SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1739 (50), Wednesday, December 12, 2012
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TITLE: Georgian Organized Clashes, Say Investigators
AUTHOR: By Jonathan Earle and Alec Luhn
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – On the eve of the next major anti-government protest, investigators announced that they had evidence that a Georgian politician helped organize violent clashes at a May 6 protest in Moscow.
Givi Targamadze, a close ally of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, "managed" opposition leaders responsible for the so-called "March of Millions" on May 6 that ended in bloody clashes with police and hundreds of detentions, investigators said in a statement Thursday.
They also said the evidence confirmed that Targamadze had played a "concrete role" in organizing "riots" at the May 6 event.
The new evidence could mean a harsher charge against opposition leader Sergei Udaltsov and his jailed associates Leonid Razvozzhayev and Konstantin Lebedev, opening the door for investigators to accuse the three of organizing mass riots, which carries a sentence of up to ten years in prison. The three activists are currently charged with a lesser, related offense.
Udaltsov and Razvozzhayev have said they have no relationship with Targamadze, and Targamadze has said the same about them.
The Kremlin has long accused the opposition of being funded by foreigners, but the statement by investigators marked a rare instance of the authorities naming a specific foreign national as an organizer of anti-Kremlin activities.
In his state-of-the-nation address on Thursday, President Vladimir Putin declared that foreign "interference" in Russian internal politics was "unacceptable," and that anyone whose political actions are funded from abroad and who likely serves foreign national interests cannot be a politician in Russia.
Investigators also repeated an earlier allegation that they had evidence that Targamadze financed Russian opposition activities, including a spring 2012 trip to Lithuania for a seminar on staging revolutions.
A video posted on LifeNews on Thursday included an audio recording presented as a conversation between Lebedev, Razvozzhayev and Targamadze in a "CIS country" on May 14. The video also showed printouts of alleged Internet messages between the three before a June 12 protest.
In the recording, a person presented as Targamadze asked the activists about the May 6 protest on Bolotnaya Ploshchad and said Udaltsov's wife Anastasia should play a leading role in the opposition movement.
The person presented as Targamadze also said he was ready to discuss at a meeting in London transferring large sums of money to the activists.
The timing of the announcement, which was ostensibly prompted by a leak of investigative documents to LifeNews, the pro-Kremlin online tabloid, seemed deliberate. The Investigative Committee wrote at the beginning of its statement Thursday that although it was "not interested in the premature publication" of the materials on Targamadze's involvement, it could confirm their contents now that they had already appeared in the press.
The authenticity of the recording and messages has not been verified, said analyst and former Kremlin insider Gleb Pavlovsky. The appearance of investigation materials in coordinated leaks, however, suggests that both the Investigative Committee and LifeNews are simply agents in a scheme directed by a third party, Pavlovsky said.
Olga Mefodyeva, an analyst at the Center for Political Technologies, said the leak was a continuation of the Investigative Committee's PR campaign against the three activists, which is covered on national television and which she said is more important than the actual investigation.
Udaltsov called the LifeNews material "childish babbling, ugly propaganda intended to discredit the opposition and directed toward those who don't like to probe very deeply into a situation" in comments carried by Interfax.
Opposition leaders are preparing to hold an unsanctioned demonstration Saturday after failing to agree with City Hall on a route for a march. It was apparently the first time the leaders had failed to come to terms with the authorities on a site for a major protest since last December.
Both sides said the other was responsible for the breakdown of talks.
Udaltsov said organizers had received an official rejection from City Hall on Thursday and that organizers do not intend to hold any unsanctioned rallies — but that he would go to Lubyankskaya Ploshchad on Saturday "as a free citizen."
"I myself will go to Lubyankskaya Ploshchad at 3 p.m. December 15. As a free citizen of Russia. And no one can forbid me from going," Udaltsov tweeted on Thursday.
Opposition leader Alexei Navalny said on his blog Thursday that he too will go to the square in front of the Federal Security Service building on Saturday afternoon.
The Investigative Committee statement comes amid a tentative thaw in Georgian-Russian relations under newly elected Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili.
Investigators are preparing a request to Georgia to be sent in the near future to help in the investigation, they said in a statement. The Georgian prosecutor general's office said Thursday that it would not extradite Targamadze to Russia, Izvestia reported.
Razvozzhayev's lawyer Dmitry Agranovsky said investigators' statement was a response to testimony from Targamadze that Razvozzhayev's defense presented at a court hearing Wednesday. In the testimony, the politician said he has had no contacts with Udaltsov, Lebedev or Razvozzhayev and did not finance their activities.
Agranovsky said the Investigative Committee was waging an information war against Razvozzhayev and said the recordings and videos could easily have been falsified.
Journalist and opposition Coordination Council member Oleg Kashin said he thought that while Udaltsov was willing to meet with almost anyone to discuss revolution, taking large sums of money would run counter to his beliefs.
"I can't believe that he and his associates took any sizable amount of money for revolution, because I know his aestheticism and his temporal attitude toward everything," Kashin wrote in a comment on news site Snob.ru.
If the LifeNews materials are genuine, then Udaltsov meeting with "obvious provocateurs" like Targamadze speaks to his extremely low political acumen and is damaging to his reputation as a politician, Pavlovsky said.
"It makes it very difficult for many people to heed his calls to attend demonstrations, and his instructions about how to protest," he said.
The case against Udaltsov, Lebedev and Razvozzhayev was opened in October after the airing of the NTV expose "Anatomy of a Protest 2," which said Targamadze had spoken with Udaltsov about seizing power in Kaliningrad and Vladivostok. The film alleged to show hidden camera footage of a meeting between the two in Minsk that the Investigative Committee said was genuine.
News reports have said Targamadze participated in revolutions across the former Soviet Union, including the Rose Revolution in Georgia and the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, and in political events in other countries.

TITLE: Investigators Open Criminal Case Against Navalny Brothers
AUTHOR: By Alexander Winning
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – Investigators opened a criminal case Friday against prominent Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, his brother Oleg and a group of unspecified others on charges of large-scale corruption and money laundering.
The criminal case is the latest in a string of investigations launched against Navalny, an anti-corruption blogger and member of the opposition's recently formed Coordination Council, who rose to prominence on the back of the yearlong protest movement against President Vladimir Putin's rule.
Investigators, who allege that Navalny and associates stole more than 55 million rubles ($1.8 million), over 19 million rubles of which were laundered via a company owned by Navalny's parents, opened the case on the eve of an unsanctioned protest scheduled for Saturday that Navalny is expected to attend.
If charged and convicted, the Navalnys face up to 10 years in prison and a hefty fine.
Navalny, who was in a meeting of Aeroflot's audit committee when investigators announced the case against him, implied on Twitter that the case was another attempt to silence him by applying pressure on his family.
"As I far as I understand, it's not enough for them to pressure me. Now they've started on my family as well," said Navalny, who sits on the board of directors of the national flag carrier.
"I've read the Investigative Committee statement. … It's complete rubbish," he said, adding that investigators searched the home of his parents and brother's place of work in the early afternoon. 
Explaining the ongoing investigation, the Investigative Committee said on its official website that the Navalnys' corrupt scheme was hatched in spring 2008, when Oleg Navalny, then a manager at Russian Post, convinced a large commercial firm backed by foreign capital to sign a contract to transport post with a company founded by Alexei Navalny but registered in the name of an unidentified acquaintance.
The statement said that the company Navalny founded, called Main Subscription Agency, then offered the large commercial firm freight services at an inflated price and outsourced the services to a separate transportation company managed by another unidentified acquaintance of Oleg Navalny.
According to investigators, the scheme ran from August 2008 to May 2011, during which time Main Subscription Agency was paid for transporting post between Yaroslavl and Moscow. In a further twist, investigators said that the commercial firm significantly overpaid the company allegedly controlled by the Navalny brothers. 
Through this elaborate ruse, investigators said the Navalny brothers pocketed over 55 million rubles, the bulk of which was spent on "their own needs" and the rest of which was transferred to the Kobyakovo Willow-Weaving Factory, a Moscow region business owned by Navalny's parents, to pay for rent and raw materials.
In August, investigators and Federal Security Service officers raided Navalny's parents' willow-weaving factory. 
At the time, Navalny suspected that they were looking for evidence implicating him in the theft of timber products from the KirovLes state company, a scam that reportedly cost the regional government 16 million rubles. Navalny was working as an adviser to Kirov region Governor Nikita Belykh at the time the theft was supposed to have taken place.
The KirovLes investigation was later dropped after law enforcement officials found that Navalny had not committed any violations. The regional investigator who oversaw the inquiry, Major-General Alexander Panov, was reportedly fired in early December after a dressing-down by his boss, Investigative Committee chief Alexander Bastrykin.
"You have a man named Navalny. You had a criminal case against him and you stopped it on the quiet," Bastrykin said while addressing Panov in November.
Belykh later denied that Panov's firing had anything to do with the Navalny case and said Panov resigned due to family reasons. He didn't elaborate further.
On Friday, investigators said they were running additional checks to determine the Navalnys' role in the elaborate corruption case announced that morning.
It was not immediately clear whether Navalny would be summoned for questioning. In June, Navalny was summoned to the Investigative Committee on the same day as a March of Millions protest, preventing him from addressing supporters.

TITLE: Russia Implicated in Litvinenko Death
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – The dramatic affair of the death of Alexander Litvinenko resurfaced with force Thursday, when a lawyer told a London judicial hearing that an initial assessment of evidence showed that the Russian state is to blame for the mysterious poisoning of the Kremlin dissident.
An examination of British government material establishes "a prima facie case in the culpability of the Russian state in the death of Alexander Litvinenko," Hugh Davies, an attorney acting on behalf of the inquest, said according to news reports. 
Litvinenko died in November 2006 after drinking tea laced with the rare radioactive isotope polonium-210 at a London hotel. His family has long blamed the Kremlin for his death, an accusation that Moscow has vehemently denied. 
A lawyer for Litvinenko's widow, Marina, told Thursday's hearing that the former KGB agent, who worked for the the Federal Security Service until his dismissal in 1998, also worked for British intelligence after fleeing to London in 2000.
Litvinenko was regularly paid for information about Russian organized crime by Britain's secret service, the MI6, barrister Ben Emerson was quoted as saying on the website of the Telegraph newspaper.
Emerson also said that Litvinenko worked with Andrei Lugovoi, the State Duma deputy who is the prime suspect in his death. 
The lawyer added that Litvinenko had been asked by MI6 to help Spanish intelligence investigate Russian organized crime and links to the Russian state and Vladimir Putin. Shortly before his death, he had planned to meet Spanish prosecutors, the reports said. 
Under British law, an inquest is held to determine the cause of death when a person dies unexpectedly. It cannot apportion criminal or civil blame.
The London hearing, which continues this Friday, is preliminary and aimed at setting out the scope of a public inquest probing the circumstances of the case. The inquest is due to start on May 1 next year, six and a half years after Litvinenko's death.
The case caused an unprecedented scandal in 2006 with the allegation of a government-sponsored murder on British soil. Russian-British relations sank to post-Cold War lows in the following years, during which Moscow imposed drastic sanctions on the British Council and pro-Kremlin youth groups harassed Ambassador Tony Brenton.
London has asked in vain for the extradition of Lugovoi, a former KGB member, who together with another former agent, Dmitry Kovtun, met with Litvinenko hours before he fell ill. 
Both left a trail of polonium behind them when they returned to Moscow. Lugovoi, Kovtun and Vyacheslav Sokolenko, a third ex-KGB agent who stayed with them at the same hotel during the alleged poisoning, have denied any involvement in Litvinenko's death.
Lugovoi, who has been a deputy for the nationalist Liberal Democrats since 2007, was unavailable for comment Thursday. His spokeswoman Sofia Filipova said that he would only make a statement after the hearing is over this Friday.
Experts pointed out that while Litvinenko's cooperation with MI6 had been suggested by British media reports early on in the affair, it was significant that investigators were again publicly blaming the Kremlin.
"The British government seems willing openly to point the finger at Moscow, something they've been reluctant to do directly," said Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian crime and a researcher at New York University.
Galeotti added that the discovery of polonium already is very strong evidence of state involvement because only sophisticated nuclear laboratories can produce the rare element in necessary quantities.
Analysts suggested that Litvinenko may have been killed by his former KGB peers for betraying his country, or that his death was intended to scare London's growing Russian dissident community. 
During his time in the British capital, Litvinenko worked closely with two of the Kremlin's harshest critics: former power broker Boris Berezovsky and Chechen rebel leader Akhmed Zakayev. The two were subsequently accused by Moscow officials of being behind the killing.
But Galeotti said that the Spanish trail might be important, too.
He argued that Moscow must have been surprised about the launch of high-level investigations in Spain. "For years it seemed that Madrid just didn't care," he said by telephone from New York.
London's The Sunday Times reported in December 2006, shortly after Litvinenko's death, that Litvinenko had crossed Russian mafia figures. It cited sources in Spain as saying he had provided information that helped lead to the arrest of nine suspected mafia members in May of that year. 
Spanish authorities went ahead with their investigations. In 2008, they arrested 20 people and seized millions of dollars in cash, cars and property, which they linked the Tambov and Malyshev organized crime groups. Among those detained were suspected ringleaders Gennady Petrov and Alexander Malyshev. 
In the same year, Spanish police issued an arrest warrant for State Duma Deputy Vladislav Reznik on suspicion of links with organized crime. Reznik denied wrongdoing and continues to enjoy immunity from prosecution as a deputy.

TITLE: Easyjet Sells Tickets for Moscow-Manchester Flights
AUTHOR: By Howard Amos
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – British budget airline EasyJet on Wednesday started selling tickets for a Moscow-Manchester service to begin in March, as the no-frills carrier looks set to slash the cost of flying between Russia and Britain.
A one-way trip from Moscow's Domodedovo Airport to Manchester, the third largest city in Britain, starts at $72.49, EasyJet director Paul Simmons told The St. Petersburg Times. The price for Moscow-London flights, with sales set to begin in mid-January, will be similar.
As of March 18, there will be four daily flights between Moscow and London, leaving London at 7 a.m. and 2:10 p.m. and Moscow at 2:30 p.m. and 9:40 p.m., Simmons said. The Moscow-Manchester service will operate on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays.
While there is a fixed quota for tickets sold at the starting price, EasyJet operates a system whereby fares increase with demand, making them more expensive in peak periods. 
The company's first commercial flight from Manchester to Moscow is scheduled for March 28. By mid-afternoon in Moscow a one-way ticket on EasyJet's website was selling for &#163;59.99 ($96.70).
As well as stealing market share from Russian carriers, EasyJet also expects to boost the numbers of tourists and businessmen traveling between the two countries. 
"We will grow the market," Simmons said. "We tend to do that when we go to a new destination."
And the company expects the new routes to be lucrative. EasyJet could reap profits of up to $2.4 million flying 300,000 passengers annually, he said. 
EasyJet was awarded the right to operate the Moscow-London route from Britain's Civil Aviation Authority in October, beating off competition from Richard Branson's Virgin Atlantic. 
Under a bilateral agreement between Russia and Britain only four carriers can fly between the two countries' capitals. A space became available earlier this year — for the first time since 1998 — after British Airways bought the other British carrier on the route, BMI. 
Aside from EasyJet, the other three carriers flying between the two capitals are British Airways, Transaero and Aeroflot. 
A one-way ticket from London to Moscow on March 18, the day EasyJet has scheduled for its first service, is currently retailing at 24,475 rubles ($798) with Aeroflot, $739 with Transaero and $1,246 with British Airways. 
The appearance of EasyJet as a rival often forces other airlines to cut prices, Simmons said.
The head of national carrier Aeroflot Vitaly Savelyov told President Vladimir Putin in October that a national low cost airline could be set up as early as next year, although the move was dependent on certain amendments to Russian aviation law. 
EasyJet is looking to expand the number of routes it flies to Moscow, Simmons said, with the next direct links to the Russian capital likely to be with Switzerland. Edinburgh is another destination the company is considering.

TITLE: Petersburg Workshop Casting Russian Rulers in Wax
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A St. Petersburg workshop is crafting wax figures of Russian rulers past and present for an exhibit ordered by the presidential administration.
The project, which is financed by an unidentified private fund, has been running for several years and won't be completed for several more, Andrei Arsenyev, director of the Russky Vityaz workshop, told Interfax on Thursday.
The workshop has made 30 figures so far, each of them 30 centimeters in height. Among the finished figures are five of President Vladimir Putin and others depicting Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible and Russia's 20th-century leaders.
A gallery of some of the figures is available here.
Each figure takes four months to produce and costs between 300,000 and 450,000 rubles ($10,000 to 15,000). The figures will be displayed either at a newly built museum or at an existing one. 
In December 2011, President Dmitry Medvedev presented his Azeri counterpart Ilham Aliyev with a chess set crafted by the same workshop, the workshop said on its website. 
The workshop primarily makes tin miniatures dedicated to military and historical subjects.

TITLE: Black Snow Falls in Omsk
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – Black snow has fallen in the Siberian city of Omsk for the second time in a week, a news report said Friday.
Omsk residents first noticed the black snow on Wednesday but were assured that the snow did not present any health risks, RIA-Novosti reported Friday.
Residents have now turned to the Federal Inspection Service for Natural Resources Use with a request to look into the snow's abnormal color, the report said.
Full tests are being carried out to get to the bottom of the freakish weather.
It is not the first time that Omsk residents have been exposed to unusual climatic conditions. In the summer, residents raised the alarm after they witnessed white powder falling from the air. 
The powder turned out to be an oxidizing agent used at a nearby Gazpromneft refinery. The refinery was fined but has denied its guilt.

