SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1734 (45), Wednesday, November 7, 2012
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TITLE: Shoigu Inherits Armed Forces at Crossroads
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky and Jonathan Earle
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — When Sergei Shoigu took the reins of the Defense Ministry on Thursday, he officially inherited a military at a crossroads, torn between tradition and the half-completed reforms of his disgraced predecessor, Anatoly Serdyukov.
Shoigu will have to decide between maintaining a large, conventional force or pursuing Serdyukov’s goal of creating a leaner, more modern military, analysts said.
While servicemen rejoiced at the ouster of Russia’s arguably least popular minister, analysts suggested that it was still too early to say which path Shoigu would follow.
Although the day saw more speculation than action, the news that Shoigu had appointed longtime aide Yury Sadovenko to head the ministry’s administration suggested that a transition was already under way behind the scenes.
That sense was enhanced by news reports that cited undisclosed military sources as saying Shoigu would name Major General Valery Gerasimov, a reputed conservative, to replace the reformist General Staff chief Nikolai Makarov.
Analysts interviewed by The St. Petersburg Times said Shoigu faces many challenges, as years of underinvestment have left the military with outdated weapons, and poor management and corruption have eaten away at the force’s battle-worthiness.
The current force is able to fight short, relatively small-scale skirmishes, like the brief August 2008 conflict with Georgia, but not a prolonged war, said Alexander Khramchikhin, deputy director of the Institute for Political and Military Analysis.
Also, Serdyukov’s modernizing reforms have stalled, leaving the military in limbo between its past as a large conscription force and its future, most likely as a professional one.
“Clearly, there is a sort of tension between the need to be a great, large force versus a modern, technologically equipped force that is capable of dealing with current security issues,” James Nixey, an analyst with Chatham House, said by telephone Thursday.
For example, Russia is one of the few G20 countries with a conscription army, though reforms under Serdyukov reduced obligatory service from two years to one.
Analysts were cautious about what to expect from Shoigu, the first defense minister in more than a decade to hold the rank of general. Shoigu served as Emergency Situations Minister from 1994 until earlier this year, when he was appointed governor of the Moscow region.
“Shoigu comes with a reputation as a strong administrator, but his position on reform is less clear,” said Nicholas de Larrinaga, Europe editor at Jane’s Defence Weekly, in an e-mail message on Thursday.
Khramchikhin predicted that Shoigu would use “trial and error” because he doesn’t have a military philosophy by which to act.
Given that Shoigu is fiercely loyal to President Vladimir Putin, who has often bemoaned the loss of the Soviet Union’s “great power” status, Shoigu might look to build a large, Soviet-style military, said Chatham House’s Nixey.
But De Larrinaga said Shoigu’s ties to Putin might have precisely the opposite effect, causing him to press ahead with reforms under Serdyukov, a Putin appointee.
“Immediately, however, it is likely that Shoigu will continue where Serdyukov left off on reform as Putin has considerable political capital invested in improving the state of the military,” De Larrinaga said.
Shoigu is expected to fire General Staff chief Makarov, a Serdyukov ally, and his choice of replacement could be a good indication of his plans, De Larrinaga said.
News reports that Shoigu would appoint Gerasimov, who opposed Serdyukov’s reforms, could indicate that Shoigu would try to undo at least part of his predecessor’s legacy.
But in some areas, such as weapons purchases, Shoigu might come against the reality of dealing with a defense industry that has failed to keep up with the West.
“Much of [the military’s] equipment stocks remain aged and out of date, while the country’s defense industry is inefficient, has suffered from a lack of investment in many sectors, and is incapable of matching the technologies produced in the West,” De Larrinaga said.
Serdyukov caught flak from Russia’s powerful defense industry for proposing that the military buy more foreign-made weapons, including French-built Mistral amphibious assault ships and German tanks.
“Just like Serdyukov, Shoigu is not going to buy old equipment,” said Igor Korotchenko, head of the Defense Ministry’s public advisory council.
Instead, Shoigu will continue the practice of buying limited amounts of foreign equipment for experimentation and to spur domestic manufacturers, Korotchenko said by telephone.
Putin said during his presidential campaign in February that Russia’s armed forces would receive over 400 ballistic missiles, eight submarines and more than 2,300 tanks over the next decade.
Serdyukov, who became defense minister in 2007, was responsible for carrying out major reforms that transformed the Soviet-era military into a more modern force.
He also reduced the size of the army considerably, making painful cuts to ranks of middle officers and generals, and simplifying a tangled bureaucracy.
Dramatic increases to the military’s budget in recent years helped provide troops with new weapons and tools, raise salaries and improve housing.
“In many ways the reforms Serdyukov launched, particularly the massive recapitalization of Russia’s military equipment, are still in their infancy,” De Larrinaga said.
But nevertheless, he was widely loathed among active servicemen, who regarded him as a hostile outsider hellbent on outsourcing and gutting the system. Soldiers and officers mocked his background in the furniture business and as a tax official.
Serdyukov also failed to end vicious, institutionalized hazing of new conscripts, and the military has been embarrassed by a string of deadly fires at weapons depots.
“Nobody I asked doubted for a second that removing Serdyukov was the correct and sound decision — 100 percent of respondents,” Grigory Prutyan, an active-duty military doctor, said Wednesday on his blog on Ekho Moskvy’s website.
Nixey, of Chatham House, suggested that criticism from within the military needed to be taken with a grain of salt.
“If you are in the military, the chances are that you would not have done very well under a Serdyukov’s regime,” he said, adding that it was noteworthy, given staunch opposition within the military, that Serdyukov lasted on the job for almost six years.
And although it was a corruption scandal that eventually ousted Serdyukov, he wasn’t known for being any more corrupt than other ministers, Nixey said.
Last month, investigators opened five criminal cases in connection with allegedly illegal sales of military property, including sanatoriums, guest houses and land worth $95.5 million, by the Oboronservis firm, which was chaired by Serdyukov until last year.
Also on Wednesday, police detained a businessman on suspicion of soliciting a 3 million ruble bribe to “speed up” a deal for the sale of Oboronservis property in the Moscow region.
Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin said Wednesday that more arrests in the case were to come.
Putin indicated Tuesday that the embezzlement scandal around Oboronservis was the main reason for Serdyukov’s dismissal from his post, though pundits say conflicts with Putin allies and other law enforcement officials played a role as well.

TITLE: Navalny Sets Up New Project to Improve Communal Services
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prominent anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny has set up a new Internet-based project to help Russians fight poor service and corruption in communal services.
"The idea is very simple: Do you pay for utilities? Of course. We will help you get what you have already paid for," Navalny wrote on his LiveJournal blog Thursday.
Navalny reminded readers that about half of their monthly utilities bills goes toward the upkeep of communal areas in residential buildings, while the actual state of many entrances, stairs and lifts across Russia is often below standards.
Navalny, who has taken an active role in organizing anti-Kremlin protests since last winter, said the new service, called RosZhKKh and available at Roszkh.ru, would help Russians identify flaws in communal services and file complaints to officials online, avoiding unnecessary red tape.
The new project, which he dubbed "a sharp stick" for swindlers working in communal services, would also help root out widespread corruption, Navalny wrote.
RosZhKKh is the latest in a series of political and anti-corruption projects launched by Navalny. His prior projects include state tender tracker RosPil, pothole-busting RosYama, election monitor RosVybory and volunteer coordinator Good Vehicle of Truth.

TITLE: British Double Agent Blake is Proud of His Career
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — George Blake, a former British spy who doubled as a Soviet agent, has spoken about his career with pride and called himself an "exceptionally lucky man" in an interview published this week.
Blake, who will turn 90 on Sunday and has lived in Russia since his escape from British prison in 1966, told the Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily that he has spent his "happiest" years in the country.
"When I worked in the West I always felt a looming threat of exposure. Here I felt free," he said.
During his time as a double agent, Blake passed some of the most coveted British secrets to the Soviets. He said that exposing a Western plan to eavesdrop on Soviet communications from an underground tunnel into East Berlin was his main achievement.
Blake also shared details of his adventures, including meetings with a Soviet liaison in East Berlin. He said that once a month he would take a train to East Berlin, make sure that he wasn't being followed, and go by car to a secret apartment where he and his contact would have a talk accompanied by a glass of Soviet-made sparkling wine.
In 1961, Blake was exposed by a Polish defector and sentenced to 42 years in prison. He said that the British prison authorities were lax enough to allow him to take regular walks with another Soviet spy, Gordon Lonsdale.
In October 1966, Blake made a dashing escape from prison with the assistance of several people whom he met in custody. He broke his wrist while jumping the wall and told Rossiiskaya Gazeta in Tuesday's issue that he still feels the pain sometimes. He spent two months hiding at his assistant's place, and was then driven across Europe to East Berlin in a wooden box under a car.
In the Soviet Union, Blake maintained contacts with other British double agents. He said he met regularly with Donald Maclean and Kim Philby, members of the so-called Cambridge Five, and he said he and Maclean were particularly close.
Blake said he adapted well to life in Russia and once joked at a meeting with Russian intelligence officers that he's like a "foreign-made car that adapted well to Russian roads." ''They appreciated the joke," said Blake, who was given the rank of colonel by Russian intelligence authorities.
Blake said that he wanted to be a priest when he was young but has stopped being religious.
"As long as our brain stops receiving blood, we pass away, and there will be nothing afterward," he said. "There will be neither a punishment for the bad things we have done, nor a reward for the good deeds."
Once in the Soviet Union, Blake divorced his wife and married a Russian woman. He said that his three sons from the first marriage plan to visit him on his birthday.
"I'm a very lucky man, exceptionally lucky," Blake said.

TITLE: Duma Lawmaker Slams U.S. Vote as 'Unfair'
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A prominent State Duma lawmaker who observed the United States presidential election lambasted the vote as “systemically unfair” and riddled with organizational shortcomings.
Ilya Kostunov, a deputy for the governing United Russia party, told The St. Petersburg Times on Thursday that large-scale voter disenfranchisement and lax identification procedures rendered the American system more prone to violations than the Russian one.
“In Russia there are institutions that protect from voting fraud; in the U.S. there are no such institutions,” Kostunov said in a telephone interview. As examples he pointed to Russia’s strict voter identification rules and the installation of web cameras in all of the country’s more than 90,000 ballot stations for the presidential election in March.
He also said an individual vote is more important in Russia because the voting system is direct. The U.S. president is elected indirectly by the 538 members of the electoral college.
Kostunov, a former Nashi commissar who made headlines in past months with bills that would label foreign-funded media outlets “foreign agents,” was speaking after returning from Annapolis, Maryland. He and three other Duma members were sent to the U.S. as short-term election observers for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
He said that while he did not see voting fraud with his own eyes, soft voter identification rules meant that double voting was a possibility. He also noted that the use of voting machines jeopardized confidentiality. “I saw polling station workers telling voters how to vote, and everybody could see for whom they voted,” he said.
The OSCE, a security watchdog that comprises 57 European and Central Asian states plus the U.S. and Canada, sent 44 long-term observers and an over-100-person short-term mission of parliamentarians to monitor the U.S. vote.
In separate reports Wednesday and Thursday, both missions expressed concern over voter registry accuracy and criticized the fact that some 4.1 million Americans were ineligible to vote because they lived outside the 50 states and that another almost 6 million U.S. citizens could not vote due to a criminal conviction.
Kostunov called these numbers “very serious” indicators that the U.S. system does not support fair elections.
The OSCE regularly sends observer missions to Russia and has questioned the fairness of the presidential vote and the December Duma elections. Kostunov said the organization’s reports about his country were overly politicized and emotionally charged.
The deputy’s words echoed earlier accusations from Central Elections Commission head Vladimir Churov, who last month called the U.S. electoral system flawed and undemocratic. Churov took the brunt of allegations of massive vote fraud, which triggered unprecedented anti-government protests in the past year.
Kostunov acknowledged that there was a lack of voter confidence in Russia. “Yes, there is a crisis of trust,” he said, “however, not in the electoral system but more broadly in the political system.”

TITLE: Amid Defense Ministry Shakeup, Corruption Case Grows
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – Sergei Shoigu officially took over his new defense minister duties Wednesday, receiving the so-called nuclear briefcase, while prosecutors announced new findings in a corruption case at a ministry agency that led to the ouster of his predecessor, Anatoly Serdyukov.
Shoigu, best-known for his long tenure as emergency situations minister, was nominated to head the Defense Ministry after Serdyukov was fired Tuesday by President Vladimir Putin amid a fraud scandal at the ministry-run Oboronservis supply agency.
The military prosecutor's office said Wednesday that Oboronservis officials had illegally sold a Navy fuel terminal in the Murmansk region that supplied the Northern Fleet and was a "key element of military infrastructure."
Valued at 452 million rubles ($14.4 million), the property was sold for less then 50 percent of that price, prosecutors said in a statement.
Last month, investigators opened five criminal cases in connection with illegal sales of military property, including sanatoriums, guest houses and land worth $95.5 million, by Oboronservis, which was chaired by Serdyukov until last year.
Also on Wednesday, police detained a businessman on suspicion of soliciting a 3 million ruble ($95,100) bribe to "speed up" a deal for the sale of Oboronservis property in the Moscow region.
Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin said Wednesday that more arrests would be coming in the case.
Putin indicated Tuesday that the embezzlement scandal at Oboronservis was the main reason for Serdyukov's dismissal from his post, though pundits say conflicts with Putin allies and other law enforcement officials played a role as well.
A number of corruption cases at the Defense Ministry were opened during Serdyukov's time in office, and investigators have uncovered instances in which Serdyukov's family members apparently received benefits as a result of the former minister's position.
According to investigators, Serdyukov's sister's husband, Valery Puzikov, is building an 800-square-meter house on Defense Ministry land near the Black Sea that he received for free, Kommersant reported Wednesday.
While Shoigu is praised for not having been involved in corruption scandals, military experts said his success in the ministry will depend on the new appointees he is expected to bring in, including a new General Staff head.
That post is currently occupied by Serdyukov loyalist general Nikolai Makarov, whose management of the military has been maligned by some analysts.
"Military readiness has become a fiction during Makarov's tenure," deputy editor of the nationalist-leaning Zavtra newspaper Vladislav Shurygin wrote on his LiveJournal blog Wednesday, calling Makarov's actions in office "ignorant."
But Igor Korotchenko, head of the Defense Ministry's public advisory council, said he didn't expect Shoigu to act hastily in replacing senior defense officials.
"Shoigu is known to make balanced decisions, so he won't act fast. He needs to understand the situation first," Korotchenko said, adding that he does believe new people will be appointed to top posts.
The Defense Ministry currently has eight deputy defense ministers, only two of whom are career military officers, Makarov among them.
Half the deputy ministers are former tax officials brought to the ministry by Serdyukov, who previously headed the tax service.
In a clear attempt to win the hearts and minds of the Army, Shoigu said his first decision in the new post would be allowing military cadets to take part in the Victory Day parade, a tradition abolished by Serdyukov, news agency RBC reported Wednesday.
Although Serdyukov's fate is unclear, analysts believe it would be hard for him to get a government post after being fired by Putin amid a corruption scandal.
Serdyukov, who was known for his sometimes rude manner with respected military commanders, also had a tense relationship with Federal Security Service officials, Vedomosti reported Wednesday.
An unidentified FSB official told the paper that Serdyukov had helped protege Sergei Korolyov become head of the agency's internal security department, a move that met resistance in the FSB.
The source said security officials were also afraid that the creation of a military police force at the Defense Ministry would make it hard for the agency's own counterintelligence arm to conduct investigations within the armed forces.
Political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky wrote in an op-ed Wednesday that troubles in Serdyukov's home life also contributed to his removal. Belkovsky was referring to Serdyukov's alleged romantic involvement with one of his subordinates, Yevgenia Vasilyeva, who is also a suspect in the Oboronservis fraud case.
Serdyukov is married to a daughter of Viktor Zubkov, a former first deputy prime minister and close Putin ally who now serves as the presidential envoy to the Gas Exporting Countries Forum.
"Serdyukov has lost not only political cover provided by his father-in-law, whom Putin trusts, but also the president's own respect," Belkovsky said in an article published in Moskovsky Komsomolets.

