SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1744 (3), Wednesday, January 30, 2013
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TITLE: Russian Veteran Recalls the Battle of Stalingrad
AUTHOR: MANSUR MIROVALEV &#8232;
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW (AP) — The Soviet soldiers used their own bodies as shields, covering women and children escaping on ferry boats from a Nazi bombardment that killed 40,000 civilians in a single day. It was the height of the Battle of Stalingrad, one of the bloodiest conflicts of World War II.
"They were all hit in the back," said 90-year-old Alexei Stefanov. "But they did not flee."
Stefanov is among the few surviving veterans of the battle, which claimed 2 million lives and raged for nearly 200 days before the Red Army turned back the Nazi forces, decisively changing the course of the war. Russia celebrated the 70th anniversary of that victory on Saturday, with President Vladimir Putin taking part in ceremonies in Volgograd, the current name of the city in southern Russia that stretches along the western bank of the Volga River.
Stefanov arrived in Stalingrad in August, 1942, just a month after the Nazis began their onslaught. A marine, he commanded what was left of a reconnaissance platoon, 17 scouts who had survived previous missions on the front lines.
The German army invaded the Soviet Union in June, 1941, and by the following summer had pushed deep inside the country. For Adolf Hitler, taking the city named after Soviet dictator Josef Stalin would be a symbolic victory, and it also would allow the Germans to cross the Volga and secure access to Russian oil supplies.
What Stefanov saw was a once-thriving industrial city being reduced to rubble by shelling and bombing by the Nazis and their Romanian, Italian, Hungarian and Spanish allies. Only about 100,000 residents had been evacuated, and the remaining civilians were frantically helping to dig trenches.
The Red Army had orders from Stalin not to retreat, so only women, children and wounded soldiers were allowed to take the crossing over the wide river to relative safety.
The day Stefanov remembers most vividly is Aug. 23, 1942, when hundreds of Nazi planes bombed the city, turning it into a giant burning ruin. Hundreds of Soviet soldiers with wounds bad enough to keep them out of the battle but not severe enough to incapacitate them set out to rescue women and children from the basements of demolished buildings. They rushed them to ferries that would take them across the Volga, a river about 2 kilometers (more than 1 mile) from shore to shore.
Fires from spilled oil and gasoline burned on the water, and the defenseless ferries were easy prey for the Nazi planes. The Soviet soldiers covered the children with their own bodies. Stefanov is still haunted by the sight of the soldiers who died, their backs ripped apart.
In the city, thousands of dead bodies were left unburied, lying amid the ruins in the sweltering August heat. For the only time during the Battle of Stalingrad, German tanks got to the river, and Soviet tanks and artillery fiercely fought them back.
"That was hell, literal hell," Stefanov said. "This one episode to me was equal to the whole war."
Stefanov recalls reconnaissance missions deep inside enemy territory, when he had to crawl for hours and hide in ravines to gather intelligence on the location and number of Nazi troops and weapons.
In September, 1942, Stefanov was hit in his left hand, a wound that still troubles him. He later returned to active service and was with Soviet troops when they drove the Germans out of Norway and marched into Warsaw and Berlin.
He was back in Moscow in late June, 1945, to participate in the Victory Parade on Red Square. Then he went on to China to help drive out the imperial Japanese.
Stefanov's contribution to the war effort won him dozens of medals. Although they weigh a combined 11 kilograms (24 pounds), he still wears them pinned to the front of his uniform on holidays and other special occasions.
His real reward at the end of the war was his marriage to Lyudmilla, also a decorated war veteran. They are still together 67 years later.
"War is not a game, it's the most horrible thing," said Stefanov, who heads a government-run organization of World War II veterans. "That's the thing youngsters should always know."


TITLE: Stalingrad Victory Commemorated 
AUTHOR: Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia on Saturday celebrated the 70th anniversary of the decisive Soviet victory over the Nazis in the Battle of Stalingrad amid talk of the revival of Stalinism, the temporary renaming of Volgograd to Stalingrad and the launch of buses bearing Stalin's image.
In Volgograd on Saturday, President Vladimir Putin laid flowers at the eternal flame dedicated to the watershed battle, which lasted some 200 days and left 1.25 million dead. He was accompanied by Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and regional Governor Sergei Bozhenov.
Putin, who has reportedly been suffering from back problems, has made only three trips around the country since early October, including the one to Volgograd on Saturday.
He used the celebration to reiterate his stance that patriotism is important for maintaining a unified Russia. Putin has been actively promoted patriotism since his return to power last May.
At a meeting with veterans Saturday in Volgograd, temporarily renamed Stalingrad to reflect its Soviet namesake for the celebration, Putin said that "understanding the importance" of the Battle of Stalingrad was "essential" for "preserving our national identity," "reinforcing" Russia and "breeding patriotism." 
"Patriotism, as we know it, is love for the motherland," Putin said, according to a transcript on the Kremlin website. "No country can exist without it. It would simply melt like a sugar cube in tea."
Ahead of Putin's visit, local deputies Thursday decided that the city would officially be called by its 1925-1961 name, Stalingrad, on six holidays dedicated to World War II.
Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin praised the renaming Friday in a post on Twitter. 
"I have never disguised my unequivocally positive attitude toward it [the renaming], including from the economic and investment point of view," he wrote.
The renaming prompted some observers to speculate about the revival of Stalinism in Russia, although Putin has never unambiguously praised Stalin.
On Friday, the British daily The Times ran an opinion piece on the renaming, saying that under Putin school textbooks have described Stalin as a "competent manager" whose actions were "entirely rational."
"The purges, the gulags, the famines are all downplayed in favor of 'Little Father,' the mighty leader who modernized the U.S.S.R. and led his country to victory against Nazi Germany," the commentary states.
Spain's ABC reported the city's renaming Friday under the headline "Stalin Resurrected!"
But U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul told the Russian audience during festivities in Volgograd on Friday, a day ahead of Putin's visit, that renaming the city was "your matter" and "your history," implying that it was Russia's own business, Interfax reported.
McFaul said the world's history had been decided in Stalingrad through the suffering of Soviet soldiers, to whom Americans were very grateful.
The launch of public buses bearing Stalin's image in Volgograd, St. Petersburg and Chita on Saturday added fuel to the fire.  
St. Petersburg lawmakers from the liberal opposition Yabloko party asked regional Governor Georgy Poltavchenko to remove the buses because "any glorification" of Stalin and "any justification of Stalin's crimes and massive repressions against his own people is a crime in and of itself," RIA-Novosti reported.
Also Friday, opposition leader Ilya Yashin said in an interview with Lithuanian news site Delfi that Putin wanted to "rule like Stalin and live like [billionaire] Roman Abramovich."
On Saturday, Sergei Ivanenko, a senior member of Yabloko, told Ekho Moskvy that Stalin's repressions were "massive," while Putin's were "pinpoint," but he said that "the choice of methods, the ways of 'working' with people and the consequences for these people are approximately the same," despite the absence of the death penalty under Putin.
In his state-of-the-nation address in December, Putin said patriotism and civil responsibility, which he defined as "serving the society and the country," are the "consolidating basis of our politics."
At a meeting with public activists in September dedicated to ways of raising the level of patriotism in young people, Putin said "nothing else" but patriotism could be thought of, "no matter how long we discuss it," to serve as the "moral base" for Russia.
In an interview in 2009, when he was still prime minister, Putin said that "no one now could throw stones at those who managed and organized" the Soviet victory in World War II because consequences would have been much worse if the country had lost the war. 
However, despite praising Stalin for the country's industrialization, Putin said that it had been achieved at an "unacceptable price" and that the repression and personality cult were "unacceptable."



TITLE: Rivalries at Bolshoi Draw Scrutiny After Attack
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – Ballet may be high art onstage, but last month's acid attack on Bolshoi Ballet chief Sergei Filin has drawn attention to the fact that it is a dirty business behind the scenes.
Two weeks after an unidentified assailant threw sulfuric acid in Filin's face outside his apartment building, the attack remains in the national spotlight.
Police have opened a criminal case in connection with the attack and have tentatively linked it to Filin's job but have named no suspects. Filin has also said he believes it was connected to his work, while some observers think it was the work of people with financial interests connected to the theater.
As artistic director for one of the world's most prestigious ballet companies, Filin, 42, had fierce rivals and critics, as well as the power to make or break dancers' careers.
During Filin's almost two years as Bolshoi Ballet director, he had the tires of his car slashed multiple times by vandals, including one such incident the day of the acid attack, media reports have stated. Also, Filin's e-mail and Facebook accounts have been hacked.
Earlier this week, a leading Bolshoi dancer came forward saying she had received threats. Svetlana Lunkina extended a leave of absence from the theater because she said she is afraid to return home from Canada because of threats targeting her and her husband, a film producer.
Boris Akimov, a ballet repetiteur at the theater and one of Filin's former teachers, said he believes the attack on Filin was motivated by the "fight for power and posts."
Akimov, who himself worked as director of the Bolshoi Ballet from 2000 to 2003, said people who occupied the post were often attacked in some way. Within a month of his appointment, Akimov said, he saw a false media report saying he had been fired, part of what he described as a smear campaign.
American theater critic Raymond Stults, who has known Filin for many years and has covered the Bolshoi for two decades, said he thought Filin got along well with his dancers.
"He has done very well as an artistic director and, I believe, is well-liked by most of the dancers at Bolshoi," Stults said, adding that most of the theater's current dancers had been Filin's colleagues until he quit dancing five years ago.
Stults described Filin as "very soft-spoken, very gentle [and] very straightforward."
"The fact that he was a star dancer didn't go to his head," he said.
Stults said he thought it was highly unlikely that someone inside the theater had committed the attack. Instead, he thinks it was "the work of some fanatic outside the theater."
But the person who has faced perhaps the closest scrutiny following the attack is a prominent figure at the Bolshoi: star dancer Nikolai Tsiskaridze.

<b>Battle For Control</b>
Tsiskaridze, 39, and Filin had been involved in a highly public feud over influence within the ballet company since shortly after Filin's appointment to a five-year term as artistic director in March 2011.
Moscow police said they questioned Tsiskaridze on Jan. 23 as a witness in the attack on Filin, noting that they were also questioning other Bolshoi Theater employees and Filin's acquaintances and family members.
The month Filin was appointed to the post of artistic director, he told Kommersant he intended to make Tsiskaridze, who was nearing the standard retirement age for dancers, the chief repetiteur, or performance coach.
"Unfortunately for Nikolai Tsiskaridze, the position of Bolshoi Ballet director has been filled for the next five years, but it is my duty to use his energy and knowledge," Filin said.
Stults said Tsiskaridze was never a candidate for the director position because his conservative views on the theater's repertoire do not coincide with those of Bolshoi management.
When Filin was asked in the March 2011 interview what would happen if Tsiskaridze didn't like the other repetiteurs selected by Filin, the latter said: "I'd suggest we play a game. … Those who don't play by the rules will get the boot."
Tsiskaridze said that during his time as a repetiteur, Filin criticized his work and tried to push him out.
In a live interview on Dozhd television Jan. 10, Tsiskaridze told interviewer Ksenia Sobchak that Filin and the theater's management had attempted to have his responsibilities reduced as a repetiteur. He also said Filin pressured colleagues into signing a letter demanding that Tsiskaridze be reprimanded for allegedly offending Bolshoi management.
The Dozhd interview was prompted by an announcement that day by the Bolshoi that Tsiskaridze had been dismissed along with dancer Yan Godovsky as part-time repetiteurs at the theater.
The firings took place on New Year's Eve. That same day, Filin's cell phone was bombarded with incessant calls, media reports said.
Tsiskaridze blamed his dismissal on his public criticism of the theater's long-delayed reconstruction, which lasted from 2005 to 2011. After the theater reopened in October 2011, Tsiskaridze said it was unfit for rehearsals and performances, criticism that the culture minister at the time, Alexander Avdeyev, called unfounded.
Bolshoi Theater expert and State Duma Deputy Alexei Mitrofanov said in an interview that someone may have "decided to deal a blow to Tsiskaridze" by attacking Filin given Tsiskaridze's conflict with Bolshoi management.
Some observers have said Tsiskaridze has powerful backers in his long-standing fight with Filin and theater management.
In November, a group of cultural figures, including the artistic director of Moscow's Estrada Theater, wrote to President Vladimir Putin asking that Tsiskaridze take over the post of general director of the Bolshoi from Anatoly Iksanov, Izvestia reported.
In the Jan. 10 Dozhd interview, Sobchak suggested that Sergei Chemezov, head of the state corporation Russian Technologies and a longtime Putin ally, was lobbying on Tsiskaridze's behalf at the Bolshoi. Tsiskaridze said he knew Chemezov but denied that he had lobbied for him.