TITLE: Diaspora Youths Sold on Russian, but not Russia
AUTHOR: By Lena Smirnova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – Members of the diaspora who gathered in Moscow on Thursday for the Forum of Russian Compatriots welcomed President Vladimir Putin's recent edict to support remote Russian language-learning amid efforts in their home countries to limit the status of their mother tongue. 
However, attendees also voiced doubts that the language programs will help draw young Russians back to their traditional motherland. 
In his annual state-of-the-nation address Wednesday, Putin told the government to support Russian schools abroad through such measures as providing textbooks. 
"I instruct the government to submit proposals for the implementation of remote education in Russian," Putin said. "It should be available to younger people in CIS countries and to our compatriots all over the world."
Russians abroad can now register for free online courses that allow them to go through Russia's school curriculum. They are given a certificate after passing the final exam. Successful completion of this program makes it easier for students to then pass Russia's general exams and apply to a university here. 
Tatyana Kuzina, chairman of the Slavic Cultural Center in Kazakhstan, welcomed Putin's effort. Only the Kazakh language holds official status in the country, but there are at least 5 million Russians in the country of 16 million people. Russian is the main language of communication for everyone, she said.
The Kazakh government is now trying to limit the influence of Russian. In March, students are expected to be tested on their knowledge of Kazakh. Kuzina said that will be a difficult challenge for the few remaining Russian schools in the country. After 2015, all education is expected to be given in the Kazakh language. 
Remote education will help Russians in Kazakhstan retain their mother tongue and encourage more of them to move back to the country, Kuzina said. She estimated that about 93 percent of people who go through the remote learning process move to Russia. 
"Today, we will really attract the best minds to Russia," she said. 
But representatives of diaspora groups in other countries expressed doubt that young Russians will move back. 
Russians in Latvia are more interested in getting Russian citizenship than Latvian, said Viktor Gushin, coordinator of Latvia's Council of Public Organizations. But most of the 40,000 Russian citizens living in Latvia now are from older generations. They see a better pension as one of the main advantages of Russian citizenship. 
"The Russian pension allows people to survive better," Gushin said. "Getting Russian citizenship then substantially improves the material standing of the person." 
Younger people are less motivated to become Russian citizens or move to the country. While older Latvians tend to speak Russian fluently, the younger generation doesn't know the language at all, Gushin said. 
About 120 young Latvian residents with different citizenship status go to Russia each year for the free education they are offered, but many others move to the West, he added. 
Yusuf-zade Gaig Yusufovich, president of a Baku-based charity fund that works with Russian expats, said trading in an Azeri passport for a Russian one would not be worth it. 
"Patriotism has nothing to do with it," he said. "What does Russia offer in return? So a person comes here. He throws away everything, sells everything and leaves. He goes to Russia, and now what?"
Even if an expatriate Russian is offered work here, the bureaucratic process can take so long that by the time he arrives, the employer will have given the job to someone else, Yusufovich said. 
He added that he doesn't know many people in Azerbaijan who want to move to Russia.

TITLE: Putin Offers Little Political Reform
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – The government will continue to bolster the country's economic and military prowess as well as dole out benefits to citizens, but political change can only be incremental, President Vladimir Putin said in his state-of-the-nation address Wednesday.
Putin's first major policy speech since he returned as head of state earlier this year had a heavy focus on domestic and social achievements. It offered cautious reforms but no major new recipes on domestic or foreign policy.
Much media attention was devoted to the president's physical health, which had been the subject of rampant speculation after he canceled foreign visits throughout October and November amid reports of a back ailment.
However, a vigorous Putin delivered the hour-and-a-half speech while standing, although his arms were periodically leaning on the podium, while his torso slanted to the right. National television showed the president walking into the hall but did not show him leave after the speech. 
A reporter for the Dozhd online television channel who was in the hall said afterward that Putin's path to the podium was shorter than usual. 
Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told Izvestia in an interview published Wednesday that the president planned to go skiing in January. 
The address was neither saber-rattling nor aggressive, balancing careful self-criticism with a new ideological impetus on boosting the nation's moral values.
The president kicked off by saying that Russia and the world were facing "epochal change, maybe even upheaval," only to go on to say that the country's rising "civil activism" should be based on responsibility and patriotism.
"No society can survive without civil responsibility," he said, quoting Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
The president added that the country's leadership had to be responsible and transparent. 
"The government must not be an isolated caste," he said.
Observers say Putin has appeared increasingly isolated over the past year, which saw unprecedented mass protests against his leadership. Last month, he seemed ill-informed when offering German Chancellor Angela Merkel a description of an allegedly anti-Semitic performance by members of the Pussy Riot punk group, which starkly contrasted with participants' accounts.
In his Wednesday address, Putin mentioned the country's rising middle class but argued that this has more significance for the regions. 
"We support the revival of the provincial intelligentsia, which has always been a professional and moral backbone," he said.
As this year's protest movement has largely been carried by the urban middle class, Putin had to increasingly rely on support from the country's more underdeveloped regions. 
Putin said widespread indifference about societal ills like corruption, extremism and offensive behavior was the result of Soviet-era "moral benchmarks" being cast away during the last two decades. 
"We literally threw out the baby with the bathwater," he said, adding that the problem was getting worse, posing long-term risks to national integrity.
As a cure, Putin suggested strengthening "spiritual ties," which he said were too weak in society. This was widely taken as a hint for more state support for officially sanctioned religious organizations, first and foremost the Russian Orthodox Church.
Controversy over the Kremlin's close ties with the church peaked this summer, when a court convicted three members of punk band Pussy Riot on charges that sprang from a performance they gave in a church to protest those ties.
Despite warnings that recent population growth will be short-lived, Putin praised his demographic policies and said three children should be the norm among families. The president himself has two daughters.
Putin did offer some political reforms, but they were of limited scope compared with the ones set forth a year ago in Dmitry Medvedev's last address as president, in which he announced direct gubernatorial elections and greatly lowered hurdles for party registration.
Putin proposed the reintroduction of electoral blocs, allowing parties to group together in parliamentary elections. Such a system, which was in place in the 1990s, increases smaller parties' chances of winning seats.
But at the same time, he supported changing the State Duma's electoral system back to a mix of proportional representation and winner-take-all constituencies, which would make it even harder for smaller parties to win seats.
The current system uses proportional representation and party lists combined with a 7 percent hurdle to enter parliament. It replaced a mixed system in 2003.
Putin also backed a proposal to give federal lawmakers the right to initiate bills in their respective regions.
Significantly, he called political competition "a blessing" but added that a set of rules was necessary to rule out separatism, direct or indirect outside interference, foreign financing of political activities and the participation of criminals in politics.
Putin has said that one reason direct gubernatorial elections were abolished was the need to prevent people with a criminal past from entering politics.
In a clear signal to the extraparliamentary opposition, he said "civilized dialogue" can be held only with "civilized" opponents. 
"Changing and modernizing the political system is necessary, but to pay for the thirst for change by destroying the very state is unacceptable," he said.
Putin also proposed that lawmakers be obligated to consider matters widely discussed on the Internet and that by 2015, CIS citizens be banned from entering the country without foreign passports.
Civil activists had little sympathy for the speech Wednesday.
"Much about what; little about how," Yelena Panfilova, head of Transparency International Russia, said on Twitter.
Opposition leader Alexei Navalny said on his blog that the speech could be summarized as "soon everything will be OK. I promise."
Analysts identified Putin's call for preventing officials from transferring money to offshore accounts as his boldest message.
Vyacheslav Nikonov, a State Duma deputy with close Kremlin ties, said Putin's goal was the "renationalization of the elites," who had been orienting themselves toward other countries.
He added that the the address was "an ambitious program to turn Russia into a first-rate state."
Alexei Mukhin, of the Center for Political Information, a think tank, said the address was moderate because it contained no clear enemy image. Putin referred only to "offshore bureaucracy and politicians acting in the interests of foreign states," Mukhin said on his blog.
Staff writers Alexander Bratersky and Natalya Krainova contributed reporting.

TITLE: Putin Targets Transparency of Offshore Companies
AUTHOR: By Irina Filatova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – President Vladimir Putin expanded Russian vocabulary Wednesday, as he called for “deoffshorization” of the country's economy, a measure he said would help repatriate capital channeled to offshore jurisdictions. 
In his state-of-the-nation address, which covered a wide range of economic issues, Putin pushed for agreements with tax havens that would help open up offshore entities and make them disclose their financials. 
“The offshore nature of Russia's economy has become a household word. Experts call this escaping the jurisdiction,” Putin said. “We need a comprehensive system of measures for the deoffshorization of our economy.”
Commenting on figures, he said that nine out of every 10 deals by big Russian companies, including state-owned ones, are not subject to national jurisdiction, according to some estimates. 
He ordered the government to submit proposals on how to make Russia more attractive for businesses. 
One possible way to do so is to improve the country's poor legal system, said Jochen Wermuth, founding partner and chief investment officer at Wermuth Asset Management.
Many Russian companies opt for offshore transactions “not to avoid taxes, but to benefit from clear international rule of law” and courts that can ensure “a fair hearing,” he said in e-mailed comments. 
Subjecting Russia's Supreme Court to a higher legal authority like the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg might make the country's legal environment more attractive, while simply forbidding offshore transactions is unlikely to bring any results and would only discourage deal activity, Wermuth said. 
Improving the country's court system was among the key highlights in Putin's speech. The president called for an end to the system under which an overwhelming majority of court decisions in criminal cases involving businesses are guilty verdicts. 
“We must consistently work to harmonize legislation and to finally give up the presumption of guilt for businesses,” Putin said. He also pushed for removing all legal loopholes that “allow for turning a business dispute into score-settling.” 
He also moved forward the issue of privatization, saying that the government should encourage capital repatriation by selling stakes in state companies on Russian stock exchanges. Reiterating his earlier statement that privatization must be fair, Putin said it would ensure trust between business and the government. 
In yet another effort to increase the public's trust in government officials and fight corruption, he suggested introducing control over their spending and imposing restrictions on officials' foreign bank accounts and equities. 
The proposal drew applause from the audience, prompting a reaction from the president: “Don't applaud yet, you might not like it all.” The remark caused the audience to laugh. 
Among those noticed in the Kremlin Georgiyevsky Hall, where the president delivered his speech, were boxer-turned lawmaker Nikolai Valuyev and Patriarch Kirill. Billionaire Roman Abramovich, known for his good relations with Putin, was also spotted in the hall, Dozhd television channel reported. 
Putin said none of the decision makers in the Cabinet and the presidential administration, nor the State Duma and Federation Council officials and their close relatives, will be allowed to hold any foreign assets.
They will also be required to declare foreign properties and report their value and the sources of funds used to pay for them, he added. 
Among other steps to stimulate investment and boost the country's economic growth that the president outlined were reforming the tax system and developing the arbitration court system. Putin also reiterated that the country's economy can't rely on oil and gas revenues anymore.
“The reserves of the natural resource-based model have depleted, while Russia's development requires annual GDP growth of 5 percent to 6 percent over the next decade,” he said. 
He pointed out that the new model of economic growth will be based on the “economic freedom, private property and competition … not state capitalism.”
Experts and businesspeople praised the steps outlined in the speech, but they pointed out that the real question is whether and how the measures will be put into practice. 
In his speech Putin confirmed the Kremlin's stated commitment to improve the country's investment climate and move Russia to  20th place in the global ranking of the most attractive countries for doing business, said Alexander Galushka, chairman of Delovaya Rossia, a business lobby.
“We view it as an economic revolution that could result only from dramatic changes in all the aspects critical for business, like taxes customs procedures … protecting the rights of investors,” Galushka said. “All these things put together will make doing business in Russia safe.”
The priorities in the country's economic policy highlighted in Putin's speech were in line with the expectations among the investment community, said Yaroslav Lissovolik, chief economist of Deutsche Bank Russia. He added that the key issue is how those initiatives will be implemented.
“It is important that improvements in the economic situation result not from restrictive measures but from more transparency and the liberalization of the investment climate,” he said.

TITLE: Plea Bargain Upheld in Politkovskaya Case
AUTHOR: By Jonathan Earle
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – A Moscow judge upheld a controversial plea bargain that could complicate efforts to determine who ordered the killing of Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006.
Judge Alexander Zamashnyuk ruled that Politkovskaya’s two children had no right to challenge the deal, which includes a reduced sentence for the suspect, ex-cop Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov, in exchange for his cooperation with the investigation, the Rapsi legal news agency reported Wednesday.
The lawyer for Politkovskaya’s children, Anna Stavitskaya, said the deal would hinder efforts to determine who ordered the killing and exactly how it was carried out because Pavlyuchenkov’s trial would now take place without the examination of documents or witnesses, and parts of it would be closed to the press.
Stavitskaya also argued that Pavlyuchenkov hadn’t satisfied the conditions of the plea bargain, which include describing his role in the crime and naming the person who ordered it.
But the state prosecutor said Pavlyuchenkov had named names previously unknown to investigators and described in detail how the crime was organized, funded and carried out.
And Pavlyuchenkov, who has confessed to tracking Politkovskaya and acquiring the murder weapon, said self-exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky and Chechen separatist leader Akhmed Zakayev were behind the slaying, a claim Stavitskaya has dismissed as political scapegoating.
The state prosecutor on Wednesday asked that Pavlyuchenkov be sentenced to 12 years in prison and pay 10 million rubles ($326,000) for passing information about Politkovskaya to the killers.
She cited extenuating circumstances, including his cooperation with investigators, awards he received as a police officer, health problems, his service in Afghanistan, and a wife awaiting his return.
“But Vera and Ilya Politkovsky’s mother will never return because a man named Pavlyuchenko did a lot to make sure she passed away,” Stavitskaya retorted.
Zamashnyuk also rejected a request that Pavlyuchenkov be tried with five other suspects rather than separately. A verdict could come as soon as Friday, he said.
According to investigators, another suspect, Lom-Ali Gaitukayev, organized Politkovskaya’s killing by hiring a criminal gang of three Chechen brothers — Rustam, Ibragim and Dzhabrail Makhmudov — and another former police official, Sergei Khadzhikurbanov.
They have been charged with murder and illegal possession of weapons, which carry maximum sentences of life imprisonment and eight years’ jail time, respectively.
Politkovskaya, a top investigative journalist who specialized in corruption and human rights violations in the North Caucasus, was shot dead in her apartment building in Moscow. Investigators linked the killing to her work.
The crime sparked an international outcry, and the government’s failure to punish the killers and identify the person who ordered the hit has for many come to symbolize the justice system’s ills.

TITLE: Human Rights NGO Receives $80,000 in Donations
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – The Moscow Helsinki Group, one of Russia's oldest human rights organizations, said Wednesday that it had received 2.5 million rubles ($81,300) in donations since launching an appeal for financial support late last month.
Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a veteran rights activist and head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, said that the donations would fund the group's operational expenses and core personnel, while any additional contributions would go toward targeted human rights programs and providing legal assistance to Russian citizens, RIA-Novosti reported.
Major donors included rock musician Yury Shevchuk, who contributed proceeds from a concert held Tuesday, and billionaire and former presidential hopeful Mikhail Prokhorov, who earlier contributed 1 million rubles. 
Another 1 million rubles came in small private donations from an unspecified number of individual contributors, Vedomosti reported.
Other rights groups including Transparency International and Golos have said they would also seek donations to finance future work after a law toughening restrictions on NGOs that conduct “political activity” and receive foreign funding came into force late last month.

TITLE: Art Exhibition Sparks Outcry
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The State Hermitage Museum has come under fire from the State Prosecutor’s office over a controversial exhibition.
Investigators are examining artwork in the exhibition “End of Fun” by British art duo Jake and Dinos Chapman, after the local prosecutor’s office was swamped with dozens of complaints of blasphemy. The authors of the letters accused the works of being “extremist” and “hurting their religious feelings.”
“We have received nearly 130 complaints about this exhibition; naturally, we took the matter seriously,” said Marina Nikolayeva, a spokeswoman for the State Prosecutor’s Office in St. Petersburg. “What people wrote in their complaints — we received most of them through our Internet site — was actually very similar in character.”
The Chapman brothers are no strangers to provocation and controversy. The British artists are internationally renowned for using provocation as a tool to draw attention to social, humanitarian or political issues that they touch upon in their works. In this sense, controversy has become an integral part of their artistic method and strategy.
The exhibition features, among other exhibits, a Christian cross with the figure of McDonald’s clown Ronald McDonald nailed to it, and a crucified teddy bear. These two images featured prominently in the complaints, according to the prosecutors.
Earlier this year, the British duo presented their shocking imagery at an exhibition in Kiev.
The Chapman brothers reacted sarcastically to the investigation, offering “extreme apologies” for their antifascist display. The duo also vowed never to set foot in Russia again.
The Hermitage’s director Mikhail Piotrovsky spoke with open outrage about the prosecutor’s investigation, and branded the complaints “a sign of the cultural degradation of Russian society” and “a parade of snitching,” and suggested the wave of similarly worded letters to the prosecutors could have been “an organized online attack on the museum.”
Piotrovsky expressed hope that the prosecutors would defend the museum’s sovereign right to mount shows of artwork that curators believe are worth exhibiting.  
“It is the competence and the legitimate right of the museum to decide what qualifies as a work of art and what does not,” Piotrovsky wrote in an official statement posted on the Hermitage’s website.
The Hermitage’s director also said that in the current context it would be reasonable to hold an academic conference that would focus on the issues of provocation and blasphemy on the international arts scene. 
“To ensure a serious debate on this sensitive and most important issue, we would invite established historians, theologists, arts experts and lawyers, rather than marginals,” he said.
The “End of Fun” exhibition is officially scheduled to run at the Hermitage until Jan. 13.
The scandal over the Chapman brothers’ exhibition is the latest in a recent series of episodes in which Western artists have faced fierce opposition from the more conservative elements of the city’s political establishment and the authorities, particularly over gender issues and human rights.
The Moskovsky district court in November dropped charges against the U.S. pop diva Madonna for “allegedly inciting religious hatred and offending cultural traditions” during her concert in St. Petersburg in August 2012.
The Trade Union of Russian Citizens and several other public organizations had sought 333 million rubles ($11 million) in moral damages from Madonna and the organizers of the concert. During the performance, Madonna reportedly trampled an Orthodox cross under her feet and encouraged the 25,000-strong crowd to wear pink bracelets and raise their hands in order to show their support for gay rights in Russia.
Following in the footsteps of Madonna, fellow U.S. pop icon Lady Gaga, who performed in St. Petersburg on Dec. 9, made statements in support of the gay community in Russia, thereby provoking the local conservative community, including the infamous United Russia deputy Vitaly Milonov. 
During the concert, Lady Gaga called for respect for gay rights, infuriating conservative politicians including Milonov, a member of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly and the mastermind of the highly controversial law banning “homosexual propaganda” in the city. Milonov has pledged to contact the prosecutor’s office and ask them to investigate the pop star for breaking this law.

