusual number of new Orthodox churches being built in the city. Tambov had many churches, most of which were blown up in the 1930s. Some of these churches are being rebuilt from the ground up, and many locals wonder whether it is money well spent, given the low wages and other social problems in the city.

<b>Cultural tip</b>

When dining, be prepared to drink vodka. If you don’t drink, at least allow your glass to be filled. It’s OK to raise the glass for a toast and then place it back on the table without drinking from it.

<b>How to get there</b>

UTair flies twice daily from St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport to Tambov via Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport. The flight takes around five hours including changeover in Moscow and costs from 4,666 rubles ($150) one way.
Trains depart daily to Tambov from St. Petersburg’s Moscow Railway Station, en route to destinations southeast of Moscow. The journey takes 17 to 20 hours and tickets cost 2,938 rubles ($95) in second class and 1,277 rubles ($41) in first class one way.
<hr />
<b>Tambov</b>
Population: 280,161
Main industries: Manufacturing plants, farming
Mayor: Alexei Kondratyev
Founded in 1636
Interesting fact: Tambov was once best-known for its honey industry. A beehive and three honey bees feature on the city’s coat of arms.
Sister cities: Bar-le-Duc, France; Genoa, Italy; Terre Haute, Indiana, U.S.
Helpful contacts: 
• Mayor Alexei Kondratyev 
(28, Pervomaiskaya Ploshchad; 
+7 475 272 0539; 
tambovduma.ru); 
• Alexei Markovsky, Head of Investment and Strategic Projects Committee 
(182 Sovietskaya Ulitsa; 
+7 475 247 5732; 
city.tambov.gov.ru); 
• Tambov Information Agency Call Center (191 Sovietskaya Ulitsa; 
+7 475 253 3800)

<b>Major Businesses</b>
• Revtrud (51 Kommunalnaya Ulitsa; +7 475 272 0576; revtrud.com) manufactures radio transmission devices for civil and military communication purposes, as well as various building materials, including door frames and paving bricks.
• Electropribor (36 Morshanskoye Shosse; +7 475 257 7303; elektmb.ru) was founded in 1954 to develop and produce aviation electronics. It remains an important player in the supply chain for the domestic aviation and space industry.
• Takf (22 Oktyabrskaya Ulitsa; +7 475 272 9725; uniconf.ru/en/takf/), a local confectionary factory founded in 1946, is now part of the United Confectionary Manufacturers, a leading confectionary holding in the country.
<hr />
<b>Oleg Betin</b>, 
Tambov governor
<b>Q: What is the most attractive industry to investors in Tambov and the surrounding region?</b> 
A: Investors actively fund agriculture. There are more than 60 large agricultural projects being developed in the region concurrently. Judging by the progress so far, the year-to-date results indicate that investments in fixed assets will total 82 billion rubles ($2.6 billion) in the Tambov region.
<b>Q: What is your attitude toward foreign investors and tourists?</b>
A: We actively participate in economic forums presenting the potential of the region to prospective investors. We offer investors technology and transportation infrastructure, both greenfield and brownfield. 
On Oct. 24, I will present a paper at the United Nations on a project called Green Valley that we plan to launch in Michurinsk, a town in the Tambov region. We have a real chance to become a platform for the development and production of healthy food. This is a global project that would take us to a new international level in offering new technologies in food production. 
As for tourism, we do welcome guests from other countries and regions. In 2010, we had 2,000 foreign tourists, and the number grew by five times in 2011 to 10,000. 
Our region is ranked first among the cleanest areas in Russia by the Green Patrol organization. This attracts visitors from overseas, where people place special importance on preserving the environment. We offer a range of services to tourists, including country cottage accommodation, sightseeing and adventure tours, craft workshops and the chance to take part in festivities and the daily life of local rural communities. (For an overview, visit the Tambov Tourism Portal +7 475 279 2402; turtmb.ru.)
<b>Q: What places would you recommend visiting?</b> 
A: Would you like to visit an apple kingdom? Then come to us, to Russia’s epicenter of gardening in Michurinsk (a one-hour trip by car, bus or train from Tambov). Enjoy the magical taste of real fruit and learn about the life and work of the great Russian scientist Ivan Michurin. Visit the museum in the house that he designed on the bank of the Lesnoi Voronezh River (Institute of Genetics and Selection of Fruit Plants, Michurinsk; +7 47545 5-79-30). Seedlings of fruit trees and bushes from special families of plants developed by the great scientist’s followers are available for purchase. 
Would you like to visit the home of Natalya Goncharova? Come to Znamenka. The wife of the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin was born and baptized here in the local church on Aug. 27, 1812, just days after the Battle of Borodino. 
If you are an outdoor enthusiast, you can organize a canoeing trip down the Vorona, one of the cleanest rivers in Russia, and you can spend a few nights at Russian Village (Karandeyevka; 
+7 475 532 4620; ekoturstar.ru ), a tourist complex on a steep bank of the river built in 1907. 
And then there is Ivanovka, a musical center of national importance. It is one of the gems of our region, the museum estate of Sergei Rachmaninov (Ivanovka; +7 475 587 7442). For 27 years, this brilliant composer found inspiration for his immortal masterpieces in this beautiful corner of the Tambov region.