SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1733 (44), Wednesday, October 31, 2012
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TITLE: Activists Say Migrants Were Held as Slaves in Grocery Store 
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Kravtsova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – Federal investigators have opened an inquiry in response to a complaint from two women that they were held in the basement of a Moscow shop against their will for a decade.
The women also said two young children had been kidnapped from the shop on Novosibirskaya Ulitsa in eastern Moscow, the Investigative Committee said in a statement Thursday.
The inquiry comes two days after civil activists said they freed 13 migrants, including six women and three children, allegedly being held in the store as slaves in squalid conditions, some of them for more than 12 years.
The workers, citizens of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, were also raped, beaten and tortured for trying to escape from the shop, the activists said. The mother of one of the women who was being held appealed to the activists for help, they said.
"These people worked in ordinary jobs as cashiers, storeroom workers and cleaners in the shop, but what distinguished them from other such workers is that they were not paid any money, lived in utility rooms, ate spoiled food, and were barred from leaving the shop at any time," said Maxim Sannikov, who participated in the rescue.
Experts estimate that hundreds of thousands of migrant workers, primarily from former Soviet republics in Central Asia, are forced into unpaid labor in Russia.
But activists say investigators are not interested in following through on this case or acknowledging that the shop workers were slaves.
The owners of the shop, a grocery store called Produkty, allegedly had ties to local police, the activists said.
More than 20 people may be currently held in other shops and apartments run by Saken Muzdybayev and his wife Sulu Dzhan Istambekova, who also run the shop on Novosibirskaya Ulitsa, the activists said.
During the rescue operation at that shop, where the activists were accompanied by two television crews from Ren-TV and NTV, two children aged 5 and 14 were abducted by the shop owners, activists said.
The Investigative Committee said two children born in 2006 and 2007 who were allegedly kidnapped were found in good health. The activists said the 5-year-old and 14-year-old were still missing.
Activist Danila Medvedev said two of the women who they helped rescue were questioned by investigators on Wednesday for three hours but were not given a sworn statement to sign afterward.
"That basically means that there is no evidence and consequently no legal case will be brought," Sannikov said.
The activists said the entire local community knew that workers were being held in the shop against their will, but police in the Golyanovo district where the shop is located refused to investigate.
No one has been arrested as part of the inquiry by investigators, activists said.
Dmitry Valentei, project coordinator at the International Organization for Migration, said migrants are sometimes forced to work without pay when they agree to take a job without having a work permit or a job contract.
"The only way to prevent such situations is to stay in the legal realm, which often depends on the immigrants themselves," he said.
Sannikov said the passports of the workers were taken by the shop's owners, so they could not find out whether they were working illegally or not.
"But the most important fact is that there is slavery in Russia, no matter where the slaves come from," Sannikov said.

TITLE: Pro-Kremlin Youth Target Mormons
AUTHOR: By Jonathan Earle
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – A week after President Vladimir Putin called totalitarian sects a "threat to society," pro-Kremlin youth activists in Moscow staged a picket against Mormonism, accusing the U.S.-based religious group of a range of crimes from fraud to pedophilia to sheltering CIA agents.
In addition to its stated goal of fighting lawbreakers, Thursday's protest by United Russia's Young Guard appeared aimed at raising fears about Western influence, a growing trend in recent months.
Just as non-governmental organizations that receive foreign funding have been branded "foreign agents," Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses and other Western religious groups are being flagged as dangerous, said Roman Lunkin, a religious expert at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
"For 'patriotic society,' they're seen as a fifth column," he said by telephone Thursday.
Protesters said the Mormon church shared the political views of its most famous adherent, U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney, whom the youth group, an arm of the ruling United Russia party, also denounced as a "Russophobe" in an online statement.
Romney is "a representative of a totalitarian religious sect that operates on Russian soil against the country's interests," the statement said, although a Young Guard leader reached by telephone on Thursday denied that the protest was linked to Romney.
The Mormon church's local branch reacted calmly to the news that similar pickets were to take place in seven Russian cities, a church spokeswoman said. She added, however, that the church had asked authorities to check the legality of the Moscow event.
About a dozen Young Guard members stood outside a Mormon youth center in Moscow on Thursday wearing matching blue vests and holding handmade signs that read, "No totalitarian sects!" "CIA, yuck!" and "No foreign agents!"
The group cited Putin's remarks as an impetus for the event, claiming in their statement that Mormons are one of several groups, including Jehovah's Witnesses and Hare Krishnas, that are dangerous to Russian society. Putin had not referred to any religious group by name.
Mormons might have been singled out because anti-sect activists are suspicious of the faith's significant public presence, which includes charity and missionary work, Lunkin said. "Anti-sect activists create this myth about a nationwide network of organizations … supported by the West," he said.
Citing a 12-year-old story in an obscure Kaliningrad newspaper, Young Guard said some Mormon missionaries doubled as Western intelligence agents. Last year's conviction of Warren Jeffs, leader of a fringe Mormon sect, on child sexual assault charges was the basis of the pedophilia claim.
Yelena Nechiporova, the Mormon church spokeswoman, dismissed the charges. "We believe in the law, and we follow the law. … We're here to live in the country where we were born and grew up, the country that we love," she said by telephone on Thursday.
In August, a police raid on an Islamic sect in Tatarstan spawned lurid rumors and increased scrutiny on perceived fringe religious groups.
Last week, Putin told a Samara regional official that totalitarian sects "hunt for souls, as well as property," and said laws regulating their activities should be improved, a remark that prompted Public Chamber member Alexei Grishin to propose creating a register of "totalitarian sect" leaders.
The Mormon church, officially known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, has operated legally in Russia since 1991 and has 21,000 members in the country. Of the 500 missionaries active in the country, about three-fourths are Americans, Nechiporova said.
There are an estimated 14 million Mormons worldwide.

TITLE: Activists Say Migrants Were Held as Slaves in Grocery Store
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Kravtsova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – Federal investigators have opened an inquiry in response to a complaint from two women that they were held in the basement of a Moscow shop against their will for a decade.
The women also said two young children had been kidnapped from the shop on Novosibirskaya Ulitsa in eastern Moscow, the Investigative Committee said in a statement Thursday.
The inquiry comes two days after civil activists said they freed 13 migrants, including six women and three children, allegedly being held in the store as slaves in squalid conditions, some of them for more than 12 years.
The workers, citizens of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, were also raped, beaten and tortured for trying to escape from the shop, the activists said. The mother of one of the women who was being held appealed to the activists for help, they said.
"These people worked in ordinary jobs as cashiers, storeroom workers and cleaners in the shop, but what distinguished them from other such workers is that they were not paid any money, lived in utility rooms, ate spoiled food, and were barred from leaving the shop at any time," said Maxim Sannikov, who participated in the rescue.
Experts estimate that hundreds of thousands of migrant workers, primarily from former Soviet republics in Central Asia, are forced into unpaid labor in Russia.
But activists say investigators are not interested in following through on this case or acknowledging that the shop workers were slaves.
The owners of the shop, a grocery store called Produkty, allegedly had ties to local police, the activists said.
More than 20 people may be currently held in other shops and apartments run by Saken Muzdybayev and his wife Sulu Dzhan Istambekova, who also run the shop on Novosibirskaya Ulitsa, the activists said.
During the rescue operation at that shop, where the activists were accompanied by two television crews from Ren-TV and NTV, two children aged 5 and 14 were abducted by the shop owners, activists said.
The Investigative Committee said two children born in 2006 and 2007 who were allegedly kidnapped were found in good health. The activists said the 5-year-old and 14-year-old were still missing.
Activist Danila Medvedev said two of the women who they helped rescue were questioned by investigators on Wednesday for three hours but were not given a sworn statement to sign afterward.
"That basically means that there is no evidence and consequently no legal case will be brought," Sannikov said.
The activists said the entire local community knew that workers were being held in the shop against their will, but police in the Golyanovo district where the shop is located refused to investigate.
No one has been arrested as part of the inquiry by investigators, activists said.
Dmitry Valentei, project coordinator at the International Organization for Migration, said migrants are sometimes forced to work without pay when they agree to take a job without having a work permit or a job contract.
"The only way to prevent such situations is to stay in the legal realm, which often depends on the immigrants themselves," he said.
Sannikov said the passports of the workers were taken by the shop's owners, so they could not find out whether they were working illegally or not.
"But the most important fact is that there is slavery in Russia, no matter where the slaves come from," Sannikov said.

TITLE: Medvedev Sends Innovation Spending Plan Back to the Drawing Board
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday rejected a government plan to develop science and technology after describing its reliance on a surge in private funding as "absolutely unrealistic."
The proposal, reviewed at a Cabinet meeting, envisioned that private companies would increase spending on research tenfold by 2020, compared to this year. None of the Cabinet members put a ruble number on either state or private expenditures during the discussion.
A brainchild of the Education and Science Ministry, the 2013-2020 plan had to gain approval from the Finance Ministry, which had insisted on reducing the state share of funding for the proposal to 30 percent over time.
Medvedev cast doubt on the plausibility of that target.
"Globally, in the [funding of the] innovation sector the state share remains very significant," he said. "To be honest, the [proposed] proportion [for Russia] … where 70 percent is private investment looks absolutely unrealistic to me. Absolutely unrealistic!"
Medvedev ordered the ministries to be more optimistic when planning the country's future economic performance.
"As long as there is hope that the general economic situation will recover … we need to orient ourselves on a development option, rather than the most conservative option," he said.
Medvedev made his comments after Education and Science Minister Dmitry Livanov warned that the government might fail to reach the development targets set forth by President Vladimir Putin immediately after his inauguration in May, should private investment in research fall short. Putin recently scolded three ministers, including Livanov, for poor work implementing those targets. Regional Development Minister Oleg Govorun, one of the ministers in question, resigned after the reprimand.
Yury Osipov, president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, urged greater state funding for the proposal. There's little hope for private effort in this area, given that "even" state-controlled firms prefer to buy technology abroad rather than develop their own.
"If we want to make a breakthrough, the state is obligated to support science," he said. "Let's make an effort and make it a drastic effort."
Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich said he disagreed with a drop in science funding relative to gross domestic product from the level that is now 0.9 percent.
"We can say that we can't increase it … but we sure can't make it lower either," he said.
The proposed state program seeks, among other things, to increase the total spending on research and development, both by state and private companies, to 3 percent of GDP by 2020; ensure that publications by Russians in international scientific journals make up 3 percent, up from 2 percent now; and raise the share of state-of-the-art equipment at research institutions to 70 percent. It also aims to guarantee higher salaries to researchers, or double that of the average in any given region.
The Cabinet has been considering the so-called state programs because it wants to base next year's and future federal budgets on these programs and replace the current budget structure.

TITLE: Senators Pass Treason Bill Affecting International NGOs
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Federation Council on Wednesday passed amendments to the law on treason that could make it possible for law enforcement officials to target people collaborating with international organizations.
The changes, which were passed by the State Duma earlier this month, were approved by 138 of 166 senators, despite appeals from the human rights community to put them on hold.
To become law, the amendments now have to be signed by President Vladimir Putin.
The expanded definition of treason includes divulging a state secret or "providing consulting or other work to a foreign state or international organization" if said organization works against Russian security interests. Traitors can be punished by up to 20 years in prison.
The previous version of the same law referred only to "foreign organizations" and not to international ones. The expansion has alarmed human rights activists who work with groups such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
The amendments are seen as part of a Kremlin crackdown on human rights activists, who President Vladimir Putin has accused of pushing the agenda of Western governments.
Ahead of Wednesday's vote, several respected human rights activists, including Moscow Helsinki Group head Lyudmila Alexeyeva and national human rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin, appealed in a letter to Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko not to vote for the new treason law.
"This highly important law has not gone through the procedure of public hearings in the Public Chamber," the letter said.
Rights campaigner Lev Ponomaryov predicted that the new law would be used against government critics.
"There will be a new round of spymania. Civil activists, opposition politicians and rights defenders will be prosecuted," Ponomaryov told Interfax.
The liberal Yabloko party organized one-man pickets near the Federation Council building protesting the amendments. One poster carried by an activist said, "The law on state treason is the way to a fascist state."
But senators who voted for the legislation said they saw no evil in it.
"There was always a legal responsibility for passing out state secrets. The new amendments just make the definition clearer," Senator Leonid Tyagachyov said Wednesday.
Andrei Klishas, head of the Federation Council legal committee, said Wednesday that a "public wave of indignation at the law" was linked to a misunderstanding of its purpose.
He added that the amendments would not "criminalize" assistance by Russian citizens to foreign organizations like the United Nations or the Commonwealth of Independent States.
But Klishas' remark regarding the public reaction to the changes prompted Matviyenko to appeal to senators to provide "maximum information" about the law.
The amendments were pushed by the Federal Security Service, which unsuccessfully attempted to push through similar changes in 2008 while Dmitry Medvedev was president.
Yury Gorbunov, the deputy director of the Federal Security Service, said during Duma hearings on the amendments that the law would target international organizations being used as cover for spy activity.
Security expert Andrei Soldatov said the amendments were a way for the security services to justify themselves in Putin's eyes. "They have all this big authority but don't work effectively, which angers Putin," said Soldatov, head of the Agentura.ru think tank.
The new legislation also introduces a separate article in the Criminal Code that stipulates punishment for forcibly pressuring someone to reveal a state secret.
A violation of that new article is punishable by a fine of up to 500 million rubles ($16 million) or four years in prison. If the pressure involves violence, the assailant can be punished by up to eight years in prison.
Federation Council senators said Wednesday that they would ask the Supreme Court to explain how the amended law will be applied in practice.
Since 2002, around 25 Russian citizens have been convicted with treason by Russian courts. While the majority of the traitors were military or security service officers who passed secrets to foreign states, researcher Igor Sutyagin and physicist Valentin Danilov were also convicted of the crime, both in 2004.
Both Sutyagin and Danilov were collaborating with foreign organizations while doing research related to the Russian military by taking information from open sources.
While Sutyagin was freed in 2010 and exchanged for several Russian spies arrested in the United States, Danilov was sentenced to 14 years in prison and has not been released. Danilov's sentence was later reduced by a year.
Soldatov said that while the government likely does not intend to use the treason law more broadly, it will turn it into a "warning stick."
"Nobody knows when the state will use that stick, so even before the amendments were passed, people started to behave more cautiously," Soldatov said.