<b>Creative Differences</b>
Another point of contention between Filin and Tsiskaridze, as well as among the management and other dancers at the theater, was the balance of classical and modern performances in the ballet's repertoire.
Filin has apparently supported both the conservative and progressive repertoires, Stults said. He may have wanted to replace some of the old performances but may have had "no choice" but to keep them because they are all staged by Yury Grigorovich, the renowned ballet-master of the Bolshoi for the past 30 years.
But Stults said Filin has been promoting the modern repertoire, inviting the world's leading choreographers to perform their ballets at the Bolshoi.
While Bolshoi director Iksanov has "strongly supported" Filin in this move, Tsiskaridze has favored the classical ballets staged by Grigorovich, the critic said.
Alexei Ratmansky, Bolshoi Ballet director between 2004 and 2008, had "a great deal of opposition" from Tsiskaridze, apparently because Ratmansky "did a great deal to change the repertoire. He wanted to phase out Grigorovich's ballets," Stults said.
"I think he [Ratmansky] simply got sick and tired of the whole thing," the critic said about Ratmansky's departure from the theater.
Ratmansky was replaced as ballet director by Yury Burlaka, whom Stults described as a "weak" director who re-enacted 19th-century ballets without staging new ones.
Burlaka was succeeded in March 2011 by Filin, who had danced at the Bolshoi for 20 years. At the time, he was serving as artistic director at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Music Theater.
The decision to appoint Filin to the Bolshoi post was a "sudden" one, Stults said. The theater's supposedly preferred candidate, Makhar Vaziyev, who at the time was head of St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theater, rejected the job because he was working under another contract.
Another candidate, Gennady Yanin, who was assistant ballet director at the Bolshoi and was supposed to replace Burlaka temporarily, resigned after someone hacked his website and posted images purportedly showing him having sex with a man, media reports said.
Filin came to the Bolshoi with a team of several associates from his former job. In one of his first interviews after being appointed to the Bolshoi post, Filin told Kommersant that by the time the theater's main stage reopened after reconstruction in October 2011, he would keep in his troupe "only people who are able to work and want to work."
When Filin began phasing in more modern repertoire, Tsiskaridze and others in the ballet resisted the changes.
Akimov, the former Bolshoi Ballet director, criticized the new ballets, which consist overwhelmingly of one-act performances staged by foreign choreographers.
"[These] performances lack a plot. They only re-enact choreography," Akimov said.
The Bolshoi has traditionally staged ballets of two to six acts based on classical Russian and international literature.
But Akimov, who is 66, acknowledged that many of the theater's young dancers like the modern repertoire.
He said members of the Bolshoi ballet troupe of his generation mostly share his views on Filin's policies but that of the troupe's roughly 220 members, the older generation is represented by only 20 to 30 people.

<b>Long Recovery</b>
After Filin was attacked, he was hospitalized with severe burns but listed in stable condition. He has undergone multiple eye surgeries and one plastic surgery, and doctors said Thursday that he may need at least one more eye operation.
It is not yet clear whether his eyesight will be completely restored, but earlier this week the head ophthalmologist at the Health Ministry said Filin was making good progress.
"We checked his vision, and he can see at the moment. I won't say to what extent, but he can already see pretty well for such an injury," Vladimir Neroyev told Interfax.
Filin is expected to be sent to Germany as soon as next week to continue his recovery, which  doctors have said will take at least six months.
The criminal charge that forms the basis of the police investigation is intentional infliction of grave bodily injury, which carries a maximum sentence of eight years in prison. Police have said some witnesses in the case will be interviewed with polygraph tests.
Last week, the Bolshoi Theater appointed longtime dancer Galina Stepanenko to be Filin's temporary replacement as ballet artistic director. Filin has said he hopes to return to the job.
"I am not going to lie. Of course it is very hard for me and very difficult," Filin said in a video-link interview aired on NTV on Sunday. "Even if the worst happens, I will continue to look upon this world, and I will continue to do what I do. I promise that you will see me on stage."

TITLE: Medvedev Outlines Economic Program
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev took the floor in the Kremlin on Thursday to outline a wide range of goals for his Cabinet, in a move seen as a show of unwavering support for him from President Vladimir Putin.
Most of the goals, such as improving the conditions for business, resembled the targets that several previous governments set for themselves. Medvedev said, however, that he will make more headway over the next five years, until the presidential elections in March 2018.
"We need five years of effective development," he said.
Medvedev spoke at the Kremlin's high-domed Yekaterininsky Hall, with his entire Cabinet, Putin and selected governors listening and seated around a large conference table. Opening the meeting, Putin said it was crucial that it took place in the Kremlin.
A Russian prime minister had never before delivered a long-term vision of his goals in such a format.
Medvedev said he wanted annual economic growth to be at least 5 percent.
He identified 10 key goals. In addition to improving the business climate, they included developing cooperation with partners in the World Trade Organization, the European Union, Asian countries and the customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Also on the list of goals are applying new technology, supporting domestic demand, helping farmers, and providing better basic services by building more roads, expanding the electric grid and making high-quality phone and Internet connections more accessible.
Besides, Medvedev said he will focus on residential construction, social services like health care and education, regional development and the quality of government.
State programs that the Cabinet had been approving will be the tools to accomplish the goals, Medvedev said.
Dvorkovich said after the meeting that the Cabinet will adopt all of the state programs by the end of June.
In the Kremlin, Putin warned that the economy had slowed in the last two quarters, which means Medvedev would have to reverse the trend to fulfill his ambitions.
Putin also weighed in on one of the sources for future investment: retirement pension money. People should be able to have a chance to invest their savings beyond the January 2014 deadline he set last year, he said.
He also guided the Cabinet to focus on more immediate tasks, such as gasoline prices. Farmers must be able to afford fuel for the spring sowing season, he said.
Yury Korgunyuk, a political analyst at the Indem think tank, said the Kremlin gathering sought to assure Medvedev that he still enjoyed Putin's full support.
Korgunyuk said the meeting was an answer to widespread speculation that Medvedev's days as prime minister were numbered.
"The show of today's event means serious infighting is going on in Putin's entourage," Korgunyuk said. "It's a battle of bulldogs under the carpet."
Korgunyk dismissed Medvedev's speech per se as deserving little attention.
"No one pays attention to the content any more. What matters is the context and subtext," he said. "Anything of importance is communicated behind the scenes."
Alexei Mukhin, director of the think tank Center for Political Information, agreed that people should read between the lines for the real meaning behind the Kremlin get-together. But he said the point was that Medvedev showed his loyalty to Putin by pledging once again to make Putin's campaign promises materialize.

TITLE: Last Year's Repression 'Worst' in Decades
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – A leading rights group lashed out at President Vladimir Putin on Thursday by saying he had “unleashed the worst political crackdown” in the country’s post-Soviet history after returning to the Kremlin last year.
Human Rights Watch’s annual report, released Thursday, says the string of restrictive laws enacted since last summer, as well as the ongoing harassment of Kremlin critics, amount to “the swift reversal of former President Dmitry Medvedev’s few, timid advances on political freedoms.”
“The past year has been the worst year for human rights in Russia in recent memory,” Rachel Denber, the deputy director of the organization’s Europe and Central Asia division, told reporters in Moscow.
Denber said that even though some of the new laws, like the widening of the definition of treason or harsher sanctions against nongovernmental organizations, had not been implemented yet, they already contribute to an atmosphere of fear: “These laws already play a role,” she said.
Human Rights Watch director Ken Roth said the reason for the crackdown was Putin’s fear of a popular uprising against him.
“I do think the motivation here is the fear of the Russian people,” he told reporters in London.
Roth said the harsh laws were “designed to close the space for dissent” as a response to the mass protests against Putin’s return to the Kremlin.
“The series of uprisings clearly panicked Putin,” he said, according to video footage on Human Rights Watch’s web-footage on Human Rights Watch’s website.
The report, which devotes nine of its 680 pages to Russia, also criticizes the prison sentences for members of the Pussy Riot punk group, the legislation banning “homosexual propaganda” as well as restrictive policies that result in the denial of palliative care for the terminally ill.
It also talks at length about the North Caucasus, where adherents to Salafism, a purist form of Islam, are regularly subjected to persecution and torture, because authorities view them as supporting the Islamist insurgency. The report criticizes Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov for overseeing a system of collective punishment against insurgents’ relatives and suspected supporters.
The authors also note that the European Court of Human Rights has issued more than 210 rulings against Russia, but that the government only pays the required compensation while it fails to implement the core of the judgements by not conducting effective investigations.
“Instead of meaningfully investigating human rights abuses, the government is spending time and energy retaliating against civil society and free speech,” Hugh Williamson, the group’s Europe and Central Asia director, said in an e-mailed statement.
Human Rights Watch also raised the issue of the Olympic Games in Sochi, criticizing that property from hundreds of local families was expropriated for building venues for the games scheduled for February 2014. While most homeowners were compensated, in many cases amounts were unfair and the process was opaque, the report says.
Neither the government nor the Kremlin responded to the criticism Thursday. Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich merely said that he had not read the report but that any negative findings would be wrong.
“We will show that the human rights situation is not so bad in Russia,” he told reporters. He added that such accusations usually come from countries that are not ideal either. “Before you criticize others, you ought to look at yourself,” he was quoted as saying by Interfax.
But Human Right Watch’s Williamson refuted Moscow’s regular line of defense that foreigners should not criticize the country’s human rights record.
“The Kremlin cynically conflates legitimate expressions of concerns about human rights and the rule of law with undermining Russia’s sovereignty. But Russia’s international partners should not be bullied into silence,” he said.
He pointed to the European Union for acting ineffectively in the face of rights abuses in the region. The EU “should adopt a common policy … that would bind their approach on human rights and the rule of law in Russia,” he said in the statement.
Human Rights Watch director Roth pointed to Central Asia as a region where the 27-member bloc’s performance in this respect had been disappointing. “The EU dropped the ball on human rights in Central Asia,” he said in London. As an example, he mentioned the lifting of sanctions against Uzbekistan, which he linked to that country’s role as a transit hub for the NATO troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

TITLE: Thrill-Seeking Russian Judge Wounded in Syria
AUTHOR: By Jonathan Earle
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – Provincial judge by day, war correspondent by night.
That very nearly describes Sergei Berezhnoi, a 57-year-old arbitration court judge in Belgorod who traveled to Syria last week to observe the country's civil war and write firsthand accounts for an obscure Abkhazian news portal.
But things didn't go according to plan for the robed renegade, who wound up in a hospital after he was shot in the face and arm Monday in Darayya, a Damascus suburb.
The incident was an odd reminder of the complicated ties between the two countries. The old Soviet-era allies are linked by billions of dollars in weapons deals over the years, thousands of intermarriages and Russia's only military base outside the former Soviet Union.
In a blog post for the Abkhazian Network News Agency, Berezhnoi, a judge with more than 20 years of experience, explained in heroic prose why he had risked his life to visit the front lines.
If Syria falls to the rebels — Islamic terrorists, he said — sectarian violence will spread to "Mother Rus" via the fractious North Caucasus and tear the entire country asunder. "Today, our scalpel against [this cancer] is our words," he said.
A Foreign Ministry spokesman moved to quash rumors that Berezhnoi is part of a covert Russian operation, describing him as a "volunteer" who had gone to Syria on his own initiative, Interfax reported Thursday.
News reports described Berezhnoi as a former intelligence officer with experience in war zones from Chechnya to Nagorno-Karabakh.
The Foreign Ministry spokesman also bristled at suggestions made earlier this week by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who accused Russia of "siding with" the government of President Bashar Assad and failing to "go forward" with a peace plan signed in Geneva last year.
Clinton's statement is nothing but "an attempt to turn [Russia's position] on its head," Alexander Lukashevich told reporters, Interfax reported.
Russia has attracted criticism for shielding Assad's government from international sanctions. The Kremlin says the West is unwisely backing anti-government fighters in the conflict, which the UN estimates has killed 60,000 people since it began two years ago.
The Kremlin condemned a reported Israeli airstrike Wednesday near Damascus, calling it an "unprovoked attack on a sovereign state" and a gross and unjustifiable violation of the UN Charter, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement on its website Thursday.
A video uploaded to YouTube on Tuesday of Berezhnoi in action offered a glimpse of the savage fighting.
A camera dangling from his neck, Berezhnoi and several men scramble across a debris-strewn street as gunshots crackle in the distance.
The action becomes chaotic. Then one of the men says in Russian, "He's hit, he's hit!" Berezhoi then reappears, his bulletproof vest splattered with blood and his left forearm punctured.
Berezhoi didn't tell his boss where he was going, but Yury Glazov, head of the Belgorod region arbitration court, said he wasn't angry at his daring deputy. On the contrary, Glazov spoke highly of him.
"Perhaps many people will not understand why a person would choose to spend their free time traveling to hot spots rather than sitting in front of the television in peace and comfort. But my deputy is a decent and responsible person" with an impeccable work record, he said.
The suggestion that Berezhnoi is a spy is "unacceptable," Glazov told the Pravo.ru news portal.
"Anybody who says that should give up television and spy novels and follow his example," Glazov said.