TITLE: Anniversary March Of Freedom Gets Go-Ahead
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: City Hall on Monday authorized the March of Freedom, set to mark Saturday’s anniversary of last year’s protests against widespread fraud in the State Duma parliamentary elections, but rejected every route that the organizers proposed.  
Natalya Gryaznevich, one of the organizers, said Tuesday that the routes in the busier part of the center used by thousands of protesters for the demos held earlier this year were rejected, and that they had had to agree to a route offered by City Hall as an alternative.
The march, which is set to coincide with the planned March of Freedom in Moscow and protests in a number of other cities, will start at Gorkovskaya metro station at 2 p.m. Saturday and end on the Field of Mars.
During Monday’s negotiations at City Hall, Nikolai Strumentov of City Hall’s committee for law, order and security suggested holding a rally in the remote Polyustrovo Park or on the causeway leading across the Gulf of Finland to the island of Kronstadt, a proposal that the organizers described as “a mockery” in a news release.
“We said ‘thanks but no thanks,’ and chose the one from Gorkovskaya metro station as the most suitable,” Gryaznevich said.
In their first application, submitted to City Hall on Dec. 2, the organizers suggested two routes starting from Oktyabrsky Concert Hall on Ligovsky Prospekt.  After City Hall had rejected them, two alternative routes, one also from Oktyabrsky and another from Vladimirskaya Ploshchad, were suggested on Dec. 10, but were also declined.
“The reasoning behind it was hilarious,” Gryaznevich said.
“He [Strumentov] asked, ‘Have you been there? It’s all icicles and snowdrifts!’ That’s interesting, because it’s their [City Hall’s] job to keep the city clear of snow and ice, but nevertheless that was the reason they gave for the rejection.”
Gryaznevich, who belongs to the Citizen’s Responsibility movement formed in the wake of the first election protests in January 2012, said the organizers act as individuals rather than representatives of any political groups. 
Only national and city flags will be allowed at the march, so as not to scare off concerned citizens who support the protesters’ demands but might not share the political views of one or another political organization. No stationary rally with speakers will be held.
“When people see flags belonging to organizations they do not support, it repels them at once,” Gryaznevich said.
“We decided to concentrate on the fact that this is a common protest, needed by everyone, and put political nuances aside. It doesn’t matter if people are nationalists or liberals.”
Last year’s protests, which drew over 100,000 in Moscow and over 10,000 in St. Petersburg, making them ten times larger than most protests since Vladimir Putin assumed the presidency in 2000, called for the annulment of the election results and the release of political prisoners, among other things. 
None of these demands have been fulfilled by the Kremlin, and the arrests of Pussy Riot members and the May 6 protesters in Moscow have only added to the number of political prisoners in the country.

TITLE: City Couples Go for Dates With Destiny
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The dates of Dec. 12 and 21 have proved popular as wedding dates among engaged couples in the city, Interfax reported.
A total of 480 Petersburg couples have applied for the civil registration of their marriage on Dec. 12, which in digital form is 12.12.12. In comparison, only 74 couples want to get married Dec. 19. 
The date of the supposed “end of the world,” which according to an ancient Mayan prophesy may be Dec. 21, has also become a popular date for local weddings, with 320 couples keen to tie the knot that day.
Scientists do not expect the world to end on that day, Interfax reported.
Couples often choose “special” dates on which to tie the knot. For instance, 561 couples got married in St. Petersburg on Nov. 11 last year — the so-called “date of six ones” (11.11.11). Registry offices had to extend their working hours in order to meet demand on that day.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Vishnevskaya Dies</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The renowned opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya has died at the age of 87, it was reported Tuesday.
“This is a huge loss, not just for Russian culture, but for world culture as a whole,” Mikhail Shvydkoi, an ex-culture minister and special envoy for the president on international cultural cooperation, was quoted by Interfax as saying.
“She and her husband, Mstislav Rostropovich, behaved like model citizens in the Soviet era,” said veteran human rights campaigner Lyudmila Alexeyeva. “They took in [dissident author Alexander] Solzhenitsyn when he had nowhere to live, even though they knew they would get no thanks from the authorities for it,” she said.
Vishnevskaya emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1974 with her husband, the cellist and conductor Rostropovich, and their children. They lived in the U.S. and France before returning to Russia in 1990. Rostropovich died in 2007. 

<b>Grateful Gaga</b> 
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Lady Gaga repeatedly thanked Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev during her weekend concert in St. Petersburg for allowing her to perform in Russia.
“Medvedev said Russia can have many laws, but that it is impossible to make a law that would regulate relationships between people,” the singer said.
Last Friday Medvedev said he didn’t see the need for homosexual relationships to be regulated by legislation.
“Far from all moral issues, far from all behavioral habits or issues of communication should be governed by legislation. Because not all relationships between people can be regulated by law,” Medvedev said.

<b>Get Out of the Car</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The head of the city’s Development, Landscaping and Maintenance Committee, Vladimir Abramenko, called upon city residents last week to use public transport instead of their cars to avoid a traffic breakdown in the city, Interfax reported.
“To completely clear the city of snow, from six to eight hours are needed if there are few vehicles on the streets. The situation on Nov. 30 [when a heavy snowfall led to gridlock in the city] is not normal,” Abramenko said.
“Let’s not create difficulties at such a time. Please use public transport,” the official said.

<b>Sweet 16 for Malafeev</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — FC Zenit goalkeeper Vyacheslav Malafeev is engaged to be married to Yekaterina Komyakova of the musical duo DJ Dolls.
Komyakova wrote on her Twitter page that the ceremony is scheduled for Dec. 16 at 4.16 p.m. (16.16 according to the 24-hour system). The date and the time have clearly been chosen to match Malafeev’s shirt number, which is 16, Interfax reported.
Komyakova was born in the town of Borovichi in the Novgorod Oblast on April 7, 1988, making her nine years younger than Malafeev.
Malafeev’s first wife Marina was killed in a car accident in St. Petersburg on March 17 last year.

TITLE: Rossiya, Pulkovo Enjoy Bigger Passenger Quotas
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The St. Petersburg-based Rossiya Airlines honored its four millionth passenger of the year last week in St. Petersburg.
While it turned out to be a pleasant surprise for city resident Natalya Grishanova, who happened to be the lucky passenger, it was also a milestone for the airline itself, since it is the first time Rossiya has achieved this threshold.
Last year the airline carried 3.5 million passengers.
Dmitry Zvonaryov, Rossiya’s deputy general commercial director, said the company had seen a 17-percent increase in passenger volumes this year.
Zvonaryov said the factors that influenced this growth included the company’s adoption of new quality standards, the merger with Aeroflot, Russia’s leading airline, and an increase in demand for flights among Russians.
“This year, Russia’s airlines are expected to carry a combined total of about 70 million passengers. This figure indicates that more and more people want to fly, be it for business or vacation,” Zvonaryov said.
Zvonaryov said Rossiya currently services 40 percent of passenger transportation at St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo airport, adding that the company hopes “to serve every second passenger in Pulkovo airport soon” and to reach a passenger volume of five million people next year. Pulkovo airport recently honored its 10 millionth passenger this year.
Next year, Rossiya plans to launch flights to the city of Syktyvkar in Russia’s Komi republic, as well as to new destinations in Spain and Greece.
 “Our aim is to offer our passengers interesting new destinations, lower prices for tickets and more sophisticated technology,” Zvonaryov said.
 “We’re planning not only to widen the geography of our flights but also to increase the frequency of flights,” he added.
Zvonaryov said that the airline had, however, once again been obliged to temporarily suspend flights to London for the fall-winter season.
“It takes so much time and effort for many people, sometimes up to one or even one and a half months, to get a visa to Great Britain that we have noticed a significant drop in passenger volume on our flights to London,” he said. “So we’ve suspended the flight to see if the situation improves. So many things have a knock-on effect on the travel market. For instance, when Israel and Russia introduced a no-visa regime [in Sept. 2008] we witnessed a significant increase in travel to Israel,” he said.
Grishanova, an IT engineer by profession, said it was “a very pleasant surprise” for her to become Rossiya’s four millionth passenger. Grishanova, who was given presents by Rossiya Airlines, including two tickets to any destination, said it was the first time this year she had flown.

TITLE: Charity Campaign Kicks Off
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The local charity organization Nochlezhka, which helps homeless people, has begun its annual charity campaign to collect Christmas and New Year gifts for the city’s homeless.
The campaign is now underway and runs through Dec. 28. Nochlezhka is appealing to city residents to donate items such as fruit, sweets, canned food and personal hygiene items that will be then used to create care packages for the homeless. The organization is also asking for donations of refined sugar, black tea, cookies, packs of instant mashed potato and pasta, canned meat and fish, toothpaste, soap, socks, hats, gloves, scarves and other items of clothing.
Last year, Nochlezhka assembled 400 sets of gifts donated by schoolchildren, pensioners, businessmen and other city residents.
Viktoria Ryzhkova, coordinator of Nochlezhka, said she hoped that this year city residents would again be ready to give gifts to people who had lost their homes.
This year donations can be brought not only to Nochlezhka’s office at 112b Ulita Borovaya (entrance from Ulitsa Rastannaya) from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily, but also to the Spasibo! second-hand charity stores located at 22, 9th Sovietskaya Ulitsa, and 50/79 Gorokhovaya Ulitsa from 12 p.m. to 8 p.m. daily, as well as to the Tretye Mesto caf&#233; and mini-hotel at 57 Ulitsa Marata from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily.
Nochlezhka will publish weekly reports updating people on what items it still requires at: http://homeless.ru/

TITLE: Zenit Enters Winter Break in Third Place
AUTHOR: By Daniel Kozin
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: FC Zenit went on mid-season winter break after Monday’s home league game against FC Anzhi Makhachkala, which capped a tumultuous half-season that saw sensational signings, in-team rivalry, rifts between players and management and a crisis in results that was only partly rectified in recent performances.
Monday’s cagey encounter pitted last year’s Russian champions against a new title contender — the high-spending, star-studded Dagestani club featuring ex-Barcelona legend Samuel Eto’o, in a battle for second place in the Russian Premier League, which was ultimately won by the latter. The 1-1 draw left Zenit in third place, just behind Anzhi in second, with Moscow’s CSKA top of the table. 
The match was played in an empty Petrovsky stadium, following a Russian Football Association decision to punish the St. Petersburg club with two games behind closed doors for an incident in which a firecracker thrown from Zenit’s fan sector injured FC Dinamo Moscow goalkeeper Anton Shunin in an away game last month. Last week’s game against CSKA Moscow was also played without fans, making Zenit the first team in Russian history to play two straight games without support. The club lost 20 million rubles ($666,000) in lost ticket revenue, according to sports daily Sovietsky Sport. 
The punishment drew a sharp reaction from Zenit management, which expressed discontent over the organization of the Russian Premier League and voiced suggestions for the formation of a new CIS football league in which Zenit would participate instead of the current Russian league.
The idea sparked widespread public discussion about the tenability of such a move, and received vocal support from a number of top clubs in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, including CSKA Moscow, Anzhi, FC Shakhtar Donetsk and FC Dynamo Kiev.
Monday’s game was the last in the Russian Premier League until March 9, and broke the historical record for being the first Premier League match to be played so late in the year in Russian and Soviet history, with temperatures of minus 8 degrees Celsius and a pitch more reminiscent of an ice hockey rink than the pristine turf of a football field. 
Last week also marked Zenit’s last game in the UEFA Champions League this season, as the team was knocked out of the competition after finishing in third place in the group stage, unable to repeat last year’s feat of reaching the knockout stages. However, the 1-0 away victory against AC Milan ensured participation in Europe’s secondary cup competition in the spring — the Europa League.
The draw for the knockout stages will be held Dec. 20, with other contenders including FC Chelsea, FC Inter Milan, and fellow Russian clubs Anzhi and FC Rubin Kazan.
Despite the victory against the Italian team, the issue of squad unity and discipline resurfaced during the game when Zenit’s Brazilian striker Hulk refused to shake hands with team coach Luciano Spalletti after being substituted in the 80th minute. The player threatened to quit the club during the winter break if the situation didn’t improve, though he later apologized and voiced his commitment to the club.
The incident was reminiscent of an earlier, more protracted disagreement between Zenit homegrown midfielder Igor Denisov and the club, in which the Russian player expressed discontent over the salaries of his two new teammates Axel Witsel and Hulk, which broke Russian transfer records in their September moves to the team for a combined 80 million euros ($104 million). Denisov demanded a pay raise that would bring his salary in line with theirs before he would agree to continue to play for the team. The player spent more than a month in the reserves squad before issuing a public apology that brought him back into the side. 
Although Zenit fell short of equaling the successful positions it held before the last winter break — first place in the Russian League and second in its Champions League group — and the expected panacea of large investments in the transfer market did not ensure success, the club was able to avert disaster, as at one point in the season it was in seventh place in the league and fourth in its Champions League group. 
Despite the turnaround, coach Spalletti expressed disappointment in the last press conference of the season.
“I cannot be satisfied if I am not in first place, because I represent a club and a city that deserve to be in first place,” he said Monday.
“I am sure that after the break we will improve and will fight for first place in the league,” he added.

TITLE: Russian Opera Diva Vishnevskaya Dies at 86
AUTHOR: By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — World-renowned Russian opera diva Galina Vishnevskaya, who with her husband defied the Soviet regime to give shelter to writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn and suffered exile from her homeland, has died at 86.
Moscow's Opera Center, which Vishnevskaya created, said the singer celebrated internationally for her rich soprano voice died Tuesday in the Russian capital. It didn't give the cause.
Vishnevskaya and the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich married in 1955, frequently performed together and used their star status in the Soviet Union to help friends in trouble. In the most notable example of their defiance of the Communist authorities, they sheltered Solzhenitsyn at their country home for several years as he faced official reprisals.
"They took in Solzhenitsyn at a time when he had no place to live, even though they knew that the authorities would not pat them on the back for doing so," said Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a Soviet-era dissident who heads the respected Moscow Helsinki Group rights watchdog, according to the Interfax news agency.
After Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the country, Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich left the Soviet Union with their two daughters in 1974. They lived in Paris and then Washington, and were stripped of their Soviet citizenship in 1978.
They returned to Russia after the Soviet collapse and became involved in public activities and charitable work. Rostropovich, who was Vishnevskaya's third husband, died in 2007.
Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who restored Soviet citizenship to Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich in 1990, praised them for their eagerness to help others. "They were people who not only excelled in art, but came to help those who needed it," Gorbachev was quoted by Interfax as saying.
Vishnevskaya was born in Leningrad in 1926. Her parents separated when she was five and she was raised by her grandmother. She remained in the city during the Siege of Leningrad and served as a volunteer helping defend the city from Luftwaffe bombings.
Vishnevskaya joined Moscow's Bolshoi Theater in 1952, making her debut as Tatyana in "Yevgeny Onegin" the following year. She remained its prima for more than two decades, performing dozens of soprano roles in Russian and European opera classics.
The late Boris Pokrovsky, who directed her at the Bolshoi, once praised Vishnevskaya's "extraordinary musical and vocal abilities, theatrical charm, hot temperament, natural feeling of the stage, and bold outspokenness."
Dmitry Shostakovich, a neighbor and a close friend, wrote two song cycles and an orchestration of Mussorgsky's "Songs and Dances of Death" for her. Benjamin Britten wanted her to be part of the premiere of his "War Requiem" in 1962, but the authorities prevented her from leaving the Soviet Union.
She made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Aida in 1961 and first sang Liu in Turandot in La Scala in 1964. In 1966, she won the coveted title of the People's Artist of the U.S.S.R.
Another legendary Russian diva, Yelena Obraztsova, hailed Vishnevskaya as a perfectionist. "Everything she did, she did well," Obraztsova said, according to RIA Novosti news agency. "She was very demanding of herself, not just others."
Vishnevskaya, who is survived by her two daughters, will be buried Friday at Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery alongside her husband.
President Vladimir Putin sent his condolences, praising the singer's "remarkable talent, strong will, nobleness and self-dignity." And Putin's envoy for international culture ties, Mikhail Shvydkoi, called her death a "huge loss not just for Russian culture, but for the world culture."