TITLE: Putin Names United Russia Heavyweight Acting Moscow Region Governor 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin on Thursday appointed Andrei Vorobyov, head of the ruling United Russia party's State Duma faction, to the high-profile post of acting Moscow region governor.
On Tuesday, Putin appointed the region's former governor, Sergei Shoigu, defense minister in place of Anatoly Serdyukov, amid an ongoing corruption scandal at the ministry.
At a meeting with Putin on Thursday, Vorobyov said he would fulfill Shoigu's plan for developing the region.
"This is a very important region of our country: 7 million people, science, industry, culture," Putin told Vorobyov. But he said there are "very many problems" in the region, too, including financial and social issues.
Shoigu, a long-time Putin ally who is best known for having served as emergency situations minister for more than 15 years, had been seen as a strong governor during his short stint in the position. Putin had appointed him to lead the region in March.
Vorobyov, 42, becomes the second heavyweight politician following Shoigu to be governor of the prominent region, where many wealthy Muscovites have homes and land is expensive.
The new acting governor was an aide to Shoigu in 2000 when the latter served as a deputy prime minister, according to Vorobyov's biography on the United Russia website.
Vorobyov's father, Yury Vorobyov, co-founded a government emergency situations committee in 1990 that later became the ministry Shoigu led.
Vorobyov had served as a Duma deputy with the ruling party since 2003 and has headed an interregional public fund of United Russia's supporters since 2000.
Talkative and flamboyant, he emerged as a prominent figure for United Russia after disputed parliamentary elections in December that sparked protests and rancor toward the ruling party.
In 2011, Vorobyov posted income of more than 2 million rubles ($63,400) for himself and nearly 16 million rubles for an unidentified child of his. He also declared three land plots and a Mercedes Benz S 500 registered in his name and an apartment and parking spot registered in his child's name.
From 1998 to 2000, he headed the Russian Fish Company, part of the Russkoye Morye group, which produces a popular brand of cured salmon. Media reports said Vorobyov co-founded it with his younger brother Maxim.
In September of last year, billionaire and Putin acquaintance Gennady Timchenko acquired 30 percent of Russkoye Morye, Vedomosti reported.
Because of his membership in the ruling party, Vorobyov stands little chance of being chosen to continue leading the Moscow region in next fall's election, independent pundit Dmitry Oreshkin told news agency Rosbalt.
That election is expected to be hard-fought, with opposition politicians already beginning to jockey for the chance to run.
In the Duma, Vorobyov had worked in committees dealing with nongovernmental and religious groups, as well as education and science.
Vorobyov has a Ph.D. in economics and wrote a dissertation focused on developing the investment potential of Russia's southern regions. He also has an MBA from the Higher School of Economics.

TITLE: U.S. Ambassador to Focus on Economic Ties
AUTHOR: By Jonathan Earle
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – "I got a little bit of sleep, but I was up pretty early," U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul said Wednesday afternoon, shortly after his boss, President Barack Obama, declared election victory.
Fatigue at first appeared to blunt his characteristic cheerfulness, but as the conversation turned to what Obama's second term could mean for U.S.-Russian relations, McFaul brightened, and the flow of facts and ideas came quickly.
"The basic strategy will not change," he said of the Obama administration's "reset" policy of engagement with Russia, which he is credited with crafting.
Economic ties will be the embassy's priority, he told The St. Petersburg Times in an exclusive interview.
The Obama administration hopes to build on gains from the first term, which included the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty, bilateral agreements on visas and adoptions, and Russia's accession to the World Trade Organization, a long-sought victory that McFaul describes as a hard act to follow.
"The next phase is not that clear-cut," he said. "It has to do with a hundred little small things, and it's hard to keep our governments focused on a hundred small things."
Although McFaul calls himself an optimist, he also appears chastened by his first 11 months on the job, which saw him denounced on state-controlled television as fomenting revolutionary sentiment and hounded by pro-Kremlin activists.
He didn't volunteer any plans for promoting human rights or democracy, a sore spot for the Kremlin. Instead, he focused on encouraging trade, which he said would also help stabilize the political relationship.
"The president believes it helps create ballast in the relationship. So if you have more going on there, that helps us when there are rocky waters in other areas," he said.
McFaul said he hoped that the United States and Russia could, over the next six to nine months, commit to a WTO-style road map for strengthening bilateral economic ties.
Making sure that Russia enforces WTO obligations will be key, as will encouraging new U.S. investors, he said.
"Those doing business in Russia are already fairly satisfied. … But there's another 98 percent of American businesses that don't come here, don't know anything, have stereotypes about what the climate is here. We've gotta reach those folks," he said.
Another priority will be granting Russia permanent normal trade relations, and a "very aggressive" campaign is under way to convince Congress to repeal the Jackson-Vanik trade restriction provision that has impeded them for decades, he said.
McFaul criticized what he saw as a "structural campaign" against interactions with foreigners, including a new law that labels some non-governmental organizations that accept foreign grants as "foreign agents."
Anti-foreign rhetoric, and particularly anti-Western rhetoric, is counterproductive to U.S-Russian relations as well as the Russian government's stated goals of modernization and increased economic ties, he said.
"You can't have a real Silicon Valley if you're afraid to interact with foreigners," he said.
Russia is the United States' 20th-largest trading partner, and bilateral trade reached $42.9 billion last year, according to U.S. government statistics.
During the U.S. campaign, Republican challenger Mitt Romney accused Obama of being soft on Russia, which Romney once described as the United States' "No. 1 geopolitical foe," but McFaul dismissed Romney's tough talk on Russia as an old trick in the political playbook.
"There's no electoral cost to being tough on Russia in American campaigns," he said. "There's no pro-Russia electorate, but there is an anti-Russian electorate … ethnic communities that left during very bad times, in terms of Soviet occupation of their countries," he said.
McFaul touted military cooperation between Russia and the United States, particularly a deal that allows NATO to transport nonlethal goods to and from Afghanistan through Russian territory. He described the military-to-military relationship as "steady, well planned-out and disciplined."
The United States will push forward with plans for a missile defense shield, including installations in Europe, which have aroused the Kremlin's ire, but McFaul said he was an optimist that physics would prevail over what he characterized as blustery rhetoric.
"I think the actual conversation about this, not the public posturing … has been more pragmatic, has been more in line with reality," he said, adding that the planned system was not designed to counter Russia's missile capability.
Also, Obama would like to have a "serious conversation" with President Vladimir Putin about a further round of reductions in nuclear weapons to build on the New START treaty, signed in 2010, McFaul said, describing the existing treaty as "modest."
Asked whether he was surprised by the ouster of Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov on Tuesday, McFaul said, "I've stopped trying to be surprised or not in Russia. I react to what comes."

TITLE: Putin Congratulates Obama on Re-Election  
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin has congratulated U.S. President Barack Obama on his re-election, while Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev expressed relief that Russia wouldn’t have to deal with Mitt Romney.
Other Russian politicians cheered Obama’s victory as a sign that relations between the two countries would continue to improve under a “reset” started by Obama during his first term.
Putin sent a congratulatory telegram to Obama and plans to call him by phone in the near future to offer his personal best wishes, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
“In general, the Kremlin greets the information about Barack Obama's election victory very positively,” Peskov said, according to Interfax.
He said the text of the telegram would be made public after the U.S. side received it.
"We hope to develop and improve the positive initiatives in bilateral relations between Russia and the U.S. in the interests of international security and stability on the world stage," he said.
Medvedev, who as president from 2008 to May 2012 worked closely with Obama, was open in his delight about the election results.
"Obama is a clear and predictable partner," he told reporters, adding to a reporter’s question that Obama was “quite a successful president." 
He took a dig at Romney for declaring Russia as the United States’ “No. 1 geopolitical foe” on the campaign trail.
"I am pleased that the president of this wealthy country will not be someone who considers Russia as the No. 1 foe. This is paranoia," he said. "Whether we like America or not, the health of the dollar affects every Russian family.”
Turning to the reset in relations, he said it was “somewhat successful and somewhat not but will need to continue.”
The architect of the reset, U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul, pledged to continue to work toward closer ties with Russia.
"The Obama administration formulated a strategy for Russia four years ago, and we will follow it now,” he wrote in Russian on Twitter during a question-and-answer session about the U.S. election.
Other Russian politicians also saw hope for the reset, with Alexei Pushkov, the hawkish United Russia chairman of the State Duma’s International Affairs Committee, saying Obama’s victory meant that relations would not return to the post-Soviet lows experienced during the administration of George W. Bush.
Romney’s hawkish supporters "made a very serious and in some respects even a desperate attempt to return the United States, including its foreign policy, to the days of George W. Bush," Pushkov said, according to Interfax.
He expressed hope that Obama’s victory would mean a “less aggressive” U.S. foreign policy.
Mikhail Margelov, chairman of the Federation Council’s International Affairs Committee, cautioned that it would be hard for Obama to pursue new highs in U.S.-Russian relations because of differences over NATO, Afghanistan and an overall international situation that has become “fuzzy” after the Arab Spring toppled authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa, Interfax reported.
He predicted that the reset would continue but in a halting manner.
“I agree with the experts who say that U.S. foreign policy under the re-elected President Barack Obama will be carried out on an ‘incentive-response’ principle that is virtually unpredictable in terms of what the incentives will be, what the responses will be and even what the relationship with Russia will be,” Margelov said. 
“But there is in this case an incentive for the reset: Growing global problems that neither the U.S. nor Russia can resolve on its own,” he said.
Nikolai Levichev, head of the Duma faction of A Just Russia, said Obama now has a free hand to pursue the reset and predicted that it could be even more successful.
"In my opinion, this is a chance to try to repeat the reset,” said Levichev, a Duma deputy speaker, according to Interfax. “It will be a kind of take two."
He said Obama’s chances for success were higher because he wouldn’t need to lay the foundation for the reset, which he did during his first term, and now his “hands are untied” because he won’t face the constraints of running for a third term.
The future of the rest, however, hangs largely on Moscow, said Sergei Karaganov, a former presidential adviser to Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin.
"Much will depend on Russia,” said Karaganov, who heads the Council for Foreign and Defense Policy think tank, Interfax reported. “If Russia is perceived as waning power, then tensions may increase. If not, then I think we will see cool, practical cooperation.”
Meanwhile, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party and a Duma deputy speaker, said Obama would not be able to accomplish much and warned of four years of stagnation.
"He understands that this is his second and final term, a time when he can especially take it easy and travel around the world to carry out negotiations,” Zhirinovsky said, Interfax reported. “But nothing much will happen."
He said the U.S. should rethink its election system to introduce a single, six-year presidential term, which he said would be “better and more useful.”
"Then the president would have the opportunity and the time to implement his promises and plans," he said.
Russia introduced a six-year presidential term starting with Vladimir Putin’s election for a third term earlier this year. But the Russian president is allowed to serve two consecutive terms.
Under Obama and the current U.S. system, Zhirinovsky said, “America is doomed to stagnation.”

TITLE: Sixth Victim Dies in Moscow Office Shooting 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The sixth victim in an office shooting in northern Moscow died Thursday from injuries sustained when a troubled colleague went on a killing spree.
Nikita Strelnikov, who was admitted to the capital's Botkin hospital in critical condition Wednesday, passed away in the early hours of Thursday morning, Interfax reported, citing an unnamed medical source.
Investigators have detained and interrogated 30-year-old legal adviser Dmitry Vinogradov, who admitted to attacking his colleagues with a pair of hunting rifles Wednesday morning at the head office of the Rigla pharmaceutical company on Chermyanskaya Ulitsa.
Three men and two women died at the scene of the shooting, and 24-year-old Yaroslava Sergenuk remains in Moscow's Hospital No. 20, news reports said.
According to the Life News tabloid, Vinogradov's victims included 33-year-old Alexander Biruk and 33-year-old Anton Tretyakov, and two women, 25-year-old Yelena Lapshina and 25-year-old Natalya Plekhanova, all of whom were at their desks at the time of the shooting.
On his way out of the office, Vinogradov fired at 33-year-old Denis Moiseyev on a staircase leading to the office. Moiseyev died immediately.
Investigators have opened a criminal case on charges of murdering two or more people, which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, according to a statement on their official website.
Five hours before the shooting, Vinogradov published a manifesto on his Vkontakte page expressing contempt for society and calling the human race "a pile of compost."
News reports said Vinogradov went on the rampage because of his unrequited love for a woman, whom he could not forget despite their breakup.
Vinogradov's mother told Vechernyaya Moskva on Wednesday that her only son was "gentle," loved the outdoors and even volunteered with the WWF.
Vinogradov bought the rifles after he had a fight with his ex-girlfriend, his mother said, adding that he had seen psychiatrists who had prescribed him anti-depressants.

TITLE: Local Firm Says Lenfilm Owes $60,000 in Unpaid Bills 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: ST. PETERSBURG — A St. Petersburg-based energy company has filed a lawsuit in the city's arbitration court claiming that one of Russia's oldest film studios is bankrupt because it can't pay up around 2 million rubles ($63,000) that it owes for energy use.
In September, the arbitration court upheld the rights of state-owned Fuel and Energy Complex of St. Petersburg, which covers around 40 percent of the city's thermal-energy needs, to recover energy-supply debts from the studio over a contract totaling 1.35 million rubles, RIA-Novosti reported.
No date has yet been set for looking at the new lawsuit, and the film studio's managers remain optimistic about resolving the matter.
The companies came to an agreement on the unpaid bills in September, so the lawsuit could have been filed because the energy company's lawyers were confused about the previous debt, Lenfilm's director Eduard Pichugin told the news agency.
"The claim over the bankruptcy of Lenfilm is a misunderstanding, and we hope to resolve the issue today and expect that the lawsuit will be withdrawn," Pichugin said.
This is not the first time that the motion-picture studio, whose history dates to 1918, has had financial difficulties. It was set to be bought up at a bargain price by Sistema Financial Corporation in 2011. 
But in August that year, prominent film directors Alexei German and Alexander Sokurov sent an open letter to then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin asking to stop the privatization of the studio.
The studio's debts are now estimated to be around 80 million rubles, RIA-Novosti reported. Pichugin said earlier that the studio's debts would be repaid in two years, but he admitted at the end of October that the debts had been partially restructured.