TITLE: Workers Appeal to Ombudsman Over Back Wages
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Amid a rising number of strikes nationwide, workers at metro-railcar producer Vagonmash appealed to the St. Petersburg human rights ombudsman to demand back wages of millions of rubles.
The St. Petersburg-based company, which produces railcars for the Moscow, St. Petersburg and foreign metro systems, owes the 592 workers more than 35 million rubles ($1.2 million) in back wages, the local prosecutor's office and the ombudsman's office said following a probe into Vagonmash.
The probe was initiated soon after an employee's appeal to Alexander Shishlov, St. Petersburg's human rights ombudsman. The employee said  the company had not paid her in several months, Valentin Arteyev, a spokesman for the ombudsman's office, said Thursday.
According to the Criminal Code, if wages are delayed for more than two months, employees can start court proceedings against their company. But they must prove that corruption is involved, which is difficult.
Under the Administrative Code, the company is obligated to pay a fine for every day of wage delays.
Arteyev said Vagonmash's former and current employees had initiated court cases against the company over unpaid wages.
The situation with unpaid salaries has arisen alongside a legal dispute over the bankruptcy of the company. In December, Vagonmash came under attack from Governor Georgy Poltavchenko, who threatened to cancel a contract to buy metro cars from the company because it had not delivered orders on time.
The company has also experienced a wave of management reshuffles, replacing three CEOs over a three year period. Vagonmash, owned by Dedal Machinery Group, is currently led by Yulia Bychkova, a former head of the company's legal department.
A Vagonmash representative did not respond to a written request for comments Thursday.
The Federal State Statistics Service said that in December, unpaid wages in Russia amounted to 2.35 billion rubles, up 2.5 percent from November.
Of the total unpaid wages, 46 percent are in the manufacturing industry,  since it is one of those most affected by the unstable economic situation in Europe.
"Most cases are connected with a lack of money at companies," said Sergei Saurin, a lawyer at the Center for Social and Labor Rights, a think tank that studies labor issues.
Anna Ochkina, a deputy director of the Institute for Globalization and Social Movements, said Thursday said the situation is different from that of the 1990s, when salaries at state-owned companies often went unpaid, leading to large-scale anti-government strikes.
"Today, it is not critical on a national scale, though it is concentrated in the industries where it could lead to social tensions," Ochkina said.
Recent findings by the statistics agency show that the number of strikes rose sharply at the beginning of 2013. Six strikes were held in January, compared with just two in the whole of 2012.

TITLE: Russians Not Lining Up to Adopt Americans
AUTHOR: By Jonathan Earle
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – When the now-infamous ban on U.S. adoptions was first introduced in the State Duma in mid-December, some Russians suggested that a more appropriate response to the United States' sanctions-imposing Magnitsky Act would have been to push their compatriots to adopt American children.
"We shouldn't ban the adoption of our children, but encourage our people to start adopting American children, given the quality of life [in Russia],"tweeted @yrikostuchenko to TV host Vladimir Solovyov, one of the ban's early critics.
The idea of Russians adopting American children was floated at least as early as April, when children's ombudsman Pavel Astakhov, a long-standing opponent of international adoptions, encouraged Russians to get in line to take in American orphans "out of principle."
His comments came months before Russia ratified a bilateral adoption agreement with the United States aimed at strengthening oversight following a series of abuse scandals — including 19 deaths since the late 1990s — involving Russian orphans in U.S. adoptive families.
Though the agreement regulates adoptions in both directions, most, if not all, cases have involved U.S. parents and Russian orphans, not the other way around.
Whereas 45,000 Russians have been adopted by American families since 1999, the U.S. State Department is not aware of any cases in which Russian citizens have adopted children from the United States, a department spokesman said in an e-mail.
Outgoing U.S. adoptions do take place, but they're rare. According to State Department records, 286 U.S. orphans have been adopted by foreign citizens living abroad since April 2008. The receiving countries are mostly highly developed Western nations, led by Canada and the Netherlands.
Experts interviewed by The St. Petersburg Times said they couldn't recall an instance in which a U.S. orphan moved to Russia.
"Our agency has not had a request for an outgoing case to Russia, and I do not know any other cases that have been done," Anna Belle Illien, executive director of Illien Adoptions International, one of a handful of U.S. adoption agencies that assists with outgoing adoptions, said by e-mail.
A spokeswoman for AdoptUSKids, a U.S. government organization that promotes adoption and connects adoptive families with orphans, said she didn't recall ever receiving questions from a Russian family about how to adopt a U.S. child.
It's not just American orphans; Russians don't adopt foreigners in general, said Yelena Fortuna, editor of the My Dears web portal for adoptive parents.
"Despite the fact that many adoptive parents can be picky … there are more than enough children [in Russia] to go around," she said.
Anton Zharov, a lawyer who specializes in children's issues, said there weren't any U.S. children for Russians to adopt, because all of them could eventually be placed in American families.
The only cases of Russians adopting foreigners, as far as Successful Orphans charity director Alexander Gezalov was aware, involved foreigners who had received Russian citizenship.
Everyone else was scared away by the bureaucracy. "Domestic adoptions are hard enough," he said, adding that the documents, visas and money required to adopt an American were just too daunting.
Immediately following the passage of the U.S. adoption ban, part of the so-called Dima Yakovlev Act, President Vladimir Putin ordered the government to boost domestic adoptions by, among other things, simplifying the domestic adoptions procedure.
A plurality of respondents  37 percent, to a Jan. 18-21 poll by the independent Levada Center said this was the single most important thing that the government could do to help orphans.
The Education and Science Ministry, which oversees adoptions, is considering lowering bureaucratic hurdles for prospective families and paying 100,000 rubles ($3,300) to those who adopt "hard-to-place" children, including those with disabilities, Kommersant reported Monday.
Such families currently receive 13,000 rubles ($430), and Kommersant quoted an adoptive mother as saying it can take more than the allotted three months to collect eight required stamps from three doctors and five clinics, meaning that many families are forced to return to square one.
There are currently about 110,000 Russian children living in orphanages, a number that appears to be falling. In the past two years, 5,000 more children were either adopted or placed in foster families than were entered into the orphanage system, the newspaper reported.
Meanwhile, the Investigative Committee on Wednesday opened a symbolic criminal case against an American family convicted of abusing their adopted 6-year-old Russian son, committee chief Alexander Bastrykin said, Interfax reported.
Nine other such cases involving 12 children are pending, and the U.S. Justice Department has refused to provide documents requested by the Russian government in four of them, an Investigative Committee spokesman said late last month.
Zharov, the lawyer, dismissed the investigations. "I don't think this is about justice; I think it's about politics," he said, explaining that most, if not all, of the parents had already been convicted by U.S. courts and therefore, according to Russian law, could not be retried in a Russian one.

TITLE: Titov Laments Status of Small Businesses
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – More then 40 percent of Russian businessmen have moved into the shadows since the government increased social taxes in 2011, business ombudsman Boris Titov said.
Titov, the government envoy for protecting the rights of small and medium-size businesses, said the introduction of a 34 percent social tax in 2011 forced many businessmen to move their companies to places like Kazakhstan.
In Kazakhstan, the social tax is 11 percent, Titov said during a news conference Wednesday, adding that the rate at the Skolkovo technology hub, outside Moscow, is 14 percent.
"Russia is losing its competitiveness, so businesses leaves for other jurisdictions," Titov said.  "The situation is really getting worse for small business."
Titov added that he receives many complaints from entrepreneurs who tell him that they will get out of business forever.
These sentiments were echoed by former tax official Alexander Pochinok, who told The St. Petersburg Times on Wednesday that "the current system makes everyone look for ways to pay less."
The government decision to raise the social tax from 14 to 34 percent was seen as a huge blow, prompting protests by entrepreneurs in several cities, including Moscow.
Vladimir Putin, who was prime minister at the time of the increase, called the move a "forced measure" when responding to a question from a businesswoman, who said her business would seriously suffer because of the increase.
Putin said in December 2010 that the government was increasing the social burden on businesses to carry out pension reform and health care reform.
Pochinok said that instead of increasing the social tax, the government should create a system that would motivate businesses to pay for insurance and would provide advantages to firms that improve working conditions and reduce work-related health problems.
"Today, even if any employer makes working conditions ideal, he receives nothing in the end," Pochinok said.
Although Titov, a former head of business lobbying group Delovaya Rossia, wants to abolish taxes on small businesses, he has limited power to influence government decisions, analysts said.
Titov said earlier that he hopes he and his deputies will gain more leverage over officials who use bureaucratic obstacles to put pressure on business.
A bill to be presented in the State Duma for a second reading in February will allow the business ombudsman to overrule officials' decisions that are not in line with legal practices.
This will address rulings by tax authorities and fire and sanitary experts, who often use their power to demand bribes.
A senior official at one ministry, who wished to remain anonymous, said   a 5 percent kickback is often added to the cost of various business services provided by regional officials.
"The only solution for it is to personally control the situation and [compel] transparency," he said.

TITLE: Sechin Reaffirms $26Bln Role in Venezuela
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – Rosneft chief Igor Sechin said Wednesday that Russian investment in Venezuela remained safe even as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is battling cancer.
Russia is betting billions of dollars on doing business in the oil-rich country, but the potential demise of an ally has raised questions about the future of warm ties between the governments.
"We have no doubts that our investment is protected," Sechin said in Caracas. "We are convinced that our projects will carry on over the long term and be unaffected by outside circumstances."
A powerful Kremlin insider, Sechin even sought more deals in the Latin American country.
State-controlled Rosneft will hold talks with Venezuela's national energy company, Petroleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA, about joining offshore oil projects, he said.
The companies also agreed to create joint ventures for oil-service and drilling businesses, Sechin said. The drilling venture will look to Russian equipment manufacturer Uralmash for drilling rigs, tentatively 50 units, and Uralmash could ultimately set up production in Venezuela, he said.
"We are convinced that Chavez will cope with his problems as he has always done," Sechin said. "We hope that everything will be fine and that he will have the strength to overcome the disease."
Sergei Kudryashov, chief of another state-controlled oil producer, Zarubezhneft, said the company could work in Venezuela to raise output from brownfields, which are existing oil fields approaching their  capacity.
The assurance of continued partnership came hours after Venezuelan Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez had to deny an earlier news report that said Chavez's ill health was deterring investment in the country.
"Ask Sechin. It's false. Everyone is here, and we're all working," Ramirez said, Bloomberg News reported. "People can decide to invest here or elsewhere. Let everyone take their own risks."
Sechin also said existing projects remained on track.
Russian companies expect their joint projects in Venezuela to eventually pump 50 million metric tons of oil a year, or 1.03 million barrels per day, he said.
Ramirez didn't give a time frame, but he said production would exceed  1 million barrels per day in 2020.
Russian companies have committed to investing $17 billion in Venezuelan projects, Ramirez said.
"This makes the group of Russian companies some of Venezuela's most important foreign partners," Ramirez said, Interfax reported.
Of that $17 billion investment, Rosneft will account for $10 billion, Sechin said.
The company's share of the joint output will equal about a third, or 15 million tons (300,000 barrels per day), he said.
One of the joint projects is development of the Junin-6 oil field. The first commercial oil from the deposit began flowing in September.
To pursue the project, Russia's five largest oil producers and PDVSA set up a joint venture, Petromiranda, in which the Venezuelan company owns 60 percent.
One Russian member of the consortium,Surgutneftegaz, pulled out, selling its stake to Rosneft in a deal completed earlier this month.
Rosneft said Wednesday that it had become the project's operator, taking over from Gazprom Neft. Rosneft is set to increase its holding to 24 percent with the takeover of another consortium member, TNK-BP, later this year.
In another Venezuelan project, Rosneft in September agreed to develop the Carabobo-2 heavy-oil field with PDVSA, paying a $1.1 billion bonus for the 40 percent stake and signing a deal to loan $1.5 billion to the Venezuelan company.
Sechin said at the time that Rosneft would invest $16 billion in the project.
TNK-BP has stakes in three more Venezuelan ventures. Those interests are set to become Rosneft's when it completes the TNK-BP takeover. One of the ventures is PetroMonagas, which produces synthetic oil.
Ramirez said Rosneft, which had asked Venezuela for permission to take over the TNK-BP assets, will get an easy ride.
"Rosneft can count on our political support," he said.
Sechin set out for Venezuela on Tuesday, leading a delegation of major Russian companies that includes Rosoboronexport, Russian Technologies, Inter RAO, RusHydro, Uralmash, Kamaz and several banks, Rosneft said in a statement.