TITLE: Norilsk Nickel Shareholders Seek to Resolve Dispute
AUTHOR: By Irina Filatova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The co-owners of Norilsk Nickel have resumed talks to settle the long-standing dispute over control of the nickel and palladium giant, in a move that could result in replacing the company’s management.
The two largest shareholders of Norilsk Nickel — Vladimir Potanin’s Interros holding and Oleg Deripaska’s RusAl — have returned to the negotiations table, Norilsk Nickel’s chief executive Vladimir Strzhalkovsky told journalists Wednesday. 
“Yes, I know that the meetings are ongoing,” he said, Reuters reported.
He said that the talks will become more intensive over the next month, adding that he is not involved in the talks.
Interros, which owns 28 percent in the nickel company, and RusAl, which holds a 25 percent stake, have been fighting intermittently since 2008 over the company’s corporate governance, board structure and dividend policy, with last year’s negotiations coming to no avail.
But this time the talks could result in changes in the company’s management, as a source close to Norilsk Nickel’s shareholders said that they are discussing replacing Strzhalkovsky.
“It’s a key issue now,” said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the information is confidential.
Both RusAl and Interros declined to comment Wednesday.
Norilsk Nickel said that there’s no reason for changing the management, which had secured a stable financial performance and capitalization growth and modernized the manufacturing facilities.
The company met its obligations during the financial crisis of 2008 thanks to effective management, without carrying out massive layoffs, it said in e-mailed comments.
RusAl has been pushing for Norilsk Nickel to get professional management with industry background. The aluminum producer argued that the growth of the nickel company’s capitalization is inhibited by the company not being run properly.
Replacing Norilsk Nickel’s CEO would be positive for the company, as it might increase its transparency, Alfa Bank analyst Andrei Lobazov said, referring to RusAl suing Norilsk Nickel for failing to provide access to the records of the nickel company’s board meetings and other documents.
Although the previous negotiations between RusAl and Interros didn’t yield any results, the companies are likely to find a compromise this time, he said by telephone. The government has indicated that it’s interested in a speedy solution, he added.
President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly said that the ongoing conflict damages Norilsk’s operations. “We hope that the disputes between Norilsk Nickel’s owners will be resolved in the near future for the benefit of the company’s development,” he said in August.
The issue was brought up again at a meeting of the presidential energy commission last week, where Putin criticized Norilsk Nickel over significant spending on buybacks over the last few years, the source close to the nickel company’s shareholders said.
Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
The talks were resumed after Deripaska’s recent claim at a meeting with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev that they had stalled, Kommersant reported Wednesday, citing a source close to Norilsk Nickel’s shareholders. Potanin met with Medvedev the following day, the report said.
Resuming negotiations could be beneficial for the nickel company, as the “management’s focus might shift from the ongoing conflict towards operating and strategic issues,” VTB Capital said in a research note.
There might be various scenarios of settling the conflict, with RusAl selling its stake being one possible option, VTB Capital said.
Interros spokesman Andrei Kirpichnikov said the company will be satisfied with any outcome that would help to cease the long-standing battle.
Interros, which is seeking to gain control over the nickel company, is preparing to apply to the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service for permission to increase its stake in Norilsk Nickel to 75 percent, Kirpichnikov said without elaborating.

TITLE: United Russia Deputy Upbraids TV Host 
AUTHOR: By Jonathan Earle
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A State Duma deputy has called on veteran television journalist Vladimir Pozner to apologize for saying on national television that Russian courts are unfair and that the prosecution of an opposition activist is being carried out KGB-style.
"I think Vladimir Pozner should either substantiate his claims about Russian courts and the Investigative Committee or apologize, or leave Channel One," United Russia's Ilya Kostunov wrote in a brief statement posted on his VKontakte page Wednesday morning.
In Sunday's episode of his popular talk show, Pozner accused the Investigative Committee of resorting to KGB-style tactics to prosecute leftist activist Leonid Razzvozhayev, who claims that he was kidnapped last month and forced to confess to plotting riots.
"There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of similar handwritten confessions in the KGB's archives, and we all know how they were procured," Pozner said in his closing monologue.
He also suggested that an Irkutsk woman convicted of fatally striking a pedestrian with her car in 2009 received a lenient sentence because she is the daughter of the region's top elections official. "There aren't any fair courts in the country," Pozner said.
Kostunov, a first-term deputy and former commissar with the pro-Kremlin Nashi youth movement, told Izvestia that he'd sent a written complaint to Channel One boss Konstantin Ernst. A spokesperson for the station said a letter had yet to arrive, Interfax reported Wednesday.
Perhaps indicative of Channel One's position, Pozner's monologue was not cut from later broadcasts of the program, he told BFM.ru.
In his consternation, Kostunov was joined by ruling party heavyweight Alexander Zheleznyak, who told Izvestia that the comparison to KGB tactics was "incorrect" and brushed off Razzvozhayev's claim that he had been psychologically pressured.
Kostunov has cheered on the Kremlin's clampdown on critics in recent months. He has said "unqualified criticism" of judges should be criminalized and foreign-financed media outlets treated as foreign agents.
Asked for commentary, Pozner, a rare critical voice on state-controlled television, quoted a poem by Alexander Pushkin: "Obey thy god, o muse, / Fear not slander, nor demand laurels, / Be unmoved by praise and abuse, / And do not argue with a fool," Izvestia reported.

TITLE: Putin Proposes Expanding Human Rights Council 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin on Thursday proposed increasing the membership of the presidential human rights council from 40 to over 60 people after more than 400,000 votes were cast for candidates to the council in an online selection process.
Putin suggested the expansion at a meeting Thursday with council head Mikhail Fedotov, who presented the president with over 80 candidates for 13 open spots on the body.
After Fedotov told the president that around 420,000 votes were registered in an online ranking of candidates for the council, Putin recommended taking three candidates for each of the open seats.
"I'm not insisting on it, but it seems to me that it would be fair [to expand the council] given that the people who voted on the Internet took this seriously," Putin said, RIA-Novosti reported.
Fedotov called the proposal "radical" and "very interesting." He suggested that the membership could be increased even more, to over 70 people.
Each of the 13 open seats was set aside for a campaigner focusing on specific issues, such as prisoners' rights, extremism, xenophobia, journalists' rights, investigation of abductions and torture, Fedotov told Putin.
Among the candidates named by Fedotov were lesser-known figures as well as high-profile activists, including TV journalist Leonid Parfyonov, head of the Agora human rights organization Pavel Chikov and Lilia Shibanova, the director of independent vote-monitoring group Golos.
The human rights council, originally founded under a different name in 1993, is an advisory body for the president on human rights issues.
The usage of online voting to help select new members — which Fedotov said Thursday was actually "discussion" because only Putin has the right to determine the makeup of the council — caused some former members to quit earlier this year.
Before June, new members were chosen by the president from a list of nominees put together by sitting council members.
Seventeen people left over disaffection with the Internet voting process or with December's disputed parliamentary elections.
Some of the country's most prominent human rights defenders were among those who left the council, including Yelena Panfilova, head of Transparency International's Russia office; Lyudmila Alexeyeva, head of the Moscow Helsinki Group; and Svetlana Gannushkina, head of refugee aid organization Civil Assistance.

TITLE: Missing Freighter Breached Safety Rules 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — As the search-and-rescue operation for the missing Amurskaya cargo ship entered its fifth day Thursday, investigators said the freighter had violated multiple safety regulations and was not cleared to leave port.
The Investigative Committee said in a statement Thursday that the Amurskaya was understaffed, not suitable for carrying loose cargo and had not sought official authorization from port authorities for its voyage in the Sea of Okhotsk.
Investigators also established that the freighter, which was carrying between 700 and 750 tons of gold ore, was overloaded by at least 90 tons. 
A criminal case has been opened on charges of breaking safety rules at sea, causing two or more fatalities. The charges carry a maximum punishment of seven years' jail time.
In comments carried by Interfax, the Emergency Situations Ministry speculated that rough weather conditions, human error or a technical fault could have caused the cargo ship to sink.
Neither the ship nor the nine missing crew members on board have been discovered. Emergencies officials said in a separate statement that rescue efforts continue by air, land and sea.
The Amurskaya disappeared near the Shantar Islands in the Sea of Okhotsk on Oct. 28 after it triggered an emergency beacon. The ship's cargo of gold ore was reportedly worth more than $230,000.


TITLE: Speculation Swirls Over Putin's Health After Flight With Cranes
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin has delayed a series of official visits abroad, giving rise to speculation that he is suffering from an injury exacerbated during a hang-glider flight with a flock of rare Siberian cranes in September.
Although the Kremlin officially cites Putin's busy schedule as the reason for the postponement of the official visits, news reports said Thursday that Putin's health was to blame.
"According to two people very close to the Kremlin, the president really is experiencing health problems, which are connected to an old injury that flared up after his flight with cranes," Vedomosti reported. 
"After the flight, it was very noticeable that he had a limp at the APEC summit in Vladivostok," the report said.
Responding to the speculation Thursday, Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, confirmed that Putin had suffered an injury before the Vladivostok summit but described it as a minor "muscle strain."
"Every athlete has many injuries, especially those who play sport actively and on a daily basis, like Putin. He has trained for a long time, practically semi-professionally," Peskov said in comments carried by Interfax.
Among excuses for the changes to Putin's schedule, Peskov earlier cited the president's desire to travel less frequently into the center of Moscow so as to prevent traffic jams on the capital's busy roads.
He also explained that Putin's trip to India, which was penciled in for early November, had been put off to make the visit as productive as possible.
Putin's flight with the cranes, dubbed the "Flight of Hope," was hailed by supporters at the time as a genuine effort to attract attention to the species' fate but ridiculed by opponents as a publicity stunt.

TITLE: Fate of Investment Project Puzzles City
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The future of the European Embankment looks to be in doubt, with speculation swirling around the large-scale project after its investor announced the discontinuation of funding for it last week.
The site is now tipped to be inhabited by the Supreme and Supreme Arbitration Courts, which will reportedly move from Moscow to St. Petersburg and occupy the site where Peterburg City, a daughter structure of VTB Development, had planned to construct an elite multi-functional residential complex at a cost of 47 billion rubles ($1.5 billion).
The presidential administration has earmarked the site for the courts, Kommersant daily reported Monday, referring to anonymous sources in the courts. No other media reported the claims.
Last week, VTB Development, which is headed by Sergei Matviyenko, son of St. Petersburg’s former governor Valentina Matviyenko, officially announced the discontinuation of construction financing for the European Embankment project. The company did not comment on the reasons for the decision.
The presidential administration allegedly plans to buy the European Embankment from VTB. The prospect of impending negotiations on the issue serve as an explanation for the discontinuation of the project, though VTB Development has still made no official comment, Kommersant said, referring to sources on the St. Petersburg real estate market. 
The proposed relocation of the Supreme and Arbitration Supreme courts to St. Petersburg appears to be part of an ongoing plan to concentrate the country’s three upper courts in one location. The Russian Constitutional Court has been located in St. Petersburg since 2008, when it was relocated from Moscow.
VTB has already spent about 10 billion rubles ($320 million) to meet its obligations as stipulated by the federal investment contract, having moved the State Institute of Applied Chemistry that was located on the site in question to a new location and started demolition of the buildings located on the site. According to the contract, VTB was also to recultivate and improve the chemically contaminated land on the site of the project and to build and transfer to state ownership the Boris Eifman Dance Palace, which President Vladimir Putin had promised Eifman would be erected as part of the project.
VTB had planned to complete the construction of top-end elite residential accommodation on the Neva River embankment with a view of the Spit of Vasilyevsky Island by 2017. In May this year, the city’s preservationists spoke up against the project, suggesting that a park should be laid out there instead.  
Meanwhile, the Boris Eifman Theater has received no official notification about the changes in the European Embankment project and therefore declined to comment on it, Interfax reported Tuesday.
The European Embankment project is located between the Birzhevoi and Tuchkov bridges on the Petrograd Side of the city, and was due to include a pedestrian area, residential buildings, a retail and office center and a five-star InterContinental Hotel Group hotel, as well as the planned dance theater.
The project was estimated to be completed by 2017.

TITLE: Search Evidence Shown at Trial of 12
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Trial of 12 — in which activists from The Other Russia face charges of re-launching and conducting the “extremist activities” of the banned National Bolshevik Party (NBP) in a case they see as fabricated and politically motivated — hit a new low this week, when the prosecution presented the evidence collected during searches of activists’ apartments in 2010 and 2011.
Under the defense’s examination, most of the evidence — consisting of disks, photographs, newspapers, books, buttons and other objects that were brought into the courtroom in cardboard boxes, travel bags and a large envelope — turned out to date back to the 1990s and the early to mid-2000s, i.e. before the NBP was banned in 2007. 
The defendants do not deny belonging to the NBP before the ban, but say they have acted as activists of The Other Russia Coalition and then The Other Russia political party since 2007.
The rest of the evidence presented at the sessions Friday and Tuesday included books written by The Other Russia’s chair and author Eduard Limonov and available from bookstores, his presidential manifesto for the 2012 elections and even a Soviet propaganda pamphlet called “Present-Day Nationalism in the Service of Anti-Communism,” published by Lenizdat in 1981.
A large number of leaflets advertising various protests, including those bearing the image of then President Dmitry Medvedev and reading “The Tsar is not real,” as well as flyers for Strategy 31 rallies in defense of the right of assembly were also presented by the prosecution.
“I don’t understand what the presented evidence has to do with the case,” said defendant Andrei Dmitriyev, the local leader of The Other Russia, at one point during Tuesday’s session.
Judge Sergei Yakovlev asked when the search was conducted and said, “That’s what it has to do with the case. In the investigation’s opinion,” he added after a pause.
Search reports did not specify the dates of the seized documents, and Prosecutor Nadezhda Filimonova appeared to be disappointed when what was described simply as “NBP membership applications” turned out to date back to 1998. Dmitriyev’s NBP congress delegate mandate was for the 2001 congress.
The evidence included a red NBP flag seized at the apartment of Dmitriyev’s parents, but there was no proof that it had ever been used in public after the ban. According to Dmitriyev, the flag was kept behind a cabinet and he hasn’t lived with his parents for the past 12 years. 
A pair of red armbands bearing a hammer and sickle symbol were found on the balcony of defendant Andrei Pesotsky, who also owned a couple of NBP application forms dating back to 2005 and 2006, while Alexei Zentsov had a CD-ROM called “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the NBP, But Were Afraid to Ask,” dating back to 2006.
Although the cases against Zentsov, Vadim Mamedov and Vladislav Ivakhnik were closed in August due to the expiration of the limitation period since their last detention at a protest, the evidence seized at their homes was presented at the trial, as well as that belonging to Sergei Porokhovoi, the 13th accused, who fled to Finland to claim political asylum in November 2011 and whose case has since been singled out into a separate one. The judge ruled that the evidence related to those four men was connected to the case of the eight activists who remain on trial. 
On Tuesday, Dmitriyev’s lawyer Gleb Lavrentyev pointed out that a pamphlet called “Extraordinary Fascism” presented by the prosecutor as containing NBP symbols was, in reality, issued in 2005 by the pro-Kremlin movement Nashi and contained an article by its then-leader Vasily Yakimenko attacking the party, which was then legal.
The defense also showed that a stack of photographs from a rally or rallies on which NBP flags were visible, which had been seized at Zemtsov’s apartment, bore a stamp from a photo lab showing they were printed in 2005.
The evidence also included a blue travel bag, found — according to the investigation — in the attic of the building where defendants Ravil Bashirov and Roman Khrenov lived in a communal apartment. Apart from a couple of hammer-and-sickle postcards, the bag contained a large number of documents — including a copy of a passport and a parachuting certificate issued to a Mikhail Bakhman.
While both Bashirov and Khrenov denied ownership, saying that the attic was accessible to everyone, Pesotsky’s lawyer Olga Tseitlina suggested that the bag belonged to the person whose documents it contained, i.e. Mikhail Bakhman, who was not a defendant in the case against the activists.
Speaking to The St. Petersburg Times on Tuesday, lawyer Tseitlina dismissed the evidence as “wastepaper.”
“The prosecution believes that it proves the defendants belong to the NBP, but we think that it proves nothing as far as the charges go,” she said.
“First, the bulk of evidence doesn’t contain any reference to the NBP or dates [to a period] prior to the ban, and secondly, there’s no proof that it was distributed publicly or used at rallies after 2007. They [the prosecution] have nothing.”
Despite multiple flaws in the evidence, Tseitlina said she is sure that the trial — which, by her estimates, will be concluded before the end of the year — will result in a guilty verdict.
“It’s a political, trumped-up case, with a planted apartment and a police provocation; the case was clearly commissioned,” she said.