TITLE: Defendant Gets Off Charge in ‘12’ Trial
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A criminal case against one more activist has been dropped as what has been dubbed the “Trial of 12” continued in the Vyborgsky District Court on Tuesday, with the number of activists facing prison terms of up to three years falling to seven.
On trial since April, the activists, who belonged to the National-Bolshevik Party (NBP) before it was banned as “extremist” in 2007, have been charged with relaunching the party’s activities, despite the majority of the defendants claiming they were acting as part of The Other Russia, a new party formed by the NBP’s founder Eduard Limonov following the ban.
Having pled not guilty, they described the trial as politically motivated and based on fabricated evidence. 
The court agreed with a motion presented by defendant Igor Boikov’s lawyer Ivan Bulgakov on Friday and ruled that his case be closed as the time limit for a minor offense had expired. Boikov had been detained for taking part in a Strategy 31 rally Oct. 31, 2010. 
However, when Boikov asked about his possessions confiscated during the search of his apartment, Judge Sergei Yakovlev said that their fate would be decided on when the trial against the other activists is concluded. On Friday, Boikov said that although he was an NBP supporter until 2007, he did not join The Other Russia when the new party was formed.
In September, cases against four other activists were closed on the same grounds. However, the remaining seven face prison terms, if found guilty. Andrei Dmitriyev, Andrei Pesotsky and Alexei Marochkin, who were charged as “organizers,” face up to three years in prison, while Andrei Milyuk, Ravil Bashirov, Roman Khrenov and Alexander Yashin face up to two years as “participants.”
In Tuesday’s session, the judge read out the response from Moscow film critic and television presenter Kirill Razlogov, the director of the Russian Institute of Cultural Studies whom he had previously asked to comment on the qualification of the Institute’s experts Vitaly Batov and Natalya Kryukova.
The defense said Batov, who was educated as a psychologist and claims to have invented a new science called “Psychohermeneutics,” not recognized elsewhere, and math teacher Kryukhova did not have the necessary expertise and legal right to conduct such analysis. The defense also identified the uncredited use of Wikipedia in their reports.
In his lengthy letter, Razlogov confirmed the qualifications of Batov and Kryukova, listing their titles and the conferences they took part in, while Kryukova in her commentary — sent with Razlogov’s letter and also read out by the judge — insisted that it was not necessary for an expert to be educated in political science or social studies. Large sections of Razlogov’s and Kryukova’s letters were identical, as the defendant Milyuk pointed out to the judge.
“It also raises questions about which of them wrote which letter, we’d like to have that clarified as well,” he said.
Batov and Kryukova, who analyzed 27 DVD discs of video surveillance secretly made during the activists’ weekly meetings in 2009, wrote in their reports that the group on the video was the NBP, thus providing the grounds that the investigators needed to bring the case to court.
Batova and Kryukova’s conclusion contradicts the previous analysis conducted by St. Petersburg University professor David Raskin, who concluded that it could not be established from the videos whether the meetings were by the NBP or any other similar group, and a report by the St. Petersburg University lecturer Dmitry Dubrovsky, who was commissioned by the defense and confirmed that it was not NBP meetings that were being shown in the video evidence.
During Tuesday’s hearing, Pesotsky gave his testimony as a defendant. Like Khrenov, Yashin, Bashirov and Milyuk, who testified last week, Pesotsky read out a written statement and refused to answer any questions from the judge, prosecutor and defense, using the constitutional right not to testify against oneself.


TITLE: Denisov Recants, Rejoins Team
AUTHOR: By Daniel Kozin
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: After weeks of speculation, the drawn-out conflict between Zenit St. Petersburg midfielder Igor Denisov and the club’s management has come to a close. The player admitted to being the guilty party in the dispute, and committed his future to the club in a public address published Thursday.
“It took time for me to understand what had happened. I acted wrongly in that situation and let my emotions get the better of me, and thus was not able to help my teammates to fulfill the expectations of our dedicated fans. I have a running contract, which I must and want to fulfill until its end.” 
The feud was sparked Sept. 22, when the Russian player demanded that his contract be renegotiated before he would continue to play for the team, citing the salary of Zenit’s new Brazilian striker Hulk, who broke Russian transfer records in his headline-grabbing arrival from FC Porto Sept. 3. Denisov was promptly demoted from the team’s main squad and barred from participating in Russian Premier League games by an impervious club management.
Denisov added fuel to the fire in a frank interview to news daily Sport Express, in which he justified his actions as defending the interests of the Russian players of Zenit’s squad, who he said were being disrespected by the club after the sudden financial inequality.
While the ostracized player languished in the reserve squad and refused to fulfill the only condition set by the club for his return to grace — a public apology for his conduct — the team’s performances continued to plummet, beginning with a Sept. 14 home defeat to FC Terek Grozny.
In the six games that followed the arrival of Hulk and fellow 40 million euro ($51m) signing Axel Witsel at Zenit, the team recorded just one victory while suffering three defeats, two of which were in crucial Champions League ties. 
The nosedive in performances and inability to come to an agreement with the team’s long-standing leader Denisov led to speculation about team unity, and even the future of Zenit’s Italian coach, Luciano Spalletti. 
In response to the allegations Sept. 27, Spalletti said: “I will show you that I was right [in choosing to remain with Zenit]. I am Zenit’s coach, and especially at this moment of great difficulty for the team, I will remain and continue to work for the club.”
Another scandal erupted in mid-October after an inquiry by the Auditing Committee into the projected cost of Zenit’s new stadium revealed a 20 billion ruble discrepancy between the project’s cost according to the contractor and the cost according to the Chief State Construction Inspectorate. The head of the city’s construction committee, Vyacheslav Semenenko, was fired amid allegations of corruption. 
However, a recent turnaround in fortunes has seen the team record six successive victories in all competitions. Denisov returned to the field for Friday’s 2-1 home victory against FC Rostov, with Zenit’s Portugese winger Miguel Danny also making his first appearance after nursing an injury since February. 
In the post-match press conference, Spalletti explained the team’s current state:
“When you go through such a difficult, unusual period, such as the one that we have experienced, it’s not easy to regain such intricate elements as team spirit, balance, and enthusiasm.”
Zenit was due to play a crucial Champions League return game against Belgian team R.C.S. Anderlecht in Brussels on Tuesday evening.
 


TITLE: Petersburg to Host Combat Games in 2013
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: In Oct. 2013, St. Petersburg will play host to the Second SportAccord Combat Games, the biggest international sports event in the city since the 1994 edition of the Goodwill Games.
Over 8 days of competition, from Oct. 18 through 26, 2013, St. Petersburg will welcome more than 1,500 athletes representing around 100 countries, ranging from traditional martial arts nations to states where these challenging sports are only emerging.
The first SportAccord Combat Games, which attracted 1,500 athletes from 60 countries, were held in Beijing in 2010. SportAccord is an umbrella organization that connects international sports federations and companies involved in organizing sports events. Its declared mission is to bring sports closer to ordinary people and encourage community activities through sports.
The Games in Beijing showcased 13 martial arts, including both Olympic and non-Olympic events: Wushu, Aikido, Boxing, Judo, Ju-jitsu, Karate, Kendo, Kickboxing, Muay Thai, Sambo, Sumo, Taekwondo and Wrestling. Nearly 120 gold medals were awarded to sportsmen from countries spanning all five continents.
It is expected that during the next edition of the Games the list of sports featured in the competitions will be increased to 15, with Fencing and Savate (also known as French boxing) included.
The event enjoys the support of the International Olympic Committee.
“The combat games celebrate the spirit of martial arts and the common values of these sports — namely, self-control, determination and mastery,” said David Neville, a representative of SportAccord, speaking Tuesday at a news conference at the Sports and Physical Culture Committee of the St. Petersburg government.
Neville, who this week inspected the future sites and sports venues which will host the competitions, said he is convinced that the city will benefit from hosting the next edition of the Games. “I have no doubt that these games will make history and become a great success,” Neville said.
This month, the organizing committee of the Second SportAccord Combat Games is organizing an open competition for a logo, which will become a key element in the promotion of the event, both in Russia and internationally.
“The event’s logo needs to reflect not only the values of the sports represented but also the cultural and historical heritage of the city of St. Petersburg,” said Pavel Zhuravlev, head of the event’s organizing committee. “We very much hope that St. Petersburg will get into the international spotlight as a major sports destination, and potentially a host city for further significant international competitions.”
Individual designers and companies wishing to take part in the contest should submit their ideas via www.rsbi.ru, the website of the Russian Federation of Martial Arts before Nov. 15.
“I do realize that we are holding the contest at short notice, but I would like to emphasize that this is rather a competition of ideas rather than that of a detailed concept,” Zhuravlev stressed. “Developing a concept will take longer, but ideally we would like to start working with the selected images by the end of November.”


TITLE: Local Town’s Hospital Unveils Baby Box
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A baby box opened in a hospital in the small town of Kirishi in the Leningrad Oblast last week has become the tenth of its kind so far in the country. The box is a window where desperate mothers can leave unwanted babies, and it is hoped that the box could save the lives of babies rejected by their mothers.
Russia annually registers several hundred murders of newborns by their mothers, and cases of dead or still living babies found in garbage containers, forests or snowdrifts in different parts of the country are often reported in the national media.
One of the most recent cases was reported in St. Petersburg in August when a stranger found a 3-day-old baby covered with a plastic bag in the bushes. The boy, who was still alive, received medical treatment and was lucky to get adopted a month later.
“Baby box is, of course, neither a slogan nor a panacea but it’s a way of attracting attention to the problem and of helping women who lose their way,” said Galina Murzakayeva, coordinator at the Russian social foundation Kolybel Nadezhdy (Cradle of Hope), which organized the baby box service in Kirishi and a number of other Russian cities.
Kirishi, located about 100 kilometers southeast of St. Petersburg, is not known for a particularly high rate of murders of newborn babies by their parents, but avoiding such situations is still necessary, said Nikolai Kozminykh, former ombudsman of the Leningrad Oblast, who actively promoted the opening of the baby box when still in the post.
Kozminykh said he decided to support the project after dealing with a case in which Tajik migrants brought a baby to police that they said they had found in a garbage container. Kozminykh, who has children of his own, said he was deeply affected by the case.
Yelena Kotova, head of Kolybel Nadezhdy, said that although statistically 12 to 16 newborn babies or their dead bodies are found in Russia every month, the real figures are three times higher, for many of the bodies are never found. 
According to Russian police statistics, in 2010-2011 268 cases that qualified as the murder of a baby by its mother were registered.
The methods used to dispose of unwanted babies are often remarkable for their brutality.
In Kotova’s home city of Perm last year the bodies of two newborn babies were found on the balcony of one family’s apartment. The woman who lived in that apartment with her other children just felt unable to raise more children, Kotova said.
In 2010 a 23-year-old woman gave birth to her baby in a forest in the Moscow region, then hit the unwanted child’s head twice against a tree, before putting the baby’s body on the rails of a suburban railway line, where it was run over by an electric train, Moskovsky Komsomolets daily reported.
On New Year’s Eve last year in a town in the Irkutsk Oblast a woman threw her six-month-old baby into a snowdrift and ran away a few minutes before midnight. Fortunately, the incident was seen by other people, who picked up the baby and called the police and ambulance, Komsomolskaya Pravda daily said.
In Jan. 2010, in St. Petersburg, a mother left her 10-day-old daughter outside when the temperatures dropped to minus 20 C. An elderly pensioner heard a baby’s cry and found the girl, which saved the child’s life.
The essential sum of 263,000 rubles ($8,300) for opening the life-saving window in Kirishi’s hospital was raised thanks to donations by local businessmen.
The technology of a baby box window is simple. After a baby is put into the baby box, the door closes after 30 seconds and a signal is sent to the nursing unit. The baby box is not under video surveillance, so women can feel completely anonymous when leaving their baby. 
Next to the baby box there are information stands with appeals to parents to think over their decision carefully, and phone numbers they can call to get help.
Kotova said that though the project in Perm was only a year old, a baby had already been left in a baby box in the city. The five-day-old girl was left in there in good health with a note that gave her name and date of birth. Two more babies were left in baby boxes separately organized by the administration of Russia’s Krasnodar region.
At the same time the emergency helpline given on Kolybel Nadezhdy’s information board has already brought at least 16 young women to the foundation and social services. All those women found the help they needed and kept their babies, Kotova said.
Kotova said from her experience the major reasons for abandoning babies in Russia are most often the combination of “post-natal depression and serious financial worries.”
“When women have post-natal depression they often behave irrationally. But if in that condition they are also in a desperate financial and social situation it may lead them to dramatic action. And in most cases those women are not necessarily alcoholics or drug addicts,” Kotova said.
“Sometimes a woman who already has two children realizes that she won’t be able to raise the third one and gets rid of that child. Or we had a 19-year-old girl who had a three-month-old baby and appealed for help to us because she had neither a place to live nor money to live on. When we met with her she held the baby dressed in a rabbit shape suit and kept saying ‘I don’t know what to do with him!’” Kotova said.
Nikolai Muravlyev, senior priest at one of Kirishi’s churches, who came to bless the new baby box at the opening ceremony, called the service “an island of safety.”
“This service may look unusual but in a dramatic situation in which a woman is so desperate that she may even commit a crime, it can really be a salvation,” Muravlyev said.
Tatyana Sobolevskaya, deputy of the head doctor at the hospital’s maternity department of the hospital where the baby box was opened, said “the baby box is not a call to leave babies that way but a lifeline which can save them in case of emergency.”
“Even if only one child is saved that way it will be worth it,” Sobolevskaya said.
The practice of installing baby boxes, which came to Russia from European countries such as Britain or Germany, where baby boxes are already quite numerous, has become the subject of heated debate. Opponents say that baby boxes promote irresponsibility and orphancy, while supporters argue that the facilities may save unwanted babies from inevitable death.
Svetlana Agapitova, children’s ombudsman of St. Petersburg, said that in order for baby boxes to be effective they should be opened in large numbers. “Otherwise, it won’t be effective for mothers deciding to leave babies but not prepared to travel to a distant place with a baby box to leave a child there,” she said. People should also be well informed about such places, Agapitova said.
Meanwhile, according to statistics provided by the St. Petersburg children’s ombudsman’s office, in 2010 there were 5,606 cases registered of mothers rejecting their newborns, in 2009 they registered 6,852 cases of the kind, in 2008 — 7,442 cases. In 2010 the leading number of such rejections was registered in Moscow, the Kemerovo Oblast, the Krasnodar region, the Sverdlovsk Oblast and the Nizhny Novgorod Oblast.
In some regions the high rate of rejections was due to such action being taken by migrant mothers, particularly by illegal migrant mothers, the ombudsman’s office said.
The total number of children in care in Russia totals more than 700,000. About 70 percent of these children have been taken in by foster parents, adoptive families or receive guardianship. However, about 130,000 remain in orphanages, Russia’s Children’s Ombudsman Pavel Astakhov said earlier this year.


TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Sokurov Walks Out</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Award-winning Russian film director Alexander Sokurov has made the decision to leave the board of directors at St. Petersburg’s Lenfilm film studio, Interfax said last week.
Sokurov wrote a letter about his decision to Russian Culture minister Vladimir Medinsky.
“I wrote that letter because I believe that my presence on the board of directors is a formality. My opinions on the development of the studio went unheard,” Sokurov said.
On Oct. 15 the Russian Property Ministry announced that Russian film director Fyodor Bondarchuk had been appointed chairman of the board.
Bondarchuk said he would not allow anyone “to oust” Sokurov from Lenfilm and that he would be ready to cooperate with the film directory “on a separate program.”
Bondarchuk said he believed that Sokurov’s statement about the impossibility of working at Lenfilm was an emotional response.
“If it is unacceptable for Alexander Nikolayevich (Sokurov) to communicate with some film directors we shall work with him on an individual program,” Bondarchuk said.
However, Bondarchuk said he was not ready to meet all of Sokurov’s demands.