TITLE: Kremlin Plans NGO to Monitor Conditions of Adopted Russians in U.S.
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – The Kremlin plans to set up a non-governmental organization in the United States to monitor the fate of Russian children adopted by American families, a news report said Thursday.
Existing arrangements for such monitoring laid out in a bilateral treaty that came into force in November will be torn up by Russia's controversial ban on adoptions to the U.S..
Officials have repeatedly claimed that Russian children in the U.S. are subject to abuse that is inadequately punished by U.S. courts.
The Russian Embassy in Washington said that such an NGO would primarily collect information about the conditions in which Russian children in the U.S. are living, Kommersant reported.
The idea has already found support in Moscow and Washington, although there are as yet no details about how it will be financed.
Children's rights ombudsman Pavel Astakhov said Thursday that an NGO was one of the mechanisms for monitoring Russian children during the negotiations leading up to the doomed U.S.-Russia adoption agreement set to expire at the end of 2013.
"The more councils, organizations, committees and other structures that are concerned with control over the observance of children's rights in the U.S., the better," Astakhov said in comments carried by Interfax.
The so-called "Dima Yakovlev law" banning adoptions to the U.S. was passed by the Duma in December and signed into law by President Vladimir Putin.

TITLE: Freedom Marches Turn Three
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Strategy 31 will mark its third anniversary in St. Petersburg with an unauthorized rally Thursday. The movement set up to defend the right of assembly will protest a bill that would ban protests in most of the city and that the Legislative Assembly passed in a first reading last week.
For three years, regular rallies at Gostiny Dvor have drawn dozens to hundreds of participants, journalists and spectators, as well as overwhelming police presence and measures, resulting in dozens of arrests, fines and brief prison sentences.
A campaign that calls on the authorities to obey the constitution, whose Article 31 guarantees the right of assembly, Strategy 31 has become a major irritant for the powers that be, who have effectively abolished the previous system under which organizers were merely required to inform them about a planned rally, rather than ask for permission.
Conceived in 2009 by the Moscow-based author Eduard Limonov, who founded The Other Russia party in 2010 after his previous organization, the National Bolshevik Party (NBP), was banned for alleged extremism three years earlier, Strategy 31 rallies have been held in dozens of cities across Russia, although the rallies have attracted fewer participants in recent months than when the campaign was at its peak in 2010.
According to Limonov, it is a nonviolent nonpartisan campaign, in which political activists and concerned citizens of any views are welcome to take part, with rallies held on the 31st day of every month that has 31 days. The first local Strategy 31 rally was held on Jan. 31, 2010 and ended in dozens of arrests.
A group of The Other Russia activists who were investigated and tried for allegedly carrying out the “extremist activities of a banned organization” in a case known as the Trial of 12, are planning to participate in the upcoming rally for the first time since the investigation against them was opened on Oct. 25, 2010. 
The activists — whose charges included participating in Strategy 31 rallies, presented by the prosecution as rallies of the banned NBP — were concerned that participating in an authorized protest during the investigation and trial could land them in a pre-trial detention center, but the trial ended with the judge finding them guilty but leaving them unpunished, due to the expiration of the limitation period for minor crimes on Dec. 28, 2012.
“Our forced vacation has ended, so we’ll come and continue to fight for the freedom of assembly,” Andrei Dmitriyev, The Other Russia’s local chair and a former Trial of 12 defendant, said Tuesday.
“This 31 protest is especially topical, because of the [proposed] amendments to the law on assemblies, aimed at banning us from rallying on Nevsky Prospekt, St. Isaac’s Square and Palace Square, closer than 200 meters to administrative buildings, and so on.”
Although the Legislative Assembly voted not to discuss the amendments when the bill was first submitted by City Governor Georgy Poltavchenko in a session on Jan. 16, the parliament then passed it in a first reading on Jan. 23.
According to Dmitriyev, the activists will urge all their fellow opposition-minded citizens to protest the amendments, as well as City Hall’s plans to move protests to a small site on the Field of Mars, which he described as “Uncle Zhora’s little paddock,” referring to Poltavchenko’s nickname.
“We shouldn’t go to ‘Uncle Zhora’s little paddock,’ graciously given by the authorities far from masses of citizens, somewhere near the Eternal Flame,” Dmitriyev said.
“The opposition — be it liberal, left-wing or nationalist — has nothing to do there; let United Russia rally there. We see that City Hall liked the idea and is sending everybody to rally there. We will continue to come to Nevsky and defend freedom of assembly by doing so.”
No Strategy 31 rally in St. Petersburg has been authorized by City Hall, which has presented a diverse range of grounds, from alleged renovation or snow-plowing work to proximity to Gostiny Dvor metro, though non-political events on the site have met no objections. 
After the State Duma introduced large fines for organizing and participating in unauthorized rallies in June 2012, the organizers stopped applying to City Hall for authorization, reasoning that the organizers who sign the application risk facing especially large fines of up to 300,000 rubles (about $10,000).
Summing up the first three years of Strategy 31, Dmitriyev said that it had established a tradition.
“On the one hand, we see that we haven’t achieved our goal — freedom of assembly — and, moreover, the laws are getting harsher. What’s important to us is that we’ve set a tradition of coming to Gostiny Dvor on Nevsky Prospekt to defend our rights,” he said.
“We are stubborn guys; we think the main thing is to hammer away at one point. I think Strategy 31 in Moscow and St. Petersburg paved the way for the mass rallies that started after the State Duma elections last year. It’s not without reason that people came to Gostiny Dvor, it was established as a protest site, which was demonstrated in December.”
The biggest Strategy 31 rallies in St. Petersburg were those held in July and August 2010, which each drew more than 1,000 people, but the most recent protest on Dec. 31, 2012 drew just a few dozen. 
The July 31, 2010 rally was also marked by particularly brutal police beatings, which led to the much-publicized trial of police officer Vadim Boiko, who hit a man in the face with his truncheon and was eventually given a three-year suspended sentence in December 2011.
According to Dmitriyev, the number of participants does not matter as much as the decisiveness of activists to continue the campaign despite arrests, fines and police violence, rather than making behind-the-scenes agreements and compromises with the authorities.
“For the opposition, the main thing is honesty and consistency, and Strategy 31 is an expression of absolute honesty and consistency,” Dmitriyev said.
“So not very many people might come to the rallies, so somebody might say that it’s a repetitive show; it’s honesty and consistency that will be in demand under the current circumstances.”

TITLE: Anti-Corruption Force Searches Mikhailovsky
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The eyes of the city’s cultural community were on the Mikhailovsky Theater on Jan. 25, as the company presented the Russian premiere of Benjamin Britten’s 1961 opera “Billy Budd,” which features an all-male cast and is set on board a ship. But the venerable institution, established as an imperial theater back in 1833 by the decree of Tsar Nicholas I, was also the focus of public and media attention that night for a less illustrious reason.
As the theater’s opera division was putting the final touches to the opera premiere, a collaboration with the respected Vienna State Opera, investigators from the economic crimes division and special anti-corruption task force of the Russian Interior Ministry were busy seizing documents from the Mikhailovsky’s offices — as well as from the offices of JFC, a large fruit import company that once shared its general director, businessman Vladimir Kekhman, with the theater.
The confiscation of the documents, which took more than five hours, was linked to a criminal case concerning the large-scale embezzlement of 10 billion rubles ($332 million) in bank loans during the period from 2010 to 2012.  
The prosecutors have alleged that the management of JFC submitted fictitious contracts to several banks, including Bank of Moscow, Sberbank, Raiffeisenbank and Uralsib in order to obtain loans. 
“Upon receiving the loans, the company showed no intention of paying the money back, and filed for bankruptcy instead,” reads an official statement of the Interior Ministry on the JFC case.
Kekhman personally is not currently facing any charges.
The tycoon, who made his fortune importing fruit, was nicknamed the “banana emperor” of Russia. Kekhman has actively sought to heighten his public image and forge ties with the authorities, and was approved as director of the Mikhailovsky Theater, funded by the federal government, in 2007.
During his five years in charge of the Mikhailovsky, Kekhman’s financial injections into the company have totaled a mighty $40 million, according to the businessman.
Although the theater hosted the world premieres of Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” in 1934 and Prokofiev’s “War and Peace” in 1946, the works of these composers are now absent from the repertoire, which focuses heavily on 19th-century classics, although it has recently added works by Leos Janacek and Benjamin Britten to its performance list. For decades, the company has been deservedly rated the second-best in town, after the Mariinsky Theater.
While artistically the company has been producing hit-and-miss operatic and ballet fare, with the productions even at their best being unable to rival many of those at the Mariinsky, its publicity campaigns have seriously rivaled the media attention enjoyed by its “big brother.” The Mikhailovsky has lured dance talent from both the Mariinsky and Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater with lucrative contracts, and has also hosted meetings of the cultural and political elite that have featured on prime time news shows.
While his supporters call him an efficient arts manager — under his leadership, the Mikhailovsky Theater has been able to afford expensive renovation, Western coaches, star guest soloists and internationally established advisors — Kekhman’s critics accuse him of lack of vision, pointing to the frequent reshuffles of the theater’s management, including heads of the opera and ballet divisions. For instance, the internationally acclaimed former Mariinsky Theater soloist Farukh Ruzimatov did not last as head of the company’s ballet division, and opera diva Yelena Obraztsova also failed to stay long as head of the theater’s opera department. Kekhman can offer generous salaries, but because he does not really have a clear idea of where his theater should go, he is easily manipulated by the various camps, hence the frequent staff reshuffles, his opponents say.
After Kekhman began running the Mikhailovsky, he delegated his director’s duties to his two deputies, Andrei Afanasiev and Yulia Zakharova. After the news about document searches reached the press, Kekhman made a statement in which he said that his company had provided all the necessary documents to the investigation, and that all the enquiries had been satisfied. 
“I have been fully informed about the course of the investigation, and I am willing to know the full truth about what has been going on in the company [JFC],” Kekhman said in a statement distributed to the media. “Personally, I am deeply disturbed and outraged by the scale of misappropriations in the company.”
He also pointed out that he had not been JFC’s director since 2007.
If the prosecutors prove in court that the bankruptcy was carefully planned in order to avoid paying back the loans, the top management representatives of JFC involved in the deals face up to 10 years in prison.
In October 2012, London’s High Court of Justice officially declared Kekhman bankrupt. The entrepreneur has thus protected his personal assets: British law protects the accounts of bankrupt businesspeople from their creditors. The case was acknowledged as the biggest personal bankruptcy case in the U.K. during the past decade.

TITLE: Polunin to Head City Circus
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The well known Russian circus artist Vyacheslav Polunin has been appointed art director of the St. Petersburg State Circus, Russian Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky announced last week, Interfax reported.
“We decided not to hold a contest for the position. Vyacheslav Polunin will be appointed head of the circus. He has a lot of plans and we’ll support him,” Medinsky said.
Medinsky said that he had recently visited the St. Petersburg State Circus and discussed the situation with the city’s authorities.
“This circus is one of the oldest in Russia and it made a depressing — even shattering — impression on me. The circus is in a bad condition,” Medinsky said.
Polunin is known as a talented clown and the creator of successful circus shows — such as his popular Snow Show — that have been performed both in Russia and abroad.