TITLE: ‘Mechanical Orchestra’ Gets New Lease of Life
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The State Hermitage Museum’s legendary Johann Strasser clock, also known as “the mechanical orchestra,” is to be restored by 2014 as part of the celebrations of the museum’s 250th anniversary.
The elaborate 18th-century clock has been silent for at least 150 years.
“This clock is outstanding in so many ways: It is a fascinating example of decorative and applied art, it is a technical marvel, it is a fine musical instrument in which there are recordings of masterpieces of 18th-century classical music, and it is an artifact that has a most romantic and dramatic story behind it,” said Igor Sychev, the Hermitage curator responsible for the maintenance of the exhibit.
The celebrated craftsman Johann Georg Strasser originally designed the Mechanical Orchestra for the Mikhailovsky Castle, the residence built by Tsar Paul I that already housed two of Strasser’s less sophisticated clocks. It took the master eight years — from 1793 to 1801 — to finish the technically challenging piece.
The tsar, however, never had a chance to enjoy the commission: He was murdered in the spring of 1801, before the order was complete. After the tsar’s death, the master craftsman, whom the project had saddled with losses as he invested most of his fortune into making the unique item, decided to organize a lottery and make the clock the main prize. It took Strasser more than two years to sell enough tickets to make the lottery financially viable. To promote the lottery, he traveled across the country and arranged performances of “the mechanical orchestra.”
The draw was held on May 4 1804, yet the lucky winner would not show up for almost a year. The winner, a young officer who, en route to his detachment, was staying with a Latvian widow, gave the lottery ticket to his landlady as a parting gift before the winning ticket was announced. When she discovered her luck, the widow decided not to keep the clock, and arrived in St. Petersburg in 1805 with the intention of setting up another lottery to dispose of it, but Tsar Alexander I instead agreed to buy it from her for 20,000 rubles plus a lifetime pension.
According to some sources, Alexander I also had a plan for the unlucky clock. He allegedly intended to include it among the gifts that were being sent to China with a diplomatic mission. However, the Chinese emperor refused to receive the Russian ambassadors, and the clock was instead installed in one of the halls of the Winter Palace.
The Mechanical Orchestra is shaped like a temple. It is about four meters high, and has a portico and paired mahogany columns embellished with gilded bronze. 
The organ is driven by four weights, each weighing nearly 200 kilograms. The music is recorded on 14 removable wooden barrels, with each of them playing an eight-minute classical composition. 
The original thirteen barrels contained pieces by Haydn and Mozart, including the overture from Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute.” One of the pieces, composed by the then-popular Viennese pianist and composer Anton Eberl, was written especially for Strasser’s “mechanical orchestra.” In 1861, a fourteenth barrel was added, but even at that time the clock was barely functional, and it has been broken ever since. 
“Like any experimental piece, and like any unique piece, the ‘mechanical orchestra’ has a rather long list of sensitive issues,” said restorer Mikhail Guriyev, head of the department of restoration of clocks and musical instruments of the State Hermitage Museum. 
“Despite its massive size and imposing looks, the Strasser clock is a very fragile creature. The coil springs that make the barrels roll can be compared with those of a steam train. The poises would often drop, destroying the mechanics, and the instrument needed to be fixed. The trick is that the instrument needs to produce a smooth, light, graceful sound, despite the rather mighty machinery that is involved in making it run.”
The grand-scale restoration project is being funded by JTI tobacco company, which signed an agreement with the Hermitage in 2011. Such charitable activities are at great risk of being banned for tobacco companies in early 2013: A draft law that would ban tobacco companies from taking part in philanthropic activities is currently awaiting review at the State Duma. If passed, the law, which has stirred a nationwide debate, would prohibit tobacco companies from donating to charities and taking part in any other philanthropic activities. 
The bill’s critics have branded the initiative as hypocritical: After all, the Russian state is comfortable with harvesting high tax revenues from tobacco companies, yet is willing to impose a ban on charity for them, thus ostracizing their business. 
In these challenging circumstances, Anatoly Vereshchagin, JTI’s director of charitable projects, has promised that the company will deliver on all its obligations that have been made to date, regardless of the outcome of the forthcoming Duma vote.
“There is still time for the State Duma to decide against the law; however, if the ban does get introduced, we will transfer all the money required for the restoration of the clock before the law comes into force,” Vereshchagin said. “All calculations of the costs have been made, and we can assure you that the money will suffice.”

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Would-Be Emigrants</b>
 ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The proportion of Russians willing to move abroad permanently has grown in the last four years from 17 percent in 2008 to 22 percent this year, Interfax reported, referring to Levada Center research.
The majority of those willing to emigrate are men (27 percent), respondents from 18 to 24 years old (41 percent), people with higher education (24 percent), and residents of Moscow and rural areas (25 percent).
Meanwhile the majority of the respondents (74 percent) are not considering moving abroad. Most of them are women (78 percent), people older than 55 (83 percent) and respondents with a low income (80 percent).
However, only one respondent in ten said they could speak a foreign language more or less fluently.

<b>Romanov Remains</b>
 ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Mikhail Fedotov, head of the presidential council on human rights, has appealed to St. Petersburg Governor Georgy Poltavchenko with a request to solve the issue of financing archeological excavations at the Peter and Paul Fortress, where the remains of the Romanov grand dukes may be buried, Interfax reported.
Fedotov said some days ago that he had appealed to Poltavchenko, asking for help with financing the digging near the fortress’s Golovkin bastion, where a grave dating to 1917-1919 and containing the remains of 112 people has been found. At present only about 30 percent of the site has been excavated, he said.
Fedotov said the excavations should be financed from the city budget, since the fortress is a city museum.
The Romanov grand dukes were executed in the Peter and Paul Fortress in 1917 and 1918. However, the exact location of their burial is still unknown.

<b>Halloween in Russia</b>
 ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Most Russians know about Halloween, but only one in every ten of them is planning to celebrate the holiday, Interfax reported, referring to sociologists at the Levada Center.
The research indicated that this year, 9 percent of Russians plan to celebrate Halloween, 3 percent more than last year.
Halloween is celebrated on the night of Oct. 31. The roots of the holiday go back to the pre-Christian epoch when the lands of Ireland, Northern France and England were inhabited by Celts. Their year consisted of summer and winter, and the transition from summer to winter was marked on Oct. 31.
On the night of Nov. 1, according to legend, the portal between the world of the living and dead opened, and people put out the fires in their houses and donned animal heads and skins in order to ward off roaming evil spirits. 

<b>Vessel Virgin</b>
 ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The Admiralteiskiye Verfi shipyard launched a new rescue ship named the Igor Belousov on Tuesday, Interfax reported. 
The main purpose of the ship, whose keel was laid on Dec. 24, 2005, is the emergency rescue of submarine crews, but it can also be used for scientific and research activities, as well as rescuing navy pilots who have got into trouble.
One of the ship’s major tasks is performing searches for and investigating navy vessels in distress, but it can also operate as part of international navy rescue groups.
After undergoing essential tests, the ship is to be presented to the Russian navy in 2014.

<b>New Appointment</b>
 ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — City Governor Georgy Poltavchenko has appointed Irina Babyuk the new head of the city’s Investment and Strategic Projects Committee.
Babyuk has worked on the committee since 2009 as vice chairwoman. The former head of the committee, Alexei Chichkanov, left the city administration this spring.

TITLE: Prokhorov Trades Business for Full-Time Politics
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov announced at a weekend congress of his new Civic Platform party that he is quitting business to enter politics full time, and delegates overwhelmingly elected him as their leader.
Prokhorov, 47, said he would place his fortune, estimated at $13.2 billion by Forbes magazine, in a trust fund and allow his investment vehicle, Onexim Group, to oversee his assets in media, mining, financial services and other areas.
Saying he would finance up to 10 percent of the party’s budget, he insisted that this time he would break into the political big time after two failed attempts.
“We are not only a country with a great past but we have to become a country with a great future,” Prokhorov said while images of Russian poverty and despair appeared on a screen behind him.
Prokhorov, who moved about the stage more like a university professor than a politician, received some of the loudest applause when he promised to regulate immigration to give preferences to highly skilled foreigners wishing to integrate into Russian society.
“Russia is not a revolving door,” he said to clapping from a packed hall of opposition activists, leading intelligentsia, businesspeople, government officials and decorated military veterans.
The first congress of Civic Platform took place in the same Russian Academy of Science building where Prokhorov held a conference of supporters as he sought to cling to the leadership of the Right Cause party last year.
That short-lived foray into national politics, Prokhorov’s first, ended after the conference with him resigning under what he called pressure from Vladislav Surkov, then a Kremlin deputy chief of staff.
The location of Saturday’s congress was not lost on Prokhorov, who called it “symbolic.”
“It was here that I crossed the Rubicon and declined to play by Kremlin rules,” he said.
Prokhorov also ran for president as an independent candidate in March, placing a distant third with 8 percent of the vote. Vladimir Putin won with 64 percent, while Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov came in second with 17 percent.
Prokhorov declared at the beginning of his political life last year that he wanted Putin’s job, which was prime minister at the time. But he avoided any direct attacks on Putin on Saturday, even as he repeated many of his presidential campaign promises to decentralize power and dismantle the Kremlin’s power vertical.
He also proposed abolishing ethnicity-based republics like Dagestan, Tatarstan and North Ossetia and reducing the number of regions from 83 to just 15. He said ethnic groups could be assigned autonomous districts within larger regions, a practice of tsarist-era Russia.
“If today’s Russia consisted of 15 regions, the bureaucrats would not be able to impose their will,” he said.
Many of the 110 delegates from 51 regions who attended the congress praised Prokhorov’s proposals as a way to strengthen Russia.
But the deputy head of the administration of Bashkortostan, an ethnic republic, complained that Prokhorov was overreaching with his ambitions.
“It is not Prokhorov who created nationalities and federalism, and it is not he who should abolish them,” Abbas Gallyamov told Interfax from Ufa.
Prokhorov’s reappearance in the national spotlight comes after months of silence following his presidential run, raising questions about his political intentions. Analysts have speculated that the Kremlin wants to use him and his party to reach out to the middle class, which is fueling anti-Kremlin protests in Moscow and other large cities.
While the anti-Kremlin opposition appears to have largely lost trust in his leadership, Prokhorov was surrounded by a bevy of high-profile supporters at the congress, including his older sister, Irina Prokhorova, a publisher who also runs the Mikhail Prokhorov Fund on arts and culture, pop diva Alla Pugachyova, anti-drug activist Yevgeny Roizman and the newly elected opposition-minded mayor of Yaroslavl, Yevgeny Urlashov.
Prokhorov first declared his intention to leave business for politics during a visit to Yaroslavl on Oct. 9.
Also at the congress were opposition politician Vladimir Ryzhkov; Alexander Pochinok, a labor minister during Putin’s first term; and the government’s envoy to the supreme, constitutional and arbitration courts, Mikhail Barshchevsky, who laid out a plan to reform the country’s court system by allowing only former lawyers or prosecutors to become judges.
“Then we will be able to get away from the judges who received a law degree from some textile institute,” Barshchevsky said.
Former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, who regularly discusses strategy with opposition activists, sent his greetings to the congress. Igor Yurgens, head of the Institute of Contemporary Development think tank, said from the stage that Kudrin was not able to attend because of a previously scheduled meeting abroad.
Liberal-leaning Kirov Governor Nikita Belykh said in an interview that he had come to the congress as an observer.
“Some of those ideas sound like they are in tune with my own,” Belykh said.
Sergei Militsky, a decorated colonel who retired from an anti-terrorism unit in the Federal Security Service a few months ago, said he liked Prokhorov’s patriotic statements and preferred Civic Front over the ruling United Russia party.
“I don’t want to be part of the crowd,” said Militsky, who sat next to Prokhorov.
Prokhorov said at a news conference after the congress that United Russia members in several regions have asked to join his party.
“We are not looking at where they have come from,” he said. “We are looking at their professional skills.”
Unlike Right Cause, a pro-business party created with the Kremlin’s blessing, Civic Platform has a loose structure that Prokhorov said is open to supporters with various views, hard-line nationalists being the exception.
He said he would seek dialogue with all political forces, including the Kremlin and the anti-Kremlin opposition’s newly elected Coordination Council.
“The party will be a platform where agreements can be reached,” he said.
The party will also field candidates in Moscow’s mayoral election in 2014 — a post Prokhorov is expected to seek — and in the next presidential vote in 2018, said senior Civic Platform official Konstantin Doroshok, known for organizing rallies in Kaliningrad that ousted Governor Georgy Boos in 2010.
“The Civic Platform party will soon be setting the course for all of Russia,” Doroshok said in his congress speech.
Political analyst Nikolai Zlobin compared the loose structure of Prokhorov’s party with that of the People’s Front, a loose structure of public groups and small parties chaired by Putin.
“Prokhorov is strong in creative ideas,” Zlobin said in an interview on the sidelines of the congress.
Zlobin, who attended as an observer, predicted that Prokhorov would seek support from within the Kremlin elite if his party was successful.

TITLE: Rallies Could See 500,000, Says Chubais
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Anatoly Chubais, the architect of Russia’s 1990s privatizations and head of Rusnano, said the authorities can’t stop anti-Kremlin street protests and predicted that the rallies could easily swell to half a million people.
“The process has begun, and it cannot be stopped,” Chubais said in an interview published in this week’s issue of Itogi magazine.
“Even though the last march attracted only 30,000, not 100,000, that does not mean things are drying up,” he said. 
“There will be 10 more rallies of 3,000 people, and then suddenly a half a million people will gather,” he said. “I am 100 percent sure of that! This train is not going back to the station.”
He said the protest movement marked the end of an era of stability and served as a “testament to the emergence of the middle class.”