<b>Fired For Drug Use</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — About 100 St. Petersburg policemen have been dismissed from their posts for drug use, head of St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast police Sergei Umnov said last week, Interfax reported.
Umnov said the drug users had been uncovered during some routine inspections.

<b>List of Shame</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The Russian Education and Science Ministry has published a list of universities in the country that have been found to be operating ineffectively. 
The list of ineffective institutions in St. Petersburg includes the State Polar Academy, St. Petersburg State Theater Art Academy, St. Petersburg State Cinema and Television University, St. Petersburg State University of Culture and Art and six more higher education institutions, Interfax said.
In Moscow, 20 institutions appeared on the list.

<b>Kids in America</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — During the past 20 years, Americans have adopted 60,000 children from Russia, the press service of the US Embassy in Russia said last week.
The press service published the statistics to coincide with the agreement between Russia and the US on adoption, which came into effect Nov. 1, Interfax reported.
“The agreement guarantees that the adoption of children between Russia and the US will continue successfully and the well-being of the adopted children will be secured,” the message said.


TITLE: Putin Puts Shoigu in Defense
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday fired Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov and appointed Moscow region Governor Sergei Shoigu in his place.
Putin informed Shoigu, a longtime ally who only became governor in May after serving 18 years as emergency situations minister, about his new appointment during a meeting at the president’s Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow.
“You know about the situation that, unfortunately, has developed recently around the Defense Ministry,” Putin said, according to a transcript of the meeting published on the Kremlin’s website. “In order to create the conditions for an objective investigation of all the related issues, I have decided to relieve Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov of his duties.”
Putin said Shoigu was best suited to spearhead his ambitious plans to pump nearly $770 billion into overhauling the armed forces over the next decade.
“Thank you, Vladimir Vladimirovich,” Shoigu replied, using Putin’s name and patronymic. “This is an unexpected offer, but I will do everything in my power… to justify your confidence.”
Serdyukov had received praise for his work in pushing through unpopular military reforms since being appointed defense minister in 2007.
But Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he was fired in connection with a corruption scandal that has engulfed Serdyukov since allegations emerged that an agency within the Defense Ministry had sold off military real estate to civilian companies at knock-down prices.
Investigators raided the offices of defense procurement agency Oboronservis, which Serdyukov chaired until last year, in connection with a $95.5 million fraud on Oct. 25.
The problem might be more personal, however. Unconfirmed media reports have said that Serdyukov’s father-in-law, former Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov, was on the warpath over alleged marital indiscretions by his son-in-law.
Peskov told reporters that Putin had “personally made the decision to remove Serdyukov” and chosen Shoigu to replace him “at the recommendation of the prime minister.”
During the meeting with Shoigu, Putin said: “There is a need for a person who can continue the positive dynamic development of the armed forces and deliver on state defense orders and the grandiose plans for army reform that have been announced. Such a person could be you, and I invite you to take the post of defense minister.”
Shoigu for years ranked as the country’s second most popular politician after Putin in opinion polls.
The acting Moscow region governor will most likely be current Deputy Governor Ruslan Tsalikov, Interfax reported, citing sources inside the regional administration.
Irek Vildanov, chairman of the Moscow region’s elections committee, told Interfax that a new governor would be chosen by voters in September 2013.


TITLE: May 6 Detainees Facing Anxious Waiting Game
AUTHOR: By Jonathan Earle  and Yekaterina Kravtsova 
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Six months have passed since bloody clashes between protesters and riot police at an opposition rally on the eve of President Vladimir Putin’s inauguration appeared to mark the end of the street protest movement’s halcyon days.
Subsequent months saw laws on public speech and assembly tightened and criminal investigations opened against two opposition leaders, while another was ousted from the State Duma.
But perhaps nothing has symbolized the Kremlin’s newfound intolerance for critics better than the plodding prosecution of 19 people suspected of participating in violence at the May rally.
It’s anyone’s guess when the 16 suspects awaiting trial — two others have had preliminary hearings, and one is still at large — will go before a judge. Estimates range from next week to next year.
The pace of the investigation has raised concerns about the effect that extended pretrial detention is having on suspects’ health and fueled suspicion that investigators are writing history rather than uncovering it.
“Investigators will use this time to make something up,” Tatyana Barabanova, mother of suspect Andrei Barabanov, 22, said by telephone Monday.
Barabanov’s lawyer, Svetlana Sidorkina, said that she expected the investigation of her client to wrap up in the next two or three weeks but that the case wouldn’t go to court until next year because it would take several months for lawyers to examine the estimated 18,000 pages of court documents.
Other theories about the sluggish tempo abound. Lawyer Vasily Kushnir said investigators are eager to produce evidence of a grand conspiracy involving financiers, organizers and activists.
“It’s my understanding that they’re trying to implicate Leonid Razvozzhayev and Konstantin Lebedev as organizers and tie them all together — ‘here are the organizers; here are the agents,’” said Kushnir, whose client, Stepan Zimin, was detained in early June.
Razvozzhayev and Lebedev, leaders of the Left Front movement, are under investigation for allegedly planning riots to be financed by a Georgian politician, allegations that appeared in “Anatomy of a Protest 2,” a documentary-style film shown on state-controlled television last month.
Investigators successfully argued that Zimin was likely to go into hiding and could influence victims and witnesses, and his detention was extended to March 6. Suspects can legally be held in pretrial detention for up to a year.
“In any country, attacking a law enforcement officer is a serious offense. This is why their detention has been relatively harsh,” said Alexei Mukhin, an analyst for the Center for Political Information. “Political prisoners are imprisoned for their ideas, not for their actions.”
Reports of death and suffering in pretrial detention in recent years have cast a pall over the system, and some May 6 suspects appeared to be faring better than others.
Barabanov’s conditions in pretrial detention are mostly satisfactory, Sidorkina said. He subsists on a diet of mostly oatmeal — his petition to be served only vegetarian food has not yet been approved — and he’s allowed to meet with relatives once per month, she said, adding that “he doesn’t feel alone.”
But suspect Vladimir Akimenkov, 25, suffers from a severe eye disease and began to lose his vision in pretrial detention. By September, he was nearly blind, according to a brief profile on the website of the May 6 Committee, which organizes rallies and donations on the suspects’ behalf.
“The hospital doesn’t treat him,” May 6 Committee activist Alexander Ivanov said by phone Monday. “Members of the Public Monitoring Commission said after a recent visit that the window in his room was broken and that he can’t use his money account to buy food or anything else. They also said deliveries don’t reach him.”
Akimenkov, Barabanov and others recently had their detention extended to March 6. Supporters have staged several rallies in Moscow and other cities.
Last week, about 800 protesters on New Pushkin Square in Moscow adopted a resolution that called for the release of “all the wrongfully imprisoned” and people in pretrial detention as well as for the resignation of Investigative Committee chief Alexander Bastrykin.
Further protests are scheduled for December, and a fundraising drive to support the suspects is ongoing, Ivanov said.
“I don’t know how I could go through this if the May 6 Committee wasn’t helping me,” said Ksenia Kosenko, sister of suspect Mikhail Kosenko. “They gave Mikhail one of his lawyers as well as material and moral support.”
Investigators have chosen to first try Kosenko and Maxim Luzyanin, who has confessed, to establish facts that can be used in later cases, said Vadim Kobzev, a former investigator and now a lawyer, whose clients include Alexei Navalny.
About 400 people were detained during and immediately following the May 6 melee. Rally organizers say police provoked a confrontation by creating a bottleneck, and some have speculated that the violence originated with hired provocateurs.
Several opposition leaders, including Sergei Udaltsov and Navalny, were repeatedly questioned and had their apartments and offices searched as part of the investigation.


TITLE: Medvedev Gives Nuclear Proliferation Warning
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has used his speech at the Asia-Europe Meeting Summit to warn of the dangers of nuclear proliferation, demand a cap on greenhouse gas emissions and call for religious tolerance.
Speaking at the summit of the Asia-Europe Meeting Summit (ASEM) in Vientiene, Laos, Medvedev appeared to call for a tighter inspections regime and monitoring of nations that had refused to sign up to nonproliferation commitments.
The START arms reduction treaties between the United States and Russia, which were renewed in 2010, were no longer enough to ensure nuclear security, he said.
“These steps have taken us to a level where we need effort not just from the United States and Russia, but all countries with nuclear capabilities. Attention must be paid to the programs of countries that have so far refused to sign up to the nonproliferation treaty,” he said.
He also pressed for a “more serious” approach to environmental protection and backed caps on greenhouse gas emissions. “All countries have a responsibility to participate in the program to reduce emissions. And I emphasize that means all countries, otherwise the project will be useless.”
Russia has refused to sign up to a second implementation period of the Kyoto Protocol on the grounds that it is useless without U.S. participation.
He also offered to host a conference to promote inter-faith dialogue in Russia, saying that the country’s multiethnic and multi-confessional history made it perfectly placed to “find a path to harmonious building of intercivilizational dialogue.”
“It is necessary to find a platform to bring together religious leaders and structures of civil society. In this context, we are ready as a country to hold an ASEM conference on inter-religious and intercivilizational dialogue,” he said.
If it happens, the conference will be organized by UNESCO, he added.
The annual ASEM summit brings together delegates from more than 50 countries across Europe and Asia.
Medvedev was expected to fly to Vietnam later Tuesday to discuss trade deals including construction of nuclear power stations and the reopening of a Soviet-era navy base in the country.

TITLE: U.K. Litvinenko Inquiry May Reveal New Details
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON — A British inquest into the killing of former Russian Federal Security Service officer Alexander Litvinenko may make public previously unreleased details about the murder investigation, a lawyer said.
Litvinenko died in November 2006 after ingesting polonium-210, a rare radioactive isotope that was secretly slipped into his tea at a London hotel. On his deathbed, he blamed the Kremlin for his death, which then took relations between Moscow and London to a post-Cold War low.
Inquest lawyer Hugh Davies said the evidence would include surveillance footage, crime scene evidence, medical notes, scientific analysis and witness interviews — offering new details about a sinister poisoning case that grabbed worldwide attention.
Davies added that details of a related German investigation into the circumstances of Litvinenko’s killing could also be published.
“The documents may be made public through the inquest website,” he said Friday at a preliminary hearing ahead of the inquest.
In Britain, inquests are held following unexplained or violent deaths. Litvinenko’s is set for next year and could begin as soon as March, according to Alex Goldfarb, a friend of Litvinenko who was at the hearing.
Inquests are meant only to determine a cause of death, so they don’t apportion blame. But in Litvinenko’s case every detail of the sensitive inquiry is being scrutinized for clues to the possible involvement of Russia’s secret services. At a previous hearing, a lawyer for Litvinenko’s widow said it was vital that the inquest investigate “the criminal role of the Russian state.”
On Friday, Davies said those behind the inquest would keep an open mind, referring to several competing theories about Litvinenko’s death, including speculation that he may have been killed in an accident, by Chechen-linked assassins, or by what Davies described as the “Spanish mafia.”
Speaking to reporters after the hearing, widow Marina Litvinenko said she wasn’t alarmed by the suggestion that the inquest would weigh each and every scenario.
“I just want to know the truth,” she said.


TITLE: Napoleonic Soldiers Get Burial
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MINSK, Belarus — Belarus held a burial ceremony Friday for 110 Napoleonic soldiers who died in a major battle in 1812 against the Russian army.
Tens of thousands of French troops died in November 1812 when the Russians attacked French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s army as it fled across the Berezina River on a retreat from Moscow.
The devastating defeat eventually led to the 1814 Russian takeover of Paris and Bonaparte’s exile. Since then, the word “Berezina” means “a complete disaster” in French.
The remains were excavated by a Belarusian Defense Ministry unit that searches for soldiers’ remains. They were buried Friday at a cemetery in the village of Studenka, 100 kilometers east of Minsk, in a ceremony attended by French Ambassador Michel Raineri.
Belarusian authorities in previous years have buried hundreds of remains of Napoleonic soldiers found in the same area.

TITLE: Nationalists Gather For Annual Russian March
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Nationalists walked along a downtown embankment Sunday shouting anti-Kremlin slogans in the annual Russian March, which was beset by low turnout and occasionally dangerous antics, including an attempt to shoot at a police helicopter with a flare gun.
The march, which took place on the National Unity Day holiday, saw some 6,000 people representing various nationalist groups, from moderate to far-right, walk along the Moscow River across from the Kremlin waving yellow-black-and-white imperial flags. The event concluded with a rally near the Central House of Artists.
Police detained a group of rally participants who tried to fire a flare gun at a helicopter, news agency RBC reported, citing police. About 25 others wearing black overcoats with swastikas were arrested near metro Tretyakovskaya, near the march’s starting point, police said in a statement.
Alexander Belov, the leader of the banned Movement Against Illegal Immigration, was met by applause when he called President Vladimir Putin an “enemy” at the rally.
“He will continue to drink our blood before he is thrown out of the Kremlin,” Belov said.
Putin created National Unity Day in 2005, and it replaces commemorations of the Bolshevik Revolution. The holiday now marks a 1612 uprising against Polish invaders that led to their expulsion from the country.
On Sunday, Putin laid flowers at the monument to militia head Kuzma Minin and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky, the leaders of that uprising. The Associated Press reported Sunday that Putin walked slowly but without assistance. Recent media reports have speculated that he has been suffering from debilitating back pain.
Standing alongside Putin were leaders of the biggest religious faiths in the nation — Russian Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist, the presidential press service said.
Nationalist leaders who attended Sunday’s march, including Belov, have also participated in opposition rallies, a fact that has unsettled some human rights activists and members of the protest movement.
Last year’s Russian March was attended by opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who addressed the crowd on stage. Navalny is known for his “Stop Feeding the Caucasus” slogan, aimed at halting major federal subsidies to the North Caucasus republics.
Navalny was not seen in the crowd at this year’s event and did not speak at the rally.
Sunday marked the first time the annual Russian March was held in central Moscow and not in Lyublino, a working-class neighborhood in the capital’s southeastern outskirts.
“For us, it was of fundamental importance to get out of the captivity of the bedroom districts,” Ivan Mironov, deputy head of Sergei Baburin’s All-Russia Union, told website Nakanune.ru Friday.
But one Russian nationalist who gave his name only as Andrei said he was disappointed by the march because of the low attendance. As many as 10,000 people have attended past events, while this year’s drew about 6,000 participants, police said.
“The Russian people are in a state of dormancy. I believe it is because we still have not repented for killing the Tsar,” he said, referring to the killing of Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II, in 1918 by the Bolsheviks.
Anti-immigrant sentiments were strong among the young participants of the rally, some of whom made Nazi-style salutes as they stood with their shoulders covered by an imperial flag.
“We are against the non-Russians who are occupying Moscow,” said one of the teenagers, who said he was a member of a fan club for the Avangard football club. There are large numbers of nationalists among young Russian football fans.
“We can only get rid of them with a white terror,” said another teenager standing nearby.
The presence of the far-right groups at the rally was noted with distaste by leaders of the more moderate nationalist parties, whose members appeared to distance themselves from such groups.
“Those youngsters don’t understand anything, and they are led by leaders who don’t explain anything to them,” said Yevgeny Vasilyev, a member of the Forgotten Regiment organization of former paratroopers.
“People are fed up with hearing about the unification of the Russian race. They want to hear about the unification of every Russian against the regime,” Vasilyev said.