TITLE: Turkish Round-the-World Cyclist Visits St. Petersburg
AUTHOR: By Dmitry Ivanov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Turkish traveler G&#252;rkan Gen&#231;, who is currently traveling around the world by bike, arrived in St. Petersburg on Jan. 20, having covered nearly 5,000 kilometers of his epic journey. 
Gen&#231; embarked on his trip, titled “Pedaling for the Future,” on Sept. 9, 2012 from Ankara, and plans to complete it in seven years’ time, after visiting 84 countries and pedaling about 110,000 kilometers, he told a news conference in St. Petersburg organized by Turkey’s consulate general on Jan. 23. 
Gen&#231;’s ride will take him through five deserts and five of the planet’s tallest peaks, covering the longest and most dangerous paths. While these routes have been completed by cyclists before, no one has yet made it through all of them, so Gen&#231; hopes that after completing the journey, he will be included in the Guinness Book of World Records, he said. 
Traveling on a Turkish-made Kron bicycle, equipped with Shimano parts and Schwalbe tyres, Gen&#231; entered St. Petersburg on Jan. 20, shortly after celebrating his 34th birthday in a tent pitched somewhere north of Moscow in temperatures of minus 34 degrees Celsius. The reading of minus 36 degrees registered by his thermometer 220 kilometers south of St. Petersburg was the coldest he has cycled in, beating even the Mongolian steppe, Gen&#231; said. Of the major cities visited on this journey, St. Petersburg, which he proceeded to explore by bike, was the most beautiful, he said.
“He presents the name of Turkey to the entire world, and does it gracefully,” said Can Esenergul, a leasing specialist with Gen&#231;’s St. Petersburg sponsor Renaissance Development, explaining the company’s motivation for supporting the traveler. Turkey’s Foreign Ministry arranged for free visas to all 47 countries on Gen&#231;’s route that require a visa for Turkish nationals.
Gen&#231; crossed Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova and Ukraine before arriving in Russia. In the town of Torzhok near Moscow where no one spoke any English, Gen&#231; was taken to a local school and shown a PE lesson. The locals understood that he was a tourist, while Gen&#231; could understand that he was being offered vodka to drink, which he accepted. “We didn’t speak, only smiled,” he recounted.
Cycling experiences in Russia can, unfortunately, be far less lucky. Japanese traveler Haruhisa Watanabe, who was on the final leg of an eight-month cycle ride from China, was killed in a traffic accident on Dec. 26, 2012 while cycling on a motorway near the Ruchi-Karelskiye railway station, some 220 kilometers south of his destination, Murmansk, where he wanted to see the Northern lights. The early-morning accident is thought to have been caused by poor visibility, Flashnord.com website reported. In 2004, when he was 22, Watanabe became the youngest Japanese climber to scale the tallest peaks on seven continents, The Japan Times reported on its website.
“If you want to undertake such a journey, risks always happen,” Gen&#231; told The St. Petersburg Times, adding that they are outweighed by the chance to see the world and to meet lots of people. A traffic accident can happen anywhere, he added.
“Bicycle is a means of transport, not worse than any other ones. Everyone knows it but not everyone uses it,” Gen&#231; said. He added that he always travels alone, and always makes a photographic and video record of his journeys. 
“I’m just looking at the world, and tell about it on my website [gurkangenc.com],” he said. 
Gen&#231;’s previous journey in 2010-2011 took him across all of North Asia, from Turkey to Japan. He noted that while it took him 334 days to cycle the 12,500-kilometer distance, during which he was beaten, arrested, chased with a knife and suffered an arson attempt on his tent, the flight home only lasted 11 hours. He subsequently used material and experiences from the journey to launch five photo exhibitions and produce two award-winning documentaries.
In places that he is particularly bewitched by, Gen&#231; leaves hidden messages for his future children. One of the letters is hidden in the Pamir mountains, in an area inaccessible by car or plane. He plans to give his children the GPS coordinates to try to locate the message when they are 15 years old.
His own fascination with long bike rides started when he was 12 years old, Gen&#231; said. His mother chased him while brandishing a shoe as he was leaving on a 50-kilometer trip, and threatened to lock up his bike. He replied that he would cycle around the world one day. However, university, military service and his career kept Gen&#231; occupied. When he was 30 years old, he started cycling to work, which made him remember his childhood dream. 
“I did not run away from anyone, I was chasing a dream — there is a great world, and it can be crossed,” Gen&#231; said. 
His mother suggested that he might return from his journey with a wife and child, he said, adding that he may get married after completing his current trip, and then visit as-yet-unseen countries together with his wife.

TITLE: Gergiev to Conduct Munich Philharmonic From 2015
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Valery Gergiev, artistic director of the city’s Mariinsky Theater, has been elected principal conductor of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra for five years starting in 2015, Interfax reported.
“The decision was made on January 23, 2013 by a majority of Munich City Council in anonymous voting. Gergiev will replace Lorin Maazel, whose contract ends in 2015,” read a message on Gergiev’s page on a social network.
Gergiev’s contract with the German orchestra will run through 2020. In the 2011-12 season, world-renowned conductor Gergiev initiated the performance of the full cycle of Dmitry Shostakovich symphonies in Munich in a nine-concert series performed by the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra and the Mariinsky Theater Symphony Orchestra.
“Valery Gergiev is indisputably one of the most important, influential and inspirational conductors of our time,” said Hans-Georg Kueppers, Munich’s chief culture official. He was the city’s first choice, Kueppers said.
Gergiev, 59, has been the principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra since 2007. The orchestra confirmed last week that Gergiev would not be signing a new contract with it when the current agreement ends in two years’ time.
The Moscow-born conductor, who studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, has headed the Mariinsky Theater for more than 20 years.

TITLE: New Law Fuels Fears of Blood Shortages
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A new item may soon appear on the black market in Russia, and the deals are bound to be multiple. The product in question is human blood, which is rapidly becoming in short supply, owing to recent amendments to the blood donation law that effectively ban financial compensation for donors.
Passed by the State Duma in July 2012, the law came into force on Jan. 21, and according to St. Petersburg doctors, the results have already been devastating. 
“Normally, between 70 and 80 people a day would come to our blood transfusion center; in the past week the numbers have dropped to about 15 people a day, and some of them even turned around and left once they heard about the new terms,” said Vladimir Krasnyakov, chief doctor at the St. Petersburg Blood Transfusion Center. 
During the past 10 years, the number of blood donors in Russia has shrunk from 4 million to 1.8 million people, according to state statistics. In St. Petersburg there are around 15 blood donors per 1,000 people, which is a far cry from the actual number needed. According to Krasnyakov, at least 30 blood donors per 1,000 people are essential to avoid crisis situations, while a safe level is considered to be 50 donors per 1,000 people.
Russian clinics on average currently possess only 40 percent of the blood stocks and 10 percent of the plasma stocks that they need to operate.
“Patients will have to seriously rely on their relatives for blood donations if the problem is not addressed,” said Krasnyakov.
Previously, when blood supplies were scarce, patients were sometimes offered the resources of paid blood banks in state hospitals — for a price.
“In 2005, my husband and I had to sell our apartment in order to pay for blood transfusions for our child who was ill with cancer,” said Irina Sigacheva, a blood and marrow donation coordinator with the Advita charitable foundation that helps children with cancer. 
“For two years, our son depended on donor blood, and our lives were turned into hell. Prices were already astronomic back then, and we had to pay 5,000 rubles per dose of blood.” 
Both doctors and charitable organizations that help to collect blood donations are crying foul at the amendment, warning that cutting the payments will result not only in a drastic decline in the number of Russian donors and thus cause a dangerous shortage of blood and its components, but also that it will ultimately create a black market on which these vital substances will be available at soaring prices, while their quality won’t be controllable.
“When first-time donors come to us, after we check their blood, 15 to 30 percent of the blood is not usable: The donors often either do not know that they have, for instance, hepatitis, or are trying to conceal this information,” Krasnyakov said. “If this business goes underground, nobody is going to check blood as carefully as we do, putting it through masses of very expensive tests.”
Recruiting new donors will be problematic, as the current scheme is full of holes, said Stanislav Davydov, a member of the Donors’ Council of the local government. 
“The law states that hospitals have to provide meals to donors after the process, but fail to stipulate the procedure for this. This creates absurd situations like this: A medical crew could collect blood from a lady in a tiny village and give her a voucher for a meal — and she would have to travel miles and miles to get that meal. In the provinces, donors have to pay hundreds of rubles for transport expenses to get to the hospital and back, and since payments for donations have been canceled, the donor would also have to invest this money, and not only their blood.”
Defending the amendments, a representative of the Russian Health Ministry that conceived the law, said that non-remunerated blood donation is a global trend. Veronika Skvortsova, the country’s Health Minister, has even gone as far as to claim that expecting payment for a blood donation is nothing less than “biological prostitution.” 
The law stipulates, however, that blood donation can be financially compensated in the case of rare blood groups.
In recent years, there have been attempts to persuade young people to give blood. For example, the Red Cross has organized blood transfusion programs on Valentine’s Day that targeted couples. Local non-governmental organizations have been campaigning in universities and colleges in an effort to increase public awareness about the issue and recruit new donors.
These efforts were paying off before the new legisation. 
“In the last couple of years, I would see young couples coming to blood transfusion centers; some would even bring their kids who would wait for them or even watch them,” Krasnyakov said. “Up to one third of our first-time donors were young people, which was most encouraging. It would be such a shame to waste all that work.”

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Born in Mid-Air</b>
 ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A female passenger gave birth on board a flight from St. Petersburg to the Kyrgyz city of Osh on Jan. 22.
Flight attendant Alexei Romanyuk delivered the baby on board the plane, which was flying on a route operated by Russian airline Rossiya, Interfax reported.
An hour before landing in Osh, Romanyuk reported to the senior flight attendant that one of the female passengers was in a critical condition. While the senior flight attendant informed the captain of the plane about the situation and announced a search for a doctor among passengers, Romanyuk prepared a space for the woman and gave her what help he could during the birth.
The parents of the newborn baby decided to name him Alexei in honor of the flight attendant, Interfax reported.

<b>Olympic English</b>
 ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Employees of the OMON special forces unit from the northwestern Russian city of Veliky Novgorod who are to patrol the Olympics in Sochi in 2014 are embarking on a drive to learn English, Interfax reported.
Twice a week, soldiers and officers of the Varyag special service police unit will study English in lessons specially organized for them. The head of the unit has also joined the classes, the region’s police press service reported.

TITLE: Kremlin Shelves Bill After Pozner Recants
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Kravtsova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Lawmakers on Monday said they would shelve a bill blocking foreigners from working in state television if they made remarks “discrediting” Russia or its government.
Critics of the bill — which was designed to target popular Channel One television host Vladimir Pozner after he called the State Duma a “silly woman” on air last month — said it would enforce a form of media censorship. That opinion was apparently shared by Kremlin officials, who came out against it in comments published Monday.
Pozner used the expression on air Dec. 23 in criticizing the Duma for passing the ban on U.S. adoptions of Russian orphans. Opposition politicians and the U.S. government have also slammed that measure, saying it uses children as political pawns.
Pozner apologized for the phrase on a program Sunday, calling it a slip-up. But he emphasized that he only regretted having used the expression itself, not having criticized the Duma.
In response, Duma deputies said Monday that they would not introduce the bill for consideration by lawmakers.
Along with a Russian passport, Pozner also has American and French citizenship. He was born in France and worked in New York between 1991 and 1997, after which he received a U.S. passport.
The bill was initiated by United Russia’s Mikhail Starshinov, Liberal Democrat Andrei Lugovoi, Communist Oleg Denisenko and former Just Russia member Igor Zotov.
“We understand that an apology was a desperate measure in response to consistent and rather tough actions taken by the Duma,” Starshinov told Interfax.
Pozner’s apology was a planned compromise between him and the deputies, an unidentified presidential administration official told Vedomosti in an article published Monday. The official said the Kremlin did not like the idea of the bill from the beginning, since it could be seen as a form of censorship.
President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the daily that the Kremlin was aware of the situation and said that insults directed at legislative bodies were unacceptable but that it was improper to intervene in the hiring policy of TV channels.
Starshinov said the bill could be submitted to the Duma for consideration in the future if other attempts to tarnish authorities were made by journalists.
Some of Pozner’s supporters said they were disappointed that he had apologized but pleased that parliamentarians had delayed the bill.
“In a normal country, the State Duma would have had to apologize to Pozner. But things turned out differently.” tweeted Ksenia Sobchak, the opposition TV personality.

TITLE: Anti-Russia Protests Stir On Thai Isle
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Hundreds of protesters on the Thai island of Phuket, a popular destination for Russian tourists, staged a protest Monday against “Russian-owned” businesses, accusing them of undercutting local competitors and taking jobs from native-born workers, the Phuket News newspaper reported.
Russians have made inroads into the taxi, restaurant, and laundry businesses, where they charge lower prices, badmouth locals and are a magnet for lucrative Russian-speaking tourists, the protesters said. 
“So how can we keep living here? I have to do something to protect the rights of the local people,” one told the local newspaper. 
The protesters, in the resort town of Bang Tao, focused their ire on the Alex Tour company, mobbing the business’s storefront and smashing its sign. They held placards and chanted “Alex Tour get out!” “Russian business get out!” and “Bang Tao Russian mafia free!”
Tensions had been simmering for weeks. At a rowdy town hall meeting this month, locals also accused Russians of scaring away other tourists.
But Alexander Kolesnikov, a Russian who has lived on Phuket for the past five years, said some of the anger was misplaced, as many businesses that employ Russians are actually Thai-owned.

TITLE: Traveling Salesman Accused Of Killing 13 Pensioners
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A 32-year-old appliance salesman has been accused of murdering 13 elderly people in the Pskov and Rostov regions during a four-month period in late 2005, according to a statement posted on the Interior Ministry’s website on Tuesday.
The man would visit pensioners in their homes, peddling clothes irons, kettles, and other goods. Once inside, he would size up the occupant’s wealth and slay the poorer ones, police said.
Victims of the killing spree, which took place from September to December 2005, were 70 years or older and lived alone, police said.
Authorities are now determining whether the man, who is currently serving an eight-year prison sentence for assault, was involved in similar crimes carried out between 2004 and 2005.