TITLE: Putin Launches South Stream
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: VARVAROVKA, Krasnodar Region — President Vladimir Putin on Friday kicked off construction for the route to deliver Russian gas to Europe.
A ceremony in which two pipes were welded together marked the South Stream pipeline’s graduation from the phase of talks between governments and corporations — and drew the attendance of Maria van der Hoeven, executive director of the International Energy Agency and chiefs of the three European companies involved in the project.
“Today, we start construction of Europe’s largest infrastructure project,” Gazprom chief Alexei Miller said in a speech.
The construction that began Friday was for the segment of the line that is not the responsibility of the Gazprom-led South Stream Transport consortium per se, but solely Gazprom’s. On the site of where the ceremony took place, the company will build a compressor station that will pump Russian gas through the South Stream pipeline.
Gazprom and its partners, Italy’s Eni, France’s GdF and Germany’s BASF, expect to start laying the pipeline under the Black Sea in 2014, once they receive final permits from Russia, Bulgaria and Turkey.
Putin opened the ceremony with a short speech and stepped off the podium to shake hands with the chiefs of Eni, GdF and BASF: Paolo Scaroni, Henri Proglio and Kurt Bock, respectively, and the other eminent attendees. But there was one person sitting in the front row who merited more than a handshake: Putin gave a warm hug to Henning Voscherau, a former mayor of Hamburg who serves as South Stream Transport’s board chairman.
Putin had paid many visits to Hamburg when he was St. Petersburg’s deputy mayor in the early 1990s, when Voscherau ran the German city. St. Petersburg and Hamburg are sister cities.
The future Russkaya Compressor Station will be the world’s most powerful, and consume up to 448 megawatts, Gazprom said. 
Russkaya will break the standing world record for power consumption, which also belongs to Gazprom and is now held by its Portovaya Compressor Station that sits at the start of the Nord Stream line under the Baltic Sea, Gazprom said.
At 924 kilometers, the underwater stretch of South Stream is shorter than Nord Stream, which spans a distance of 1,224 kilometers on the sea bed. But the southern line will be able to carry 15 percent more gas, or 63 billion cubic meters, so it requires more powerful equipment.
The Black Sea route will also, according to the plan, eventually have four parallel pipelines, which is double Nord Stream’s quantity.
Van der Hoeven didn’t get to speak Friday. A day before, she told reporters that making multi-billion investment into the pipeline “could be seen as a brave choice,” given Europe’s sliding gas consumption.
European gas demand declined 11 percent last year, and the indications are that there may be a further slide this year. Electricity utilities have been burning more coal, cutting down on higher-priced gas consumption.
But the demand for gas, she said, is sure to rebound, especially if the price is right.
“At the IEA, we see a brighter future for gas in Europe,” she said. “South Stream represents many things to many people, but it would also be a vote of confidence in the future of European gas.”
Under the agency’s latest outlook, the demand will return to its highest ever levels of 2010 by the end of this decade and will rise thereafter.
South Stream’s first phase is scheduled to start operation in December 2015.

TITLE: MTV Russia To Go Off Air in 2013
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — MTV Russia will stop airing in mid-2013 due to falling ratings, the holding company that controls the music channel has confirmed.
“It’s true, as of June 1, 2013, MTV will be replaced by a new entertainment channel for young people called ‘Pyatnitsa’ [Friday],” ProfMedia president Nikolai Kartozia told Kommersant in an interview published Tuesday.
Unidentified sources had predicted the station’s closure in a Dec. 6 report in the Vedomosti business daily.
Kartozia explained the decision to close the station by saying that MTV Russia had ceased to be “the music channel that we all once loved.” 
MTV Russia’s ratings have dropped off because of the growing popularity of listening to music online, he said, adding that the channel “is no longer effective.”

TITLE: Duma Responds to U.S. Magnitsky List in Kind
AUTHOR: By Jonathan Earle
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — In a widely expected response to the passage of the U.S. Magnitsky Act, State Duma deputies on Monday introduced a bill that would make Americans suspected of mistreating Russians personae non gratae.
The bill bans Americans from traveling or investing in Russia if they are deemed to have “illegally” harmed Russians, according to a draft available on the Duma’s website.
The legislation mirrors but does not match its American counterpart, which imposes similar restrictions on Russians suspected of human rights abuses without specifying the victim’s nationality.
Analysts have described the Russian bill as mostly symbolic, and senior lawmakers on Monday appeared to focus on denouncing the Magnitsky Act rather than arguing the merits of their response.
“It’s astonishing that a country that has created secret prisons abroad — places of lawlessness and arbitrary justice, where inmates are subjected to torture, like in the Middle Ages — would lecture another country on moral issues,” Duma Speaker Sergei Naryshkin said, according to a transcript on the Duma website.
The bill appears to take special aim at U.S. officials involved in the arrest and prosecution of arms dealer Viktor Bout, who was extradited from Thailand to the United States over Russian objections in 2010.
These include provisions targeting Americans involved in “kidnapping and unlawful imprisonment,” “groundless prosecution” and “groundless and unjust punishment.”
The bill also freezes the Russian assets of anybody on the list and bans any property or investments.
Hermitage Capital co-founder William Browder, who has spearheaded the effort to pass “Magnitsky acts” throughout Western Europe and North America, dismissed the Russian bill as wrongheaded.
“They should be focusing on punishing the people who have abused human rights in Russia before making symbolic retaliation like this,” he said. “Secondly, it’s hard to imagine any American officials feeling all that hard done by not being able to travel to Russia or hold money in Sberbank.” 
Political analyst Pavel Salin said Russia’s retaliation, which is widely believed to include a new barrier on imports of U.S. meat, is “weak” and shows that Russia has few tools at its disposal.
Russia’s only serious lever against the United States is the Northern Distribution Network, a NATO supply route to Afghanistan that runs through Russia, Salin said, adding that Moscow hasn’t yet shown any intention of using this as a bargaining chip, for fear of a backlash.
A proposed EU-wide Magnitsky list would be more painful to Russia, which is the bloc’s third-largest trading partner but only the 37th-largest for the United States.
But while Browder said the prospects for bills everywhere “increased exponentially” as a result of the American bill, Salin and other analysts have said an EU or British bill is unlikely.
The Russian bill, which was submitted by the leaders of the four Duma factions, looks unlikely to face any serious opposition in the 450-seat chamber, which is controlled by ruling party United Russia.
Only about seven members of the moderate A Just Russia party spoke out against the measure at a faction meeting, said Deputy Ilya Ponomaryov, adding that opposition in other parties was unlikely.
Ponomaryov said he was “strongly against” the language of the bill, which he said should target nationals from any country — not just Americans — who abuse Russians.
The bill is set to undergo its first reading Friday and be passed by the end of the year, Naryshkin said. It calls for sanctions to go into effect Jan. 1.
The Magnitsky Act is named after Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in pretrial detention in 2009 after being arrested on suspicion of fraud. His supporters say the charges were fabricated because Magnitsky had investigated a $230 million tax fraud scheme.

TITLE: Eight-Year-Old’s Design Wins Google Contest
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A drawing by an 8-year-old resident of a small town in the south of the country depicting national symbols like a nesting doll and samovar was chosen Monday to be the logo for Google.ru.
The drawing, by Pyotr Alexeyev, of Belgorod, was chosen by the Internet giant from more than 5,000 works sent by children across Russia who participated in a contest announced by the company earlier this year. 
Participants aged from 6 to 17 were asked to send their doodles — drawings devoted to various holidays or significant historical events that Google places on its home page — depicting traditions of Russia or any of the country’s cities. 
The winning doodle, devoted to Alexeyev’s hometown, 670 kilometers south of Moscow, depicts the search engine’s name drawn on a piece of birch bark. A traditional Russian samovar and a wooden nesting doll form the logo’s letters. The other symbol in the doodle is a brown bear holding a tub of honey. 
As a reward, the boy received a tablet computer and a trip to Google headquarters in the United States with his family, the company said in a statement. Google will also provide equipment for his school’s computer class.
The search engine uses doodles by professional artists to tell users about significant historical dates, the company’s staff artist, Sophia Foster-Dimino, told RIA-Novosti earlier this year. 
The doodle posted Monday on the British and German versions of Google was devoted to the 197th birthday of British mathematician Ada Lovelace, known as the world’s first computer programmer.

TITLE: Islamist Sapsan Plotters Receive Jail Sentences
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Moscow City Court on Monday handed down long prison sentences to four Muslim extremists who plotted to blow up the Sapsan high-speed train between Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Islam Khamzhuyev, Falya Nevlyutov, Mansur Umayev and Mansur Edilbiyev were found guilty of attempting a terrorist act, “banditism” and illegal possession of explosives. They were sentenced to between 15 and 18 years in prison colonies, news agencies reported. 
Prosecutors said all four are members of the Caucasus Emirate, an Islamist terrorist group that authorities blame for most recent terrorist attacks in the North Caucasus and other parts of Russia.
The suspects were convicted of planning to plant a bomb on the Sapsan’s tracks just north of Moscow. The bomb would have exploded underneath the train, which carries up to 600 passengers between the country’s two biggest cities.

TITLE: Lavrov Snubs U.S. Overtures On Voluntary Exit for Assad
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has turned down a U.S. invitation to act as an intermediary in efforts to convince Syrian leader Bashar Assad to step down voluntarily, a news report said Tuesday.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked Lavrov for diplomatic assistance in facilitating Assad’s departure and forming a coalition government in Syria during their recent meetings in Phnom Penh and Dublin, according to Kommersant.
The U.S. is concerned that the Assad regime could use chemical weapons against its opponents and that these weapons could fall into the hands of Islamist terrorists, the report said.
Although Moscow has repeatedly backed the idea of creating a coalition government, Russian officials have refused to pressure Assad by calling for his resignation or voting for additional sanctions against the Syrian government in the UN.
Russia also downplays the possibility that Assad’s supporters would use chemical weapons. On Sunday, Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Security Council, said that Syrian authorities had assured Moscow that they wouldn’t embark on chemical warfare with their own people, Itar-Tass said.
More than 40,000 people have died since the Syrian civil war erupted in March 2011, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Friday, adding that half a million Syrians had sought refuge in other countries and nearly 3 million had been internally displaced since the fighting broke out.

TITLE: Channels Pass Blame Over Leak
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW— Television channels were passing the blame Monday after unofficial footage from an interview with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev was leaked Friday.
Footage that appeared on YouTube showed the prime minister just after the end of a 90-minute interview, chatting freely with the journalists from the five channels that aired the show live.
In the five-minute video, Medvedev can be heard calling investigators “bastards” for staging a pre-dawn raid in the home of a director filming a series on the opposition movement. 
That caused the Investigative Committee to issue an angry statement Saturday saying it was “very strange to hear comments that not only insult investigators … but also undermine the authority of all the country’s law enforcement agencies.” 
The statement, which did not mention Medvedev by name and was signed by committee spokesman Vladimir Markin, was later removed from the agency’s website, but remained accessible via Google cache Monday. 
Medvedev’s spokeswoman, Natalya Timakova, refused to comment on the incident. She merely told Vedomosti that it amounted to “eavesdropping on a conversation.” 
The footage bears the logo of RT and apparently first appeared on one of the Kremlin-controlled English-language satellite channel’s YouTube accounts.
RT editor Margarita Simonyan admitted that her station published the footage but said that the transmission was done automatically.
“We tried to stop it after the official part was over, but couldn’t do this in time and could not edit [the footage] for more than two hours,” she told Kommersant in an interview published Monday. 
Simonyan said that she would write to YouTube to ask about the reasons for this, saying that the transmission was organized by “one of the national TV channels” without naming the channel.
An unspecified representative of VGTRK, the state media holding that includes Rossia-1 and Rossia-24, which broadcast the live interview, told the newspaper that the transmission had been organized by Channel One.
The leak also included an almost two-minute segment showing Medvedev chatting with his interviewers just before the transmission started.

TITLE: Shoigu Pledges to Re-Establish Ties Between Army and Church
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu on Friday pledged his support for the Russian Orthodox Church, promising to re-establish the close ties that bound religious and military officials before the October Revolution in 1917.
“We will continue to support the Russian Orthodox Church with renewed energy and, most importantly, restore those traditions that existed under the Russian [pre-revolutionary] government,” Shoigu said at a meeting with Patriarch Kirill, the country’s top Orthodox Church official, RIA-Novosti reported.
Shoigu, who was installed as defense minister in early November after his predecessor was ousted amid a corruption scandal, worked closely with the church in his capacity as emergency situations minister, a post he held for almost two decades.
Russian authorities are often accused of an overly cosy relationship with church officials. 
In February, after Patriarch Kirill publicly likened President Vladimir Putin’s rule to a “miracle of God,” punk band Pussy Riot staged a controversial performance in Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral protesting perceived collusion between the Kremlin and the church.
At the meeting with Shoigu on Friday, the patriarch expressed hope that his appointment would lead to a strengthening of Russia’s armed forces.
“Understanding the importance of the responsibility placed on your shoulders, we will pray for you. At every service, the church prays for the country’s authorities and its army,” Patriarch Kirill said.

TITLE: Why Russia’s Golden Bridges Collapse
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Ryzhkov
TEXT: The first shot fired by President Vladimir Putin in his anti-corruption battle was aimed at former Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov. This was followed by the investigation into the large-scale embezzlement at Rosagroleasing, Rostelecom and the Federal Space Agency. What’s more, municipal officials and businesspeople were detained in St. Petersburg on charges of embezzling 3 billion rubles ($97.3 million) from funds allocated to repair the city’s heating system. The detainees were hastily transferred to Moscow by train to prevent them from using their local ties in St. Petersburg to escape arrest. If that were not enough, investigators have opened cases involving the misappropriation of state funds involving the Regional Development Ministry and the APEC summit held in Vladivostok in September.
Meanwhile, Putin signed a law last week that would have been unthinkable only a short time ago. The legislation, which goes into effect Jan. 1, requires ministers and other senior officials to declare all major expenditures, including those made by their spouses.
The Kremlin’s new catchphrase seems to be: “We will throw all the crooks in jail, including ministers!” For now, however, Serdyukov and former Agriculture Minister Yelena Skrynnik have only been called to testify as witnesses in the corruption cases that are linked to them.
On the surface, it would seem that Putin has finally become serious about cracking down on corrupt officials. After 13 years of tolerating corruption as a necessary evil that guarantees the loyalty of bureaucrats, it seems that the Kremlin has finally decided to initiate a tough anti-corruption campaign against mid-level and senior officials. Of course, only Putin himself will give final approval for the arrest or jailing of ministers or anyone else closely tied to him. But there can be no doubt that a new policy has been adopted.  
The main reason for shifting the focus is the country’s growing number of serious economic problems. In recent years, economic growth has slowed and has fallen below other BRIC nations. In addition, capital flight has increased, and foreign investment has declined. The shortfall in the Pension Fund amounts to 1 trillion rubles ($32.4 billion) and is growing. According to the Audit Chamber, more than 1 trillion rubles were stolen last year from government contracts. As a result, there is a chronic shortage of funds for housing, education, health care, pensions and other key social sectors.
Putin’s declining popularity is the second reason the Kremlin initiated its anti-corruption battle. Putin has realized what the opposition had been shouting about for years — that ubiquitous corruption has halted the economy, social services, infrastructure and any hope for modernizing the country. Russia has broken international records for its excessively high cost of building roads, bridges, stadiums, hospitals, schools and street underpasses.
You would think that at these prices, these structures were built of solid gold — except that they often collapse or are never even built in the first place. The final price tag is often six times higher than the initial cost estimate, with little oversight and far too few cases in which embezzlers have been tried and convicted.
Nonetheless, by focusing on high-profile corruption cases, such as those involving Serdyukov and Skrynnik, Putin may be trying to emulate China’s seemingly strong-armed methods of fighting corruption. But in reality, the Chinese have achieved only modest success in their battle, despite capital punishment against those found guilty of large-scale corruption. The Chinese experience shows that the temptation to get rich quickly all too often is more powerful than the fear of severe prison sentences or even death.
In Russia, corruption has spread to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The system of parliamentary, public and media control over public officials has been destroyed. At the same time, Russia’s list of “untouchable officials”remains large. To be effective, the battle against corruption requires the observance of one basic rule: That no top official, including the president, is above the law.
In the end, Putin’s anti-corruption campaign doesn’t stand a chance. Mark my words: In a year from now, the recent high-profile corruption cases that everyone is talking about will fade away with few people ever serving time for their crimes. As a result, the level of corruption will only continue to grow each year.

<i>Vladimir Ryzhkov, a State Duma deputy from 1993 to 2007, hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio and is a co-founder of the opposition Party of People’s Freedom.</i>

TITLE: inside russia: A Miniscule Third Estate
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: On Dec. 5, 2011, the day after the widely disputed State Duma elections, the first large-scale demonstration was staged and the protest movement was born.
Those protests showed that Russia does have a third estate, and it — not the communists, neo-Nazis or liberals — is the core of the grass-roots protest movement.
While the third estate is generally understood to mean the masses, in Russia it is a small minority. In Russia, the masses are dependent on the state like drug addicts are dependent on narcotics. They wait each month for their monthly fix of guaranteed salaries in their guaranteed-for-life jobs, regardless of productivity. They take a negative view of the values that the traditional third estate in France considered essential to a progressive, more democratic society.
In the 19th century, people in Asian countries who wanted to extricate themselves from the quagmire caused by ineffective and obsolete leaders knew exactly what to do: Follow the Europeans by eliminating the boyars, emirs and samurai and upholding the inviolability of private property.
Now, “doing it the European way” means returning free elections and true universal suffrage. Unfortunately, in a country where a large part of the population is poor and dependent on the state, free elections do not lead to anything but a new dictatorship, one led by a populist who promises voters the very things they had dreamed about over a glass of vodka.
In any case, it will not lead to reforms, which only rile the masses dependent on the state and the robber-baron minority that feeds like parasites on them. Russia already tried the European approach in 1991 and ended up with President Vladimir Putin.
In the 19th century, states had to modernize or face extinction by military conquest. Under current, more peaceful conditions, dictators do not have the same motivation to modernize. On the contrary, dictators are motivated to make the third estate as small and as marginalized as possible and make the common people as dependent as possible on the government. In other words, the leaders want to stack the deck in their own favor.
Free elections in a country rich in oil but poor in democracy and rule of law can only lead to someone like Putin or Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez coming to power. This is because dictators fear the third estate and its demands for freedom and private property even more than they fear being conquered in war. Make a move to the left and you lose your horse.
Of course, miracles do sometimes occur, but sitting around every day hoping for a miracle to come is a strange way to live.
In the end, I am afraid that the protest movement in Russia will continue to lose ground unless a catastrophic global crisis occurs, one that serves as shock therapy, one that will lead not only to a drop in oil prices but also to a rethinking of the world’s established ideologies.
The problem is that the window of opportunity is quite narrow. The regime’s degradation, the brain drain, the mass immigration of cheap labor from Central Asia is occurring at such a fast clip that if this crisis doesn’t happen in the next five or 10 years, there will be nothing left of Russia to reform.