TITLE: PM Calls for Pussy Riot Release
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PARTSA, Mordovia Republic — Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said the women in the Pussy Riot punk band serving two-year prison sentences should be set free, while a band member’s husband tried to visit his wife in jail in the Mordovia republic.
Medvedev said Friday that he detested Pussy Riot’s performance of a “punk prayer” at Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral during which they pleaded with the Virgin Mary for deliverance from President Vladimir Putin.
But Medvedev added the women have been in prison long enough and should be released.
He made a similar statement before October’s appeal hearings, fueling speculation about their possible release.
Three members of the band were convicted on charges of hooliganism in August. One of them, Yekaterina Samutsevich, was released on appeal last month, but the other two, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, were sent to prison camps to serve their sentences.
Also Friday, Tolokonnikova’s husband, Pyotr Verzilov, was turned away by authorities when he tried to visit her at a prison camp in the village of Partsa in Mordovia, a region known for the gulag camps filled with tens of thousands of inmates in the 1930s.
He had brought paperwork regarding the ongoing legal drama of the Pussy Riot trial that should have enabled him to meet his wife on prison grounds. But he was told that she remains in quarantine for several more days.
Tolokonnikova and a team of lawyers are planning an appeal to a regional court, requesting that her sentence be put off until the couple’s daughter, 4-year-old Gera, is 14, Verzilov said.
Verzilov said his wife has been treated well by prison officials, but he attributed that to the publicity stirred up by the trial.
“All that would be needed here would be an order from someone high-placed in Moscow who’d say, ‘Press her, make her feel the real Russian prison,’” Verzilov said. “People follow the instructions they are given from the top.”
The women are woken up at 6:30 a.m., and their workday begins at 7:30 a.m. and continues for eight hours by law, but sometimes more. Most of the women in Tolokonnikova’s prison work in the sewing industry, where they make clothes for Russia’s special and civil services.
Tolokonnikova has not yet begun working mandatory shifts, but was offered the chance to break some asphalt within the prison compound a week ago, a task she undertook with fervor after being cooped up for too long, Verzilov said.
Relatives are allowed to visit the women inside the prison for several hours, six times a year. Conjugal visits, for three days, are permitted four times per year. With the right stack of paperwork, prisoners are allowed food, books, medicine and clothes — in black, the uniform of the prison — from relatives and friends.
Meanwhile, the country’s main patent agency refused to register the words “Pussy Riot” as a trademark, Rospatent said Friday. The agency did not provide any details on why the request was turned down.
The registration request came from a company that belongs to the wife of the band’s lawyer, Mark Feigin. Feigin tweeted that he will try to register the trademark in the West.

TITLE: Police Detain Owner of Missing Freighter
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The owner of the missing freighter Amurskaya has been arrested on suspicion of negligence leading to multiple deaths.
Police in Komsomolsk-on-Amur said early Tuesday that they had arrested the CEO of the Nikolayevsk-on-Amur Sea Port, the company that owns the missing vessel.
The unnamed manager is expected to be charged with violations of maritime safety rules leading to two or more deaths. The charges carry a sentence of up to seven years in jail.
The Amurskaya freighter was carrying a cargo of 700 tons of gold ore when it went missing near the Shantar Islands in the Sea of Okhotsk on Oct. 28.
All nine crew members are still missing.
Rescuers said Monday that they believed they had located the missing vessel in shallow waters near its last known location, but a diving expedition to conduct a closer inspection had to be postponed because of deteriorating weather.
An officer on the rescue tug at the scene said divers would try to reach the submerged object again on Wednesday, Interfax reported.
An Emergency Situations Ministry aircraft searching the area of the suspected wreck returned to base after failing to find any survivors Tuesday.

TITLE: Former Mayor Luzhkov Says Putin is Avoiding Him
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Yury Luzhkov said he feels like a pariah two years after his ouster as Moscow’s mayor, with President Vladimir Putin and other officials going out of their way to avoid him.
Luzhkov, speaking in an interview with Moskovsky Komsomolets published Tuesday, said he has not met with Putin since then-President Dmitry Medvedev fired him over “a loss of confidence” in October 2010.
“No we haven’t met,” he said, adding that he believed Putin was avoiding him.
He said he resigned from the Russian Geographical Society, where Putin serves as chairman of the board of trustees, over such “politicking.”
“I received an invitation and agenda for a meeting in St. Petersburg. A half hour later, the courier returned and retracted the invitation because Putin was going to attend the meeting,” Luzhkov said. “These people didn’t want to meet with me even a year after I left my post.”
Luzhkov, who served as mayor for 18 years, left in disgrace amid a power struggle with the Kremlin. In the weeks before his dismissal, state-controlled television aired reports that cast doubt on his leadership and the work activities of his wife, one-time billionaire Yelena Baturina.
Luzhkov also complained that he hadn’t been invited to the re-opening of the Bolshoi Theater last fall, despite overseeing its reconstruction at the personal request of Medvedev.


TITLE: Bombardier Considers Local Plant
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Canadian plane builder Bombardier may become the first foreign aerospace firm to commercially assemble aircraft in Russia.
Executives from the Canadian firm have discussed plans to start building its Q-400 turboprop aircraft with officials at the Industry and Trade Ministry.
The plans being considered would see the aircraft being built at the Aviakor aviation plant in Samara, part of Oleg Deripaska’s Russian Machines corporation, Vedomosti reported.
“Discussion is not only about assembly, but also production of several components for Bombardier’s global market,” Deputy Industry and Trade Minister Yury Slyusar told the paper.
The 78-seat, twin-engine Q-400 has a range of 2,500 kilometers and carries a price tag of $27 million.
President Vladimir Putin has ordered the Transportation Ministry to make a priority of boosting inter-regional air travel, the sector that the Q-400 is designed to serve.
U.S. aerospace giant Boeing already produces numerous components for its jets in Russia, including specialized parts for its 787 Dreamliner, but Bombardier would be the first foreign plane builder to carry out the full aircraft assembly process in the country if the deal goes through.
Bombardier’s official representative in Russia could not be reached for comment Thursday.
Vedomosti cited a source close to the project saying that the government has a keen interest in the deal and that financing could come from state-owned VEB investment bank.
The Canadian engineering firm and Yekaterinburg-based Uralvagonzavod are preparing a joint bid for a tender to build new metro cars for the Moscow metro.

TITLE: Medvedev Rues Lack Of  Innovation Investment
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 figure 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 towards 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 at 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: Internet Agency Swamped With 5,000 Ban Requests
AUTHOR: By Rachel Nielsen
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Communications and Press Ministry was inundated with more than 5,000 requests to ban various websites on the day a new Internet restriction law took effect.
Yet only 190 of the requests were deemed suitable for “expert” review, and fewer than 20 sites have so far been placed on the blacklist, the Federal Mass Media Inspection Service, the ministerial agency responsible for maintaining the list, said on its website Friday, a day after the program began.
Ten websites were banned by Friday, adding to the six that had been blacklisted a day earlier. The agency said the initial six were banned because an “expert opinion” concluded that they contained child pornography, but it didn’t explain the bans for the other 10 sites.
The blacklist is not publicly available. By law, the state should notify the domain owners, hosting companies and Internet service providers affected by the ban.
The only way for the general public to know whether a page has been officially blacklisted is to enter its address into a search engine on the agency’s website, zapret-info.gov.ru, which also accepts submissions for the list.
To file a submission, users must enter the Web page’s address into the online form, describe the content type (video, photo, text, etc.), and indicate whether the offending material is child pornography, promotion of drug use, incitement to suicide or other offending material.
That matches the legislation itself, which bans Internet material displaying child pornography, soliciting children for porn, encouraging drug use or promoting suicide, and also bans distribution of content that is illegal under Russian law.
The form also encourages users to give “additional information, including the login/password and/or other information for access” to the Web page in question.
According to the registry website, the decision to shut down a Web page falls to officials at the agency running the registry, the Federal Drug Control Service or the Federal Consumer Protection Service, the country’s public health watchdog.
Complaints can be filed online by ordinary citizens, businesses, organizations, government agencies and local administrations.
No further information on the number of complaints, reviews or blacklisted pages had been released since last week. Monday was a national holiday. The addresses and names of the sites banned under the program have not been disclosed.


TITLE: Moscow’s Mercury Tower Eclipses London’s Shard
AUTHOR: By Irina Filatova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Driving around Manhattan in early 1991, billionaire Igor Kesayev admired the Chrysler Building and Citigroup Center, thinking that a similar skyscraper should appear in Moscow someday.
Twenty years later this dream came true, resulting in Russia’s capital getting the tallest building in Europe that overtook the previous leader: London’s Shard.
The Mercury City Tower in the Moscow City financial district was ranked the continent’s highest structure by German research firm Emporis after it reached its final height of 338.8 meters, said Kesayev, whose Mercury Development had just completed construction of the skyscraper.
The tower, which is almost 29 meters higher than its British peer, cost more than $1 billion to build, he said at a presentation of the project Thursday, adding that its implementation encourages Mercury Development to set more ambitious goals.
Several skyscrapers have been built in the city over the past few years, and there are more projects in the pipeline, with the expansion of Moscow City being under way.
Mercury Development CEO Vyacheslav Basati said that the district has good prospects to develop as a business center. He added that it is likely to concentrate more activities over the next few years as a result of City Hall’s ban on high-rise construction in Moscow’s historical center.
Earlier this year City Hall prohibited the construction of buildings that are higher than 75 meters in the city center in an effort to preserve Moscow’s historical skyline. However, the regulations didn’t affect the projects that had been approved prior to the ban and ones under construction.
The interior design of Mercury City, whose construction started in 2006, is to be completed by the end of this year. The 75-story tower, covered with gold-colored glass, was designed as a multi-functional complex whose total space amounts to 173,960 square meters, including 87,600 square meters of A-class offices and 22,360 square meters of apartments.
Getting the highest skyscraper in Europe is a significant milestone for Moscow, which marks its development as a financial center and will attract more global companies in the future, Basati said. 
Basmati added that Moscow now has 87 buildings higher than 100 meters, which makes it “a city of skyscrapers.”
Seven in Emporis’ list of Europe’s 20 tallest buildings are located in Moscow and include the likes of Capital City Tower and the Federation Tower in Moscow City, according to the research company’s website. Mercury City is not yet on the list.
Apartment sales in the tower have already started, and the company is also in talks with potential tenants of the office space, with Gazprom, Rosneft and Rosatom indicating interest, Basati said.
He said monthly office rental rates in Mercury City range between $950 and $1,150 per square meter per month, which is close to the upper limit in the district. Average rates for offices in Moscow City stand between $650 and $1,000 per square meter without taxes and maintenance costs, according to Jones Lang LaSalle.
Basati said Mercury Development has yet to sign contracts to lease out offices in the tower, but he expects a surge in demand after the tower is completed, as tenants tend to choose completed projects to avoid risk.
The share of tenants who sign preliminary agreements to rent office space in buildings under construction currently stands at between 3 percent and 5 percent, down from 30 percent to 40 percent before the financial crisis of 2008, said Alexei Bogdanov, head of office department at S.A. Ricci.
Before the crisis there was a shortage of offices in Moscow, resulting in tenants seeking to secure space in advance, but the amount of vacant office space has increased sharply since then, he said by telephone.
“There are alternative options on the market. So why should a tenant risk and rent space in a building whose construction is still under way?” Bogdanov said.
The overall amount of high-quality office space in Moscow stood at 14.6 million square meters at the end of the third quarter, of which 13.2 percent was vacant, according to Jones Lang LaSalle.
A total of 12 new office buildings, including ALKON in the north and Park Pobedy in the west, will be completed in Moscow by the end of this year, adding 313,000 square meters of office space available for rent, the consulting company said.

TITLE: Restoring Russia’s Greatness 
AUTHOR: By Richard Lourie 
TEXT: Greatness is an odd word because it signifies both quantity and quality. In the case of Russia, the two are easily confused. Even after the huge territorial losses incurred with the Soviet collapse, Russia still accounts for one-seventh of the Earth’s surface. Therefore, it has a geographical imperative to think big.
Russia is unlike Britain and France, which shrank back to their middle-sized home nations after losing their empires, making the transition to second-rateness with good grace. Russia’s loss of empire was more sudden, destructive and humiliating. Russia suffers from the malaise of lost greatness, the gigantic hangover that results when a historical bender comes to its inevitable bad end.
Both Britain and France were able to fashion post-imperial identities for themselves. This was facilitated for Britain by English becoming the lingua franca of the age, and by world pop culture figures like the Beatles and James Bond. Russian culture had never much transcended the country’s own borders. Kvas never rivaled Pepsi as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had hoped. The one great exception was Russian literature, where writers like Alexander Solzhenitsyn dwarfed most others in moral range, sweep and depth. But in post-Soviet Russia, literature no longer plays the crucial role it had played for some two centuries. In fact, Russia today proves disappointingly slack in the realm of painting, cinema and literature. That is partly the result of modern conditions, in which entertainment and technology are the dominant forces. But there are also specific Russian causes.
Post-Soviet Russia has been marked by three ongoing failures. First, democratic institutions have not evolved quickly and firmly enough. How much can even fair elections mean in any country where the media and the judiciary are controlled by the state? Still, political progress in Russia has been marked by two steps forward, 1 1/2 steps back, something that both foreign commentators and the domestic opposition tend to forget. Even the strength of President Vladimir Putin’s repression since his inauguration in May show how seriously he takes the opposition, meaning that on some level Russia now has something like politics.
The second failure is not diversifying the country’s economy sufficiently to protect against the eventual collapse that will result from an over-?reliance on gas and oil. Contrary to the government’s expressed reprivatization plan, state-?controlled Rosneft has recently bought out TNK-BP, making it the largest oil company in the world in terms of reserves. Aided by foreign expertise and technology, the successful exploitation of the Arctic will buy Russia some time. Gas and oil are not, however, renewables, and one day the needle will point to E on the country’s gauge.
The third failure is subtler and less obvious than the other two but may well be the more important because it allows the other two to proceed unobstructed. In the two decades since the Soviet implosion, Russia has failed to fashion a new identity for itself. It salutes a tsarist flag and sings a Soviet anthem with new words.
The failures in politics and economics mean that much of the populace does not see itself either as citizens or shareholders. Politics is viewed as a rigged game and though the rebirth of the economy has created a genuine middle class, there still is no sense of a normal, healthy economy with long-term prospects. It’s all about taking the money and running — to Britain or the United States, if you can afford it.
Energizing the collective psyche probably requires a new vision of Russian greatness or a real sense of enemy. Of course, the two can go very nicely together in a mindset tinged by paranoia. This became abundantly clear on Oct. 20, when Putin officially established the Directorate for Social Projects, whose goal is to strengthen “the spiritual and moral foundations of Russian society” and stimulate “patriotic upbringing.” Even the struggle for a new Russian identity has been infiltrated by foreign powers hostile to Russia’s renewed greatness using nongovernmental organizations to sap the nation’s strength. “Cultural identity and spiritual and moral values are the subject of intense competition, at times even of an open information war and well-orchestrated propaganda attacks,” Putin said.
The Russian Orthodox Church may play a role in Russia’s revival as it has in the past, but this will not come from any unsavory fusing of church and state, which most likely will result in a vicious, sanctimonious patriotism. One thing is certain: Russia’s new identity, new values and new sense of patriotism and national mission will not grow out of bureaucratic initiatives like this new Directorate for Social Projects. This is natural fodder for satire, perfect for a post-Soviet Nikolai Gogol. Putin should have remembered his own example. It was the daring, dashing image of Soviet spies in the movies that motivated him to join the KGB. The Kremlin would be better off rebuilding its film industry, from which new role models could emerge for the country. (A hint of that possibility is visible in the excellent film “Elena.”)
In any case, maybe Russia should just concentrate on getting reasonably good choices of opinion on television and reasonably good choices of candidates at the polls and a reasonably good chance of justice in the courts. Sometimes good is better than great.