TITLE: Anti-Gay Bill Approved Despite Resistance
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Kravtsova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — With a United Russia deputy declaring that Russia is not Sodom and Gomorrah, the State Duma gave tentative approval to a bill that would ban “gay propaganda” to minors.
But the measure, which mirrors similar legislation in place in St. Petersburg and several other areas, met with unusually strong resistance from opposition-minded lawmakers.
Of the 450 deputies, 52 refused to vote on Friday, while one opposed it, Sergei Kuzin of United Russia, and one abstained, Dmitry Nosov of the Liberal Democratic Party. But with the support of the other 338 deputies in attendance, the bill was easily approved in a first reading. 
“We live in Russia, not Sodom and Gomorrah,” United Russia Deputy Dmitry Sablin said before the vote. 
Russia, he said, was “founded on its own traditional values, the protection of which is dearer to me than even oil and gas.” 
The bill, which stipulates fines of about 4,000 rubles to 500,000 rubles ($130 to $16,000) for promoting homosexuality among minors, was introduced in the Duma by Novosibirsk regional lawmakers in March. The date for its consideration was pushed back several times before Friday’s vote.
“The bill is being used to distract people from more important topics, such as a bill passed in a first reading last week giving regions the option not to hold gubernatorial elections,” said Just Russia Deputy Dmitry Gudkov, who decided not to vote on the bill Friday. He made his remarks on Twitter.
Human rights organizations said the bill would aggravate societal divisions over gay rights. 
Sergei Nikitin, head of Amnesty International Russia, said the measure showed the world how backward Russia remained in its attitude toward gays. 
“It’s unacceptable to discriminate against people because of their sexual orientation,” he said. “The bill contradicts both Russian and international legislation and in no way will help to establish common ground in society.”
In Washington, the U.S. State Department said it was “deeply concerned” about the bill and noted that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been pressing Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov over the issue for more than a year.
“You know how strongly we feel about LGBT rights around the world, how strongly the secretary of state personally feels, that nobody should be discriminated against for who they love,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters Friday in Washington, according to a transcript on the State Department’s website.
“I would note that Russian citizens are also concerned. I understand that there was a kiss-in outside the Duma today to protest this legislation,” she said.
A clash broke out at the kiss-in when self-professed Orthodox activists attacked gay-rights activists in the second brawl during a kiss-in protest at the same place in a single week. Police said 20 people were detained Friday.
“We are concerned about homophobic sentiment in Russia and about the fact that LGBT activists have been attacked in every region where they have tried to show their discontent with the bill,” said Yulia Gorbunova of Human Rights Watch.
According to a survey by Levada Center last year, 32 percent of Russians consider homosexuality “an illness or the result of a psychological trauma,” while even more — 43 percent — believe it is “immoral and a bad habit.” Only 17 percent consider homosexuality a sexual orientation that can exist alongside heterosexuality.
The debate over gay rights came to the forefront last year after St. Petersburg legislators passed their law. The St. Petersburg initiative instituted fines for the promotion of homosexual relationships among minors, and it essentially bans gay-pride parades.
Activists for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people appealed to the Supreme Court, which upheld the law.
Only 4 percent of the population supports gay-pride parades, while 52 percent opposes them, the Levada Center’s poll found. 
“In October, the UN Committee on Human Rights recognized a similar bill in the Ryazan region as discriminatory,” Gorbunova said. “We are concerned that instead of adjusting Russian legislation to international norms, our government wants to make the law work on the federal level.”
In addition to Ryazan, Novosibirsk, Arkhangelsk and Kostroma have passed similar laws.
Opponents of the Duma bill say it equates gays to pedophiles. Human rights activists also fear that the vague definitions used in the bill would open the door to misuse. 
“The bill is worded in such a way that many attempts to discriminate against the LGBT community might be camouflaged by the words ‘propaganda’ and ‘homosexuality,’” she said. 
Just Russia Deputy Ilya Ponomaryov, who refused to vote, said on Twitter that the bill was poorly written and might lead to repressions. 
Rights organizations said the bill contradicts international treaties signed by Russia, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights.
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said in December that Russia did not need laws that regulate sexual relations.
To become law, the bill must be approved in two more readings in the Duma, after which it must be considered in the Federation Council and signed by President Vladimir Putin.

TITLE: 8 Die As Trawler Sinks In Far East
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Fifteen crew members from the Shans-101 fishing boat that sank in the Sea of Japan on Sunday night have been saved by rescuers, while eight have been reported dead, news reports said Monday.
The survivors include 11 Russians and four Indonesian nationals, Gazeta.ru reported. 
The boat sank after being overturned by a high wave in stormy weather in the Sea of Japan near the Primorye region. 
Survivors said they threw overboard the bodies of eight crew members who died of hypothermia while on rescue boats, Interfax reported. So far, those bodies have not been found. 
The search for the missing crew members continues, with 10 ships and four aircraft from the Emergency Situations Ministry, the Navy and a local airline. 
The boat had 30 crew members on board at the time of the disaster, including 19 Russian and 11 Indonesian nationals.  
Prosecutors have opened an official inquiry and filed negligence charges, which carry a maximum punishment of seven years in prison. 
Local medics told Interfax that 10 fishermen have been hospitalized with cold-related injuries to their limbs, while two suffered from general hypothermia.
The ship’s owner, the company Vostok-1, said that Shans-101 was in good working order at the time of its last voyage and had all necessary rescue and communication equipment, Interfax said.

TITLE: Putin Ousts Dagestan Head Magomedov
AUTHOR: By Alexander Winning and Ivan Nechepurenko
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin on Monday dismissed Magomedsalam Magomedov as leader of turbulent Dagestan, a republic where authorities are fighting a militant Islamist insurgency.
Putin said in a statement that Magomedov had tendered his resignation, but experts told The St. Petersburg Times that the change in leadership likely signified that Magomedov had fallen out of favor in Moscow.
As part of the reshuffle, Magomedov, 49, was appointed presidential deputy chief of staff, a high-ranking role that appeared to be a sweetener to persuade him to vacate his post without a struggle.
Magomedov’s tenure as Dagestan leader had been punctuated with a number of prominent terrorist attacks as well as shootings of judges, journalists and religious leaders. On Jan. 15, a top judge was shot dead as he approached his car in Makhachkala, the republic’s capital, in what appeared to be a revenge attack.
Veteran lawmaker Ramazan Abdulatipov, 67, was appointed acting Dagestan leader. He has served as a Federation Council senator, State Duma deputy, deputy prime minister and ambassador to Tajikistan, and in 1991 mediated a conflict between ethnic Chechens and Avars with former State Duma Speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov.
Magomedov’s ouster comes ahead of gubernatorial elections scheduled for the fall in the North Caucasus republic, although the State Duma last Wednesday tentatively approved a bill that would allow federal subjects to cancel direct elections.
Speculation had circulated for over a week that Magomedov could lose his post after local media reported that Putin had asked him to resign at a meeting in Moscow on Jan. 14. At the time, Magomedov’s spokesman confirmed the trip but declined to elaborate.
On Thursday, Vedomosti cited Kremlin sources as saying that Dagestan-born Abdulatipov would be appointed to head the republic in an effort to tackle lingering regional instability.
A string of official denials followed until Abdulatipov said in an interview to the Kavkazskaya Politika news portal Sunday that Putin had already signed an order appointing him to lead the republic.
Magomedov’s press office brushed off Abdulatipov’s comments as unfounded early Monday, only for the Kremlin to officially confirm the appointment by mid-afternoon.
Speaking as the news of Magomedov’s departure unfolded, Alexei Malashenko, an expert with the Carnegie Moscow Center, said by phone that the Kremlin’s policy in Dagestan was “a mess.”
“This uncertainty only provokes further instability in a region that is the heart of Russia’s Caucasus,” he said.
Enver Kisriyev, a Caucasus expert with the Russian Academy of Sciences, explained the drawn-out nature of Magomedov’s removal as a struggle between rival factions that lasted until the very end.
“It’s strange that the Kremlin was slow to act, but it’s clear they want to make changes,” he said. “Magomedov worked steadily for just under three years. There were no major failures or scandals during his time in office, and the situation might even have improved slightly.”
Dagestan, which boasts 28 indigenous languages, is one of Russia’s most ethnically diverse regions, and authorities have been battling a resurgent Islamist insurgency in the troubled republic following two separatist wars in neighboring Chechnya. 
Attacks on law enforcement officers and officials are an almost-daily occurrence in Dagestan, which is also trying to attract investment as part of plans to develop a network of ski resorts in the North Caucasus. (See related story, Front Page.)
Magomedov, who had led Dagestan since February 2010, is the son of Magomedali Magomedov, who headed the republic between 1987 and 2006. 
An ethnic Dargin, he reportedly received the post thanks to the influence of local billionaire Suleiman Kerimov, who promised to invest in social programs in the republic when Magomedov’s appointment was being discussed, Vedomosti reported. Abdulatipov is an Avar, the republic’s dominant ethnicity.
In an interview with Business FM radio Thursday, Abdulatipov talked up his credentials for the leadership post, saying that “few besides me would be able to bring stability to Dagestan.”
But a reporter with the independent local newspaper Chernovik suggested that Abdulatipov was unlikely to keep the post for long. “The Kremlin likely settled on Abdulatipov as a transitional candidate known for being old-fashioned and a statist,” the reporter said, requesting anonymity in order to speak freely.
Kisriyev, from the Academy of Sciences, echoed these thoughts, predicting that Abdulatipov would find it hard to garner support and that he would be viewed as an outsider.
“Abdulatipov has never held a political post in Dagestan and never led a large-scale government structure. He has never had to fight for his legitimacy,” Kisriyev said.
“What’s more, he is detached from the clans that have formed in Dagestan over the past 20 years. Officials in Moscow could have thought that someone from outside the clans would have greater freedom to act, but that’s not how it works. These clans determine the politics of the republic.”
Beyond internal difficulties, Kisriyev said, Abdulatipov will have to deal with Kremlin incompetency if he were to win popular backing and effect a tangible improvement in regional security.
“Dagestan’s greatest problem is the incompetence of the country’s leadership in Moscow, which controls the republic with presidential decrees and countless demands,” he said.
“There are huge financial interests at stake and complex ethnic boundaries. If Abdulatipov experiences the same incompetent attitude, he won’t achieve anything.”

TITLE: Net Closes In as Serdyukov Implicated in Dacha Case
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The net appears to be closing on former Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov after military investigators opened an investigation into extravagant improvements at a dacha belonging to his brother-in-law, a news report said Monday. 
Serdyukov resigned in disgrace last month amid allegations that several of his close associates had enriched themselves via the fraudulent sale of Defense Ministry real estate, but investigators have yet to level accusations at Serdyukov himself. 
The latest investigation, reported in Kommersant on Monday, relates to extravagant upgrades to a Volga-delta summer house belonging to Valery Puzikov, who is married to Serdyukov’s sister. 
Serdyukov spent so much time at the dacha in the Astrakhan region in the summer of 2011 that it became known in the Defense Ministry as “Serdyukov’s Dacha.”
Then-President Dmitry Medvedev and then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited the dacha for a fishing trip that summer. 
Serdyukov’s stay coincided with extensive redevelopment at the site, including building a road and landscaping projects, allegedly carried out by military personnel. 
According to prosecutors’ information, conscripts from a long-range aviation unit laid turf and planted poplar trees, while a railway unit built a paved road from the dacha toward the Caspian Sea shore to ease access for fishing trips. 
An entire battalion was allegedly assigned to the road-building project, which, including the eight-kilometer road, two bridges and land beneath it, allegedly cost the Defense Ministry 100 million rubles ($3.3 million). 
Investigators believe that Serdyukov approved the order for the conscripts to landscape the grounds and personally supervised the project. 
Prosecutors may remain reluctant to charge Serdyukov, however, because of the high burden of proof required to charge officials with abuse of office.

TITLE: Putin to Start ‘Conservation’ Activities Again
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin will soon recommence his “active hobbies” despite several months of speculation about his health, his spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Izvestia on Monday.
“Vladimir Putin will continue his active hobbies. Maybe he will go scuba diving in the summer. He continues the fight to preserve endangered species,” Peskov said.
According to sources cited by the paper, plans for the coming year include ice hockey and a visit to Antarctica.
Putin accepted an invitation from Chilean President Sebastian Pinera to visit a Russian-Chilean Antarctic research station in September last year.
Although it had earlier been assumed Putin would make the visit at the height of the Antarctic summer in January, Peskov said the date had not yet been set.
“But he will continue to pursue his activities in conservation as he has in the past,” he told the paper.