<i>Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.</i>

TITLE: Northern exposure
AUTHOR: By Natalya Smolentseva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Week of Finnish Cinema that runs in St. Petersburg next week offers city residents the opportunity to see another side to its northern neighbor than simply the shopping malls and ski resorts frequented by Russian visitors every weekend. 
This year’s festival — the 23rd annual event — presents both new names in Finnish cinema as well as some celebrated classics, and seems largely oriented on young people, as it mostly deals with the problems faced by teenagers and their parents.
“I especially like the last film of the festival, ‘Miss Farkku-Suomi,’ a retro story about a graduate who is preparing to enter adult life,” said festival program director Alexei Dunayevsky.
The film that opens the festival, “Almost 18,” is the debut full-length fiction work of director Maarit Lalli. “Almost 18” was written by and stars the 18-year-old Henrik M&#228;ki-Tanila, and is based on the true stories of five teenagers and the problems they face in modern life. 
Lalli and M&#228;ki-Tanila will come to the city to open the festival, along with the director of “Rat King,” which tackles one of the major problems of modern Finland: Gambling. “Rat King” describes the life of a young gamer who ceases to understand where the game begins and reality ends. Director Petri Kotwica is no newcomer to the Week of Finnish Cinema, having shown his debut work “Koti-ik&#228;v&#228;” (Homesickness) at the festival in 2005. The Finnish premiere of “Rat King,” his third work, will take place on Jan. 20, but guests of the Week of Finnish Cinema will have a chance to see it earlier.
“The most common topic of Finnish cinema is human social disorder — unemployment, people who lose their material prosperity, crumbling marriages, teenage problems,” said Dunayevsky. “And above all, the topic of war, especially the Winter War, as well as biographies of famous people,” he added.
The Winter War fought between Finland and the Soviet Union from late 1939 to early 1940 is the subject of the drama “Silence.” Dunayevsky singled it out as “very serious, deserving the prizes it has won; a war drama that is very promising in terms of spectator reaction.” 
Finland’s nominee for the Oscar award for the best foreign-language film, “Purge” — based on the novel by the eminent contemporary Finnish writer Sofi Oksanen — will be the only movie in the festival to be shown at Dom Kino. The movie tells the story of an elderly woman who takes in a young woman in hiding, only for them both to be reminded of their horrifying past.
Those in search of something more lighthearted might enjoy director Elias Koskimies’ grotesque comedy about the media market “Dirty Bomb.” Nicknamed the Finnish Woody Allen, Koskimies explores the price of success in his debut work that has received three nominations for the national Jussi award. 
Equally, the musical comedy “Ricky Rapper and Cool Wendy,” devoted to the subject of friendship, is suitable for family viewing. 
Friday, December 21 is devoted to the best Finnish films of the second half of the last century. Among the classics being shown are Finland’s best known and biggest-budget cinema project, Pekka Parikka’s “The Winter War” (1989), and the most highly regarded film outside Finland, “The Earth Is a Sinful Song” (1973) about a womanizing reindeer herder and the consequences of his affair with a young girl.
All the movies will be shown in Finnish with English subtitles. 

<i>The Week of Finnish Cinema runs from Dec. 17 through 23 at the Avrora and Dom Kino movie theaters. A full schedule of the festival can be found at http://kinoforumspb.ru</i> 

TITLE: Personal perestroika
AUTHOR: By Diana Kondrashin
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: “My Perestroika,” a documentary by Robin Hessman that has had huge success in the United States, had its Russian premiere Saturday in Moscow and will be shown again next week. The film looks at five ordinary Russians living in extraordinary times. Hessman, who was in Moscow for the premiere, spoke to The St. Petersburg Times about the film.
Q: How did the idea itself emerge?
A: I arrived in the Soviet Union in 1991 when I was 18, went to VGIK [film school] and worked as a producer for “Ulitsa Sezam,” the Russian “Sesame Street,” so my entire early adult life was spent here. I neither had a Soviet childhood nor a Russian family background, but the generation shown in the film was really the generation that I joined when I moved here. These people had completely normal Soviet childhoods, and they were teenagers struggling with their own identity just when everything started to change: When Gorbachev came, when the foundation started to shake, when everyone started questioning things that were taken for granted. These huge political and historical waves are often examined abstractly from more of a geopolitical point of view. When I came back to the U.S. I was surprised and a little disappointed that despite the end of the Cold War and despite the rising of the Iron Curtain, there was still such superficial information about how things in the first 10 years in Russia had gone. I was asked questions about Russians that I could have answered in ten different ways. So I started thinking of this film as an idea. By telling the story through ordinary people I was hoping to show the diversity of opinions.
Q: The film does not resemble a guide to Russian history for foreigners.
A: I hoped that the film might give the American audience an experience of being here for a while, sitting at the kitchen table having tea with these people. But over the years and years of filming and talking to my Russian friends I realized that I wanted to make a film for them to watch and enjoy as well, so it wasn’t just for outsiders. That made the editing more complicated, to make it not too simplified for them and not too complicated for people who don’t know anything about the country.
Q: How was the film received in the U.S.?
A: It was shown in more than 70 cities around the U.S., and we were surprised how enthusiastic people were about it — both the Americans and former Russian immigrants who even took their children to the movie theaters to show how their early years in the Soviet Union had been.

<i>“My Perestroika” is shown in Russian with English subtitles. It will next be shown in Moscow on Dec. 17 at 7 p.m. at the Sakharov Center. 57 Zemlyanoi Val, building 6, Moscow. 
www.sakharov-center.ru</i>

TITLE: Crazy young love
AUTHOR: By Viktoria Koltsova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Mikhailovsky Theater will unveil the first ballet premiere of the season this week with choreographer Nacho Duato’s new production of Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet,” which will be shown on Dec. 13, 14, 15 and 16. Balletomanes are already heatedly arguing over the choreographer’s style, the theater has been closed for 10 days for rehearsals, and needless to say, tickets are sold out.  
It will be the second full-length production that Duato has staged for the Mikhailovsky Theater, following last year’s “The Sleeping Beauty.” Widely known as the creator of plotless one-act ballets, the Spanish choreographer explained his decision to reinvent Shakespeare’s timeless tragedy. 
“Prokofiev’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is, in my opinion, the most beautiful score ever created for the ballet stage,” he said via the theater’s press service. “I have already worked on this music before — in Spain in the late 1990s — but I am creating a new version now for the Mikhailovsky Theater.” 
Duato first worked with Prokofiev’s score in 1995, staging “Romeo and Juliet” for the Compania Nacional de Danza. The two productions have some dramatic differences, however: If 20 people were involved in the previous production, more than 60 dancers are featured in the new show. 
“And, of course, I am writing new choreography for the main characters, because there will be wonderful dancers with phenomenal capabilities. I have put in some pas de deux especially for Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev,” added Duato.   
Starring as Juliet will be Natalia Osipova, Olesya Novikova and Valeria Zapasnikova, while the part of Romeo will be danced by Ivan Vasiliev, Leonid Sarafanov and Ivan Saitzev. International husband-and-wife star dancers Osipova and Vasiliev, who joined the Mikhailovsky from Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet Theater, will dance the opening night.
Support will come from Andrei Yakhnyuk as Mercutio and Andrei Kasyanenko as Tybalt. 
Osipova has previously performed in “Romeo and Juliet” in London and New York in productions choreographed by Kenneth MacMillan and Frederick Ashton, respectively, but it will be her Russian debut as Juliet. 
“I think that ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is one of the most important shows this season, if not the most important,” Osipova said via the theater’s press service. “It is a large-scale, enthralling work, and when performing it I realize that this is the artistic freedom I have always dreamed of, this is the interesting role I have yearned for. Working with Nacho Duato is like learning a new, complex and beautiful language. He has such a fine-tuned perception of the music — picking up on this yourself gives you an incredible sense of satisfaction,” she added.   
Kasyanenko said of his character Tybalt: “My character is one of the most vivid in the whole show. I also danced the part of Tybalt in Oleg Vinogradov’s production [at the Mikhailovsky], but this new version simply can’t be compared to the previous one. The focus this time is definitely on different elements.” 
Duato told Iskusstvo TV that he sees Juliet as “very young and quite crazy.” 
“To run away that night, and to sleep with a guy on the first night in those times and get a poison, you know — that’s a mad woman. I wanted something like that. Very young, innocent, not knowing what to do, very irresponsible — and the same with Romeo.”  
Duato does not seek to be abstract in his new version. 
“Shakespeare sets the action in Verona, you must be able to sense the Mediterranean atmosphere of sunlight, proximity to the sea, and the smells of orange and jasmine; it’s this completely special, exciting blend,” he said. 
“The drama of the events spills out onto the streets and squares of the Italian city, and to me it is important to combine the legendary story of the two lovers and the aura in which it unfolds,” he added. 
The atmosphere will be partially created by costumes designed by Angelina Atlagic, who last year in Duato’s production of “The Sleeping Beauty”  demonstated her ability to create exceptionally beautiful and detailed costumes, stylized for the epoch yet comfortable and light to dance in. For “Romeo and Juliet,” she has created Renaissance-inspired looks.
This will be the fourth version of “Romeo and Juliet” staged for the Mikhailovsky. Nikolai Boyarchikov created a new production in 1988 and Oleg Vinogradov premiered two productions here in 1976 and 2008. The latter received good reviews, but disappeared from the repertoire quite quickly nevertheless.

TITLE: Germany on the big screen
AUTHOR: By Tatyana Sochiva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The annual German Film Festival returns to the city this week, introducing local filmgoers to the best movies to come out of Germany in recent years. 
According to the organizers of the event, the main goal of the festival is to present viewers with a variety of recent German films that have not been screened in Russia before. With this in mind, the jury members from German Films (the information and advisory center for the promotion of German films worldwide) and the Goethe Institut, together with Russian film reviewers, have carefully selected the festival’s movies from among the laureates of both German Film Academy Awards and international festivals, successful debuts by young directors and the highest-grossing German films of the year. All of the films will be screened in German with Russian subtitles.
This year’s festival opens on Thursday, Dec. 13, with “Three Fourths Moon” (Dreiviertelmond, 2011) by Christian Z&#252;bert about a grumpy German taxi driver who takes a six-year-old Turkish girl under his wing after his wife leaves him. 
“For the opening film, we tried to find a movie that is not too specific, but also not too ‘easy,’” said Friedrich Dahlhaus, director of the St. Petersburg branch of the Goethe Institut. “This year it will be ‘Three Fourths Moon,’ a kind of tragicomedy, which offers encounters on different levels — generation-wise and also intercultural-wise,” he said. 
“Three Fourths Moon” will be presented by its director Christian Z&#252;bert and lead actor Elmar Wepper at 6.30 p.m. on Dec. 13.
Director Brigitte Bertele will also be present at the screening of her film about a woman who seeks justice after being raped, “The Fire” (Der Brand, 2011) on Saturday, Dec. 15. 
One of the highlights of the festival looks set to be “Stopped on Track” (Halt auf freier Strecke, 2011), directed by Andreas Dresen. The drama about a man suffering from an inoperable brain tumor won the Un Certain Regard prize at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. 
Another much discussed movie showing at the festival is David Wnendt’s drama about a young female neo-fascist, “Combat Girls” (original title Kriegerin, 2011).
The festival also features two movies that competed against each other at the 62nd Berlinale Film Festival: “Mercy” (Gnade, 2012) by Matthias Glasner and “Home for the Weekend” (Was Bleibt, 2012) by Hans-Christian Schmid. Both films center on family breakdown and reunification.
In keeping with festival tradition, “Next Generation,” an annual compilation of short films by students from Germany’s universities of television and film will also be shown at this year’s festival. Also showing are the children’s film “My Magical Friend Sams” (Sams im Gl&#252;ck, 2012), based on books written by Paul Maar; and a series of other thought-provoking films presenting a wide range of styles and ideas. 
The festival, which is being held in St. Petersburg for the ninth time, generally addresses issues common to all mankind, while at the same time focusing on specifically German topics. For example, no German Film Festival is complete without a movie devoted to the time when East Berlin and West Berlin were located in different countries and divided by the Berlin Wall. This year the festival features two films, taking the audience back to the relatively recent past: The romantic melodrama “The West Wind” (Westwind, 2011) by Robert Thalheim, and a documentary film about street culture in East Berlin called “This Ain’t California” (2012), by Marten Persiel.

<i>The German Film Festival runs at the Avrora movie theater from Dec. 13 through Dec. 16. For a full program, visit www.avrora.spb.ru</i>

TITLE: Looking back at 2012
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Experiment and controversy dominated the local artistic scene this year. The St. Petersburg arts environment, which — despite the city’s moniker of “cultural capital” — has frequently been likened to the serenity and academism of “The Sleeping Beauty,” is now booming and blooming. The creative element of these endeavors has been an obvious hit-and-miss enterprise and has not escaped serious criticism, but it is becoming harder and harder for skeptics to refer to St. Petersburg cultural life as somnambulist, homogenous and conservative.  
The St. Petersburg Kinoforum showcased existential films in impressive quantities, but was it necessary to squeeze four film festivals into a single, packed week? Did British theater director Graham Vick go too far in his sobering examination of Russia’s ages-long corrupt relationship between the rulers and their governed? The decade-long Mariinsky II construction saga is finally reaching its finale — and as strong as the relief that the procrastination is finally over is regret that the city has failed to acquire the new architectural marvel that the project had promised to become when the planet’s most creative architects submitted their visions of the new theater at an international competition back in 2003. Is the reconstructed version of the Summer Gardens a triumph of kitsch or a sign of respect for historical legacy? These were some of the complex and challenging issues that St. Petersburg faced this year.

<b>MARIINSKY II</b>
At long last, almost a decade after the government decided to construct a second stage for St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater in 2003, the theater has announced the opening date of its new building. Mariinsky II, designed by the Canadian architectural bureau Diamond and Schmitt architects, will have its acoustics checked at a forthcoming test concert on Dec. 22. The official inauguration is scheduled for May 1, 2 and 3, when the new venue will receive its first audiences. 
In March, the Audit Chamber found massive violations in the construction process, which is being carried out by the North-West Construction, Reconstruction and Restoration Directorate. The auditors said at the time that budget money had been spent ineffectively on construction during the last three years. The inspection also revealed that at least 290 million rubles ($9.4 million) had been misspent. 

<b>FILM</b>
Russia’s self-proclaimed cultural capital is showing signs of ambition. The St. Petersburg Kinoforum, which took place for the third time in September, has evolved into an umbrella brand for four different film events, namely the International Film Festival and three already established local events: The Message to Man festival of short and documentary films, the Beginning festival of student films and the Vivat, Russian Cinema! festival of Russian films. 
Reflecting on the experiment, its participants said that the unification has been a success. Internationally acclaimed Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica, who presided over the jury of the International Film Festival, said the St. Petersburg event has great potential. 
“With such an astounding background in the filmmaking industry and a wealth of up-and-coming talent, St. Petersburg is a natural cinematic capital,” the director said.
However, the project’s ideologists have agreed that for the sake of the audiences, the festival needs to run over a longer time period. This year, spectators were tormented by the high concentration of tempting screenings happening simultaneously at different locations. Having to choose was difficult, and squeezing the four distinctive events into a one-week festival was perhaps unwise, critics said.
“In the future, I think the film forum needs to be transformed into a kind of film marathon,” said Lyudmila Tomskaya, director of the Vivat, Russian Cinema! festival. Although the exact format of the next Kinoforum is yet to be determined, it has been suggested that St. Petersburg should follow in the footsteps of the established international film festivals in Cannes, Berlin and Helsinki that traditionally run for two weeks. 

<b>FASHION</b>
Intensity and concentration was apparently in the air this year. In June, six premier St. Petersburg fashion designers indulged in a game called “Playing at Antiquity,” which saw six dramatic outdoor fashion shows within just one evening. 
Lilia Kisselenko’s collection had an Olympic twist, with models sporting longbows, balls and ribbons as props on the catwalk in the Cameron Gallery of the Tsarskoye Selo former imperial estate, while designer Tatyana Kotegova’s models rode in open carriages in the alleys of the adjacent Catherine Park. Ianis Chamalidy built a bridge between the worlds of pagan antiquity and monotheistic Christianity with his collection, entitled “Bird in a Cage,” and Stas Lopatkin  sent his models, dressed as forest and water nymphs, to dance gracefully — with languid sensual movements that looked as if they had been borrowed from Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes — across the grass and around a fountain. 
The event was part of the annual Association project, which was held for the fourth time this year. Every year, the show celebrates an epoch or style in art — as seen through fashion — and is put together by the finest fashion talent from Russia’s cultural capital.  
“Art and fashion have so much in common, and our event is great proof of that,” said Olga Taratynova, director of the Tsarskoye Selo Museum Estate. “We cannot wait for the next edition of our fashion feast.”