Richard Lourie is the author of “Sakharov: A Biography” and “The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin.”



TITLE: always a dissident: A Senseless Abduction
AUTHOR: By Boris Kagarlitsky
TEXT: Opposition activist Leonid Razvozzhayev’s luck failed him twice. The first came when he was kidnapped in Kiev by Federal Security Service agents, brought back to Moscow and tortured into incriminating himself. The second is that his troubles began several weeks after the Pussy Riot affair had peaked: Western public opinion cannot follow two foreign scandals simultaneously, and mounting a campaign to support various political prisoners at once is difficult. The result is that some jailed Russians have become international celebrities, while many others are either unknown or have been forgotten by the outside world.
But the situation with Razvozzhayev is far more scandalous than Pussy Riot. The charges against him are based on hidden-camera footage of opposition figure Sergei Udaltsov and a Georgian diplomat engaged in a rather rambling conversation in Minsk. The only thing Udaltsov was guilty of in that encounter might be excessive braggadocio, and as far as I know, that is still not considered a crime in Russia. If it were, more than one senior official would be at considerable risk.
In any case, it remains a complete mystery why Udaltsov is free and his associate, Leonid Razvozzhayev, is sitting in jail.
There can be no reasonable justification for abducting Razvozzhayev from a foreign country, and it’s obvious that kidnapping is a far more serious crime than having a conversation with a Georgian diplomat.
Razvozzhayev is not important enough to have been targeted for strictly political or national security worries. Bureaucratic concerns were most likely behind it. Perhaps someone staged this “bust” to impress his superiors, or to use up monies allocated for covert operations by the end of the year to receive more funding for next year. How else can you explain the decision to fly Razvozzhayev back to Russia on a private jet?
The abduction in Kiev shocked the Moscow intelligentsia, who now sincerely believe that anyone can be arrested at any time and for any reason. But those fears are unfounded. Nothing drastic will happen — at least not until the new federal budget is approved.
Meanwhile, government officials should give serious consideration to the fact that they are becoming hostages to decisions being made at fairly low levels. One group carries out a kidnapping, but a different group must deal with the political consequences.
What’s more, if the abduction of Razvozzhayev did not create the storm of indignation in the West that it deserves, it was only because those countries were too preoccupied with the Pussy Riot affair and Ukrainian politicians were so focused on pre-elections rivalries that they missed a chance to exploit the scandal to their own advantage.
Even if the authorities managed to pull off such a stunt once, there is no guarantee they can do it again without paying a heavy political price. More important, such actions are not characteristic of a strong state, but of a weak government — one that cannot control its own intelligence agencies or adhere to a coordinated and well-considered political agenda, taking actions that make sense over the long term.
Nobody knows what to do with Razvozzhayev now. The authorities feel compelled to keep him in custody, but convicting him on trumped-up charges would risk inciting an even worse — and more important, senseless — scandal.

Boris Kagarlitsky is the director of the Institute of Globalization Studies.



TITLE: On the dark side
AUTHOR: By Tatyana Sochiva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A new exhibit at the Rosphoto State Museum and Exhibition Centre for Photography offers those with an interest in photography a long-awaited chance to see the work of internationally-acclaimed photographer Roger Ballen in Russia.
The retrospective exhibit, titled Shadow Land, is the first major exhibit in Russia of work by Ballen, who is known for his strange, psychological and oddly beautiful pictures, many of which have been exhibited in galleries around the world.
The retrospective presented at Rosphoto covers a long period of his work and allows visitors to witness the evolution of his style. It should be mentioned that the principal feature of his work that has remained constant over the years is his use solely of black and white film. “My pictures are not separated from the fact they are black and white. I like black and white because it is a very minimalist, very reduced and at the same time very abstract art form. Besides, I am a part of the generation that grew up using black and white film,” says Ballen.
The photographer was born in New York in 1950, but for over thirty years he has lived and worked in South Africa. His early pictures from 1982 to 1994 partly continue the tradition of documentary photography through the depiction of political, social and cultural aspects of the South Africa of that time. In those days Ballen was chiefly influenced by photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Andre Kertesz. On the contrary, his current work has no clear influences, appearing to be simply a series of artistic, aesthetic statements that make no claim to portray anything particular about South Africa. Since 2002, Ballen has even replaced portraits of people with drawings, sculptures, paintings and installations that he transformed into a particular photographic reality through the camera. 
So the title of the exhibit, Shadow Land, not only refers to the photographer’s black and white style and shadows as his ways of achieving a certain visual effect, but it also seems to express both themes of his art: On the one hand, the darkness of life in South Africa; on the other, the shadowy side of the mind.
“We cannot understand happiness without understanding corresponding emotions such as sadness. There is an existential happiness, which is a deeper emotion than the one governed by ordinary temporary experiences,” says Ballen. Taken from this point of view, the darkness of his work is not as frightening as it might seem, functioning as an essential aspect of our understanding of light, as well as a part of our complex subconscious.
  However, his pictures have many visual meanings and sometimes these meanings are contradictory in nature. Men, animals and objects do not function according to viewers’ rational expectations in his photos, which defy precise interpretation. Ballen’s surrealistic and complex aesthetic world is both the fruit of his imagination and a set of universal symbols and ideas strongly affecting other people. An archetype realized in an image is regarded by the artist as being an important aspect of photography, addressed mainly to viewers’ subconscious. For example, the bird, symbolizing transcendence, purity and godlikeness in many cultures, will be a central theme of Ballen’s next book. Some photographs from this project are currently on show at Rosphoto. 
This exhibition covers three decades of work, from his early series, Dorps (1986) and the highly charged series Platteland (1994), Outland (2001), Shadow Chamber (2005) and Boarding House (2009) through to unseen new work from the Asylum series.
Besides his photographs, visitors have a chance to see his recent collaborations with filmmaker Saskia Vredeveld and South African rap-rave group Die Antwoord, for whom he directed the video for their song “I Fink U Freeky.”

“Shadow Land: Photographs by Roger Ballen 1983-2011” runs through Dec. 19 at Rosphoto, 35 Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa. Tel. 314 1214. M. Admiralteiskaya. www.rosphoto.org

TITLE: Polar peoples
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The films being shown in the city this week as part of the Northern Lights international film festival have one thing in common: The Arctic.
In addition to developing a cultural exchange among Arctic countries and showcasing movies made by filmmakers from that region, the festival’s stated aims include promoting movies about small ethnic groups of the Arctic region.
Hence, movies about lesser-known Arctic peoples will be shown in addition to full-length films from Russia, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden and the U.S. 
The documentary films will be shown at Dom Kino on Nov. 14. The program features “Son of the Priazovsky Steppe — Hero of the Arctic” (Ukraine), “My Reindeer Are Running” (Russia) and “Sami. Russian Lapland” (Russia).
The same day will see a screening of controversial Russian director Valeriya Gai-Germanika’s film “Everybody Dies But Me” (2008) at the Khudozhestvenny movie theater as part of an event featuring the director, who is a member of the festival’s jury.
Russia’s contributions to the competition part of the festival include “Siberia, Monamour” (2011), a dark tale of life in a deserted village, to be shown at Dom Kino on Nov. 12 and 14, while Scandinavian movies due to be featured include “Julie” (Denmark), about a young tennis star who falls in love with her trainer, and the award-winning “Stockholm East” (Sweden), which opened Critics’ Week at the Venice International Film Festival and depicts the love story between two strangers bound together by a tragedy.
The festival will end on Nov. 16 at Dom Kino with a screening of the thriller “An Enemy to Die For” (Sweden, Norway, Germany and Poland).

The Northern Lights film festival runs from Nov. 11 through Nov. 16 at movie theaters around the city. For a full festival program, see www.arcticfilmfest.ru


TITLE: Hamburg’s hero
AUTHOR: By Shura Collinson
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: This year’s Diaghilev. PS. festival has a twist to it: It is devoted not only to the great Russian impresario himself, but also to the renowned contemporary choreographer and founder of the Hamburg Ballet, John Neumeier. 
The festival, which is being held in the city for the third time, kicked off Monday with the presentation of a new book, “John Neumeier in St. Petersburg.” The U.S.-born choreographer, along with his ballet company, was a major presence at the first Diaghilev. P.S. festival, held in the city in 2009.
This year’s event sees two much anticipated performances of the Hamburg Ballet’s “Lady of the Camellias” at the Mikhailovsky Theater. Those who missed Mariinsky principal dancer Diana Vishneva in the title role Tuesday still have the chance to see the Hamburg Ballet’s own Helene Bouchet take her place in the production Wednesday evening, as well as a gala show on Nov. 9 titled “Neumeier Without Borders,” starring the principals of ballet companies from around the world bringing the choreographer’s creations to life. 
As usual, the festival features an exhibition, which this year is titled “Vaslav Nijinsky and John Neumeier.” Much of Neumeier’s work has focused on the life and work of the great dancer and choreographer Nijinsky, who was at various points the protege and lover of Sergei Diaghilev. Composed of items from Neumeier’s own extensive collection as well as from the Museum of Musical and Theatrical Art, where it opened Monday, the exhibition includes original creations by Gustav Klimt and Jean Cocteau.
Diaghilev — a dedicated patron of the arts — took Europe by storm a century ago with his Russian Seasons, a combination of Russian ballet, art and music presented to audiences in Paris, London and other European capitals.
“Since I was 11 years old, I have been fascinated by this very important era of Diaghilev and by dance, which I always knew was my calling,” Neumeier said during the original Diaghilev. P.S. Festival in 2009. 
“This era, which produced so many important new scores written for ballet — probably the most since the 18th century — was a very important time for me.”

<i>For a full festival program, visit www.diaghilev-ps.ru.</i>


TITLE: Variety show
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: New British cinema at its most inspired — from a documentary drama to a gangster movie, from a novel adaptation to a psychological thriller — comes to town on Nov. 14, as the 13th edition of the annual New British Film Festival kicks off.
Over the five nights of the festival, which is sponsored by the British Council, St. Petersburg cinema-goers will be treated to six of the most recent British premieres, including several productions that stirred debate in the UK media. All screenings will be hosted by the Avrora cinema.
This year, the festival takes place in Moscow, where it runs from Nov. 1 through 11, Yekaterinburg, where it moves on Nov. 22 for 5 nights, and St. Petersburg.
 The opening night sees the local premiere of Joe Wright’s 130-minute cinematic adaptation of Lev Tolstoy’s masterpiece “Anna Karenina,” starring Keira Knightley in the title role.
The film won mixed reviews in the British press, with the director’s decision to set most of Tolstoy’s drama inside a Russian theater from the 1870s eliciting controversial reactions from critics and the public alike. 
“Tom Stoppard, a fluent and sensitive adaptor, has made a distinguished job of carving a workable screenplay from Tolstoy’s 950-page novel, and Joe Wright has found a distinctive way of bringing it to the screen with Keira Knightley as Anna, Jude Law as her middle-aged, cuckolded husband, Karenin, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as her dashing lover, Count Vronsky,” reads a recent review in The Guardian newspaper. “The director’s intention was to create a large-scale image of upper-class Tsarist society. This symbolic theatre is a place of dramatic performance and moral judgment, a forum where aristocrats gather to see and be seen, to observe and to censure. Wright’s movie is a dazzling affair, a highly stylised treatment of a realistic novel, superbly designed by Sarah Greenwood and edited by Melanie Ann Oliver, with rich photography by Seamus McGarvey, sumptuous costumes by Jacqueline Durran and a highly romantic Tchaikovskian score by Dario Marianelli, all previous Wright collaborators. The theatre stage with its oil lamp footlights is sometimes a real stage with 19th-century flats and sometimes a venue for actual events such as the provincial racecourse where Count Vronsky has his terrible fall.”
The Tolstoy epic drama is not the only adaptation that the audiences will be treated to at the festival. On Friday, Nov. 16, Avrora will host the premiere of Mike Newell’s interpretation of Charles Dickens’ classic “Great Expectations,” featuring Helena Bonham Carter, Ralph Fiennes and Jason Flemyng.
Newell’s work has won praise far beyond home. “Director Mike Newell makes a solid case for big-screen presentation with an assured version that’s no less entertaining for being quite conventional,” reads a review in the respected magazine The Hollywood Reporter. “A crucial aspect that Newell gets right from the start is cementing the long-range connection between the young orphan Pip (Toby Irvine) and escaped convict Magwitch (Ralph Fiennes), which will shape many of the tale’s key events. Caked in mud and growling in a common-as-muck accent, Fiennes is feral and frightening. Sneaking up on the cherubic lad in the cemetery, Magwitch terrifies him into fetching food, whisky and a blacksmith’s file to saw through his prison shackles. While the boy acts out of fear, Magwitch is starved for kindness, and an exchange of glances as he’s recaptured conveys his gratitude.”
One of the most highly anticipated premieres of the festival is the dark absurdist comedy “Black Pond” (Sunday, Nov. 18, 5 p.m.), directed by Tom Kingsley and Will Sharpe.
An egocentric father, his emotionally deflated wife, their two YouTube-crazy daughters, and their young Japanese friend are the central characters in this black comedy that revolves around a murder investigation. The film won a BAFTA in the outstanding debut film category, was nominated for a BAFTA in the best film category, and was given the best newcomer award by the Evening Standard newspaper.
A lighter form of comic relief will be served to the public in the form of the romantic thriller “Comes A Bright Day” (director Simon Aboud), in which the plot revolves around the armed robbery of an exclusive jewelry shop in central London. The main character, a young but very ambitious employee of a London hotel, is on a mission to deliver a broken piece of jewelry to a prestigious jewelry shop, where the girl he loves also works. At the very moment he enters the shop, two armed gangsters break in — and the young man has the chance of his life to show his courage, wit and talent. “Comes A Bright Day” screens  Thursday, Nov. 16, at 7 p.m.
James Marsh’s poignant psychological drama “Shadow Dancer,” set in 1990s Belfast, where an active member of the Irish Republican Army becomes a double-dealer, providing information about the militants’ activities to MI5 in exchange for protection for her son, has already been shown locally once — at the closing of this year’s edition of the St. Petersburg International Film Festival in September. The New British Film festival offers a brilliant opportunity to see this gripping film, which won the Best Acting in a British Movie prize at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. “Shadow Dancer” will be shown  Sunday, Nov. 18, at 7 p.m.