TITLE: Facebook Fails to Outstrip Rival
AUTHOR: By Yelena Minenko
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Last October, the number of active users of the world’s most popular social network Facebook reached 1 billion, accounting for more than half of the world’s Internet population. But in Russia, Facebook is unable to overcome the country’s homegrown copy, VKontakte.
“Our long-term aim is to reach a certain level of penetration in the market: Fifty percent of Internet users, but what percentage of users we have now I’m not allowed to tell you,” said Yekaterina Skorobogatova, Facebook development director for Russia. 
According to research by the Sarafannoye Radio social marketing lab, Facebook, which launched a Russian-language version in 2008, occupied eighth place in the rating of the 20 most popular social networks in Russia in 2009, and climbed up to the fourth position the year after that. 
“Russia is one of the few countries where there is a local search engine that occupies first place in the country, and its own top-ranking social networks,” said Roman Frolin, an Internet expert and blogger, in an interview with Golos Rossii radio station.
“I think that in the next three to five years, foreigners will be able to claim only third or fourth place on the Russian market,” he added.
Experts agree that many people in Russia prefer VKontakte to Facebook due to the fact that the former allows users to share music and videos — often in contradiction of copyright legislation — and for its simpler interface.  
Stanislav Usoltsev, a software engineer and independent developer who attended a presentation given in St. Petersburg at the end of last year by Facebook engineers as part of the company’s tech-talk program, said he used Facebook first of all as a communication platform, and also creates Facebook-based applications.
“I prefer Facebook to all other social networks, because there are many scientific communities there with decent people, unlike VKontakte, which is filled with sex and pornography-themed groups; the audience on Facebook is more educated, I guess; it is a whole different level,” said Usoltsev. 
Russia’s Internet market is the biggest in Europe, making it an attractive target. In October, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s creator and chief executive, traveled to Russia to meet with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who made the Internet and technology buzzwords during his tenure as president from 2008 to 2012. 
The product originally built for U.S. users is now popular far beyond that country. According to the Los Angeles Times, eight out of ten Facebook users are outside of the U.S. But while in the U.S. Facebook has confidently defeated other market players such as MySpace — a major social platform until 2006 — in other countries, this has proven less easy to achieve. 
In Europe, Facebook has powered past the formerly dominant British network Bebo and German StudiVZ, but in major markets such as Russia, Japan and South Korea, the company has signed up less than 50 percent of Internet users, according to ComScore statistics. 
Another big issue for Facebook is that even today, in the century of democratization, many countries block access to the Internet and Facebook. Facebook is blocked in Iran, Syria, Bangladesh, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan and, last but not least, China, the most populated nation in the world. 
Globally, the main question for Facebook now is not how to get more users, but how to make them stay online and be more active.
“During all these eight years that Facebook has existed, we were focusing mainly on the growth of users; now we are focusing on the support of quality,” said Alexei Maikov, a Facebook software engineer from Russia currently working in Seattle, Washington who came to Russia at the end of last year to give lectures as part of Facebook’s tech-talk program.
The team of Facebook engineers went on to visit other Russian cities after Moscow and St. Petersburg with the aim of encouraging young and talented developers to collaborate with the company via internships, joint research, grants and possible future recruitment. 
According to Maikov, the main task for him and his colleagues is support of the platform for other computer engineers developing their applications on the basis of Facebook, focusing on mobile devices, and extending Facebook’s Internet marketing via sponsored stories and other types of advertisement. 
“Mobile devices are developing faster today than any other kind, and Internet access is embedded even in TV sets and cars. We want Facebook to work in all of them, so, for example, when you liked a song on your home computer, it will then be played in your car automatically,” said Maikov. 
Facebook’s managers agree that the network’s future lies in mobile devices, and this policy is also followed in Russia. Last year, Facebook established a partnership with Russian mobile network operator Beeline, which now provides free-of-charge Internet access to smartphone owners when they are using the Facebook application.

TITLE: Cellphone Users to Keep Numbers If They Switch
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Cellphone subscribers will now be able retain their current numbers when switching operators provided they don’t switch more than once in six months, according to a draft of changes published by the Communications Ministry on its website Saturday.
In a Vedomosti report, sources at two cellphone operators explained that the process would be quite simple, with subscribers required to first settle all debts with the original operator and verify that the number is registered in the same region where it will be used. They will also have to pay a fee of 100 rubles or less. 
The subscriber must complete an application requesting the change, sign a contract with the new operator and receive a new SIM-card. The operator is obligated to complete the transfer within five days, during which time the subscriber will be issued a temporary phone number. Once the transfer takes effect, the same SIM-card will be automatically programmed with the subscriber’s original number.
Users with corporate phone numbers might have a harder time switching to a new operator. The employee must first obtain consent from their employer to have the number withdrawn from the corporate contract and assigned to the worker personally. Only after that can the number be transferred to a new operator.

TITLE: Norilsk Seeks $500M Duty Exemption
AUTHOR: By Irina Filatova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Norilsk Nickel’s new chief executive, Vladimir Potanin, asked President Vladimir Putin to exempt his company from export duties to free up approximately $500 million a year for modernization of the nickel giant, a report said Monday. 
In a letter to the administration earlier this month, Potanin asked Putin to order the government to consider the issue, Kommersant reported, citing sources familiar with the letter.
Cancellation of export duties would allow Norilsk Nickel to spend more on upgrading its facilities and fulfilling its social obligations, the letter said. 
The government is unlikely to exempt Norilsk Nickel from paying export duties because it would have to do the same for other producers, like Ural Mining and Metallurgical Co., said Andrei Lobazov, a metals analyst at Alfa Bank.  
The move would bring a loss to the federal budget of approximately $1 billion a year, an amount the country’s leaders are unlikely to sacrifice, he said. 
Russia is slated to abolish export duties on nonferrous metals in 2015 as part of its agreement to accede to the World Trade Organization. 
Lobazov also said Norilsk Nickel is in a sustainable financial position, so Potanin’s initiative is likely a result of the need for additional funding to pay the high dividends outlined in the new shareholder agreement, which was signed by majority owners in December. 
The agreement stipulates that the nickel company will pay $9 billion in dividends over the next three years, sources familiar with the situation said late last year. 
Norilsk Nickel spokeswoman Alisa Fialko declined to comment on Potanin’s letter but said the nickel giant would like to see the duties go down, as metal prices remain weak. 
“The idea of lowering export duties is being discussed at the company,” she said, adding that Norilsk Nickel might spend the saved money on its development. 
A spokeswoman for RusAl, which holds 25 percent in the nickel company, said the aluminum-maker is aware of the letter and supports the initiative.  
Potanin’s Interros Group, which owns approximately 28 percent of the nickel giant, declined to comment.  
RusAl plans to pay off $1.5 billion in debt annually in 2014 and 2015, with part of that amount coming from the dividends the company will get from Norilsk Nickel, first deputy chief executive Vladislav Solovyov said in an interview with Interfax published Monday. 
“The funds from Norilsk Nickel are more than sufficient to maintain the debt. … The situation was comfortable enough anyway, and considering the proceeds from Norilsk Nickel, we understand already how we’ll survive in 2014 and 2015,” he said.

TITLE: U.S. Gas Exports Are No Threat, Says PM
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia is unconcerned about natural gas exports from the United States driving down the price European consumers pay for Russian gas, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said in an interview with Germany’s Handelsblatt.
The commercial exploitation of shale gas reserves has allowed the U.S. to replace Russia as the world’s biggest gas producer, and the country now stands on the threshold of exporting gas across the Atlantic.
“It’s not yet clear what will come of [U.S. natural gas exports to Europe] because there are pricing problems and ... ecological problems,” Medvedev said in response to a question suggesting that a worsening of U.S.-Russia relations could be attributed to U.S. gas exports, according to a transcript posted on the government’s website Monday.
European gas demand has fallen steadily since 2006, including an 11 percent decline in 2011. In addition, the long-term pricing formulas used by state-owned Gazprom have been undermined by consistently lower prices in the flexible spot market.
Medvedev added that Russia does not fear a drop in the price of Russian gas in Europe.
“We don’t fear anything,” said Medvedev. “Because if we are going to depend on gas alone, then it would be better to do nothing at all. … We have to get away from hydrocarbon dependence.”
In the same interview, Medvedev commented on the financial crisis in Cyprus.
“We think the main burden to solve these problems should be taken on by Cyprus and the EU states,” Medvedev said. “But we are not refusing to help under certain conditions. The conditions must be accepted first. Until that happens, there can be no money from us.”

TITLE: Jailed Tycoon Alleges Set-Up
AUTHOR: By Allison Quinn
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Real estate developer Sergei Polonsky, currently being held in a Cambodian prison following a scandalous New Year’s celebration, told Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in an open letter published on Polonsky’s blog on the Ekho Moskvy website that his detention is part of a conspiracy. 
In the letter, the former millionaire claims that on Jan. 26, while in prison, he and the two other Russians detained with him were visited by an employee of the Russian Consulate. According to Polonsky, the consulate employee said that “various sources” in Moscow had paid “big money” to ensure that the three men stayed behind bars for three years. He and his friends were also denied legal and political help and told that the Foreign Ministry could not provide assistance, he said. 
Polonsky was arrested in Cambodia on Dec. 31, 2012 with two of his friends, Konstantin Baglai and Alexander Karachinsky. Cambodian investigators say that the businessmen threatened the crew of a rented yacht with a knife. According to police, the Russians locked the crew members below deck and forced them to jump into the water and swim to shore. The Russians deny all charges. Shortly after the incident, Polonsky wrote on his Twitter page that the three men had been detained for setting off fireworks and refusing to show identification to the Cambodian military. 
The letter also says that strong psychological pressure is being placed on the three men, and mentions a range of different measures “that can’t even be put down on paper.” In addition, Polonsky said that accurate information on the current situation is being withheld. 
“Considering the unpredictability of this situation’s development, the danger to our lives and our health, we ask for an immediate explanation of the situation,” Polonsky wrote.

TITLE: How Russia Can Lead the G20
AUTHOR: By Jingdong Hua and Janamitra Devan
TEXT: Russia is taking the helm of the Group of 20, and with that honor comes a unique opportunity: To lead the international community toward sustainable, inclusive growth and shared prosperity in 2013.
The Russian government has pledged to focus its G20 presidency on practical solutions to stimulate growth and jobs, manage government debt and regulate the financial sector. Russia could lead in advocating yet another significant G20 priority: Strengthening local capital markets.
Deep and efficient local capital markets contribute to global financial stability. They are the foundations for long-term economic growth. They provide resilience against volatility in capital flows and reduce dependency on foreign debt. They offer investment alternatives for social security funds, pension funds, insurance companies and other institutional investors that provide safety nets.
Local capital markets provide access to local-currency finance, which is essential for financing infrastructure and housing, sectors that underpin economic growth and long-term development. This enables small and medium-size enterprises to borrow in their own currencies, protecting them from foreign-exchange risk so they can grow and create jobs.
Without strong domestic capital markets and access to local-currency finance, the private sector cannot thrive. A thriving private sector is necessary to give people the opportunity they crave most: To improve their lives.
Russia wants to become an international financial center, and it recognizes that strong, deep domestic capital markets are needed to achieve that role. This year, the country implemented a number of reforms to strengthen its domestic capital markets and increase the participation of foreign investors. The Central Bank is putting in place measures to facilitate monetary flows and enhance market liquidity. The securities supervisor approved reforms that better support cross-border transactions and better protect international investors. In parallel, as it looks to boost its ranking in the IFC/World Bank “Doing Business” report, Russia is working to improve its investment climate and stimulate growth. All these reforms leave Russia well positioned to lead the G20 agenda on developing domestic capital markets.
International financial institutions such as the International Finance Corporation and the World Bank can be valuable partners to countries as they seek to strengthen their domestic capital markets. For example, just last month the IFC issued its first Russian-ruble-denominated bond in the domestic markets. IFC’s ruble bond is innovative because it offers inflation-protected returns to investors. The bond should encourage greater investor participation and pave the way for future inflation-linked issuances in the Russian market.
The World Bank’s recent report on Russia’s capital market recommends various reforms that will support market development, such as creating more benchmark government bonds, reducing the cost of private issuance and improving securities distribution networks to increase participation by small and medium-size enterprises and small investors.
International financial institutions can also help increase the availability of local-currency finance to the private sector. In Russia, the IFC has invested more than 40 billion rubles ($1.33 billion) since 2005 to support important sectors such as small and medium-size enterprises, health care and infrastructure. To meet the growing demand for long-term local-currency finance in the country, part of the proceeds from IFC’s debut ruble bond will be invested in the domestic private sector.
Developing local capital markets is a long-term task. Countries must implement sound macroeconomic policies, achieve price stability and realize fiscal prudence. Local regulatory and legal obstacles must be overcome. There is an urgent need for reforms in capital markets, such as the introduction of primary dealer systems, which allow firms to act as market makers of government securities. Also needed are regulations that encourage market-making in government and corporate bonds, repo facilities that help finance dealer inventories of securities, and derivatives and hedging instruments for market and credit risks.
IFC, the World Bank and other international financial institutions are helping countries overcome some of these challenges, and Russia can use its influence in the G20 and similar forums to make a compelling case for encouraging domestic capital markets to thrive.
As the impact of the global financial crisis continues to spread and as large developing economies experience slower growth rates, the need to support development of local capital markets takes on a new urgency. At the G20 meeting in Seoul in 2010, world leaders asked international financial institutions to strengthen local capital markets and domestic-currency borrowing.
Under France’s leadership, the IFC and the World Bank worked with others to create the G20 Action Plan for Local Currency Bond Markets. Collaborative efforts among international finance institutions continue today, and Russia is well positioned to provide further impetus to their efforts. Through its leadership, it can make a unique contribution to ensuring long-term growth and stability.