TITLE: Party Suffers Setback As Blocs Break Away
AUTHOR: By Jonathan Earle and Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A Just Russia, the moderate-left State Duma party that includes several leading opposition figures, suffered the latest in a series of setbacks Monday when leaders of two of its founding groups announced they were splitting off.
Leaders from the Pensioners’ Party and the Rodina party said they were ditching A Just Russia because party officials had put personal ambition ahead of party unity.
“Rodina’s ideas, activists and leaders were either ignored or dismissed,” Igor Zotov and Alexei Zhuravlyov said in a joint statement signed Monday, Interfax reported.
Analysts said the move was no surprise and was unlikely to spark an exodus from A Just Russia, but signaled trouble within the party, especially for leader Sergei Mironov.
Zhuravlyov, a State Duma deputy and head of the nationalist Rodina party, said A Just Russia was never a truly unified force but rather a “political Frankenstein.”
In February, members of another part of the coalition that made up A Just Russia, the pro-environment Green movement, announced that they would be leaving to form their own political party.
A Just Russia was formed in 2006 with the merger of Rodina, the Pensioners’ Party and Zhizn, as a social-democratic alternative to the Communists.
The union was blessed by the Kremlin, but A Just Russia has shown itself willing to attack the ruling United Russia party, thereby attracting more vocal opposition voices.
When anti-government protests broke out in December, three Just Russia deputies — Ilya Ponomaryov, Gennady Gudkov and Dmitry Gudkov, Gennady’s son — quickly became leaders of the movement.
Last month, Gennady Gudkov was stripped of his Duma mandate for illegal business activity. He said he was being punished for supporting opposition protesters.
Before political reforms passed earlier this year made it easier to form political parties, A Just Russia was one of only seven officially registered parties and represented an alternative to the Communists and the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party.
Party chairman Nikolai Levichyov said the party was strong and dismissed Monday’s news conference as a stunt to promote Rodina and a party called Russian Pensioners for Justice.
In a statement, Levichyov said Zotov and Zhuravlyov had already de facto left A Just Russia.
Zhuravlyov was elected to the State Duma in December on the list of the ruling United Russia party, and Zotov was expelled for supporting Dmitry Medvedev’s candidacy for prime minister.
The defection of a small group of deputies including Zotov and Alexei Mitrofanov earlier this year gave pro-Kremlin parties a de facto constitutional majority — 300 seats — in the 450-seat Duma.
A Just Russia currently has the third-largest party faction in the Duma, with 64 seats in the body. United Russia controls 238 seats.
Alexei Makarkin, head of the Center for Political Technologies, said the split was the result of the Kremlin’s displeasure with A Just Russia’s links to the opposition.
But Pavel Salin, an independent political analyst, said the real problem was with the shrinking political clout of co-founder and leader Sergei Mironov.
Although Mironov’s party took 13 percent of the vote in Duma elections last December, it won just under 4 percent of the vote in the presidential election in March,
Mironov, a former Federation Council speaker and once a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, stepped down as chairman of the party in April 2011.
Mironov protested the ouster of Gennady Gudkov from the Duma last month, calling it “unlawful revenge” and “a rude violation of the Constitution.”
But Saturday, he called on members of his party to stop wearing the white ribbons that have become the symbol of the anti-Kremlin protest movement after a United Russia deputy disparaged Mironov and several of his party’s deputies by name in a Duma speech.

TITLE: Sweden Honors Russian Lawyer
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Swedish government has awarded a Russian human rights lawyer from Dagestan with the Per Anger Prize for defending victims of human rights violations, a news report said Tuesday.
Sapiyat Magomedova was nominated by Swedish NGO Civil Rights Defenders for possessing “the best qualities that define a true human rights defender,” according to a statement posted on the NGO’s website. 
“She has become a symbol of courage,” the statement added. Memorial, a Moscow-based human rights center, said in comments carried by Interfax that Magomedova had defended victims of torture, kidnappings, extrajudicial killings and sex-based violence in Dagestan.
The 33-year-old lawyer is known for taking on difficult cases that others have rejected for security reasons. Magomedova was herself a victim of violence in 2010, when she was brutally beaten at a local police station in the town of Khasavyurt.
Established in 2004, the Per Anger Prize supports human rights and democracy initiatives and is named after Swedish diplomat Per Anger, who helped rescue Hungarian Jews during World War II.
Other notable prizewinners from the former Soviet Union include Belarusian rights defender Ales Bialiatski (2006) and Ingush activist Arsen Sakalov (2005).
The official award ceremony will take place in the Swedish city of Gothenburg on Nov. 12.

TITLE: Loose Cargo May Have Sunk Ship, Say Experts
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Loose cargo may have sunk a freighter that disappeared in rough seas in the Far East, shipping industry insiders said Tuesday, while bad weather continued to hamper a broadening rescue operation.
But the Russian Union of Seamen rejected the idea that the Amurskaya, which was carrying 700 tons of gold ore, might have been the target of foul play because of its cargo.
“One could suggest that the ship’s disappearance is somehow linked to the cargo of gold ore it carried, but, as we know, one ton of mineral ore contains two to several hundred grams of pure gold,” it said in a statement. 
The ship disappeared in the area of the Shantar Islands in the Sea of Okhotsk on Sunday.
It might have sunk after its loose cargo shifted in rough seas — unless the crew have managed to find a quiet harbor to wait out the storm, shipping experts told Interfax. 
Investigators established Tuesday that the freighter had nine people on board when it set off for its last trip, contradicting earlier reports of eight to 11 crew members. They said most of the crew members were Primorye region residents. 
The scope of the rescue operation Tuesday was limited due to continuing stormy weather in the search area. Only one ship was able to continue the search, while two trawlers and three aircraft remained on standby, Interfax said.
Stormy weather was forecast for the next two days.
Despite all efforts, no traces of the missing ship or its crew have been found. An emergency beacon that the sailors used to make an initial distress signal has not been found either, Interfax reported, citing the local sea rescue service. It said none of the ships sailing through the area have had any contact with the missing ship.

TITLE: Moscow Court Upholds Ban On Gay Parade
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Moscow City Court on Tuesday upheld a decision by City Hall to ban a gay pride parade on May 27.
The parade’s organizer, Nikolai Alexeyev, said the ruling indicated that the authorities had no intention of fulfilling their obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights and promised to lodge an appeal in the European Court of Human Rights.
“Today’s decision will be challenged in the European court,” he said, according to Interfax.
Tuesday’s ruling upheld a decision by the Tverskoi District Court in July. The ban was the seventh imposed by City Hall since 2006.
Despite the ban on the May parade, which was supposed to mark the 19th anniversary of the decriminalization of homosexuality in Russia, hundreds of people gathered at two unsanctioned rallies in downtown Moscow. Forty people were detained amid clashes between gay and Russian Orthodox activists.

TITLE: City’s Hotels Seek to Boost Winter Revenues
AUTHOR: By Olga Kalashnikova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg hotels traditionally rely on conferences and other services to see them through the winter period, when fewer tourists visit the city than in the summer months. This year, however, local hotels are expecting more tourists in the coming winter season than during the same period a year ago. 
According to data from Maris, part of the CBRE affiliate network, this year three-star hotels will see 42-52-percent occupation (compared to 35-42 percent in 2011), four-star hotels will be 40-47 percent occupied (compared to 39-45 percent in 2011) and 35-45 percent of rooms will be occupied in five-star hotels (compared to 35-42 percent in 2011).
“This year, the average occupancy rate at hotels is higher in general than in 2011, which is partly explained by the hotels’ flexible pricing policy,” said Natalya Kireyeva, senior analyst at the consulting and valuation department at Maris.
The winter is traditionally the low season for hotels in St. Petersburg, with the weather being a major factor in tourists postponing their trip until a warmer time of year, said Marco Fien, general manager of the Courtyard by Marriott St. Petersburg Pushkin hotel. 
“Moreover, the popular White Nights period that creates the special St. Petersburg charm and attracts most guests to the city falls in June and not in the winter,” said Fien.
“However, there are guests who would particularly like to visit Russia in winter, partly to change their mind about widespread stereotypes. During the winter season we have tourists from the U.S., China, Japan, Italy, Germany and France. But most of our guests in winter are Russian tourists,” he said.

<b>WINTER SAVINGS</b>
The average rate for a hotel room in St. Petersburg reserved at the hotel reception desk in low season is 2,550 rubles ($80) per night at a three-star hotel, 4,500 rubles ($140) at a four-star hotel and 11,000 rubles ($350) for a night in a five-star hotel. In high season guests pay on average 4,500 rubles ($140) per night for a three-star hotel and 19,500 rubles ($620) for five-star accommodation, according to the Maris data.
“In low season, our guests are mainly cost-oriented people or people who have time and aren’t bothered by the weather conditions, but are guided by what to see or what to do in St. Petersburg,” said Edgard Pauly, general manager at the Novotel St. Petersburg Centre. 
“And in winter we have a lot to discover, no rush, no queues. Tourists who are interested in art and culture enjoy wintertime,” he added. 
In addition to the city’s cultural life, business activity in St. Petersburg continues throughout the winter season, and there are plenty of business travelers among visitors to the city.
“In the low season, hotels mainly depend on business tourism, the corporate market and online booking systems,” said Natalya Minina, general manager at the Helvetia hotel.
“The Internet, including social networks, blogs and forums, has become a new venue for the promotion of hotel services,” said Kireyeva. “The hotels are beginning to take advantage of new ways of promotion on the market.” 

<b>PROVIDING INCENTIVES</b>
The low and shoulder seasons are periods when hotels provide tourists with special rates and offers.
“Most hotels are of the same mind in choosing ways to attract tourists in low season,” said Fien. “These are special offers for individual guests, special rates and conditions for corporate clients and bonus programs for loyalty program participants.” 
“Every Friday we have hot sales when we sell certain periods for special rates; you have a 24-hour window in which to book a room using this offer,” said Helvetia’s Minina. 
“We have also special rates for early bookings — if a guest books a room 30 days before the trip and chooses a rate without the option of a booking cancelation, they get a significant discount. For those who make a last-minute booking there is also a small bonus. Moreover, we offer special rates for weekends as the occupancy is a little lower then than on working days,” she added.
Traditionally, December is a busy time for New Year corporate events that help the hotels to survive the low season. Applications for corporate parties start coming in at the beginning of December, industry professionals say. The hotels provide companies with their banquet halls and restaurants. 
“If the client wishes, we not only provide them with gastronomic services, but help to find professional organizers of festive programs,” said Natalya Belik, PR director for Corinthia Hotel St. Petersburg.
“Some hotels provide catering for other city venues. At our hotel, this tradition has its roots in a time when the choice of hotel banquet halls was limited,” she said.

<b>FESTIVE ADD-ONS</b>
During the winter festive period, hotels often increase their production of cakes, partly due to the growth of special orders for corporate events or for the New Year and Christmas. 
Although the New Year holidays are on the threshold of the low season, hotels can increase sales as a result of the expansion of festive offers and additional services for both tourists and city residents, said Belik.
“Additional services can include transfer from and to the airport and help with organizing excursions and cultural activities,” said Kireyeva.
Hotels organize events that can be of interest to local residents, for example, exhibitions or festivals in the hotel. 
“We let space for an international porcelain conference, which can also be of interest to collectors,” said Minina.
Hotels that have conference facilities have the most to gain from providing a venue for corporate events. The autumn, winter and spring are the busiest times for holding conferences, seminars and training events, according to hotel representatives. 
“The city’s business life is at its peak,” said Minina. “Moreover, room rates are lower in the low season, which is one more reason to hold a corporate event. With the emergence of our conference facilities, we have observed an increase in interest from corporate companies and agencies specializing in business travel,” she said. 

<b>ROOM FOR GROWTH</b>
For hotel industry representatives and event organizers, however, the number of conferences held in the low season is not enough.
“New initiatives in promoting St. Petersburg as a destination for individual and business tourism on the international market could help to attract new business events to the city,” said Fien. “It is nice to hear that such initiatives are being actively promoted by the city government.”
For incentive tourism, however, St. Petersburg is too rainy and cold a destination, believes Pauly.
“For MICE [Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, Events], it is more interesting to choose warmer destinations with cheaper prices, such as Thailand, the Middle East, Egypt or Turkey,” he said.
For other corporate events, the opportunity to hold a conference on the same site where guests are staying is a convenient option. The technical equipment of many hotel conference facilities equals those at separate specialized conference venues, so many companies orient their choice toward hotel offers.
“If the participants of the conference are not St. Petersburg residents, the choice of a hotel as a provider of both accommodation and conference facilities is a logical decision that makes logistics easier and reduces expenses,” said Fien.
“Moreover, it is a guaranteed level of service, especially when it comes to hotel chains, and it is also a question of company prestige,” he said.
“For many organizers, the determining factor in making the decision is the complex infrastructure that is offered by hotels. These are conference rooms, restaurants, the kitchen, qualified staff, audio-video conference equipment and 24-hour service,” said Fien.  
“We try to organize events at hotel conference facilities, because both we and the client get all the services in one place — the event rooms, accommodation, meals and other requirements,” said Dmitry Alexeyev, head of the St. Petersburg branch of Reiseburo Welt, a company that arranges events and provides travel services. 
“For the event’s organizer it is far more convenient to choose a large hotel with enough conference halls and guest rooms; the organizer can be sure that all the participants will come to the conference room and will not lose their way arriving from another hotel, and will not decide to skip a boring event for an interesting excursion. It also reduces logistics expenses,” he added.
Yet the occupancy of St. Petersburg conference rooms leaves a lot to be desired. According to Reiseburo Welt data, there are only a few hotels that can host a conference with more than 1,000 participants (taking into account the number of guest rooms and conference halls). 
“The new ExpoForum convention and exhibition center is going to open in the city in 2014, but to develop MICE in the city it is necessary to launch at least two or three hotels like Holiday Inn Moskovskiye Vorota or Park Inn by Radisson Pribaltiiskaya,” said Alexeyev.

TITLE: Conference Venues Offer Something for Everyone
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Now that business conferences on all conceivable subjects — from medical research and tourism development to heavy machinery — are regularly held in St. Petersburg, the city offers a wide range of conference facilities to help people maximize the potential of their professional events. 
The city’s individuality means that it has a plethora of venues available for conferences, ranging from luxury hotels to historical palaces and from congress halls to boats available to rent in the summer.  
The key task is to find an appropriate venue that meets both the format and purposes of the event as well as its budget and expectations, say market experts.
At the same time, experts note rising competition for conference clients, with leading international hotels dominating the market due to their convenient location and, no less important, the wide range of services they offer.
Tatiana Anashkina, business development director at the SPN Ogilvy public relations agency, said some of the best locations for conferences in St. Petersburg are the Corinthia Hotel St. Petersburg, the Grand Hotel Europe and the Astoria hotel.
“The advantage of hotels is the combination of different services that conference visitors can make use of simultaneously, and their flexibility and business orientation,” said Anashkina. “For instance, at hotels, conference organizers can take advantage of the on-site catering.
“In the case of palaces and historical sites, catering may require additional efforts, as not all those have facilities convenient for catering, or they may have their own agreement with some catering company that may not necessarily be to the liking of a client,” she added.
At the same time, historical venues have certain advantages, such as the atmosphere they help to create at an event, Anashkina said.
“Such places are especially good for conferences with foreign participants or people from cities other than St. Petersburg. For such purposes we’d, for instance, recommend the Yelagin Island Palace,” she said.