<b>INTERNATIONAL STARS</b>
In one of the most captivating and visually spectacular events of the year, Cirque du Soleil celebrated the talent of the late king of pop, Michael Jackson, in its new production “Michael Jackson The Immortal” that enjoyed its Russian premiere in St. Petersburg in November. 
With “Michael Jackson The Immortal,” the world-renowned Canadian circus company has for the first time produced a rock-tour-style performance juxtaposing music, dance and acrobatics. 
The globe-trotting company will return to the city in 2013 with its classic show “Alegria.” This veteran production, which first hit the stage in 1994 in Montreal, has been a huge international success, with 10 million spectators attending the shows. 
“Alegria is a Spanish word that means joy and jubilation,” said Katja Byushgens, a spokeswoman for Cirque du Soleil Russia. “This production has baroque and operatic style, flamboyant costumes, original music performed live and an elaborate set that serves to enhance the astonishing spectacle of athleticism and artistry.” 

<b>GOURMET DINING</b>
Creative spirit abounded in the city’s restaurants this year during a new gastronomic project launched with the goal of showcasing the cream of the crop of international cuisine to St. Petersburg. Titled Chef’s Discovery, the project saw six of the world’s most dynamic chefs visit St. Petersburg from locations ranging from South Africa to the Seychelles during the course of this year. 
The project began in March with 28-year-old Moscow chef Dmitry Zotov, who delights in incorporating elements of gastronomic theater into the presentation of his sets, serving up a seven-course meal at the panoramic restaurant Luce, located at the top of the Grand Palace shopping center. During the course of the year, the city’s dining establishments welcomed international star chefs, such as the award-winning South-African chef David Higgs, who introduced a highly creative signature five-course meal at the More.Yachts & Seafood restaurant. The driving force behind the Chef’s Discovery project is Alyona Melnikova, an advertising and marketing specialist whose roles include brand ambassador for Acqua Panna and San Pellegrino mineral water brands in the city. The two brands are at the heart of the San Pellegrino Cooking Cup, an annual gastronomic regatta that is held in Venice.
“It is an open secret that St. Petersburg boasts only a couple of restaurants that can safely be counted as gastronomic — miX in W hotel and Grand Cru, and that is about it,” Melnikova said. “Ultimately, the aim is to inspire more gastronomic venues to pop up. In 2013, the project will not only continue in St. Petersburg, but also expand to Moscow.”
 
<b>OPERA</b>
The premiere of the British director Graham Vick’s rendition of Mussorgsky’s opera “Boris Godunov” at the Mariinsky Theater in May became one of the most discussed premieres of the season. In a production that saw the action transposed from the late 16th century to the modern day, the director acted like a surgeon, carefully exposing the many absurdities and peculiarities that are key to the reality to which the country is so accustomed. From the boyars’ wives draped in furs and oversized sunglasses to the police officers surreptitiously accepting backhanders from illegal immigrants, the action on the stage of the Mariinsky represented a microcosm of modern Russian life.
Some reviewers welcomed the director’s attitude, comparing Vick to the French aristocrat Marquis de Custine. The historical de Custine is the author of scandalously critical memoirs about his life in Russia — in particular, in St. Petersburg — which were written in the early 19th century. 
Others accused Vick of being a Russophobe, offering questionable subjective judgments and creating a distorted image of Russia. 
“The director has no right to be patronizing” and “Trying to offer a modern twist on this historical Mussorgsky opera was doomed from the start: It is as silly as trying to add a few extra paragraphs to Pushkin’s prose” were a couple of the shots fired at Vick.

<b>SUMMER SCANDAL</b>
More controversy arrived in May with the reopening of the Summer Gardens. Founded by Peter the Great in 1704, the gardens welcomed visitors after having been restored to their historical splendor. The reconstruction work, which took almost two years to complete, has dramatically changed the face of the magnificent gardens. Peter meant for them to be regular gardens, and the restoration was intended to emphasize this concept. Landscape designers and historians meticulously examined historical documents, prints and sketches in order to plant trees and bushes as conceived in the tsar’s original plan. Four fountains are now located on the gardens’ main alley, while three more are situated inside boskets. The park’s ornate railings — one of the most popular postcard views of St. Petersburg — have also been fully restored. This Herculean effort stirred a wave of criticism, however. 
“The gardens are suffocating under all the inner fences and enclosures” and “a feast of kitsch” were some of the bold accusations that the grand restoration project endured.

TITLE: THE DISH: Falafelnaya No. 1
AUTHOR: By Daniel Kozin
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: <b>A fad for falafel</b>
Sightings of falafel, the Middle-Eastern chickpea dish beloved by vegetarians and ethno-food explorers around the world, are being reported in St. Petersburg with increasing frequency.
Cooption of the global craze for the food is, however, still far on the horizon, as the city’s ubiquitous shawarma joints are yet to add anything more palatable to their menu, unlike their equivalents in the world’s more cosmopolitan urban centers.
A new vegetarian establishment with the simple title Falafelnaya No. 1, a clever play on the Soviet tradition of naming mono-dish establishments, such as Pyshechnaya (Donut Place), seems to have found the winning formula, and it may not be long before other places start filling the niche identified by St. Petersburg’s first falafel eatery. 
For now, the short walk from Mayakovskaya metro station to Ulitsa Zhukovskogo is worth every step.
In a culinary milieu oversaturated with restaurants aspiring to the ostentatious, and forgetting all about that key ingredient — soul — on the way, Falafelnaya No. 1 is a healthy reminder that sometimes a combination of fresh ingredients prepared simply is all that a dish or an interior really needs. 
From the minimalist Finnish-style interior to the no frills vegetarian menu, the theme here is simplicity, and it is executed to perfection.
Opened last month, and still fresh with the smell of sawdust, the small space holds just eight tables, and though most were filled on a Friday evening, the atmosphere was noticeably intimate and relaxing. 
The cozy space is decorated in a clean blue and white paint scheme, warmed by the wooden tables and distant bar counter, where customers in a rush to get their daily dose of falafel can do so during the day. By night, it is a pleasant oasis of warmth. Lit candles, ambient lamps and expansive windows with views of the snowy street outside provided a perfect backdrop for conversation, and the framed prints of root vegetables foreshadowed the fresh goodness that was to come. 
The kitchen, headed by a chef from St. Petersburg’s celebrated Probka group, offers fare that is as refreshing as the concept and setting: Vegetarian dishes including other Middle-Eastern classics such as hummus and couscous, salads, soups and pasta dishes. 
Service was excellent for a restaurant that is fine dining in all but name — cutlery is provided in a simple basket with paper serviettes, and dishes do not exceed the 300-ruble ($10) mark, yet the Chilean red (220 rubles, or $7.30, per glass) was brought out for tasting, and dishes were recommended, presented and served to the highest of standards.
The waitress’ recommendation of tomato soup (180 rubles, $6) is an essential experience here: A piping hot, fresh tantalizing blend of tomatoes perfectly complemented with hints of coriander and a drizzle of olive oil and fresh basil — no tin-can imposter, to say the least.
Roasted eggplant with mozzarella (220 rubles, $7.30) consisted of a stack of the juicy vegetable cooked to smoky tenderness interspersed with the soft texture and taste of the cheese, in a delicious tomato sauce begging to be scraped off the plate — a task that will be taken care of by the fresh breads that are to be baked on site in the soon-to-be-opened bakery. 
The scrumptious yet deceivingly simple couscous salad (220 rubles, $7.30) was the surprise crown of the meal. Though less a salad than a side dish, the light North African grain was given bursts of sweet freshness by additions of shredded mint and basil, tomatoes and raisins. 
The greatly anticipated falafel platter (230 rubles, $7.60) consisted of authentic deep fried patties drizzled in tahini sauce. The falafel was nutty and heartily crunchy, though a little dry, and served on a bed of homemade hummus accompanied by fries and pickled vegetables. 
The tiramisu (260 rubles, $8.60) was less remarkable in light of the meal proper, and perhaps the enormity of the portion explains why it was bizarrely the most expensive dish of an otherwise stellar dinner.
 At the end of the meal, two dedicated carnivores came to the realization that despite an enormously filling and pleasing meal, not a gram of meat had been consumed.
Perhaps the cheeky addition of “est. 2012” under the logo Falafelnaya No. 1 might not be so bold after all, as this new vegetarian establishment is certain to become a favorite for all who venture into new culinary territory.

TITLE: A Winter’s Fairytale: Tallinn
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The small yet diverse and vibrant Baltic country that is Estonia has plenty to offer in summer, when it is visited by tourists from all over the world, but the winter season in Tallinn is something special.
Fabulous views of Estonian islands and Tallinn’s Old Town open up to visitors even before the tiny, 33-seat SAAB340 airplane that flies between St. Petersburg and Tallinn touches the field of Lennart Meri  Tallinn Airport.
Named after the second president of Estonia (and the first since Estonia regained independence from the Soviet Union in August 1991), the compact airport calls itself “the world’s coziest” and is indeed a notch above St. Petersburg’s shabby Pulkovo II. There are currently two flights a day between the cities, and the distance between them is covered in about one hour.
Tallinn’s medieval Old Town is at its fairytale best in winter, with its red rooftops covered in snow. A walk along the town’s chaotic narrow streets leads to the center of Christmas and New Year festivities: Town Hall Square, where a huge Christmas tree stands — a tradition stemming from 1441, when Tallinn’s Brotherhood of Blackheads guild put up a tree, making it the first public Christmas tree ever put on display in Europe.
Under the tree is a lively Christmas market, with plenty of stalls offering all kinds of things from a glass of hot spiced wine or non-alcoholic grog to Estonia’s famous woolen socks and mittens, various kinds of souvenirs and even Latvian lard. Children and adults alike crowd around the wooden enclosure containing a trio of reindeers munching hay. 
Estonia is renowned for both respectfully preserving traditions and simultaneously introducing daring innovations. The country’s inventions and discoveries are celebrated at the newly reopened Tallinn Television Tower (58a Kloostrimetsa, tel: +372 680 4057, www.teletorn.ee), which during the Soviet era was famous for its caf&#233;, from where, weather permitting, guests were said to have been able to look behind the Iron Curtain to see the lights of free Helsinki across the Gulf of Finland.
The 314-meter tower — Estonia’s tallest structure — was built in time for the 1980s Soviet Olympic Games, whose sailing regatta was held in Tallinn. The plans to show off Soviet achievements to the West failed when the Olympics were boycotted as a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.
The outdoor observation desk — located at a height of 170 meters — is closed for safety reasons during the wintertime, but dizzying views can be seen through the structure’s glass walls. A digital panel in the tower’s fast-moving lift (the ride takes 49 seconds from bottom to top) shows the height to which visitors are elevated.
The museum inside the tower features an old Soviet stationary television camera, enabling visitors to try their hand as television presenters and record their performance, while a large portion of the exposition is dedicated to innovations created by Estonians, including Skype technology, developed by Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu and Jaan Tallinn. The same team was previously responsible for Kazaa, the once popular but now defunct peer-to-peer file sharing application.
Less well known is the fact that the famous Paiste cymbals used by rock bands across the world were first produced in 1906 by Estonian musician Toomas Paiste in his instrument repair shop in St. Petersburg. Visitors can easily spend hours in the tower looking at the exhibits before having a meal at the tower’s caf&#233; and restaurant located on the 22nd floor.
The tower, which was closed in 2007 due to fire safety regulations, reopened to visitors in April after major renovation work. A memorial stone in front of the tower is dedicated to the people who risked their lives to defend the tower — unarmed — against Soviet tanks that besieged the building on August 20, 1991 in an attempt to gain control of Estonia’s broadcasting, which had by then gotten rid of the Kremlin’s censorship.
The stone honors four Estonian men who locked themselves in the tower to stop invading paratroopers attempting to gain control of the nation’s broadcasting. 
The tower is located in Pirita, a district around the Pirita River, close to the marina built for the 1980 Olympic yachting events and the ruins of the 15th-century Pirita Convent.
The year of Tallinn as Europe’s Culture Capital 2011 may be over, but the city continues to launch impressive projects aimed to inspire interest from tourists and locals alike. One is the new, state-of the-art branch of the Estonian Maritime Museum, located in the Seaplane Harbor, a 20-minute walk from the Old Town (6 Vesilennuki, tel: +372 620 0550, www.lennusadam.eu).
Opened in May, the high-tech museum occupies three hangars, initially constructed in 1916-1917 as an addition to the historic naval fortress of Peter the Great. The world’s first reinforced concrete shell structure, the hangars are now home to a wealth of unusual items, including Estonia’s original Lembit submarine, the world’s only surviving mine-laying submarine of its series dating back to the 1930s. Visitors can climb into the submarine and explore its interior.
The old Maritime Museum, opened in 1935 in the Fat Margaret Tower on the edge of the Old Town, also still functions. Built in the early 16th century to protect the city from attacks by sea and to impress visitors arriving in Tallinn by ship, the tower is also worth visiting for the detailed insight it provides into Estonia’s past and present as a land of sailors and fishermen (70 Pikk, tel: +372 641 1408, www.meremuuseum.ee).
The Fat Margaret Tower’s rooftop viewing platform offers splendid views of the Old Town and the city’s coast. The platform can be accessed during the winter period, excluding windy and snowy days.
Next to Fat Margaret is a monument to the 852 passengers of the Estonia ferry who drowned when it sank in the Baltic Sea in 1994. The story of what was one of the worst maritime disasters of the 20th century is also featured in the museum’s displays.
On a less somber note, Estonian traditions are well reflected in national cuisine. The famous Olde Hansa restaurant in the Old Town serves dishes made according to medieval recipes — including bear and elk meat — and eschews foodstuffs brought to the country in more recent times, such as potatoes.
Launched six months ago, the private food sightseeing tour “Flavors of Estonia” enables participants to enjoy some of the best local food combined with sights of the Old Town, as the group is escorted from one place to another on foot, ensuring they retain just enough appetite to have a bite here and there along the way (www.foodsightseeing.ee).
Last week, the culinary excursion began with clear fish soup with a mixture of red and white fish served with fresh bread buns at the Fish & Wine restaurant (1 Harju, tel: +372 662 3013, www.fw.ee).
Located in a Soviet-era building known as the House of Writers — Soviet Estonia’s Union of Writers was once based in its premises — the restaurant once bore the name Pegasus (its former name still can be seen on the wall) and was a popular hangout for Tallinn’s literary and art crowd.
Don’t overlook a tiny place called Vertigo Gourmet Deli & Caf&#233;, located right on Viru, the Old Town’s main street (17 Viru, tel: +372 507 2220, www.vertigogourmet.ee). The miniature cafe sells Estonian black bread in the shape of baguettes flavored with juniper berries or raisins and peanuts. 
Estonia is famous for its bread, and any self-respecting restaurant offers its own individual kind.
Vertigo’s other specialty is its delectable tomato marmalade and onion jam, sold at about 30 stores across Estonia under the brand name Gourmet Club. To participants of the food tour, Vertigo owner and chef Imre Kose offers a glass of apple or blackcurrant wine at the caf&#233;, which is also known for its vast range of desserts.
Tours also take in an unlikely open-air caf&#233; called Luscher & Matiesen, located on Toompea, a steep limestone hill where the government and parliament of Estonia are stationed, in the courtyard of the former Luscher & Matiesen wine factory, right next to the Kohtuotsa viewing terrace that offers a marvelous view over the city (12 Kohtu, tel: +372 56912910, www.luschermatiesen.com).
The tour ended at Gloria, a restaurant located in the medieval city walls (2 M&#252;&#252;rivahe, el: +372 640 6800, www.gloria.ee). Opened in 1937, it features a wine cellar and a guesthouse. Owned by Dimitri Demjanov, a celebrity chef in Estonia, Gloria is frequented by politicians and other public figures who come to Tallinn, and, recently, by the Dalai Lama.
For the dining tour’s participants, Gloria offered its award-winning Nordic pine-smoked salmon Ballotine. This mildly smoked salmon cooked at a low temperature for several hours is served at many official receptions held in Estonia, while Demjanov is known for honoring Estonian food traditions, describing Baltic sprats as the “gold of Estonia” and distinguishing between 21 sorts of Estonian potatoes in his recent book.
Tallinn is famous for its chocolates and candies produced by the Kalev candy factory, the biggest and oldest confectionery company in Estonia. Kalev Marzipan Museum Room in the Old Town is a branch of Kalev, which was called Georg Stude after its owner until the Soviet occupation in 1940.
Like other enterprises, the factory was confiscated from its owner, and so much as mentioning Stude’s name was forbidden when Estonia was under Soviet rule, according to Otto Kubo, who has documented the history of Kalev since 1955.
The marzipan museum room, located in the Maiasmokk cafe building, gives a good overview of the history of marzipan, which was conceived as a medicine and was made at pharmacies during the Middle Ages. 
One interesting exhibit is a marzipan doll that was commissioned as a present in 1935 and was brought to the museum uneaten by the recipient’s descendent.  
“I say that she is 77-years-young, because she’s a little girl,” says Kubo.
Marzipan does not keep for more than four weeks, after which it becomes hard enough to break teeth, he added.
Visitors can try their hand at painting white marzipan figurines in a variety of shapes with special food paints, or buy handmade marzipan from the museum’s store (16 Pikk, tel: +372 646 4192, www.kalev.eu/en/the-world-of-sweets/kalev-marzipan-museum-room).
During the Soviet era, many Russians went to Estonia to buy Estonian clothes for both themselves and friends and family. Clothes were either in short supply or just depressingly tasteless in the rest of the Soviet Union. 
It’s somewhat refreshing to discover that the Estonian fashion industry is alive and well, and offers quality clothes at cheaper prices than world-famous brands. Estonian clothing brands such as Baltman, Mosaic, Monton and Ivo Nikkolo can be found in the Baltika Quarter, a shopping area based on the modern concept of a Fashion Street 
(24 Veerenni, tel: +372 521 5400, 
www.baltikakvartal.ee). 