For more information , please visit www.ukfilms.ru and 
www.avrora.spb.ru


TITLE: the word’s worth: Give me a treat or you’ll regret it
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: Õýëëîóèí: Halloween

Why do you think Russians are getting into Halloween? It’s because a) Halloween goes back to ancient Celtic rituals and everyone knows that Celts and Slavs are related; b) it’s part of the protest movement against the Russian Orthodox Church and state; c) it’s a good excuse to dress up in cool costumes and party.
If you guessed “c,” you might be right. I actually have no idea. I’m just making this stuff up. But judging by my Russian acquaintances, Õýëëîóèí (sound it out) is not very well understood as a holiday by the masses, but nevertheless heartily embraced as a great opportunity to wear scary, silly or sexy costumes and drink a lot.
I personally support this, since the growing interest in Halloween means that phrases I’ve struggled to render in Russian for decades now have more or less accepted and acceptable translations. The jack o’ lantern, which has a complicated etymology involving an Irish folk hero named Jack, the devil and imprisonment of the latter by the former in a carved turnip, is usually called a “pumpkin lantern”: òûêâà-ñâåòèëüíèê or òûêâà-ôîíàðèê. The phrase “trick or treat” — often mangled almost beyond recognition, including as “trik or trak” — is translated variously, from the rather threatening óãîñòè èëè ïîæàëååøü (give me a treat or you’ll regret it) and êîøåë¸ê èëè æèçíü (your wallet or your life) to the more linguistically and culturally accurate ïðîäåëêè èëè óãîùåíèÿ (prank or treat) and ñëàäîñòü èëè ãàäîñòü (sweet treat or dirty trick).
Of course, Russian kids aren’t dressing up as Spider-Man or the Fairy Princess and going from door to door with plastic jack o’ lanterns filled with Òâèêñ (Twix) and Øîê (Shock). In Russia, Halloween is primarily a young adult holiday (see observations on costumes and alcohol consumption above). Interestingly, some Russian sources interpret the holiday as “counter-cultural” in the West, perhaps because Russian tourists have been most impressed by the extravagant gay Halloween parades and parties in many cities and didn’t see the grade school parties, suburban trick-or-treating rituals and offices filled with vampire computer programmers.
In any case, once you leave the culturally specific domain of Halloween, it’s easy to talk about the more universal rituals in Russian, since the culture has a rich tradition of dressing up in costumes, creepy ghosts and goblins, and scary stories.
Getting dressed up in a costume is íàðÿäèòüñÿ: Êåì òû íàðÿäèøüñÿ íà Õýëëîóèí? (Who are you going as on Halloween?) You can also say íàäåòü êîñòþì: Îí íàäåë êîñòþì ïèðàòà (He wore a pirate costume).
If you are heading out to a party this weekend, you can still order costumes online, although they tend to be erotic rather than terrifying, with offerings like âîñõèòèòåëüíàÿ ïèðàòêà (the enchanting lady pirate) and êàðàìåëüíàÿ âåäüìà (caramel-colored witch). You just gotta love capitalism, right?
Scary images might include ïðèçðàê or ïðèâèäåíèå (ghost); ÷¸ðòèê (devil), âåäüìà (witch); âàìïèð/âàìïèðøà (vampire, male and female); êîëäóí/êîëäóíüÿ (wizard, male and female); ôàíòîì (phantom); or çîìáè (zombie). You can tell ñòðàøèëêè (ghost stories), probably about äîì ñ ïðèâèäåíèÿìè (haunted house) rather than íîâûé çàêîí îá èçìåíå (the new law on treason). You can serve òûêâåííûé ïèðîã (pumpkin pie).
In my set, we celebrate ñîáà÷èé Õýëëîóèí (doggie Halloween). Last year, the canine winner was a black lab wearing a blue safety light on his collar. What was he? Ëèìóçèí ñ ìèãàëêîé (limousine with a flashing blue light).

Michele A. Berdy, a Moscow-based translator and interpreter, is author of “The Russian Word’s Worth” (Glas), a collection of her columns.

TITLE: Immortalizing the King of Pop
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Cirque du Soleil celebrates the talent of the late king of pop, Michael Jackson, in its new production “Michael Jackson The Immortal” that will see its Russian premiere on November 9, 10 and 11 at the St. Petersburg’s Ice Palace.
“Michael Jackson The Immortal” is a rather unusual offering from the world-renowned Canadian company that has for the first time produced a rock-tour-style performance juxtaposing music, dance and acrobatics. However, the Jackson and Cirque alliance could not be more natural: The late pop idol was an eccentric who made circus an integral element of his stage existence, and who actually frequented the company’s performances in the U.S.
The production had its world premiere in Montreal on Oct. 2, 2011, before successfully touring 67 North American cities. The performances were generally sold out and were attended by a total of 1.4 million spectators. This year, the production moved on to Europe, where it premiered at London’s O2 arena in October. 
“Acrobats wearing LED lights glimmered like stars,” reads a review of the show’s European premiere in London’s The Independent newspaper. “A chaos of strobe lights swung around the arena to assail the audience. Dancers became silhouettes of changing colours and acrobats dangled in darkness with lights studded across their coiled bodies. A ghostly hologram of Jackson, his arms in crucifix, was a marvel of lighting technology.”
Kevin Antunes, who is responsible for the production’s sound, promises that the show will enable the world to hear Jackson’s voice in a way it has never been heard before. 
“In the show, Michael will give a new vibrance to the rhythm of the songs: The words will be muffled down by the arrangements of the tunes,” said Antunes. The sound designer has incorporated a unique recording of the five-year-old Michael Jackson that has never been broadcast before into the song “ABC” from the repertoire of the Jackson 5 band.
“I went to Michael Jackson’s concert in Moscow in 1993, and I have seen Michael Jackson The Immortal,” said Craig Cohon, vice-chairman of Cirque du Soleil Russia, who attended the European premiere in London. 
“I can testify that at our show, one can feel the presence of the artist. This production is a feast not only for those who worship Michael Jackson and admire him but a delight for any music fan.”
Responsible for the choreographic element of the show is a team of 10 internationally renowned coaches, three of whom were once members of Jackson’s own team. The trio of “the initiated” includes the choreographer Travis Pane, who was involved in preparations for the King of Pop’s planned series of concerts scheduled for London in July 2009 — before the singer’s untimely death on June 25 that year — and the Talauega brothers, Richmond and Anthony, who were in their teens when they were originally discovered by Jackson’s team, and then went on to work for the superstar on various projects for almost 10 years.
“Michael Jackson’s first Cirque du Soleil tribute is bigger than big, an over-the-top touring rock concert built for stadiums packed with thousands of frenzied fans,” reads a review of the show in the U.S. publication Vegas Magazine. 
“The props are enormous, the cast and crew in the hundreds; but stripped down, Cirque du Soleil’s The Immortal tour is a labor of love from those who knew him best, from choreographers Rich and Tone Talauega, brothers who worked with Michael for 10 years, to musical director Greg Phillinganes, who started working with the Jacksons back in 1978. These were the creative souls who made Michael tick. Many of them, including choreographer Travis Payne, costume designer Zaldy Goco, and props and scenic designer Michael Curry, were working with the music legend on his final tour, This Is It, until he died before his time on June 25, 2009.”
Founded in 1984 in Montreal, Cirque du Soleil has evolved into an international giant, with seven permanent shows in Las Vegas, plus its own venues in Orlando, Florida; Macau, China; and Tokyo. Each venue has its own repertoire created specifically for that performance space and audience. Cirque du Soleil employs more than 5,000 people worldwide, including 1,300 artists, of whom about 20 percent are performers from the former Soviet bloc. 
In 2012, it is expected that around 15 million people will have attended the company’s performances by the end of the year.

“Michael Jackson The Immortal” will be performed at 7 p.m. on Nov. 9, at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Nov. 10 and at 5 p.m. on Nov. 11 at the Ice Palace, 1a Prospekt Pyatiletok. M. Prospekt Bolshevikov. Tel. 718 6620. 
www.cirquedusoleil.com

TITLE: From Kennedy to MLK
AUTHOR: By Joanna Kozlowska
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The beauty and troubles of the American 1960s come to life at Steve Schapiro’s retrospective exhibition “Living America,” now on at the Lumiere Brothers Photography Center in Moscow. The exhibition features over 100 works by the photographer often referred to as the chronicler of modern America’s formative years.
Among them are world-famous photos from the sets of Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather,” including the iconic images of Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone. Another highlight are imaginative pictures of celebrities from all career walks, from Dustin Hoffman to Andy Warhol and Muhammad Ali.
“For me, photography is all about conveying the model’s personality, capturing an emotional moment,” Schapiro said in an interview. “To achieve this, you need to get the person’s trust. I have always tried to be quiet and polite, not trying to be best friends with them, nor to impose my vision.”
His models included Barbra Streisand (“confident and focused, with very strong ideas about how she wanted to be portrayed — only her left profile was deemed fit for photographing”), Andy Warhol (“possibly the shyest person I have ever met”) and David Bowie (“our sessions would often finish at four in the morning, with Bowie constantly coming up with new outfits”).
Some of Schapiro’s work seems to reinforce the public image of his models, like the ironic shoot of Woody Allen with an ant on a leash. Others defy popular representations: Mohammed Ali is pictured playing with neighborhood children and enjoying a game of Monopoly.
“Nevertheless, each picture conveys something about the portrayed person,” the photographer said. “The photo of Allen was based on one of his own fantasy stories. As for Ali, the children adored him. It’s always a privilege when a model opens up to you, allowing you to see their private life.”
There is, however, a less well-known strand to Schapiro’s photographic oeuvre. “This exhibition should be entitled: Two worlds, two Shapiros,” said Olga, a 25-year-old Muscovite who visited the photo center.
The “other” Shapiro emerges as a passionate photojournalist documenting the turning points in American history, such as Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1968, the “Summer of Love” and anti-Vietnam demonstrations in the same year, as well as several key demonstrations of the civil rights movement.
Schapiro, who started his career with photoessays on Brooklyn’s drug addicts and the plight of migrant workers in Arkansas, said: “I think of myself primarily as a photojournalist. Working with celebrities and on film sets was incredibly rewarding. However, if I had the chance, I would happily spend all my life doing documentary work.”
He cited the photos of Eugene W. Smith, Walker Evans and Robert Frank as his primary inspiration. “Initially, I wanted to be a novelist,” he said. “What attracted me to writing was the possibility to capture the whole world, present life as it is. Documentary photography can offer the same chances.”
Both Schapiro’s early photoessays and his mature documentary work are now presented at Lumiere Brothers. Famous images include a portrait of Dr.Martin Luther King during the March on Washington and a picture of Robert Kennedy speaking at an electoral convention. Also on display is the harrowing photograph of King’s motel room hours after his assassination (Schapiro, as a reporter for Life, was the first photographer to take pictures of the site).
The organizers describe the exhibition as especially relevant to Russia’s contemporary situation. “The photos will undoubtedly be of interest to the modern Russian viewer, as they depict the U.S. at a time when civil society was formed,” the description on the center’s website reads.
Schapiro’s more recent projects are also documentary in nature, including photoessays on the Occupy Wall Street Movement, the 2006 Immigration Rally in Chicago and America’s independent music festivals (Newport Jazz Festival, Burning Man). He is currently working on a book entitled “Bliss.”
“I am fascinated by the idea of ‘modern hippies,’” he said. “While the hippies of the 1960s would get high on drugs, many young people today derive intense pleasure from meditation, spirituality and a simple, sustainable lifestyle.”

”Living America” runs through Dec. 9 at the Lumiere Brothers Photography Center, 3/1 Bolotnaya Naberezhnaya, Moscow. Metro Kropotkinskaya. 
Tel. (495) 228 9878. www.lumiere.ru

TITLE: THE DISH: Bargains from Bangkok
AUTHOR: By Shura Collinson
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: My Thai, the latest incarnation of the Thai Express fast-food cafe on Finlyandsky Prospekt, calls itself a “bungalow cafe,” though the illusion of a thatched hut on a pristine Thai beach is never really effectively created. It is least of all convincing on a rainy late-October evening, when the draughty glassed-in sidewalk terrace is certainly not an option, and even the inside seating is a little chilly. Instead of a turquoise sea and shimmering white sand laced with palm trees, the tables look out onto the considerably less idyllic Petrovsky Fort business center and a drab car park. An alternate view — of the ubiquitous Fashion TV — is offered by several flatscreen TVs, while pop and dance hits serve as a replacement for the lapping of waves on a shore. 
Some effort has been made — occasional elephant and rhinoceros statues are dotted around the cafe and dried flower arrangements decorate the walls — but other aspects, such as the wooden strips overhead that reveal a distinctly unappetizing warehouse-like ceiling between them, reveal a curious lack of attention to detail.
While it maintains the canteen-like interior of its predecessor, My Thai has dropped the self-service, fast-food format of Thai Express and now has table service, though this is not the cafe’s greatest asset — rather, it is a reminder that the real Land of Smiles is far, far away. It proved possible to transform a Thai green curry with chicken, bamboo shoots and eggplant into a vegetarian option without the chicken (the menu is woefully short on vegetarian dishes), but the waitress seemed to find the idea of such a thing — and, seemingly, vegetarianism in general — sneeringly risible. When it arrived, the curry (250 rubles, $8) had more spicy kick to it than can usually be expected from a Russian restaurant, though it had a rather disconcerting smoky taste to it that at times bordered on eau-de-paraffin, and was not exactly piping-hot. Worse still, everything ordered arrived at the same time, giving rise to the dilemma of eating the curry before a salad and spring rolls while it was still vaguely warm, or sticking to the traditional order of things but facing a stone-cold curry. 
It wasn’t all doom and gloom and paraffin, however. The vegetable salad (190 rubles, $6) was a high point of the meal: A bed of glass noodles topped with vegetables in a moreish sweet and spicy mango and ginger dressing with a sprinkling of crushed nuts to finish it off. The vegetable spring rolls were on a par with those served at the upscale restaurant Mops — seemingly the city’s only other restaurant devoted to Thai cuisine — yet a relative steal at 130 rubles ($4.10). The average cost of a starter at Mops, in contrast, is a whopping 450 rubles ($14). 
Another plus was an offer on the cocktail menu — order one, and get a second one free. “True Passion,” (225 rubles, $7.10), a suitably exotic yet not too sweet concoction, comes recommended. Of the non-alcoholic drinks, the refreshing yoghurt and mango smoothie (150 rubles, $4.75) is about the closest the restaurant comes to offering a true taste of Thailand. 
Less exciting was the tom yum seafood soup (250 rubles, $8), which was disappointingly bland and tasted above all of soy sauce. Noodles with chicken and vegetables (270 rubles, $8.50) similarly left the impression of something lacking, though the portion was generous.
My Thai also offers a standard selection of sushi and sashimi, likewise competitively priced, with tiger shrimp sushi costing 75 rubles ($2.40).
While the prices at My Thai certainly can’t be faulted, and the appearance of another Thai joint in the city is in itself encouraging, it is hard not to wonder whether the arrival of a reasonably priced restaurant serving decent red and green curries might not be too much to ask.

TITLE: A Northern Safari to Finland’s Kouvola
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: After just two and a half hours on the Allegro high-speed train from St. Petersburg, you step off in quiet Kouvola. This serene Finnish town is a nature-lover’s paradise. A weekend here is a quiet escape, a dive into nature and a striking contrast to touristy Imatra and Lappeenranta, with their crowded superstores and spa-centers: Although Kouvola also offers opportunities for shopping, it is a much calmer experience here than in the border towns. Travel to Kouvola for the captivating beauty of the Repovesi National Park, the finest rhododendron seeds from its botanical garden Arboretum Mustila, a bottle of local blackcurrant wine and superb fishing in its lakes.
A lunch or dinner in the Barracks restaurant at the Officer’s Club, which was originally built for the Russian Imperial Army, is a must — as is a stroll through the former army garrison area, and the surrounding park where jazz concerts are held in the summer.