<b>MORE THAN A PLACE TO STAY</b>
The five-star Grand Hotel Europe is one of the leaders on this market. Situated in the heart of the city’s main shopping and commercial district, the hotel is a venue for meetings, conferences, banquets and receptions and offers at least 12 conference facilities. The Krysha Terrace, located on the top floor of the hotel, is one of the most popular, as besides having 250 square meters of space, it also offers views of the central part of the city. Among other events, it has successfully hosted the city’s Christmas Art Fair Auctions. 
The Corinthia Nevsky Palace Hotel, located right on the city’s main thoroughfare, Nevsky Prospekt, offers a total of 17 different rooms and halls. Some can be used as classrooms, boardrooms, cocktail and dinner facilities, and offer capacities ranging from about 20 to about 700 people.
The Sokos Hotel Palace Bridge, in turn, presents itself not only as a spa and business hotel, but also as a conference hotel. It offers seven event halls, varying in size from 30 to 410 square meters.
Another centrally-located hotel, the Novotel St. Petersburg Center, offers nine modern fully-equipped meeting and conference rooms with daylight and individual air conditioning.
The Park Inn Pribaltiiskaya Hotel, another popular conference venue, is home to a business center, congress hall and more than 30 meeting rooms.

<b>A DATE WITH HISTORY</b>
Of the conference facilities that offer a historic atmosphere, experts single out the Matilda Kshesinskaya mansion, which is now home to the city’s Museum of the Political History of Russia. 
The private residence of the celebrated Russian ballet dancer Matilda Kshesinskaya was built in 1904-1906. At the beginning of the 20th century, state receptions held in the White Hall by Kshesinskaya, who was the prima ballerina of the Mariinsky Opera and Ballet Theater, were wildly popular, and attracted luminaries such as ballet dancers Anna Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky, bass singer Fyodor Chaliapin, entrepreneur and impresario Sergei Diaghilev and jeweler Charles Faberge, as well as the Romanov grand dukes.
In 1917 the house was at the center of revolutionary events when it served as the headquarters for the Bolsheviks and their leader Vladimir Lenin. Nowadays the mansion is not only home to the museum but also hosts conferences, seminars, concerts, festivals and other events. Its three halls can accommodate from 70 to 100 people.
The Peter and Paul Fortress, the historical heart of the city, also offers its Atrium and Flag Tower facilities for conferences and other events. The Flag Tower, an octagonal room with panoramic windows, is suited to small conferences, as it can only host up to 45 people.
Another historic location in the city that can lend events a truly aristocratic and mysterious flavor is the Yusupov Palace, notorious for being the site of the dramatic murder of the controversial Russian mystic Grigory Rasputin by a group of aristocrats.
The Yusupov Palace boasts 10 halls capable of hosting both meetings and banquets.

<b>FURTHER AFIELD</b>
Other unusual opportunities for holding large conferences and forums are provided by the dazzling palaces in the suburbs of Pushkin, Pavlovsk and Strelna, the former summer residences of the tsars. 
The Catherine Palace, part of the Tsarskoye Selo State Museum in Pushkin, holds conferences, congress opening and closing ceremonies, symposia, training seminars, business forums and other formal events. Although located outside the city, the Catherine Palace has the advantages of its ornate ceremonial rooms, among them the world-famous Amber Room, and has the regal air of a tsarist-era residence. 
The Pavlovsk State Museum in the suburb of Pavlovsk offers the use of its Rose Pavilion, which can be used as a venue for both formal events and business forums.
The National Congress Palace state complex, historically known as the Konstantinovsky Palace, located on the Gulf of Finland in the suburb of Strelna, 15 kilometers from St. Petersburg, combines the functions of a national residence, a historic palace and a business center.
In addition to serving as the city residence of the Russian president and partly as a museum, the Congress Palace hosts high-profile state events (it was the venue for the G8 Summit in 2006) as well as conferences, negotiations, scientific and political forums, exhibitions and presentations. The complex of the recently renovated Konstantinovsky Palace also includes the Baltic Star Hotel, 20 cottages and a modern conference center.

<b>SIZE MATTERS</b>
“Of course, we shouldn’t forget about the biggest conference and exhibition center in the city — LenExpo,” said Anashkina.
Among the city’s new facilities that local experts recommend for conferences is the multi-functional center Crown Plaza Airport City St. Petersburg, an ultra-modern center that opened in March this year. It boasts state-of-the-art technology, 11 conference halls — the largest of which can hold 600 people — a convenient location and competitive prices.
Anastasia Pekutko, marketing director of Airport City St. Petersburg, said the center had experienced “unexpectedly wild success and demand for its conference facilities.”
“It looks like the city was longing for such a super-modern facility, while the location next to the airport turned out to be particularly attractive for traveling businessmen and participants who often just need to come to a conference and immediately leave the city after that, or who prefer to stay in our new Crown Plaza hotel, which is also next to the airport,” Pekutko said, adding that the location next to the Ring Road also contributes to the center’s transport advantages.
Sports complexes including Yubileiny, Ice Palace and Petersburg Sports and Concert Complex can also be turned into large venues for conferences.

<b>NEW APPROACHES</b>
Svetlana Melnikova, head of Uniquepr, which is largely involved in the organization of press conferences, said her PR agency often tries to choose interesting or unusual facilities for press conferences, including venues where such events have never been held.
“It could just be a lawn or abandoned factory,” Melnikova said.
“We really liked holding a conference at Erarta Museum of Modern Art. Museums are always good venues for events, because people can combine them with visiting the museum at the same time and seeing at least some of the exhibits,” she added.
Another alternative option for less formal, more creative conferences is Tkachi, a multifunctional creative center dedicated to culture, education, work and leisure located in the abandoned building of a former spinning and weaving factory that is being renovated. 
Finally, for a summer conference with a truly St. Petersburg flavor, renting a boat is a popular option. After a trip along the city’s rivers and canals, participants can moor at the Peter and Paul Fortress to continue the event with a business meeting at the fortress’s Atrium hall. 
“Meanwhile, VIPs may have the unique opportunity of arriving at the site by helicopter; they [helicopters] are officially allowed to land and take off in the grounds of the fortress,” said Anashkina.

<i>Tatyana Natarova contributed to this report.</i>

TITLE: Growth Remains Sluggish on Recruitment Market
AUTHOR: By Olga Kalashnikova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The St. Petersburg labor market has entered its traditional autumn peak, with local companies showing 58 percent more vacancies in late August than at the beginning of the summer, according to data from the recruitment website HeadHunter.
“The growth of activity on the market is consistent in this period between the summer holidays and the run-up to New Year that starts in late November to early December,” said Maria Margulis, head of the 1000 Kadrov recruitment agency.
Last year the local labor market reached pre-crisis indicators, and a monthly increase in vacancies was observed at the beginning of the year. However, during the second half of last year, the labor market remained stable. 
“At the beginning of 2012, the job market started to grow again and this trend is continuing,” said Alexander Yegorov, division director at the northwest branch of Ancor recruitment agency. “Compared with the pre-crisis years, however, this growth cannot be regarded as significant, and growth rates are more modest.” 

<b>WANTED: ENGINEERS</b>
Trends that emerged on the local labor market in 2011 have continued to develop throughout 2012. The locomotive of the market, according to the 1000 Kadrov agency, remains the engineering sphere, including the automotive industry and auto-equipment suppliers. These companies are actively seeking staff.
“That’s why the occupations most in demand are, as before, specialists of various levels working in manufacturing and engineering; workers with different qualifications,” said Margulis. 
Demand for new employees has doubled since the beginning of the summer, according to HeadHunter research. 
In the banking sector, the highest demand was registered by offices specializing in attracting clients and the sale of financial products, particularly credit-based ones, according to HeadHunter. 
A high demand for candidates is also apparent in the FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) sector. Demand for store assistants and cashiers is constantly increasing.
“In retail and the hotel business, the ongoing expansion of chains and the launches of new projects mean staff are required,” said Margulis.
Sales specialists represent another occupation that is traditionally in demand in various spheres of business. According to HeadHunter research, vacancies in sales topped the list of job opportunities available in different spheres in the first half of 2012: Eighteen percent of the total number of vacancies were openings for sales specialists. In second place were IT and telecommunications specialists (12 percent of the total). According to Ancor analysts, IT and telecom is one of the fields in which companies are most actively searching for staff. The St. Petersburg labor market lacks qualified computer specialists.

<b>MEETING DEMAND</b>
“It is important for higher education establishments to prepare specialists with knowledge that actually corresponds to the demands of the labor market,” said Andrei Ivanov, COO at JetBrains IT company. “Nowadays the attitude of business to education is changing; there is a tendency toward cooperation between business and educational establishments.
“Before, the attitude of business to education was that of a consumer, when businesses simply demanded specialists without cooperating with institutions to develop education. Nowadays many companies regard these relationships as cooperation and coordinated improvement of higher education,” he explained.
“Companies provide teachers with grants, send their employees to lecture on current topics, and encourage advanced students with scholarships,” Ivanov added.

<b>THEORY VS PRACTICE</b>
Yet specialized higher education and a degree are not considered mandatory by St. Petersburg employers. According to HeadHunter research, the most important factor in whether a candidate will be hired is not their qualifications but the candidate’s work experience. Seventy-eight percent of employers will hire candidates who don’t have a degree but do have work experience.
The biggest number of vacancies on the market is for specialists with one to three years of experience (55 percent), according to HeadHunter data.
Fifty-nine percent of employers believe that higher education qualifications do not confer any significant advantages on candidates without a specialized education. Moreover, 22 percent of employers look positively on candidates who apply for a job that is not in their field of specialization, because they are showing that they are motivated to prove themselves in a new sphere, said HeadHunter experts. 
While for financial specialists, lawyers and IT workers, professional qualifications are obligatory, 13 percent of employers are not interested in the candidate’s education at all, according to HeadHunter research.
Yet despite this evidence, most employers believe that climbing the career ladder will be difficult for those without a degree. A fifth of respondents believe that a candidate cannot be successful without the basic knowledge acquired by studying at an educational establishment.

<b>TOO MUCH INFORMATION</b>
A candidate wielding several degrees, on the other hand, may seem suspicious to potential employers. According to HeadHunter research, employers consider that such candidates lack in-depth knowledge in any sphere and are unlikely to be professional material. For managerial posts, only candidates with a higher education will be considered. Fifty percent of employers prefer their employees to have higher education, while for 41 percent it is enough to have completed high school or further education.
“There is a lack of good candidates, and the situation is worsening every year,” said Margulis. “Taking into account the failure of higher education establishments to adequately prepare [local] graduates for the realities of the labor market and the [graduates’] excessive expectations, our companies often fill their vacancies with candidates from other regions,” she said.
One of the trends of 2012 is the growing requirement for entry-level staff and young specialists, Ancor experts noticed. In the first half of 2012 the largest number of vacancies fell in the “graduate/student vacancies” category, almost 2.2 times more than in the same period in 2011, according to HeadHunter data.
“Next year demand for employees in entry-level positions will increase. Professionals will be continue to be valuable and the demand for such workers will grow,” said Ancor’s Yegorov.

<b>SALARY SCALE</b>
Students and specialists without work experience are paid some of the lowest salaries in the commercial sector, earning an average wage of 22,000 rubles ($700), according to HeadHunter data from the end of June. The biggest earners on the list are those working in top management (100,000 rubles, $3,200), extraction of natural resources, and IT (45,000 rubles, $1,430, respectively). The highest salary in St. Petersburg was in executive management — 300,000 rubles ($9,500), while people working in the fields of science and education were paid an average monthly salary of just 7,500 rubles ($240), the lowest recorded salary in the city. The average St. Petersburg salary at the end of June was 34,400 rubles ($1,100), according to HeadHunter research.
Average salaries in St. Petersburg are a third less than in Moscow, where the average monthly salary is 45,200 rubles ($1,450), and 20 percent higher than salaries in other regions.
“In 2012 the growth of salaries has been insignificant and barely surpassed the level of inflation. The most serious wage growth was seen in the sectors most lacking in employees,” said Yegorov.
The lack of growth in salaries is partly explained by the anticipation of the ongoing economic crisis spreading from Europe. However, “frozen” salaries are the only component of the labor market that has been influenced by these fears. In other areas of the market, St. Petersburg companies are pursuing a policy of active development.
“Not taking into account fears of the crisis, in general in 2013 we will see smooth and moderate growth in the market,” said Yegorov.
At the same time, the number of new vacancies emerging on the market is now approaching the number of candidates. From the beginning of the summer, the number of available candidates increased only by 7 percent, while demand for staff grew by 58 percent, according to HeadHunter. If the situation continues, increased competition for candidates between employers is predicted.

TITLE: Kremlin Reviews Trade Offices
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The government has published a proposal to improve the services of its trade offices around the world.
Put together by the Economic Development Ministry, the plan seeks to help domestic companies in the bare-knuckles global fight for markets, resources and investment.
It opens with the statement that the worldwide economic turbulence has made it difficult for businesses to expand internationally, and the problem is expected to last for a long time.
“This is leading to fundamental changes in the foreign policies of the world’s largest countries,” the proposal said. “The policies of states on the foreign markets become more aggressive, while the trend for protectionism is on the rise.”
The plan calls for such measures as setting up more offices in Africa, Latin America and Asia and getting the trade offices to sign agreements with major Russian companies.
The Cabinet is slated to consider the plan Nov. 15.
The Economic Development Ministry calls for the trade offices — now present in 53 countries — to stay state-run. 
Research by the ministry showed that Russian companies have interests in many developing countries where the country has no trade offices. At the same time, there’s no need for them in some developed countries, the ministry said.
Published on the ministry’s website Friday, the proposal envisions “strengthening” the offices in Brussels, Geneva and Paris because these are the cities that are home to the governing agencies of the European Union, the World Trade Organization and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, respectively. Russia joined the WTO in August and is aspiring for OECD membership.
If the plan holds, Russia will trim down or close some of its offices in the United States and Canada, but will increase staff and offices in Latin America.
The ministry proposes to build up trade support in China and some other Asian countries. It also seeks to create offices in the African countries where Russian companies operate or want to have a presence.
The plan, which also devotes a lot of attention to better motivation of trade staff, could start working immediately after Cabinet approval in November, produce the first results in 2014 and come to completion in 2016.
A spokeswoman for aluminum producer RusAl, which does business across the globe from Jamaica to Nigeria to China to Australia, sounded concurrent on the possible new locations for Russia’s trade offices. The company believes there is a lack of them in sub-Saharan Africa and in Latin America, she said.
Existing offices were responsive to the company’s needs, she said. “As a rule, whenever we contacted them their help was timely and useful,” she said.
LUKoil considers trade offices especially helpful in establishing ties with the authorities of the countries where it wants to do business, company spokesman Dmitry Dolgov said. It wouldn’t hurt for the trade offices to be more “active” in defending Russian interests, he added.