<i>The St. Petersburg Times was a guest of the Estonian Tourist Board, Enterprise Estonia (2 Lasnam&#228;e, 11412 Tallinn, Estonia. Tel: +372 6279 770). 
www.eas.ee, www.visitestonia.com.</i>
<hr />
<b>How To Get There</b>

From St. Petersburg, Estonian Air (www.estonian-air.ee) flies to Tallinn twice a day. GoRail’s train service between St. Petersburg and Tallinn was reestablished in May 2012 with a train departing once a day (www.gorail.ee). Eurolines (www.luxexpress.eu) and Ecolines (www.ecolines.net) also operate daily bus services to Tallinn.

<b>Where To Stay</b>

Swissotel Tallinn 
3 Tornim&#228;e, Tel: +372 624 0000. 
www.swissotel.com/hotels/tallinn
A luxury five-star hotel in Tallinn’s tallest inhabited building, boasting impressive views of the old town and the Baltic Sea.

<b>Where To Eat</b>

 MEKK 
17/19 Suur-Karja, Tel: +372 680 6688. www.mekk.ee
A restaurant offering modern dishes based on Estonian culinary traditions on the first floor of the Savoy Boutic Hotel in the Old Town. The name is both the Estonian word for “taste” and the Estonian acronym for “modern Estonian cuisine.”  

 Restaurant Tchaikovsky
9 Vene, Tel: +372 600 0610, 
www.telegraafhotel.com/restaurant-tchaikovsky
A posh restaurant located in the Telegraaf Hotel in the Old Town that presents a “symphony of Russian cuisine” (the restaurant’s motto) fusing it with French influences. It was named Estonia’s second best in the fine dining category in Flavors of Estonia’s annual 50 Best Restaurants in Estonia Award in 2011. 

TITLE: Investment Projects Play Snakes and Ladders
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: While 2012 has been a rather conservative year for the launch of new investment projects in St. Petersburg, the city’s three largest ongoing investment developments enjoyed differing fortunes, analysts said. 
“It’s hard to say that 2012 was particularly successful for the city’s new investment developments,” said Dmitry Kumanovsky, head of the analysis department at the LMS investment company.
“After the changes in the city’s administration, investors preferred to take a pause to figure out the business priorities of the current authorities. For instance, after the new city government said it would give priority to the major current projects, a number of investors switched their plans to new projects in the Leningrad Oblast. The difficult situation on the financial markets also hindered investors from plunging into new projects,” Kumanovsky said.
Among the successfully developing major investment projects in the city, experts unanimously named the expansion of Pulkovo Airport, the ongoing construction of the Western High-Speed Diameter toll highway and the continuing enlargement of local car manufacturing plants. 
Experts said the freezing of some of the city’s large-scale investment projects, such as the Orlov Tunnel and the Novo-Admiralteisky Bridge, which were suspended by the new city government, though initially seen as discouraging news, was in reality a pragmatic decision.
“In the current situation, when the city needs to complete huge and important projects such as the construction of the Zenit soccer stadium, the Lakhta Center business complex and the development of roads, the new city administration realizes that significant financial outlay will be required in the upcoming decade,” said Kumanovsky. “Therefore it was a pragmatic decision to freeze projects such as the Orlov Tunnel, the Novo-Admiralteisky Bridge and a modern tram network, which sounded popular but would not be effective economically.” 
The never-ending, increasingly expensive construction of the city’s Zenit soccer stadium, due to be a FIFA World Cup venue in 2018, continued to plague the city in 2012. The date for the completion of the sports venue has already been deferred about a dozen times, from the initial deadline of 2009 to the current one of 2014-2015.
The construction of the second stage of the Mariinsky Theater faced similar difficulties. 
Meanwhile, the biggest surprise of the year regarding investment plans was the termination of VTB Bank’s high-profile European Embankment project, a planned multi-functional complex on the Petrograd Side. The project was canceled this fall due to the state’s decision to relocate the Russian Supreme and Supreme Arbitration Courts from Moscow to St. Petersburg. They will reportedly occupy the area meant for the European Embankment project.
“The change of project won’t affect the area from an economic point of view. However, the possibility of such abrupt changes in the situation also makes other investors cautious,” Kumanovsky said. 
St. Petersburg’s automotive cluster, which has given rise to the city’s label of the Russian Detroit, already numbers at least four major car manufacturing plants — GM, Nissan, Toyota and Hyundai — and is also continuing to expand. 
Other important investment and development projects in the city, both private and public, include the redevelopment of the historical New Holland district; the construction of the Lakhta Center business complex; the construction of the Baltic Pearl district and Yuzhny satellite town residential areas; the Morozova industrial park outside the city, and land reclamation projects on Vasilyevsky Island and near the town of Sestroretsk.

<b>FLYING HIGH</b>
On Nov. 29 this year, the Northern Capital Gateway consortium held a ceremony to mark the completion of the exterior of the new centralized passenger terminal of Pulkovo Airport. The new terminal now awaits interior fitting.
The main construction of the terminal was completed exactly two years after the laying of the first stone in November 2010. In December 2013, the company plans to put the new terminal complex into operation.
The new premises on the airport’s landside area, including a 200-room hotel, a business center, a multi-level parking lot for 560 cars and an open parking lot for 1,200 cars, are also to be launched in December next year.
The airport expansion project’s budget totals 47 billion rubles ($1.5 billion).
Sergei Emdin, general director of Northern Capital Gateway, said the airport development project was “strategic for St. Petersburg.”
“It is coming to fruition thanks to the active participation of the city administration, for only our synergy will allow us to finish the reconstruction of the airport in time. In turn we are going all out to have the new terminal open its doors to passengers next year,” Emdin said at the Nov. 29 ceremony.
Kumanovsky said the successful development of the Pulkovo hub was to a large extent a result of the project’s “initially clear concept and business model,” which didn’t require any revision, unlike the new Zenit stadium and the Mariinsky Theater’s new stage.
“It was the right decision to allow foreigners into the project and to implement foreign ideas in the new hub,” Kumanovsky said.
The city acknowledged that it was necessary to expand Pulkovo Airport when it became obvious that the capacity of its current facilities was not sufficient during peak times. In accordance with traffic forecasts, Pulkovo Airport is likely to process more than 17.3 million passengers by 2025 and has the potential to reach 40 million passengers by 2039.
It is against this background that the existing terminal configuration is constraining potential for long-term growth. This is due to the lack of a physical connection between Terminals 1 and 2: Pulkovo I, which serves domestic flights, is located some 6 kilometers away from the international terminal, Pulkovo II.
A new combined international and domestic terminal is now under construction in the midfield between the two independent runways. The development will involve integrating the existing Pulkovo I into the new terminal complex, so that sufficient facilities for all domestic and international operations can be accessed under one roof, enabling centralized access. The existing international terminal is expected to become a private airport.
Pulkovo authorities say that having split operations in two terminals is proving to be inefficient. Nowadays, neither of the existing Pulkovo terminals is able to accommodate the increasing demands of aviation security and handling procedures, due to the buildings’ outdated design. In addition, the current apron layout provides only 47 operational aircraft stands, instead of the 100 stands that will be required for future operations. Terminal capacity is limited by having 43 registration desks in both terminals, instead of the 98 needed.
Modern technology services will be implemented in the new terminal to help facilitate the forecasted growth.
In fact, as the only international airport in northwest Russia, Pulkovo is vying to position itself as an international hub by 2025, capable of competing with the Moscow airports. 
The strategy for hub status involves attracting new airlines that would operate regular long-haul flights to St. Petersburg from Japan, the U.S., Asia Pacific and the Middle East.

<b>THE ROAD TO SUCCESS</b>
The completion of the Western High-Speed Diameter, a 47-kilometer toll highway under construction, is also expected in 2013-2014. 
The road will connect different parts of the city with the aim of easing congestion. A section of the highway is already open for traffic.
Kumanovsky said the construction of the road, which will also connect St. Petersburg’s port to other highways, would ultimately lead to “an increase in goods traffic and a decrease in time and cost for goods delivery.” 

<b>THE RUSSIAN DETROIT</b>
The development of the city’s automotive cluster has been boosted by GM, Toyota and Nissan’s plans to expand their existing facilities.
The MAN plant, run by German automobile concern MAN Truck and Bus, is to begin production of trucks in St. Petersburg in 2013. Investment into the project will come to around 25 million euros ($32.3 million), according to Regnum news agency.
Maria Chernobrovkina, executive director at St. Peterburg’s American Chamber of Commerce, said construction of the MAN plant was “a good example of successful foreign investment projects in the city,” along with the opening in the city this summer of a washing machine plant by BSH Bosch und Siemens Hausgerate. 
Although plans to expand the cluster next year with another plant to produce the ambitious Yo-Mobile, a Russian-made hybrid electric car that can run both on gasoline and natural gas as well as an electric motor, have been postponed, the car will still be put into production in a couple of years, Motor.ru reported.
The Yo-Mobile is the product of a joint venture between Yarovit, a producer of trucks based in St. Petersburg, and the Onexim investment group headed by Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, who is the financier and head of the project. Prokhorov plans to invest about 150 million euros ($200 million) in the venture and intends the vehicle to “break the stereotype that Russia can’t produce good cars.”
The 32 billion-ruble ($1 billion) plans of the Fiat-Chrysler concern to build a modern full-cycle plant in St. Petersburg’s suburb of Pushkin have also been reportedly terminated due to the difficult times the alliance is going through in Europe.

<b>NEVER-ENDING STADIUM</b>
It seems the only remaining hope that the endless saga of the construction of the city’s Zenit-Arena soccer stadium will be resolved is the FIFA World Cup in 2018. Russia has won the right to host the tournament, at which the stadium is due to hold important matches.
Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko said recently that the authorities of St. Petersburg should impose their will and ensure the stadium is finished by 2017, when it is to host the matches of the Confederation Cup, a tournament traditionally held a year before the World Cup.
The construction of the new stadium, located at the western tip of Krestovsky Island, began in 2007. However, due to soaring project costs, construction has been repeatedly interrupted.
On Nov. 19, the city’s Legislative Assembly announced the latest estimated cost of the project to be 37.7 billion rubles ($1.2 billion), making it one of the most expensive stadiums in the world. The stadium will be able to seat more than 60,000 visitors and will eventually be a huge covered arena with a retractable roof.
Mutko said this month that the cities to host the Confederation Cup in 2017 should first be approved by FIFA, after which the international soccer body will closely follow the construction of the arena in St. Petersburg, RIA Novosti reported. 
Kumanovsky, who referred to the stadium project as “the most scandalous and difficult” project in the city, said the organizers had missed a great opportunity in 2008.
“The project was begun in 2006, then during the financial crisis of 2008 they had a chance to buy cheaper construction materials, but instead they were busy revising costs at that time. A while later, prices for construction materials went up again and the organizers again had to spend time on new revisions,” Kumanovsky said. 
Mutko said the construction of the stadium was the responsibility of the city, which chose the project and contractor and began the construction. Mutko said the only state interference concerned the recommendation to increase the capacity of the stadium following Russia’s victory in its bid to host the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

<b>SHOCK OF THE YEAR</b>
October’s abrupt cancelation of the long-discussed project for the construction of the European Embankment residential and commercial complex on the bank of the Malaya Neva River in the city center was one of the surprises of the year.
The project’s main investor, Russia’s VTB Bank, which had planned to construct a business and cultural complex surrounded by an attractive new pedestrian zone on the chemically contaminated land where the State Institute of Applied Chemistry was formerly located, suddenly and without comment terminated the 47 billion-ruble ($1.5 billion) project, which was already underway and in which nine billion rubles had already been invested. 
Shortly afterwards, state plans to relocate the Supreme Court and the Supreme Arbitration Court to St. Petersburg were announced, and Kommersant daily reported that the site of the European Embankment project had been earmarked for the courts.
According to the new plan, the territory is to house the buildings of the courts and residential buildings for the courts’ employees. 
The whole process of the courts’ move to St. Petersburg will cost about 50 billion rubles ($1.6 billion) and take up to four years, Anton Ivanov, chairman of the Supreme Arbitration Court, said during his visit to the city at the end of November. 
The Boris Eifman Dance Palace, which was planned to be built as part of the European Embankment project, will still be built in the area. However, it is now to be constructed not using funds from the state budget but through private investment, Viktor Khrekov, a representative of the presidential administration, was cited by Vedomosti daily as saying.
Khrekov said a tender for the construction of the courts and residential buildings is due to be announced.
Meanwhile, the presidential administration is studying VTB’s documentation relating to the European Embankment project in order to determine the conditions of the company’s withdrawal, Alexander Rotshtein, a representative of VTB Development, said. Rotshtein said that if VTB were offered a role in the construction of the courts it would consider such an offer, Vedomosti reported.
The move of the Supreme and Supreme Arbitration courts to St. Petersburg appears to be part of a concerted attempt to concentrate the country’s three upper courts in one location. The Russian Constitutional Court has been based in St. Petersburg since 2008 after its relocation from Moscow.

TITLE: Staff, Employers Look for Flexibility at Work
AUTHOR: By Olga Kalashnikova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: This year has witnessed a turning point in the attitude of employees toward their work, and according to recruitment experts, family and hobbies are now employees’ top priorities. In other indicators, the labor market has maintained stability and gradual growth throughout the year. 
“None of the various economy sectors have seen mass reductions or serious recruitment during 2012,” said Alexander Yegorov, director of the northwest branch of Ancor recruitment agency. “The majority of cases in which employers turned to recruitment agencies were linked to the internal rotation of employees within companies, insignificant expansion or the dismissal of staff,” he said. 
Among the trends to emerge in 2012, experts have identified the readiness of employees to change their workplace at any moment and even to abandon a traditional work format in favor of their own business, freelance or creative activities.
“This trend is more typical for young people, for the so-called ‘Generation Y’ [the demographic cohort including those born from the late 1970s to the early 2000s],” said Yulia Sakharova, director of the St. Petersburg branch of HeadHunter recruitment agency. “This generation has already occupied its niche on the labor market — more than 50 percent of active applicants are people from 22 to 30 years old,” she said.
“Within the trends forming now, the winners on the labor market are employers who understand the significance of work and life balance, who are ready to develop not only the professional but also the human qualities of employees and pay attention to the non-working aspects of staff’s lives,” she added.
As a result, a trend emerged this year of giving employees the opportunity to choose a working schedule that most suits them. This trend, according to HeadHunter experts, will develop further in 2013.
“Another trend stemming from the global change in priorities and from the search for meaning in work is an increase of trust and interest in public services,” said Sakharova. “The number of jobseekers interested in working for state establishments grew five-fold during 2012, indicating the formation of a new pool of people prepared to work in the public sector for the well-being of society.” 
The unemployment level in St. Petersburg is one of the lowest in Russia. According to Ancor experts, this is linked to the city’s traditionally well-developed spheres of engineering, FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods), the construction and banking sectors, tourism, retail, IT and telecommunications.
“These are all flagship fields for the St. Petersburg economy; they create new jobs and stimulate demand for personnel,” said Yegorov.
The most in-demand occupations traditionally include sales specialists, IT and telecommunications experts and engineering and manufacturing staff. In 2012, companies including Bosch and MAN opened large plants in St. Petersburg. The pharmaceutical production company Polisan is expanding its operations, and Gazprom’s ongoing policy of relocating its subdivisions to the city is creating new jobs. Recruitment specialists predict that in 2013, the demand for working personnel will continue to grow.
“At the moment the market cannot satisfy the growing demand for workers in the manufacturing and engineering spheres,” said Sakharova.
“As a result, there is great demand for migrant workers, both Russian and foreign. Nowadays, workers themselves are ready to relocate if a job offer is interesting,” she added. 
According to HeadHunter research, the level of personnel mobility increased by 34 percent in 2012, compared with the previous year. The most mobile professionals are top managers, as the move does not represent a serious dent in their budget. However, the readiness of blue-collar workers to relocate is also growing.
“This trend will remain during the next few years and will be supported by high-profile events like the football championship in 2018, and the construction of large infrastructure objects and other large projects on both an international and federal level,” said Sakharova. 
The most popular places to relocate to in Russia are Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sochi, Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Novgorod. 
Requirements for qualifications and skills are becoming tougher — employers do not want to take a ‘pig in a poke,’ said Sakharova. Experience, references and professional achievements are important for future employers, but jobseekers are also paying more attention to their choice of job and employer.
“They are learning to sell themselves at interviews, negotiate their salary and secure better conditions,” said Sakharova. “An important factor for both sides is the concurrence of corporate ideology and the jobseeker’s personal concept of what amounts to right and wrong in work and corporate life,” she added.
Salaries in St. Petersburg increased by 8-10 percent in 2012, while inflation this year ran at 6.8-7 percent, according to Ancor specialists.
Next year is not expected to bring a significant boom in business activity. The pace of labor market growth depends both on the growth of the Russian economy and on that of the world economy.
“Assuming we don’t take into account the potential scenario of a snowballing of the global economic crisis, the situation on the labor market in 2013 will be the same as in 2012,” said Yegorov. 
“We also expect to see an increase in competition for personnel next year, as the demographic gap hits home, causing growth in competition on the domestic market,” he said.