<b>Repovesi</b>

Unspoiled forests, cliffs, lakes and ponds dominate the landscapes of Repovesi, Finland’s most popular national park. It takes almost an hour’s drive to get there from Kouvola, and on a rainy day the last third of the journey feels like a northern safari on a mud road. Tourists take the trip to Repovesi to stroll in the forest, as well as to fish and hunt, for both of which you need to obtain a license.
In autumn, it seems as though the Finns are not great fans of mushroom and berry picking for fun — these fruits of the forest are found in generous quantities, completely untouched. For some Russian visitors, a trip to Repovesi can therefore turn into a blissful experience of sitting around and wolfing down blueberries — you won’t need to walk very far to find the nearest large cluster of berries. 
Another aspect that is likely to strike Russian visitors is the tidiness of this wild forest. There are no garbage cans. The park maintains a responsible tourism program, which means that every visitor to the park assumes responsibility for dealing with any garbage they produce. 
The park’s diverse fauna includes moose, lynx, wild boar, otter and pine marten as well as owls and the Siberian flying squirrel.
Repovesi has several well-marked hiking routes, with the most popular sights for walkers being Olhavanvuori Rock and the hills of Mustalamminvuori, Katajavuori and Haukilamminvuori, as well as the hanging bridge over Lapinsalmi Sound and the floating log structures in Kuutinlahti Bay.
Visitors can stay overnight in one of the cottages in Repovesi, though the conditions are rather spartan. There is also a small sauna by the lake next to the cottage that is located near the entrance to the park. 

<b>Verla Paper Mill</b>

This atmospheric 19th-century red-brick industrial complex on the shore of a tiny forest lake feels cozy inside. The large brownish sheets of cardboard that have been part of the display since the factory stopped its operations in 1964 feel silky smooth to the touch — and their quality would put today’s factories to shame.
Verla is an amazingly well preserved example of the small-scale rural industrial settlements associated with pulp, paper and board production that flourished in northern Europe and North America in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Less than a dozen similar settlements have survived until today, and Verla has been classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1992.
Verla was founded in 1872 by Hugo Neuman as a groundwood mill but it lasted for less than four years: The premises were destroyed by a massive fire in 1876. Six years later, Gottlieb Kreidl and Louis Haenel, two master papermakers at Kuusankoski, founded a new, bigger groundwood mill with a board mill on the side. The mill then changed hands a couple of times before closing down in 1964.
Verla’s signature products were book covers, biscuit cartons, cheese boxes and cigarette packets. The factory, which produced 2,000 tons of cardboard per year, had a strong reputation, with its main clients being box manufacturers and bookbinders. 

<b>Rhododendron Feast</b>

“I would describe myself as a spiritual person, and I do go to church from time to time, but let me tell you something: My real temple is here,” says professor Peter Tigerstedt, stretching out his hand and pointing at sky-high Macedonian and Serbian pines. Huddled together, they do resemble a gothic cathedral, and this impression gets even stronger once you part the giant low branches to find yourself inside a natural sanctuary. Tigerstedt is the man behind the paradise-like Arboretum Mustila, a 120-acre natural park that was founded in 1902 by his grandfather, a civil engineer, who had a passion for exotic flowers. Even what one would call an “undesirable plant” — some might say, a weed — is nurtured here: The tiny and sublime Cladonia Nivalis, a key ingredient in a popular series of Russian anti-aging cosmetics.
“Yes, as you can see, it is all over the place now but we do not have the heart to get rid of it, it is such a nice little thing,” Tigerstedt smiles.
The park, which boasts more than 100 species of conifer trees, 200 species of broadleaved trees and numerous vines, flowers, bulbs and plants, is a horticulturalist’s dream. Its signature plant is the rhododendron — Mustila boasts more than 100 species. The park, which takes at least four hours to explore, is open all year round, although perhaps the best time to visit is June, when rhododendrons and many other flowers are in blossom. 
One of the species was created especially in memory of the late Raisa Gorbacheva, the wife of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the U.S.S.R. In May this year, when Gorbacheva would have turned 80, more than 100 specimens of this flower were planted in a garden of the Raisa Gorbacheva Memorial Center for Children’s Hematology and Transplantation in St. Petersburg. 
“So much was admirable about this woman — her grace and style, her will and stamina,” Tigerstedt said. “And this flower very much resembles her.” 
A small store next to the entrance to the park sells seeds as well as homemade berry wines, juices and marmalade.

<b>Tykkimaki Amusement park</b>

Children love this spacious amusement park surrounded by woods. Tykkimaki, which is open from May until early September, boasts around 40 different rides, and something new is added every season. One of the most recent additions and an indisputable hit is the Wild Loop Fighter, which takes you on a journey that challenges the force of gravity. From Water Slide and Ghost Train to Kouvola Wheel and The House of Surprise, Tykkimaki caters to all ages and characters, from the most sheepish toddlers to up-and-coming adrenaline addicts. Finland’s third-largest amusement park, Tykkimaki also has the country’s highest ride, the Starflyer.
In the colder months of the year the park’s employees work on safety precautions — there has not been a single accident at Tykkimaki — and travel the world searching for new ideas. A single entry to any ride costs five euros ($6.50). Another option is to buy a bracelet that grants unlimited access to all rides. The bracelet is a bargain at 31 euros ($40) for children (and adults) over 120 centimeters tall. It costs 25 euros ($32) for kids of 90 to 120 centimeters in height. A 25-percent discount is offered after 5 p.m.

<b>World’s largest Prisma</b>

Very few Russians are likely to plan a holiday abroad, even if it is a weekend getaway, without including some kind of shopping activities.
September saw the opening of the vast Veturi shopping center, which now ranks as Finland’s sixth-largest mall, and the biggest one in southeast Finland. Located within three kilometers from the center of Kouvola, Veturi is within easy reach, has more than 90 shops and a wealth of Russian-speaking staff. During the holiday season, the store’s management is considering showing films with Russian subtitles at one of the center’s cinemas. 
Very few Russian visitors to Kouvola can resist a trip to what is known as the world’s largest Prisma hypermarket. Unlike in Russia, where Prisma mainly sells food, the flagship store in Kouvola has sections with sports equipment, construction materials, electronics and fashion items. Prisma loyalty cards issued in Russia are not valid here, but all Russian catalogues have special discount coupons that can be used for purchases in Finland.
<hr>
<b>How To Get Therer</b>
The high-speed Allegro train 
(St. Petersburg-Helsinki) has four services per day.
A full schedule is available at: 
http://www.poezd-allegro-train.ru/
Russian citizens require a Schengen visa.

<b>Where to Stay</b>
Sokos Hotel Vaakuna
A comfortable four-star hotel located in a peaceful, green area in the heart of the city with three saunas and jacuzzis.
2 Hovioikeudenkatu, 45100 Kouvola 
Tel. +358 20 1234 651
www.sokoshotels.fi

<b>USEFUL INFORMATION</b>
Kouvola Tourism Board website: 
www.visitkouvola.fi
www.repovesi.com
www.verla.fi
www.mustila.com
www.tykkimaki.fi
www.prisma.fi
www.kauppakeskusveturi.fi
<hr>
<b>Where to Eat</b>

• Kasarmiravintola (Barracks) Located in the former Officers’ Club, this upscale restaurant offers good Finnish and European cuisine.
5 Paraatikentt&#228; 
FI-45100 Kouvola
Tel.  +358 20 729 6782

• Restaurante Ole
One of the more expensive eateries in Kouvala, Ole is renowned for its Spanish and Mediterranean dishes.
34 Kouvolankatu 
FI-45100 Kouvola
Tel. +358 05 3116961

• Fransmanni restaurant
The popular restaurant of the 
Sokos Hotel Vaakuna is a favorite with city residents as well as hotel guests, serving reasonably priced local fare.
Sokos Hotel Vaakuna
2 Hovioikeudenkatu, 
FI-45100 Kouvola 
Tel. +358 20 1234 651

TITLE: Cossack Horsemen Ride 2,800 Kilometers to Paris
AUTHOR: By Patrick Reevell
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: LAGESSE, France — Deep in the Champagne region, on a stud farm surrounded by vineyards lain fallow and turning to mud in the autumn rain, Pavel Moshchalkov sits silently. An imposing presence — huge, with a tanned, hewn face — he sits with his head lowered.
“You mustn’t hassle us. You mustn’t come and prod us,” he says, his speech deliberate, his voice commanding. His shoulders shamble forward. “We’re like bears.”
“You know what Alexander Nevsky said, ‘Russians want to drink, to lie by the stove.’ But then if you come —” He raises his huge hands, like claws, wide above his head.
Moshchalkov is an ataman, the leader of a regiment of 23 Don Cossacks riding to Paris on horseback to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Russia’s Patriotic War of 1812, which devastated the invading French army and led to the capture of Paris and the abdication of Napoleon Bonaparte two years later.
The cavalry unit left Moscow in August on a horseback ride that would take them across Europe — through Belarus, Lithuania, Poland and Germany — retracing the journey of their forebears to their destination in Paris, a distance of some 2,800 kilometers.
Soon, on Oct. 20, the horsemen would gallop to the Palace of Fontainebleau to participate in a memorial show alongside the Red Army Choir and re-enact Cossack General Matvei Platov’s victorious ride into the capital in 1814. Their trip comes at a time when Cossack culture is seeing a resurgence in Russian society.
On the morning I visit, the troops have been traveling for two months, keeping mainly to small towns — they prefer country folk to city slickers — and are within 200 kilometers of Paris. The tiny hamlet of Lagesse is playing host to the horsemen, billeting them in a large house attached to an indoor paddock.
The house is full of Cossacks. They sit around the kitchen table in their high boots and breeches; today they’ve abandoned their blue-and-red dress uniforms for more everyday military tunics.
They come and go, puffing on pipes below thick mustaches. One man stands in the kitchen, berating the French cooks over their stew. In a patterned silver cassock, a priest sits at the head of the table. He is in charge of protecting the regiment’s icon.
Through a long window set in the wall, a group of young Frenchwomen are seen attempting to take running jumps onto three horses. One woman stops at the last moment.
“Cossacks can do that,” a soldier says, with sheepish pride.
The Cossacks, whose ages range from 18 to 76, are accompanied by a 20-person support crew traveling by bus. We are told that “diplomatically” we had best meet the ataman first.
Moshchalkov dominates the regiment as well as the conversation. He is joined by one of his lieutenants, Volodya, an older Cossack in epaulettes whose kindly face behind the drooping ends of his mustache holds a look of endless comic bashfulness. The priest, Father Vladimir, sits to Moshchalkov’s right.
The ataman explains that this is the first time in Europe for most of the men and they do not entirely feel at home. “I’m tired, I’m sick to death of Europe,” Moshchalkov says. “People have been very good. Smiles everywhere. But there’s no soup! Argh, borshch! Shchi!” he clamors. “And the cheese —” he spits. “And French drinks! Dry wine, yuck! Ah, for a hundred grams of vodka!”
“We couldn’t live here. We have a different mentality than you,” he continues. “In Europe everything is protected, Europeans are calculating. We live widely, we live with our souls. Maybe people don’t like us for that, but that doesn’t really matter. Our country is vast.”
But Moshchalkov is pleased and grateful for the hospitality his men have received, particularly among equestrian clubs, which have supplied most of the group’s accommodations and with which the pilgrimage was intended to develop relations.
“We’ve found a common language wherever we go,” he says. “Horse people have a common language, they always understand one another. They speak with the soul.”
He does not mention that a van carrying the group’s uniforms was broken into shortly after arriving in France. In general, the trip has gone smoothly. “People stand on the street and applaud,” the ataman says.
Between 1812 and 1814, General Platov led a vanguard of 60,000 Cossacks to Paris — bringing terror in his wake, as “liberated” German townspeople found themselves emancipated from their clothes and valuables. This time, the horsemen’s mission is friendlier. While in Paris, the Cossacks intended to tour the Louvre, without their horses.
“This is a march of peace. We are coming in peace, not anger,” the ataman says. “This march is to commemorate all who died, not just Russians. This is one of the things I like about Europe: the respect. The war memorials are looked after.”
But as Moshchalkov tells us, Napoleon’s defeat is not the reason for the trip, it is a “pretext,” a pretext for Moshchalkov to draw attention to his beautiful horses and the depletion of their numbers following the collapse of the subsidies once provided by the Soviet government.
“Our horse farms in Russia are ruined,” he says. “The government provides nothing.” A mining engineer who worked in Africa for the Soviets, Moshchalkov has turned to horse breeding, endeavoring to restore the Don breed.
The Don horses are huge, beautiful animals, capable of traveling enormous distances without rest. A Don horse ridden by a Cossack can do 300 kilometers in a day. “It would kill another horse,” the ataman says. “Four hours’ rest, 20 hours riding. But that’s —” (he pretends to spit). On the long ride from Moscow, they have kept to a more restrained 60 to 80 kilometers a day.
Outside, a young Cossack causes his mount to prance sideways past the door. The horse lets out a roaring bellow. I ask whether Moshchalkov hopes the march will inspire the government to offer some funding. He exchanges an ironic smile with the priest. He doesn’t answer.
Like their horses, Cossacks have struggled to adapt to the modern era. Persecuted by the Soviets, the horsemen in the last two decades have continued to suffer from poverty and a loss of purpose. Father Vladimir, who now has changed his long, silvery robes for an ironed shirt and jeans, seems to act more like an official mouthpiece. He paints an optimistic picture of a Cossack future, speaking of Cossack schools in the city of Rostov-on-Don, where students “learn the history of the culture.” “The best students — the most disciplined and organized — come from the Cossack Cadet School,” the priest explains.
Moshchalkov is less optimistic. “How can we preserve our traditions?” he demands. “All our bearers of traditions are gone — annihilated. There’s no longer a critical mass. But what’s to be done?” he sighs. He stares gloomily at the table, a great weight seems to hinder him — the organization of the march? The fate of the Cossacks? Europe? “They’re marvelous people. They’ve done so much for Russia,” he says heavily.
The past two years have seen a surprising re-entry of Cossacks into public life, reviving their traditional role as the enforcers of the state, providing security for state enterprises and taking it upon themselves to police rallies for democracy and gay rights.
The second annual Cossack Village festival took place at Moscow’s Luzhniki stadium on the same day as the Fontainebleau concert, with 1,500 Cossacks present. In August, Krasnodar Governor Alexander Tkachyov turned heads when he announced that Cossack paramilitary troops were to protect the region from illegal immigrants. Such patrols began in September.
Moshchalkov, for his part, shows little interest in such political moves, though, he says, he remains a supporter of President Vladimir Putin.
“They say Putin didn’t win legally. That’s a lie,” he says. He defends the president’s record, arguing that Putin inherited terrible problems from his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, and says he is irritated by Western criticism of Russia. “I don’t tell Englishmen how to live,” he rumbles. “We know your European democracy. In 35 years, it’ll be African.”
The idea for the trip itself came not from the state but from Moshchalkov, who says the government loved the plan but quickly refused funding. The ataman raises his eyebrows. He explains that he and corporate sponsors were left to finance the ride.