TITLE: ZiL Unveils Prototype For New Kremlin Limo
AUTHOR: By Roland Oliphant
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — After six full years of development, President Vladimir Putin finally has a car more beautiful than U.S. President Barack Obama’s, the ZiL auto company announced.
A ZIL-4112P prototype, with a 7.7 liter engine and six-speed automatic transmission, was unveiled to federal television channels Sunday just months after Putin ordered government departments to seek appropriately patriotic, domestic alternatives to the mostly German foreign brands he and other top government officials have become accustomed to being driven around in.
“We tried to preserve the generic feature of the ZiL: the recognizable style, the lighting, the mirrors. We wanted it to be clear that this is a ZiL, not a soapbox, not a Mercedes. If you look, it’s dark blue. If you look at what Obama drives around in, it’s a scary submarine, no kind of aesthetic, it’s awful to look at,” ZiL’s Director of Limousine Production Mikhail Sattarov told Channel 1.
Soviet nostalgia has not sacrificed modern comforts, however. The interior features leather seats, worktables, and the pride of the ZiL: a big screen hooked up to an external video camera that allows passengers to see where they are going even with the curtains drawn. It also boasts specialist security features — “know-how that no-one else has,” according to Sattarov — to guarantee the safety of both driver and passenger.
Fuel consumption has also been improved to 25 liters per 100 kilometers. The late Communist Party chief Leonid Brezhnev’s limo was said to guzzle a fearsome 65 liters.

TITLE: City Hall Seeks to Encourage Mid-Range Hotels
AUTHOR: By Nadezhda Zaitseva
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: As City Hall focuses its efforts on bringing inexpensive hotels to the city, developers say that in order to attract investors, some kind of financial incentive is necessary. 
A new framework for developing hotel infrastructure in the city from 2013 through 2018 has been devised. The plan has been drafted to focus the efforts of developers toward the sector of affordable hotels.
Around St. Isaac’s Square alone, there are about 10 four- and five-star hotels, while the development of two- and three-star hotels in St. Petersburg is an objective necessity, said Nikolai Nagach, the general director of the three-star Baltiya hotel. 
“Expensive hotels mainly host elderly foreigners and business travelers, but the volume of these categories of traveler stopped growing long ago,” he said. 
According to data from Jones Lang LaSalle Hotels (JLL Hotels), the average price for a room in a luxury hotel in the city is 11,850 rubles ($378).
The number of hotel guests in the city is increasing thanks to Chinese visitors, young people and business travellers from the Russian regions, for whom price is important, said Nagach. 
“Steep prices for rooms do not allow us to increase the volume of tourists at the expense of people with average incomes; the demand for economy-class hotels and hostels is not being met,” said Yevgeniya Tuchkova of Colliers International St. Petersburg. 
According to information from Alexei Musakin, director of Cronwell Management, the cheapest hotels (two-star) currently offer rooms from 2,500 rubles ($80) per night. However, the rates for three- and four-star hotels have dropped compared to 2011 from 6,850 rubles ($218) to 6,300 rubles ($200) and from 3,150 rubles to 3,100 rubles, respectively, according to data from JLL Hotels.
Oleg Lyskov, acting chairman of the city’s Committee for Investments and Strategic Projects (KISP), said that up until now the municipal government has supported the development of this industry as a whole, but the market itself has been identifying which trends attract investment. Developers’ interests have shifted in favor of high-end hotels, but the lower-priced sector, a lack of which exists in St. Petersburg, “remains untapped,” the official stated.
The new framework is currently being approved by the municipal government. It proposes designating buildings hotel status, and extending project deadlines from 3.5 to five years if the property is purchased at a city auction, said Lyskov. The authorities will not be creating a property directory of those buildings earmarked for hotels. Investors will be able to propose specific properties and will be given a chance to acquire them from the city with permission to turn them into hotels, said Lyskov. However, it will be specified in the investment contract that for the duration of 15 years the building must be used as a hotel, Lyskov clarified. This is a reasonable time period; most hotels are built to operate as such for longer, said Nagach.
However, having granted the premises without a formal tender, the authorities will find it hard to control what happens next: The developer could build, for example, a complex of guest apartments and sell them off to various proprietors, said Musakin. Stimulating the sector of low-cost hotels makes financial sense, for example, by providing government safeguards on loans, he added. According to Musakin, it is worth adopting the European practice in which developers building a three-star hotel using loans obtained with government support sign a contract with the town council on pricing; in the event that the contract is broken, the interest on the loans is recalculated at market rates.
A hotel’s profitability consists not only of the revenue earned from hotel guests, but also from restaurants, business and fitness centers and other hotel facilities. Among three-star hotels, the proportion of profit from other facilities is less than among five-star hotels, but their operating expenses are lower, said Tuchkova. As a result, three-star hotels provide the investor with an 18-20-percent annual return, which for five-star hotels is an almost impossible rate. 
If we measure profitability not by percentages but by money, then thanks to more expensive rooms, 5-10-percent occupancy at five-star hotels is equal to 20-percent occupancy at three-star hotels, said Nagach. The period of recoupment for three- and four-star hotels is approximately eight to 12 years, with the fastest return being on hostels at five to seven years.

TITLE: Rosneft Delivers a Blow to Market Economy
AUTHOR: By Sergei Guriev and Aleh Tsyvinski
TEXT: The decision by BP and AAR, the Russian shareholders of TNK-BP, to sell their stakes to state-owned Rosneft crowns a very successful year for the company — and particularly for Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin. Before taking over TNK-BP, the country’s third-largest oil company, Rosneft struck several multi-year investment deals. Earlier this year, Rosneft signed three agreements with ExxonMobil, Eni and Statoil exceeding $700 billion in total, an amount that dwarfs all other recent foreign direct investment in Russia combined.
What a difference a year makes. In 2011, Rosneft agreed on a joint venture with BP, but TNK-BP’s Russian shareholders forced it to retreat from the deal. Now, Russian taxpayers will pay TNK-BP shareholders $45 billion in cash (and the rest in Rosneft shares). With this transaction, Sechin has built the largest publicly traded oil company in the world.
What changed? And what implications does Rosneft’s takeover of TNK-BP have for Russian business?
Some observers are pointing to Sechin’s growing importance. But the Rosneft deal should not be viewed simplistically as a realization of Sechin’s personal dream of building a national oil champion in Russia.
After all, Sechin, widely believed to be a former KGB officer, was already powerful. He was in charge of Rosneft and, until May, was deputy prime minister responsible for the oil sector. When then-President Dmitry Medvedev announced in 2011 that government officials had to step down from state-owned companies’ boards, Sechin quit his position as chairman of the board of Rosneft. But his successor, Alexander Nekipelov, publicly stated that he would continue to follow Sechin’s recommendations on running the company.
Moreover, recent events have cast doubt on the idea that Sechin’s position has become stronger. For example, since the Presidential Commission on Fuel and Energy came under President Vladimir Putin’s control, Sechin has played a technical rather than a leadership role there. In addition, he lost a recent battle on whether to transfer Rosneft’s dividends to the government budget or invest them in additional assets within Russia.
So why did the deal take place now? An important piece of the puzzle is Russia’s macroeconomic position, particularly the capital account. Since September 2010, Russia has experienced a substantial net capital outflow, which reached $85 billion (4.5 percent of gross domestic product) in 2011. The outflow this year will likely be similar.
This capital flight is striking. Oil prices are high. Unlike the U.S. and Europe, Russia has zero sovereign debt, a balanced budget, a GDP growth of 4 percent, and inward foreign direct investment is growing. Yet the net capital outflow persists.
The only reasonable explanation for this is the quality of the investment climate. Although investment opportunities in Russia abound, they are outweighed by the risks of expropriation. That is why private shareholders prefer to sell to the state, and why foreign companies prefer to do business only with state companies.
Rosneft’s expansion takes this logic to a new level. It is the ultimate proof of the Russian government’s embrace of state capitalism, giving it control over the economy’s commanding heights. The Russian state now owns Gazprom, the largest natural gas company in the world, Rosneft, which will now control 40 percent of the country’s oil production, other oil companies, as well as major holdings in transportation, financial intermediation, defense and other sectors.
The Rosneft deal is especially important, as it turns an important page in Russian economic history. For many years, economists have been arguing that private property and competition are good for productivity and investment, relying upon a comparison between the natural gas and oil sectors. Unlike the gas industry, which has been dominated by Gazprom, the oil sector was privatized, creating a field with several key players. Just 10 years ago, the four largest oil firms were private. Whereas Gazprom’s production stagnated and even fell, oil output increased by more than 50 percent over the course of several years.
Russian oil companies expanded outside of the country and invested in modern business processes and technology. Russia became the world’s biggest oil producer, while it ceased to be the biggest producer of gas. But with the nationalization of three of the four oil players — Yukos and Sibneft eight years ago and TNK-BP now — Russia is set to build another Gazprom, this time in the oil industry.
Kremlinologists see in the Rosneft deal the rise of Sechin to the position of Russia’s economic tsar, second only to Putin, the political tsar. Whether true or not, Sechin’s fortunes are less important than what the takeover of TNK-BP means for the future of the Russian economy.
Though the Russian leadership denies that it is implementing state capitalism and affirms its commitment to privatization and competition, the Rosneft deal is a bold statement to the contrary. Russia’s still-young market economy has now lost its last important bastion.

<i>Sergei Guriev is rector of the New Economic School in Moscow. Aleh Tsyvinski is professor of economics at Yale University. © Project Syndicate</i>

TITLE: between the lines: Zinovyev Aimed at Communism but Hit Russia
AUTHOR: By Alexei Pankin
TEXT: The views of Soviet dissident writer Alexander Zinovyev, much like his work and his life, cannot be categorized according to conventional ideas or stereotypes. And unlike the two other great Soviet-era dissidents, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, Zinovyev, who died in 2006, was never formally canonized by Russia or the West. But successive reprints of his books consistently sell out, proving that he is a literary treasure.
His thoughts on perestroika and the post-Communist development of Russia could be summed up in the following excerpts from his 1976 book “Yawning Heights”:
• The Soviet people will not fight communism. Dissidents are not a danger to the system. Only Soviet leaders have the power to destroy communism if they start reforms that disrupt the entire system of government.
• The Party, Komsomol and labor unions at the level of the workplace constitute Soviet civil society. If those are removed, it will cause the collapse of the system and society as a whole because there is nothing else holding it together.
• You cannot build a skyscraper from the wreckage of an old barn – only another, even shakier barn.
Zinovyev, who was born 90 years ago, exposed the failings of the Soviet system in much the same way as Solzhenitsyn did in “Gulag Archipelago.”
“Yawning Heights” is the first and best-known work in which Zinovyev describes “real communism” — that is, the way communism actually worked, as compared to the version proclaimed by government propaganda. After its first publication in the West in 1976, Zinovyev, a world-renowned scholar and former combat pilot who had served throughout all of World War II, was stripped of his academic credentials, military honors and Soviet citizenship and expelled from the Soviet Union.
At a recent news conference, his widow, Olga Zinovyeva, revealed a fascinating KGB document from that period. The first part contains a note to the Central Committee signed by then-KGB chief and later Soviet leader Yury Andropov detailing all of the harm Zinovyev had done to the Soviet Union. The second part explains why the best way to curtail Zinovyev’s anti-Soviet activity was not to send him to a hard labor camp or a psychiatric hospital but to expel him from the country. According to his widow, Andropov saved Zinovyev.
“Many years later,” Olga Zinovyeva said, “we learned that a copy of ‘Yawning Heights’ lay on his [Andropov’s] table filled with underlining and commentaries.” Apparently, even the most well-informed Communist in the Soviet Union had something to learn from Zinovyev about how the system really worked. In his university years, Zinovyev had planned to assassinate Josef Stalin. The only thing that saved him from being arrested was his decision to volunteer for the army.
Later in life, however, Zinovyev said Stalin had to use inhuman measures to provide education and opportunities to millions of people who, like himself, hailed from remote villages and provinces and to lift the Soviet Union from the chaos and collapse of the post-revolutionary period to become a superpower — one that emerged victorious from the horrors of World War II.
Yet, Zinovyev was not trying to justify Stalin’s methods. “He simply explained the phenomenon of Stalinism. When you set out to analyze something, there is no room for emotion,” Olga Zinovyeva said.
Having observed the experiments that liberals and so-called democrats conducted with post-?Soviet Russia, Zinovyev quipped that he “was aiming at communism but hit Russia.”
The Izborsky Club, which brings together leading analysts such as economists Sergei Glazyev, Mikhail Delyagin and Mikhail Leontyev and journalist Alexander Prokhanov, are developing an alternative to the liberals’ plan for Russia’s development. Notably, they are reportedly planning to name the club in honor of Zinovyev.

<i>Alexei Pankin is the editor of WAN-IFRA-GIPP Magazine for publishing business professionals.</i>