TITLE: Top Real Estate Deals of 2012
AUTHOR: By Olga Kalashnikova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: As Russia’s second capital, St. Petersburg followed the pace set by Moscow in 2012 on the real estate market.
Both the Moscow and St. Petersburg markets have caught the attention of major investors. According to data from real estate consultants Colliers International, these investors can be divided into two groups. The first consists of companies that are acquiring real estate for their own activities, whereas the second group consists of professional investors, large experienced companies that aim to purchase good investment assets.
“The professionalism of the second group allows them to purchase premises at prime cost or even lower,” said Nikolai Kazansky, general director of Colliers International Russia.
“For example, Jensen Group bought the SuperSiva hypermarket with the aim of redeveloping it at a profit,” he said. 
According to Colliers International specialists, Jensen Group has been the most successful company in 2012 among real estate investors. Among companies that intend to occupy premises themselves, Kazansky named Imperia, Rurik, Teorema, Fort Group and Adamant. 
“In terms of the number of projects and deadlines for their completion, the most successful company is Fort Group,” said Kazansky. Together with Adamant, it owns half of all retail premises currently under construction in St. Petersburg.
Other large deals on the retail real estate market in 2012 include, according to experts from Penny Lane Realty St. Petersburg, the purchases of the Leto retail and entertainment complex  (116,000 square meters), Galeria mall (192,000 square meters) and the Smile shopping center (11,000 square meters).
Adamant also launched the biggest quantity of office real estate on the St. Petersburg market in 2012, according to specialists at Jones Lang LaSalle in St. Petersburg, which specializes in investment and real estate management.
“The Gazprom-affiliated companies were highly active on the office real estate market this year,” said Veronika Lezhneva, head of research in St. Petersburg at Jones Lang LaSalle Russia & CIS. “In 2012, the company — with all its branches — became one of the main tenants of the [local] office real estate market,” she said. 
The largest transactions in the rental of office premises include the rental by GazpromInvestZapad of 8,500 square meters in the Jupiter business center, the rental by JetBrains of 5,200 square meters in the Universe business center, and Gazprom’s occupation of premises covering more than 3,000 square meters in the Renaissance Forum business center. The St. Petersburg Plaza business center let large office premises of 3,000 square meters each to Nord and QB Finance respectively, according to Penny Lane Realty data.
The Universe business center is one of the most successful projects on the office real estate market. It was launched in 2012 by Bierre Lumiere Holding, the leader among office real estate developers, according to Colliers International. 
In the residential real estate segment, Colliers International experts name LenSpetsSmu, YIT, LSR, NCC, RBI and TSDS as companies that have completed major projects.
“This year could be considered a preparation for 2013. There was a lack of quality premises for investors in all segments of commercial real estate; there were hardly any premises for sale,” said Kazansky. 
“During the next one to three years, some of the world’s leading players — the companies Hochtief, NCC, British investment fund Fleming Family & Partners, and Renaissance Construction — will launch a number of interesting high-quality projects on the market,” he added.
One of the peculiarities of the St. Petersburg real estate market is that interest rates on specialized loans such as project financing are higher than in Europe. In St. Petersburg, interest rates can range from 12 to 15 percent annually, which ultimately leads to high rental rates.
The pace of property development in St. Petersburg is sluggish due to bureaucratic factors that influence and limit its growth, according to experts from real estate consulting companies. 
“There are deals involving premises on the local market, but the purchase prices are small, as they are bought by experienced investors picking up quality assets at low cost, or the purchases are made for the buyer to occupy the premises themselves,” said Kazansky.

TITLE: Incoming Tourism Grows, New Players Enter Market
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Incoming tourism to St. Petersburg has grown by 3.2 percent this year, with 5.7 million tourists having visited the city, the northwest office of the Russian Tourism Industry Union said.
Two and a half million of those visitors were foreigners and 3.2 million were Russian tourists.
Although in 2012 the growth in incoming tourism was slightly lower compared to last year’s increase — when the number of tourists rose from 5.1 million people in 2010 to 5.5 million — the city is still seeing a gradual increase in visitors.  
 “The volume of tourists coming to St. Petersburg has grown recently, mostly thanks to an increase in travelers from China, India and Latin American countries, many of which have a visa-free regime with Russia,” said Pavel Rumyantsev, spokesman for the northwest office of the Russian Tourism Industry Union.
“We are also seeing an increase in the number of new direct flights between St. Petersburg and other cities in Russia (for instance, Astrakhan and Stavropol), CIS countries and the world,” he said.
However, Rumyantsev noted that there are many areas that tourism experts should keep working on in order to attract more tourists.
“To attract more foreign tourists we need to develop a systematic policy for simplifying the visa regime. To attract more Russian tourists we need to cancel VAT on domestic flights,” Rumyantsev said.
Another significant factor would be the creation of an effective and convenient transport infrastructure for tourists, including permission for tourist buses to use bus lanes, he said.
“We also need lots of interesting events in the city that we can include in tourist packages,” he added.
Rumyantsev described “an interesting trend now in St. Petersburg” that consists of the emergence of two distinct “St. Petersburg for tourists.” One is the “official,” imperial St. Petersburg, which clients of travel agencies normally see. The other is the “mystical, innovative, European, youthful” city that is usually shown to individual tourists — mainly Russian ones — by guides working without licenses who are not members of any tourist organizations.
“We need to unite those two St. Petersburgs and show both of them to make the city even more attractive,” Rumyantsev said.
Rumyantsev said if the political and economic situation in the world is favorable next year, tourist volumes to St. Petersburg may exceed six million people.
Russian outbound tourism, including from St. Petersburg, has shown stable growth this year and taken a leading position in the world.   
Accordingly, both Russian and foreign travel operators and airlines expanded their services on the local tourism market in 2012. 
This year European travel operator TUI announced the launch of flights from St. Petersburg on both TUI-branded charter planes and regular planes. The company began flying on TUI-branded planes to the Egyptian resorts of Sharm el-Sheikh and Hurghada on Oct. 7. The operator also offers package holidays with direct flights from St. Petersburg to Thailand, Spain, the Canary Islands and the United Arab Emirates. 
Just a week before TUI announced its new flights from St. Petersburg, another major player in the travel market — Emirates Airlines — announced the arrival in the city of its tourism branch, Emirates Holidays, which is the biggest travel agency in the Middle East. 
Emirates Holidays’ St. Petersburg office, which opened in the summer, offers holiday packages to both local travel agencies and individual tourists on Emirates flights, which were launched from St. Petersburg in November 2011. 
Ian McDougal, regional director of Emirates Holidays, said at a news conference in St. Petersburg that the company was ready to organize trips to numerous destinations around the world, including the United Arab Emirates, the Maldives, Mauritius, the Seychelles, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Singapore, Malaysia and India. 
On Dec. 8, Korean Air also launched twice-weekly direct winter flights between Seoul and St. Petersburg. The flights also provide connections for passengers flying from Russia to China, Japan, the U.S. and Australia, as well as countries for which Russians do not require a visa, such as Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines.
Yevgeny Ilyin, commercial director of Northern Capital Gateway, the consortium that runs Pulkovo Airport, predicted that after the launch of the new passenger terminal at Pulkovo, planned for the end of 2013, the popularity of Asian destinations among Russian travelers would “keep growing.”
The St. Petersburg-based carrier Rossiya Airlines also continued to increase the range and scope of its flights and registered a growth in passenger numbers.
Tatyana Gavrilova, head of the northwest office of the Russian Tourism Industry Union, said in the fall that Russia was currently one of the world’s leading nations in outbound tourism. 
“According to the latest survey, Russians now travel 30 percent more than the Chinese and 640 percent more than Brazilians,” Gavrilova told The St. Petersburg Times. 
Europeans, on the other hand, are showing no growth in outbound tourism, although they continue to travel a lot. Due to the financial crisis in Europe, outbound tourism is in stagnation there, she said. 
“Therefore it is understandable that foreign travel companies — those that are thinking about the future — realize the necessity of developing the Russian market. St. Petersburg, as the center of Russia’s northwest, is a very attractive location for them,” Gavrilova said. 
Other factors, such as Russia’s entry into the WTO and the efficient policy of Northern Capital Gateway, have contributed to this positive development, she added. 
According to data from the Russian Federal Agency for Tourism, the volume of Russian tourists abroad increased by 7 percent in the first half of the year compared to the same period last year. In total, Russians made about 6.5 million trips abroad, Interfax reported. 
Turkey, traditionally the most popular destination for Russian tourists, again received the highest number of visits, welcoming 936,000 Russians, although numbers decreased by 17 percent from the year before. 
In second place was Egypt, which saw 804,000 visits by Russians, an increase of 65 percent from last year. China received the third most number of visits by Russians in the first half of this year with about 573,000 Russian citizens going there, though this figure marked a decrease of 9 percent. 
At the same time, the volume of Russian tourists significantly increased in Slovakia (by 97 percent), Tunisia (by 92 percent), Romania (by 85 percent) and Japan (by 62 percent).

TITLE: Mali’s PM Resigns After Arrest by Junta
AUTHOR: By Baba Ahmed and Rukmini Callimachi
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BAMAKO, Mali — Soldiers arrested Mali’s prime minister and ordered him to resign, showing that the military is still the real power in the capital of this large West Africa country even though soldiers made a show of returning control to civilian leaders several months after launching a coup in March.
Prime Minister Cheikh Modibo Diarra, dressed in a dark suit and his forehead glistening with sweat, went on TV at 4 a.m. to announce his resignation. He was reportedly back in his house Tuesday afternoon under military guard, brought there from a military base.
“Our country is living through a period of crisis. Men and women who are worried about the future of our nation are hoping for peace,” he said on TV. “It’s for this reason that I, Cheikh Modibo Diarra, am resigning along with my entire government on this day, Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2012. I apologize before the entire population of Mali.”
Despite the events, planning for a European Union military training mission aimed at giving the Malian army the ability to oust Islamist insurgents who have seized northern Mali will proceed, said Michael Mann, a spokesman for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton. He added that the EU is watching the situation closely and hopes for the quick appointment of a new prime minister, leading to credible elections and the restoration of constitutional rule.
EU foreign ministers on Monday approved the concept of an EU training mission for an attempt by Malian and other African troops to deprive the Islamists of a haven and training sites in north Mali, where they have instituted strict Shariah law, including punishment by stoning and amputation. But Germany’s foreign minister indicated the arrest of Diarra may obstruct the plan.
“One thing is clear: Our offers of help come with the condition that the process of restoring constitutional order in Mali be conducted credibly,” German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said in a statement. He later added: “A return to constitutional order is a very decisive criteria for our involvement” in the military training mission.”
Hours before he announced his resignation, Mali’s prime minister was arrested by the military in his home, forced into a car and driven to the Kati military camp, the sprawling base where the March 21 coup was launched. The developments indicate the military is still the real power in Mali, whose northern half fell to Islamist insurgents in the wake of the coup, even though the soldiers made a show months ago of handing power back to civilians.
Westerwelle said President Dioncounda Traore and other political leaders “must now act responsibly so that Mali returns to stability.” But the 70-year-old Traore might not have the power to bring the military to heel. In May, Yerewoloton, a violent citizen’s movement which is believed to be backed by the junta, broke through the security cordon at the presidential palace and severely beat Traore.
A police officer who was on duty Monday night at Bamako’s international airport said the same group stormed the airport before the prime minister was to fly to Paris.
“The plane that was to take the prime minister to France was on the point of departure,” said the officer, who insisted on anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the press. “It was stopped by people from the group Yerewoloton who invaded the airport. The people from Yerewoloton are still at the airport as we speak, searching cars.”
In Paris, French Foreign Ministry spokesman Philippe Lalliot said: “We condemn the circumstances in which Prime Minister Cheikh Modibo Diarra was compelled to resign ... the former junta must stop its interventions in the political affairs of the country.”
“These developments underline the need for the deployment of an African stabilization force,” Lalliot said.
The spokesman for the military junta acknowledged that Malian soldiers arrested Diarra.
“For several days now, Cheikh Modibo Diarra has mobilized his supporters and boycotted the national conference (currently being held to discuss Mali’s future),” said spokesman Bacary Mariko. “And now he says he’s going to Paris for medical tests ... but we know better and realize that he is trying to flee in order to go and create a blockage in the Mali situation.”

TITLE: Italian Premier Defends Austerity
AUTHOR: By Victor L. Simpson
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ROME — Premier Mario Monti on Tuesday defended his government’s austerity measures as necessary to restore confidence in Italy’s financial future, and warned voters to beware of “magic solutions” promised by candidates in upcoming elections.
Monti has said he will resign as soon as the country’s budget is approved, spreading anxiety in the markets that a new elected government will not follow through on reforms.
Speaking on state TV, he warned politicians against suggesting during the elections that there is an easy way out of Italy’s financial problems.
“It is important that everyone use some self-discipline and avoid the tendency to oversimplify, presenting magic solutions to the citizens,” he said.
Monti declined to discuss his future plans. Supporters have been pushing him to lead a centrist movement in the elections. Others say he may seek the largely ceremonial position of president, or that he may seek an EU position in Brussels.
Keeping the jittery markets in mind, Monti stressed that “there is a government in Italy and will be until another is named.”
Former Premier Silvio Berlusconi, meanwhile, was in full election mode. In a call to one of the TV stations he owns, he said Monti’s politics are too “German-centered,” belittling concerns about the country’s borrowing costs as measured by the spread — the difference in interest between benchmark German bonds and Italian ones.
Monti was tapped by Italy’s president to lead the country in late November 2011 after Berlusconi resigned, having lost the confidence of international markets in his ability to save the country from a Greek-style debt crisis.
Monti, a respected economist and former European Union commissioner, won back a degree of international credibility for the country through a series of tax hikes and fiscal reforms that were deeply unpopular at home.
He will step down as soon as Parliament passes the 2013 budget law later this month. His term was due to end by April, and his resignation would move up elections by about two months.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she supported the reform course that Monti’s government has set in motion.
“We have seen that financial investors also have regained some confidence in Italy,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters in Berlin. “And so the Italian population will surely make its choice in such a way that Italy continues along a good path.”

TITLE: Violence Fans Flames In Egypt Ahead of Key Vote
AUTHOR: By Hamza Hendawi
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CAIRO — Thousands of opponents and supporters of Egypt’s Islamist president were flocking to key locations in the nation’s capital ahead of rival mass rallies Tuesday, four days before a nationwide referendum on a contentious draft constitution.
The protesters were beginning to gather just hours after masked assailants set upon opposition protesters staging a sit-in at Tahrir Square, firing birdshot and swinging knives and sticks, according to security officials. At least 11 protesters were wounded in the pre-dawn attack, according to a Health Ministry spokesman quoted by the official MENA news agency.
The violence stoked tensions ahead of the mass demonstrations in Cairo by supporters and opponents of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi over the disputed draft constitution. The charter has deeply polarized the nation and triggered some of the worst violence since Morsi took office in June as Egypt’s first freely elected president.
Protests are also planned elsewhere in Egypt, including the Mediterranean city of Alexandria and Suez to the east of Cairo.
The latest spate of violence in Egypt has divided the country into two camps: President Mohammed Morsi, his Muslim Brotherhood and ultraorthodox Salafis on the one side, and liberals, leftists and Christians, on the other.
It was unclear who was behind the pre-dawn attack on the protesters who have been staging a sit-in at Tahrir for nearly three weeks, security officials said on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to talk to the media.
The Tahrir protesters belong to the liberal opposition, which claims the draft of the charter restricts freedoms and gives Islamists vast influence over the running of the country. The draft, hurriedly adopted late last month in a marathon session by a constituent assembly dominated by the president’s Islamist allies, is going to a nationwide referendum Saturday.
The dispute prompted hundreds of thousands of the president’s opponents to take to the streets in massive rallies — the largest from primarily secular groups since the uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak last year. Morsi’s supporters responded with huge demonstrations of their own, which led to clashes in the streets that left at least six people dead and hundreds wounded.
The opposition has rejected any dialogue with Morsi until he shelves the draft constitution and postpones the referendum. They have also demanded that Morsi rescind decrees giving him near absolute powers. He withdrew those powers on Saturday, but insisted that the vote will go ahead as scheduled.

TITLE: South Africa Worried As Mandela Lies in Hospital
AUTHOR: By Jon Gambrell
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: JOHANNESBURG  — South Africa’s former president Nelson Mandela underwent more medical tests Monday in a military hospital as the public and journalists outside asked: What, if anything, is wrong with the health of the 94-year-old anti-apartheid icon?
Government officials in charge of releasing information about Mandela have repeatedly declined to provide specifics about Mandela’s now three-day hospitalization, calling on citizens to respect the beloved politician’s privacy. Yet Mandela represents something more than a man to many in this nation of 50 million people and to the world at large, and the longer he remains in hospital care, the louder the demand for the private details about his health will grow.
“He symbolizes what our country can achieve with a statesman of his stature. He’s our inspiration and personifies our aspirations,” an editorial in Monday’s edition of the Sowetan newspaper reads. “That’s why we dread his hospital visits, routine or not. That’s why even now when we are told not to panic, we do.”
Mandela is revered for being a leader of the struggle against racist white rule in South Africa and for preaching reconciliation once he emerged from prison in 1990 after 27 years behind bars. He won South Africa’s first truly democratic elections in 1994, serving one five-year term. The Nobel laureate later retired from public life to live in his remote village of Qunu, in the Eastern Cape, and last appeared in public when his country hosted the 2010 soccer World Cup.
On Saturday, President Jacob Zuma’s office announced Mandela had been admitted to a Pretoria hospital for medical tests and for care that was “consistent for his age.” Zuma visited Mandela on Sunday and found the former leader to be “comfortable and in good care,” presidential spokesman Mac Maharaj said in a statement.
Such is the level of confidentiality surrounding Mandela’s hospitalization that it wasn’t until Monday that the public received government confirmation that he was being treated at 1 Military Hospital in Pretoria, the capital. That word came from Defense Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, who visited the aging leader there. Speaking to journalists afterward, Mapisa-Nqakula said Mandela was “undergoing a series of tests to determine what is going on in his body.” She said Mandela’s release date would be determined by the test results.
“He’s doing very, very well,” Mapisa-Nqakula said. “And it is important to keep him in our prayers and also to be as calm as possible and not cause a state of panic because I think that is not what all of us need.”