TITLE: A prayer to nihilism
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Alexei ‘Lyokha’ Nikonov, songwriter and frontman of PTVP, one of Russia’s most radical bands, describes the group’s new album “Ultimatum” as “most hard-edged and insolent in its nihilism.” 
According to Nikonov’s album notes, it is “an attack on daily routine [and on the] opportunism of those who surround us and [on the] conformism of those who are being surrounded; war against narrow-mindedness and servility; war against Philistinism and indulgence; our Ultimatum.”
“Ultimatum,” made available for free download on Friday, is the band’s eleventh album. PTVP’s first disc in two years, it is a departure from “Poryadok Veshchei” (The Way Things Are), the 2010 album described by Nikonov as PTVP’s “pop album.”
“This [“Ultimatum”] is obviously not a pop album, there are no hits here. We consciously made a point of not having any pop songs, even if the songs are short — 2’30” and sort of radio format — but this is all, of course, a parody of radio format,” said Nikonov, 39,  sitting in the corridor outside PTVP’s rehearsal room Sunday.
“All the songs are punk, hardcore and there’s none of the mysticism of the last album, there’s no romanticism at all, for sure. I think it’s a sober, neo-realistic album. I would even call it naturalistic and odious enough. Consciously odious.”
The album’s subject matter deals with aspects of contemporary Russia’s protests and repressions.
“If you call this ‘elections,’ I fuck the system,” Nikonov sings in a song called “Zhizn za Tsarya” (A Life for the Tsar), while the chorus goes, ‘Who did you want to dupe?’
 “It’s a reaction to modern reality, an ultimatum,” Nikonov said, although he admitted he had no idea what was going on in the authorities’ minds.
“Unfortunately, we’ll only be able to find that out in about 20 years,” he said.
“Recent events point to that; you can’t calculate the authorities’ next move, they’re so illogical and unpredictable. They could be panicking, or they could all have gone mad, it’s not clear.”
The title song, however, is an invective-filled diatribe apparently directed at a fictional girlfriend. “It’s a love song, the only love song on the album,” Nikonov said.
“It was also intended as a joke; it’s a love song, but love is shown from the other side. But it is love as well, this string of foul words and things like that. I’ve been criticized that it’s not lyrics, but simply a stream of bad language. But I think it’s enough to listen to any argument between people who live with each other, and it would be something like that.”
Nikonov said he was more inclined to compare “Ultimatum” to “Zerkalo” (Mirror), PTVP’s ninth album, released in 2008, than to “The Way Things Are.”
“It’s quite like ‘Mirror,’ not heroin-like, as ‘The Way Things Are’ was,” he said. “’The Way Things Are’ was taking a rest from something that had started to happen. Getting ready.”
According to Nikonov, he started writing songs for the album 18 months ago, before Putin and Medvedev announced in September 2011 they would swap jobs, and before mass protests sparked by widespread electoral fraud.
“It was before the December protests, for instance I wrote ‘Chto Delat’ (What Is to Be Done) in spring 2011, and when we started to record the album last spring, I got scared and chose not to write lyrics for half the songs as I was writing them,” he said.
“I sang some words in English and deliberately didn’t write the lyrics, because I realized that they could become dated due to the political situation. That’s why half of the lyrics on ‘Ultimatum’ were written by me about a month ago. In that respect, it really is a new album.”
Nikonov followed the protests of the past year closely, despite being bed-ridden for two months due to an inflammation of the trigeminal nerve when the demonstrations were at their height in early December.
“To me, the turning point was that boxing match, when I saw Putin get booed,” Nikonov said, referring to a video of Putin getting heckled by the crowd when the presidential candidate showed up at a Moscow stadium  in November 2011 to congratulate Russian martial artist Fyodor Emelianenko for beating America’s Jeff Monson.
“I saw it on the Internet and realized that it was the beginning of the end for his reign as a tyrant. Like in the book ‘Three Fat Men’ [a 1924 revolutionary fairytale by Yury Olesha]. You have to reread it to understand it. There’s no need for Marxism or [anarchist theoretician Pyotr] Kropotkin’s ideas. It’s all on the surface as it is.”
The rapidly changing political and social situation demanded a direct answer, according to Nikonov.
“I didn’t want to limit myself to cryptic statements, as the Russian intelligentsia and musicians like to do; I wanted to make a straightforward declaration,” he said.
“But there’s still a lot of literary references, there are nods to Lermontov and Coleridge in [the opening track] ‘Situation,’ there’s also a song called ‘Night of the Long Knives’ — if you think about the historical situation, it can be approached from a totally different angle. But it’s a punk, hardcore album; I stress that once again. In contrast to the previous one, where the guitars were transparent, where the sound was airy, we didn’t care about that [on ‘Ultimatum’]. What was important for us was the message and this aggressive, fringe sound. We were told that fans would turn their backs on us, but we didn’t care. We wanted to do something different: An anti-‘The Way Things Are.’
“If ‘The Way Things Are’ is a nighttime album, this one is a daytime one, like Nietzsche’s ‘The Dawn of Day.’ A sober one.”
The song “Chto Delat” (What to Be Done) refers to Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 revolutionary novel of the same name that he wrote when a political prisoner in the Peter and Paul Fortress.
“Of course, it’s a parody of a well-known novel and is a portrayal of a present-day nihilist, from my point of view,” Nikonov said.
“If the old one slept on nails, this one keeps a Molotov cocktail in his pocket and a DIY newspaper. This is a song about a hero of our time. It’s also a parody of Lermontov, like ‘I had a dream in a valley of Dagestan…,; that kind of stuff. I am in a period when I rely more on Russian classics, rather than on French ones, I’ve grown up.”
Despite being punk and straightforward, ‘Ultimatum’ was the result of hard and elaborate work, according to Nikonov, with Igor Karnaushenko as a recording engineer and Yasin Tropillo — the son of the St. Petersburg production legend Andrei Tropillo, and the band’s “talisman” — as producer.
 “We went through three or four studios while recording it,” Nikonov said.
“We thought we would not spend much money on the album, but in the end we spent a lot. Maybe more than on any other.”
Alongside Nikonov, PTVP (Posledniye Tanki v Parizhe, or Last Tanks in Paris) features Yegor Nedviga on bass, Anton Dokuchayev on guitar and Denis Krivtsov on drums. The band, now based in St. Petersburg, was originally formed in Vyborg in 1996.
Unlike many bands, which have started performing protest songs in the past few years, PTVP opposed the regime as soon as Putin came to power, with the band’s 2001 album “Hex@gen” linking the 1999 apartment building explosions in Moscow to the Kremlin, and with gig flyers featuring the image of Putin complete with a Hitler-style moustache.
Nikonov was inspired by the post-Dec. 4 State Duma election protests, when hundreds of ordinary people rather than the usual political activists came to Gostiny Dvor on Nevsky Prospekt to express their anger over the rigging.
“It was something real, but then some charlatans appeared. I don’t know who they were, whom they represented; they appointed themselves [leaders],” he said.
“The ‘democrats’ who appeared immediately joined forces with the nationalists, and some indistinct movement appeared that represented I don’t know whom, and it was headed by some odious figures.
“I don’t think that the people who got indignant about the elections saw those figures as an alternative. The funniest thing was when I heard on the radio, ‘And with us is leading opposition activist Ksenia Sobchak [the daughter of St. Petersburg’s late mayor Anatoly Sobchak and a celebrity television presenter]. I recalled perestroika at once, with everything that followed. It put me on alert, to put it mildly.
“The ruling class won’t give anything away. It may change one party for another, put one actor in place of another, swap one presenter for another, but this is no democracy and there is no freedom of speech. This is a circus. I don’t think people want this kind of democracy at all. At least that’s what I think, as a representative of the people. Thus, we’re coming to the idea of direct democracy, rather than representative democracy.”
PTVP’s response to the Kremlin’s recent treatment of protesters — including the imprisonment of two members of feminist punk group Pussy Riot and 18 of the May 6 protesters — is songs called “Stukach” (Snitch) and “Trety Otdel” (Third Department), named after the office created in 1826 by Tsar Nicholas I to fight political dissent using a broad network of spies and informers.
Alongside stadium rockers DDT, PTVP took part in a Pussy Riot Fest charity concert in St. Petersburg last month. 
“It was an act of solidarity, we had to support them as a punk band, even if we’re not big fans of this kind of creative work,” Nikonov said.
“Repressions are growing, [the women] should be released, but what can be done about it now that the trial is over? I can’t imagine what can be done within the legal system in Russia to change the situation.”
Despite apparent flaws in the Russian protest movement and the authorities’ firm attitude to ignore protesters’ demands and punish protesters, Nikonov said he had not lost all hope of change.
“It only means that legal means have been exhausted, but there’s plenty of illegal methods,” he said.
“People’s patience won’t last forever. Having said what they wanted to say, now they’ll wait a little longer. Now that [the authorities] have raised municipal housing charges and public utility fees, let’s see what happens next.”

<i>PTVP will perform at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 8 at Zal Ozhidaniya, 118 Naberezhnaya Obvodnogo Kanala. Tel. 333 1069. Metro Frunzenskaya / 
Baltiiskaya.</i>

TITLE: Tolerance through film
AUTHOR: By Ciara Bartlam and Marina Ivankiva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The fifth Bok o Bok (Side By Side) film festival, which aims to strengthen the LGBT community in Russia and unify people against discrimination in all its forms, opened in the city last week with screenings at several venues. 
This year’s festival theme is the worldwide LGBT movement, and the festival features films from countries around the world, including China, Chile and Uganda, where the LGBT movement is relatively new and faces strong opposition. 
For the first time, this year’s festival features political debates, with a debate on the subject “LGBT and Russian Politics” scheduled for Nov. 1 at the Zelyonaya Lampa press club following a screening of the documentary film “Outrage” (U.S., 2009) about secretly gay, high-profile U.S. politicians.
Closing this year’s festival is a film by Lucy Malloy called “Una Noche” (One Night), her first feature film, shot in Havana, Cuba where the LGBT movement is still in its infancy. Included in this year’s lineup are six Russian films — more than ever before.
“It shows that the festival has created a platform for this kind of film-making in Russia,” said Manny de Guerre, one of the festival’s organizers.
Since its inception in 2008, when the festival was held in St. Petersburg with support from venues in the city and the LGBT community, the festival has gone from strength to strength. Thousands of people have visited its events in St. Petersburg and Siberia during the last few years, and the existence of such organizations undoubtedly lends support to the LGBT community in Russia. The situation in Moscow and St. Petersburg is, however, more developed than in other regions of Russia, according to de Guerre. 
“In St. Petersburg, there are three groups: Side By Side, LGBT Network and Coming Out,” de Guerre said. “During the last five years, we have been very active and through our activism, we have mobilized the community — and the community is starting to feel stronger. The festival also works in the Russian regions. We work in Siberia and people there are very frightened. People just go to clubs on a Saturday night and [the gay scene] is not open. It’s very fragmented, quite weak and is only just starting to develop.”
Holding an LGBT film festival in a country where homophobia is widespread has brought a number of organizational challenges. The inaugural version of the festival was far from hassle-free and the organizers came up against a host of obstacles. De Guerre says that issues with the local authorities in St. Petersburg proved the most problematic, forcing them to find new venues after the Dom Kino and Pik cinemas were pressured to pull out. But there was still hope. 
“People had come for the festival from Moscow and there had been a hugely positive reaction from the LGBT community so we knew the festival wasn’t dead yet,” said de Guerre. “Even though they closed the festival down, we managed to find an alternative venue and for the two days of screenings, the place was packed.”
However, the introduction of a controversial law banning the “propaganda of homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexualism and transgenderness among minors” in St. Petersburg earlier this year heralded a new level of difficulty for the festival organizers. 
“After all this homophobic campaign, working in Siberia, we had a very strong reaction against the festival,” recalls de Guerre. “We were getting death threats, threats of physical violence and our local coordinator in Kemerovo was physically attacked. A week later, we were having a festival in Novosibirsk and on the second day of it, a huge picket was organized ‘in honor’ of us. We complained to the police but they weren’t interested; they just said, ‘Tomorrow, we’re not going to do anything. We’re not going to protect you.’ So we had to cancel the third day and organize taxis for our audience so that everybody could leave safely.”
Tatyana Shmankevich, another of the festival’s organizers, said that the vagueness of the anti-homosexual bill has resulted in many people in St. Petersburg adopting a cautious attitude toward being associated with the festival.  
“The problem with this law, in an indirect way, is that nobody knows exactly what it is about. Everybody knows the phrase ‘homosexual propaganda,’ so people are simply afraid of working with us.”
Sixteen thousand people have attended Side by Side events during the last four years, and the festival’s own research shows that 29 percent of the audience is non-LGBT. 
“They say that by coming and watching the films, by discussing them, it helps them to understand the issues more,” de Guerre said.
Despite the challenges encountered, the festival’s organizers hope that it will continue to grow and become active in more cities across Russia. 
“It took many years to create the situation they have now in Europe and the U.S., and we only started five years ago,” said Shmankevich. “We have made progress and what you can see now is really cool.”

<i>The Side By Side festival runs through Nov. 3 at Loft Project Etagi (74 Ligovsky Prospekt), Zelyonaya Lampa (3 Bankovsky Pereulok) and the Ligov movie theater (153 Ligovsky Prospekt). The closing ceremony will be held on Nov. 3 at the Angleterre hotel (24 Malaya Morskaya Ulitsa). 
www.bok-o-bok.ru</i>

TITLE: the word’s worth: Keeping secrets
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: Ñåêðåò: secret, know-how

One unexpected consequence of having a dog is that you instantly become the go-to person for anyone looking for an address in your neighborhood. You are clearly ìåñòíàÿ (local) or the more slangy çäåøíÿÿ (from around here), so you must know how to get to Polyclinic No. 586 or the much vaguer ìåñòî, ãäå óëè÷íûé ðûíîê ïî âûõîäíûì (the place where there’s a street market on the weekend).
Usually midway through my earnest and detailed instructions for how to get from here to there, it dawns on the lost Russian inquirer that a foreigner is giving them directions. Sometimes that disqualifies me in their eyes and they hurry off to find a real Russian. But sometimes they just grin and thank me, and then ask: Îòêóäà âû, åñëè íå ñåêðåò? (literally, “where are you from, if it’s not a secret?”) That, in turn, always makes me grin. I mean, it’s not 1937. Why would my nationality be a secret?
But here ñåêðåò isn’t really a secret. It’s a bit of information that I may wish to keep confidential. In English, we might express this as: Where are you from, if you don’t mind me asking?
So what exactly is ñåêðåò, and how is it different from the native Russian òàéíà (secret)? As usual, that’s a bit tricky — but not exactly secret.
Ñåêðåò is any piece of information or object that is confidential, private or kept hidden. Íèêîìó íå ãîâîðè, ÷òî îíà óâîëüíÿåòñÿ. Ýòî ïîêà ñåêðåò (Don’t tell anyone that she’s quitting. It’s a secret for now.) Îí ìíå ñêàçàë ïîä áîëüøèì ñåêðåòîì, ÷òî áóäåò ñîêðàùåíèå øòàòîâ (He told me in total confidentiality that there will be staff cuts). Íå ñåêðåò, ÷òî îíà äàâíî èùåò äðóãóþ ðàáîòó (It’s no secret that she’s been looking for another job for a long time). Íå íàäî äåëàòü ñåêðåò èç êàäðîâûõ ïåðåñòàíîâîê (You shouldn’t make a secret out of staff changes).
Ñåêðåò can also be some kind of know-how that is the secret to success of anything, from a cake recipe to a company’s growth rates. Ñåêðåò ìîåãî ñîóñà — ÷àéíàÿ ëîæêà óêñóñà (The secret of my sauce is a teaspoon of vinegar).
There’s also ñåêðåò íà âåñü ñâåò (an open secret), also called among the literate crowd ñåêðåò ïîëèøèíåëÿ (the secret of Polichinelle, a standard character in French folk theater who always blabs everyone’s secrets).
A mechanical ñåêðåò is some kind of security device. Çàìîê ñ ñåêðåòîì is a security lock. Those special bolts you put on your car wheels to keep people from stealing them are called ñåêðåòêè (disc or wheel locks).
Òàéíà is also something that is hidden or should not be disclosed, but it seems to be used for secrets that are more substantial or would have greater consequences if revealed, like ãîñóäàðñòâåííàÿ òàéíà (state secret). 
It can also be secrecy, as in òàéíà èñïîâåäè (seal of confession) or òàéíà ïåðåïèñêè (secrecy or privacy of correspondence).
Òàéíà can also be used to describe know-how, but it’s usually in the plural and sounds a bit lofty: Ýòî òàéíû òâîð÷åñòâà (That’s the mystery of creation).
Unlike ñåêðåò, òàéíà can be something not just unknown or hidden but unknowable, like òàéíà ïðèðîäû (the mystery of nature).
As far as my nationality goes, it’s not hidden, unknowable or even the key to my success. My answer will be: ×òî òàèòü? ß àìåðèêàíêà. (What’s there to hide? I’m an American.)

<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: Montmartre on Dumskaya
AUTHOR: By Daniel Kozin
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The stars of the Moulin Rouge are on show on Dumskaya Ulitsa, in an exhibition of Parisian bohemian decadence par excellence.
Housed in the Perinniye Ryadi gallery, the troupe of the legendary dance hall performs in all its color and glory in an exhibit of lithographs by the French post-impressionist, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), that opened Thursday under the title “Paris, Paris.”
Known equally for his vibrant and original artwork as for his bohemian lifestyle, the “iconographer of Montmartre” captured the Belle Epoque of late 19th-century Paris as both actor and observer. Plagued by physical infirmities caused by an unknown genetic disorder sometimes referred to as the Toulouse-Lautrec Syndrome, likely caused by inbreeding (his parents were first cousins) that led to his standing just over five feet as an adult, he reveled in the beauty of the physical as well as the wretched. The decadence of cafes, cabarets and brothels in Paris’ seedy Montmartre district figure prominently in his art alongside the physical prowess of the circus and horse racing. 
Comprised of 52 lithographs from private collections in Paris, the exhibition attempts to showcase a full range of Toulouse-Lautrec’s work, including his early sketches, burlesque cabaret posters and later darker pieces, including his last completed work “The Gypsy,” a sinister theater poster that contrasts strongly with his earlier and more vibrant work, completed before his premature death from alcoholism and syphilis at the age of 36.
“We wanted to show something from his early years, the humorous works, the development of his art and technique, and of course his heyday during which he perfected his linear style and use of color, to show how he discovered himself as an artist,” said Polina Slepnekova, curator of “Paris, Paris.” 
The exhibition is divided thematically into periods from the artist’s life, including his youth, the beginning of his work in Paris, his famous Moulin Rouge cabaret series of posters and later years.
The works are full of color, caricature and most of all, a grotesque fascination with beauty through ugliness, portraying the captivating and unusual world of the artist.
His idolization of famous cabaret performers is well represented, with both posters and sketches revealing a preoccupation with finding the true character of the stars, rather than a realistic portrayal. The sketch of Yvette Guilbert, a famous Moulin Rouge singer, is especially notable, for though it is fantastically distorted to the point of ugliness through caricature, the resemblance to the real singer is unquestionable, as shown by a nearby photograph. Guilbert reputedly proclaimed Toulouse-Lautrec “the genius of the hideous” after seeing the work.
Other posters of gaudy cabaret stars and can-can dancers La Goulue (The Glutton) — known as the Queen of Montmartre — and Jane Avril, as well as of singer Aristide Bruant reveal similar attempts to reveal the truth through gross exaggeration, portrayed through a strong linear style, bold colors and the influence of Oriental prints. 
The impact of Toulouse-Lautrec’s style on the development of art and especially poster art is unequivocal, with Picasso in particular showing the influence of the short-statured French artist. 
Although the exhibition’s organizers call the works on show “the cream of the crop” of Toulouse-Lautrec’s art, many of the artist’s more recognizable portraits and paintings are missing, such as the iconic “At the Moulin Rouge.” However, the best of his posters, including “La Troupe de Mlle. Eglantine” as well as a number of his sketches do justice to the influential artist and his impact on the art world.
Yet despite the merry scenes and flamboyance of the works, a sense of the artist’s personal suffering lurks beneath the surface.
“Tragedy hides in all of Lautrec’s work, sometimes masked by humor, ephemeral elements, bright color and vivacious lines, but it is still there,” Slepnekova told The St. Petersburg Times. 
Slepnekova described Toulouse-Lautrec’s work and life as “a stellar example of how something absolutely new and original can come out of a time period of decadence and downfall, which contradicts all traditions and stereotypes. 
“I believe that this can serve as an important reminder for young artists today,” she said. 

<i>“Paris, Paris” runs through Dec. 9 at the Perinniye Ryady art center, 4 Dumskaya Ulitsa, M. Gostiny Dvor. Tel. +7 904 601 0000. www.artcenter.su.</i>

TITLE: Moving pictures
AUTHOR: By Tatyana Sochiva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The 10th Multivision international animation festival began in the city Saturday with an evening of French animated films at Dom Kino to mark International Animation Day (Oct. 28).
The evening formed part of a series of cultural events organized to mark the opening of the festival, including a campaign in support of putting up a memorial to one of the best loved characters of Russian animation, the Plasticine Crow, which took place on Malaya Sadovaya Ulitsa on Oct. 25.
Multivision is the first festival of animation art in Russia to enjoy international status. It collaborates with the largest Russian animation studios as well as foreign ones, including Aardman Animations (U.K.) and French companies Premium Films and Autour de Minuit. All of these studios supply exclusive material that is new to the public. When choosing films for inclusion in the festival program, the organizers attempt to select those that are most interesting in terms of plot, technique and visual effects.
“We strive for beautiful and meaningful art,” said festival director Svetlana Petrova. “The conglomeration of ugliness in contemporary art is often considered to be cool. However, we are against filth and violence,” she said.
The foreign section of the Multivision 2012 program is diverse, featuring the best short films from the British Animation Awards, as well as animations shown at prominent festivals such as Klik! Amsterdam (Netherlands), Trickfilm (Germany) and many others. But industry experts say Russian animation faces considerable difficulties. 
“There is no funding for animation in the country,” said Petrova. 
“One of the best Russian studios, Pilot, submitted no animations at all to the contest this year. It simply has nothing to submit. And we could count animated series for children on the fingers of one hand: ‘Masha and the Bear,’ ‘Belka and Strelka’ and ‘Smeshariki’ — that’s all. That’s not a normal situation for such a large country,” she said.
Nevertheless, a selection of Russian animations will be screened at the Multivision festival. Among them are “Chinty,” a stop-motion animation by Natalya Mirzoyan made entirely using tea leaves, and the touching horror story “I Will Find You,” by Andrei Bakhurin.
The films in the competition program will be judged by eminent figures in the world of art and culture.
Ordinary movie-goers will also have the chance to become jury members and participate in the Russian Audience Award, which will be given to a Dutch animation from the Klik! Amsterdam festival. It is the first time a Dutch festival participant will receive the people’s choice award from Russia.
In addition to screening animated films, the festival comprises animation workshops for both children and adults. As a part of Multivision’s 10th anniversary celebrations, the German video artist Max Hattler will visit St. Petersburg and give a series of master classes for young Russian professionals. A video installation resulting from their collaboration will be exhibited at Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art.
The Multivision festival organizers have a busy year ahead of them. In 2013, which has been declared the Year of the Netherlands in Russia, the Multivision and Klik! festivals will carry out a joint project in August to screen animated films about urban life on Palace Bridge in St. Petersburg and Magere Brug (the Skinny Bridge) in Amsterdam. 
Other long-term plans include promoting closer interaction between video art and theater, but animation industry insiders say achieving this goal largely depends on financial aid from the government or sponsorship support.

<i>The 10th Multivision international animation festival runs from Nov. 1 to 4 at the Avrora movie theater (60 Nevsky Prospekt, tel: 942 8020) and Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art (2, 29th Line, Vasilyevsky Island, tel. 324 0809). www.multivision.ru</i>

TITLE: THE DISH: Cardamom
AUTHOR: By Shura Collinson
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: <b>A passage to India</b>
Cardamom, which opened at the beginning of the autumn at the foot of the Tuchkov Bridge on Vasilyevsky Island, is the latest arrival on the city’s small but unhurriedly growing Indian culinary scene. 
Opened by Ravi Arora — known to many expats and Russians alike from his years managing eateries around town — and his partner, executive chef Sumit Gupta, Cardamom is a very welcome addition to the long-standing Indian restaurants Tandoor and Tandoori Nights that occupy neighboring premises on Voznesensky Prospekt, and to the younger Jai Hind on Ulitsa Ryleyeva. 
That the restaurant is an authentic Indian establishment, and not a Russian counterfeit, is immediately apparent upon entering Cardamom. The heady aroma of spices, sweet incense and tantalizing dishes greets diners as soon as they begin to descend the few steps down into the restaurant from the street. Unlike many basement restaurants, however, Cardamom is not bereft of windows, but has enclosed its casements with traditional Indian latticework, ensuring the chaos and building work of the embankment and bridge are left securely outside.
Uneven whitewashed stone walls form a plain background, the perfect foil for the broad wooden chairs decorated with elaborate tasseled fabrics placed at all the tables, and for the occasional gold wall lamp. Large terracotta jugs adorn the deep windowsills, together with glass jars of dried pulses and chili peppers. 
Large flat plates with artistic geometric designs add the perfect finishing touch to an interior that is simple, very pleasant, and surprisingly difficult to leave — especially after a hearty meal.
Cardamom bills itself as a bar and restaurant, and one room is certainly more akin to a watering-hole than a restaurant as such, with a brightly lit bar along one side of the room, and a flat-screen TV playing Bollywood and other Indian hits. To the left of the bar, the restaurants leads off into a labyrinth of smaller rooms with brightly colored floor and wall tiles, while to the right is the main room, off of which a private dining room for up to 12 people is tucked discreetly.
In case any doubts remain as to the restaurant’s authenticity, the fact that Cardamom is already frequented by visiting Indian passengers from cruise ships should be an irrefutable stamp of authenticity. 
It is the food, however, that speaks louder than anything else here.
Hariyali chaat (240 rubles, $7.60), a mixed salad of tomato, red onion and deep-fried spinach with a generous sprinkling of fresh cilantro, was sinfully good. A pair of samosas with potato and vegetables (155 rubles, $5 for two), also more than met expectations.
For the many locals who remain suspicious of spice, Cardamom also offers an extensive menu of Russian classics such as Olivier salad, borsch and beef Stroganoff, as well as that British classic, fish ‘n’ chips. 
More adventurous visitors are however advised to ignore these commonplace distractions in favor of the preciously rare Indian menu.
Punjabi chole (270 rubles, $8.50), a spicy, pleasingly bitter chickpea stew topped with fresh tomatoes and fresh red onion, was a hearty, filling hit. Tandoori chicken (330 rubles, $10.40), on the other hand, at first appeared to be a small portion, but was in fact another substantial and perfectly cooked dish, especially when complemented by pulao rice (140 rubles, $4.40) and paneer kulcha (110 rubles, $3.50), an Indian flatbread stuffed with cheese in which the paneer cheese was admittedly hard to detect.
As anyone familiar with the standards set by Ravi Arora at previous establishments would expect, the service at Cardamom is warm and impeccable. Another bonus is that prices are considerably cheaper here than at the city’s other Indian eateries, perhaps due to the less than perfect location, though it is only a quick trot over the Tuchkov Bridge from Sportivnaya metro station.
Even drinks — so often the key to a restaurant’s profitability — are reasonably priced at Cardamom, with half a liter of Bochkarev costing 130 rubles ($4). The business lunch (Russian dishes only for now) is another bargain at 180 rubles ($5.70) for soup, salad, a main course and tea.
With an irresistible combination of great, reasonably priced cuisine, excellent service and a program of events such as an Indian-themed party last weekend with traditional dancing, competitions and of course delicacies from the subcontinent, Cardamom deserves to do very well indeed.


TITLE: New Arts Space Aims to Revive Culture Scene
AUTHOR: By Daniel Kozin
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg’s blossoming contemporary culture scene was bolstered over the weekend by the addition of a brand new performance arts space the like of which has not existed in the city before. 
A dedicated group of creative enthusiasts, among them the organizers of the Lyogkiye Lyudi contemporary dance school and the ByeByeBallet art space on Ulitsa Belinskogo is behind the new project: A multi-purpose space — Skorohod — that will see performances of contemporary indie theater and dance productions, as well as music performances, lectures and festivals, both foreign and local. 
In the finest traditions of contemporary European art spaces of similar intent, the location is that of a renovated factory, in this case the old Skorokhod children’s shoe factory, from which the new center takes its name, just behind Moskovskiye Vorota metro station.
Redesigned with a stylish interior dominated by tall ceilings, sleek black couches and a long white bar that will also serve organic vegetarian food, Skorohod’s 700 square meters were packed during the 30-hour opening marathon at the weekend, lending great promise to the project’s future success. The dimly lit warehouse-like space was filled with chic representatives of the city’s contemporary culture community, and despite the colorful cocktails and pulsating DJ beats, the events were markedly non-glamorous. Rather, they were tinged with the edge of the creative underground. 
The St. Petersburg Times spoke to Tatyana Priyatkina, artistic director of Skorohod, about the ambitious project at its opening.
<i><b>Q. Is the St. Petersburg public ready for Skorohod and contemporary theater?</b></i>
A. We don’t know! We really hope that that is the case, but nobody knows for a fact. But we know that we are ready to take on contemporary theater , and there are many contemporary theaters that are waiting to meet the public, and the only thing missing is to attract the public so that they get involved.
<i><b>Q. Who do you see as your principle audience?</b></i>
A. You can guess what sort of people will be willing to come to such a place. They are the sort of people who don’t generally go to the theater, though they go to exhibitions; they go to Dom Kino, they spend their time playing frisbee at New Holland.
We believe that there are exciting, modern and comprehensible theater productions that can and should be shown to the contemporary audience, they just need to be met half-way: In this theater, with the audience that you see here. 
<i><b>Q. So you don’t consider yourselves to be in competition with the Mariinsky or Alexandriinsky theaters?</b></i>
A. No, this is a completely different audience, a different type of show.
My favorite dance collective, a famous British dance troupe called DV8 that performs unusual contact theater, came to the Mariinsky Theater for a performance, but later said that they would never return to Russia. That is because the Mariinsky is too academic for them, too beautiful. How can you put a bum up on the stage if you’re at the Mariinsky? There are venues where this is not possible, but at our theater these limitations don’t exist. 
<i><b>Q. Do you have certain limitations to what you can show in St. Petersburg due to the specificity of the public? For instance, as a result of local politics, or the new law against the promotion of homosexuality, or the condemnation by representatives of the Orthodox Church?</b></i>
A. You know, that’s why we have set an age limit of 21+ for our space: Not because we won’t be showing anything suitable for children, but because we want to protect ourselves from any expected or unexpected problems. Contemporary theater often includes swearing, or naked actors on stage, and much more besides, but it’s normal for us to bring up topics that concern us; we want people who come here to understand that this is possible.
<i><b>Q. Why do you think that no similar place has appeared yet in St. Petersburg?</b></i>
A. The main reason is that you need to find funding somewhere. But where? There aren’t many idiots like us who would put all their savings and take out a loan for something that will never make a profit. 
We do this because we love it and this is what we want; we believe in theater, and it’s stupid that we don’t have any similar platforms, because they are necessary, and if the government doesn’t do it, then we will do it ourselves. 
<i><b>Q. You have a very concentrated program of events, how did that come together?</b></i>
A. We don’t even know where we’ll find audiences [for all the events]! There has been this crazy rush among theaters and companies because everyone wants to participate. Every day I get about 20 messages saying ‘Please invite us,’ and I don’t even know half of them, even though I’ve been working in this sphere for years.  
People will be able to come here on any day and there will always be something new. For instance, every weekend there will be a “trash Saturday” with the most avant-garde productions, and a “light Sunday” with easier fare. People will have the chance to choose among genres, for instance you might say that you aren’t quite ready for contemporary dance on Wednesdays but you might want to see a lecture on Monday, or vice versa. There will always be variety, but the events will always be contemporary.
<i><b>Q. So you will be representing the St. Petersburg avant-garde?</b></i>
A. That’s what we would really like. But not some obscure underground that does something that nobody understands. That’s not what it’s about. I believe that if we’re doing something new, it should be accepted and understood by our audience. Maybe even [we could include] new mainstream productions, if they’re cool.
We’re collaborating extensively with Dutch and French theaters, Israeli contemporary dance groups and also a Swiss group with a series of shows. There will also be groups from Moscow, Volgograd and Minsk. 
We want to mix up what’s happening in St. Petersburg with the world, because we’ve fallen behind a little. We live as if we are in exile, or underwater, [preserved] in the Kunstkamera.

<i>Skorohod, located at 107 Moskovsky Prospekt, is open daily from 12 p.m. to 11.30 p.m. Metro: Moskovskiye Vorota. Tel. 987 6690. www.skorohod.me</i>