<i>Jingdong Hua is vice president and treasurer of the Washington-based International Finance Corporation, a member of the World Bank Group. Janamitra Devan is vice president of financial and private sector development at the International Finance Corporation and World Bank. This comment appeared in Vedomosti.</i>

TITLE: the russian front: America’s Poor Grasp of Putinology
AUTHOR: By Richard Lourie
TEXT: Every self-respecting intelligence agency should have a full-time Putinologist. One reason is that President Vladimir Putin alone rules Russia. What he says goes. Of course, there are all sorts of competing influence groups — the military, tycoons and the new and newly vocal middle class — whose views and interests Putin must take into account, but in the end he’s the “decider” and need not fear pesky legislative or judicial impediments to his will.
Another reason is how inscrutable the Russian president can be. Jonathan Winer, a former high-level U.S. State Department official, once ranked Putin second only to then-FBI director Louis Freeh when it came to being impossible to read. But Putin, unlike Freeh, went on to become president and prime minister of his country, positions that require some secrecy but also demand many opposite talents: The ability to communicate with other leaders and the public, to empathize and connect rather than keeping oneself hermetically sealed when it comes to masking thoughts and feelings.
So there is a contradiction at the core of Putin’s political personality, between his 16 years of training and practice in the KGB and the requirements of a political leader in an age where communication skills are essential.
Another contradiction that lies at Putin’s psychological core is one that he shares with tens of millions of his fellow Russians: He is a Soviet man living in a post-Soviet world. Like them, he is a creature adapting to an abruptly changed environment. In purely Darwinian terms, he has adapted quite successfully. After all, he is on top of the heap. But there are other ways in which he has failed to fully shed Soviet ways, like his insistence on a strong centralized state that does not allow its citizens sufficient participation for them to consider themselves stakeholders.
Capital flight leads to brain drain, the loss of the very talent that could transform Russia from a gas and oil giant to a multifaceted economy. This is the only way to avoid the collapse of the Russian state that will occur when gas and oil prices collapse because of new technologies or discoveries of vast deposits of shale oil.
It is politically convenient and intellectually lazy to portray Putin solely as the enemy of liberty and orphans, a ruler surrounded by a conspicuous number of murders, most of which got rid of his worst enemies and critics. But there’s more to him than that. His philo-Semitic side has led to a greatly improved position for Russian Jews, some of whom casually walk through Moscow in sidelocks and yarmulkes as if they were not in the land that put the “pogrom” in the dictionary.
Mixing cynicism and sincerity, he also has done much to repair rifts in the Russian Orthodox Church caused by the Soviet regime. A unified church is a stronger support for the state.
Politically, he’s also complex, allowing the U.S. and NATO to use Russian airspace and an air base to resupply their troops in Afghanistan. He canceled a contract to sell Iran the S-300 air defense system, which could have been a nightmare for Israel. Finally, the U.S. can hitch rides on Russian rockets to the International Space Station — for a fee, of course.
The U.S. must have both a clear sense of what it wants from Russia and who Putin actually is. At the moment, it has neither.

<i>Richard Lourie is the author of “Sakharov: A Biography” and “The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin.”</i>

TITLE: Life on the periphery
AUTHOR: By Melinee Prochasson
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Photographer Alexandra Demenkova has found herself in some hair-raising situations in the line of duty.
“I have found myself in danger a lot of times; it always happened when I was taking pictures,” Demenkova recalled during an interview with The St. Petersburg Times in her native town of Kingisepp in the Leningrad Oblast. 
“It was mostly with drunken men — or women — when I felt in danger, when people would suddenly get aggressive and attack me, wanting to beat me up, or worse, kill me. The worst case was when I had to run out of a house barefoot — it was winter, minus 20 degrees Celsius, and the man was chasing me with a knife. That happened in Moldova. Or once I found myself face to face with a bull at a farm and I had a narrow escape. Normally, it all happens so quickly that you don’t have time to think about taking pictures anymore. I feel lucky that I survived miraculously so many times, but now I can’t do most of the things that I used to do in the past.”
These are not, however, the recollections of a war correspondent, but simply the obstacles encountered by an art photographer whose focus is the Russian village. Demenkova eventually hopes to publish her images of villages in a book. 
Demenkova, 32, who is now based in St. Petersburg and whose work was recently exhibited in Barcelona, Spain and Namur, Belgium, refers to the people she photographs as “characters,” comparing the scenes she photographs to a real-life theater: Frozen frames from places lost in space and time. 
“There is a certain connection between life and the situations I photograph, and literature and theater (or cinema),” she says. 
“There is a direct comparison for me; I watch life in a similar way other people (and me) read books, watch movies or theatrical plays. But I prefer life, because it is a first-hand experience. Because it is not someone else, like a writer or a director, telling me a story, and me sitting in a chair or on the sofa, but me living, witnessing and discovering it and getting the opportunity to create it through photography, and tell it the way I see it.”
Talking about her subjects, Demenkova describes people beset by problems: People who drink a lot or have other problems, people who are ostracized by society. 
“Even if they are always looked down on and most people despise them, for me, they are people who have not surrendered,” she says. “Alcohol, gambling and so on is a way to escape; they are forms of protest for those people. You make a decision, and you use your freedom to do what you want, even if you are ruining your life. It’s an act of liberty and I respect it.”
Demenkova has a degree in foreign languages, although she originally wanted to study literature. Despite her change of heart, she says she continued to devour theater plays every day, spent a lot of time in bookstores and frequented a poetry society for some time. 
Her interest in languages reflects how much importance she places on being able to speak with the people whom she meets and photographs. In addition to her native Russian, she speaks English, Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese, and continues to work as a translator from time to time. 
Communication is very important for Demenkova. Generally she stays for a few days in any one place, enough time to meet people and get to know their way of life. She starts work by talking to members of the community on which she is focusing, and it can be several days before she starts taking pictures.  
Two years, ago, she produced a photo-reportage about a school for deaf children, spending days observing and photographing the children. Other subjects on which she has trained her lens include a retirement home, a circus and transvestites.
 Her interest in and respect for outsiders is reflected in her explanation of the life path that brought her to photography. 
“Photography was the first thing that came and made me think, ‘this could be my life,” she said. 
“No other thing before that gave me the same feeling of ‘this is it.’ Before that I had tried different lifestyles and professions, and I would always think, ‘I can’t spend all of my life doing this thing, or living like that.’ The problem was, other people imposed all those things on me, and photography was something I discovered myself.
“Sometimes I feel like a magician, other times like a worthless person who bothers people without any reason,” she says, explaining what photography means to her. 
“In any case, I am glad that photography has happened to me; I have become more than a spectator while remaining a spectator. I like the fact that every single picture is created in a fraction of a second.”
When asked if she ever felt wrong about being somewhere or taking a picture, Demenkova replies: “I only regret one time when I was photographing a car accident and a man was seriously injured in it. I was doing it on assignment. Although I sometimes feel that everything I have photographed is a kind of a burden for me, because the situations and photographs stay with you forever, stamped in your mind, I believe it was important to take them.”

<i>Work by Alexandra Demenkova can be seen at www.lightstalkers.org/alexandra_demenkova.</i>

TITLE: When two worlds collide
AUTHOR: By Natalya Smolentseva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: “Soviet Pin-Up,” which sees the merging of Soviet social posters with American pin-up art, is a genre that couldn’t have existed just a few decades ago. But now the style, represented by posters by Valery Barykin, an artist from Nizhny Novgorod, is being showcased — and even sold — at Erarta Museum and Galleries of Contemporary Art.
In the Soviet Union, social posters portraying happy, rosy-cheeked citizens were used to deliver an all-encompassing range of messages, from warnings on the dangers of excessive alcohol consumption to encouraging workers to look after their tools and young people to exercise regularly, and of course, to promote Communist tenets.
The American pin-up style, which appeared in the 1930s and ’40s, was more about sex than socialism, and consisted of printed images of glamour and fashion models or actresses that could be pinned to the wall. This aesthetic reached its peak in the ’50s, when magazines were packed with scantily clad beauties. 
“The most interesting thing about the exposition is collaboration and mixture. It is global art on the one hand, but a focus on Soviet history on the other hand,” said Polina Zakharova, director of Erarta Galleries.
Barykin’s exhibition consists of 17 limited edition posters that can be bought in two sizes: 130 centimeters x 90 centimeters, and 90x60, priced at 25,000 rubles ($830) and 10,000 rubles ($332) each, respectively.
“It is our first limited edition project,” said Zakharova. “This format is now very popular abroad, especially in the U.K. and U.S.”  
Sales of original posters represent a chance for collectors to buy works signed by the artist. 
“Poster art is popular because it still gives a sense of exclusivity; you buy an original work, but it is more affordable than a masterpiece,” said Zakharova.
While many of the young people visiting the show at Erarta will be familiar with the works of Barykin from the Internet, for their parents, the exhibition represents a chance to see how the Soviet poster has survived and evolved in contemporary art, and to recall its role in the U.S.S.R.
Nowadays, a lot of modern art first appears on the Internet, but still has to be exhibited to prove its significance. 
“It is a logical release of Internet art,” said Zakharova. “There are more and more projects every year that begin on the Internet and end up in real exhibition spaces all over the world.” 
Erarta Galleries is the department of the museum of the same name that promotes modern Russian art for sale. With branches in London, New York, Zurich and one soon to be opened in Hong Kong, Erarta promotes modern Russian art far beyond the boundaries of the former Soviet Union. Forthcoming projects, according to Zakharova, will be realized in collaboration with Dmitry Shorin (whose sculpture for the project “I Believe in Angels” can now be seen in the galleries) and Maksim Kaetkin, an artist from Perm. 

<i>“Soviet Pin-Up” runs through March 11 at Erarta Museum and Galleries of Contemporary Art, 2, 29th Liniya, 
Vasilyevsky Island. Tel. 324 0809. 
www.erarta.com. Entrance is free of charge.</i>

TITLE: Speak, memory
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: As St. Petersburg marked the 69th anniversary of the lifting of the Siege of Leningrad this weekend, Dutch film director Jessica Gorter came to St. Petersburg for several screenings of her award-winning documentary on the subject.
Called “900 Days: The Myth and Reality of the Leningrad Blockade,” the documentary features several survivors of the 1941 to 1944 Siege of Leningrad, giving personal accounts of their lives as children during the siege and sharing their views, which frequently contradict the official propagandist line.
“In ‘900 Days’ I touch on a universal theme: How do personal memories relate to collective commemorations, and the power of propaganda,” Gorter wrote in her director’s statement for the film.
“The film poses the uncomfortable question of whether it is better to know a gruesome truth or to embrace the comfort of a myth. The film does not give unequivocal answers, but tries to address these complex problems individually.”
The St. Petersburg Times spoke with Gorter during a screening of her film at the city’s European University on Saturday.

<b>Q:</b> The subtitle of the film contains a conflict or juxtaposition. What did you mean?
<b>A:</b> I think the subtitle is a little bit simplified, “myth and reality.” I mean wherever there’s history, many myths are created, and also, what exactly is reality? In people’s memory what happened is always different for everyone, but at least what I found about the blockade of Leningrad, there’s an official version, the so-called “heroic version,” but when you really start to talk to blokadniki [the Russian term for Siege of Leningrad survivors], there’s also a lot of other things going on, there’s also many other views on this history that you don’t hear so often. That’s why I decided to put this subtitle there.
Also, to give it a context, because the film is not only about the blockade; it’s also about the way people memorize the blockade.

<b>Q:</b> The film starts with a victory parade being shown on television and then-president Dmitry Medvedev talking in clich&#233;s about the heroic victory, and the family of siege survivors switches off the television because they feel that what he is saying is fake.
<b>A:</b> I wouldn’t directly call it “fake” what Medvedev is telling; it’s one side of the history and people who react to it strongly, saying his words are bullshit, they feel the history is different and they don’t just want to have this one side. 

<b>Q:</b> It is refreshing to see the Siege of Leningrad survivors speaking frankly, without resorting to standard propaganda clich&#233;s. How did you select who to show in the film?
<b>A:</b> I spent a lot of time talking to a lot of different blokadniki, and from the beginning I knew I wanted to make a film where people had different opinions of what happened, so my main search was to find people with different views on the history.
It depends a little bit, but mostly it takes a while before people start to speak openly, you really have to have trust. So even the people who are telling it in a different way than you usually hear it, it was not on the first day I met them that they would speak this way, it would take a lot of time, and I had also to figure out what kind of questions I had to ask in order to reach this. Because actually I asked them questions that nobody had really asked them before, or at least they’re not really often asked.

<b>Q:</b> What kind of questions were they?
<b>A:</b> Like how they felt about the censorship up until perestroika to talk about what really happened during the blockade. Or how they looked upon the Leningrad Case after the blockade. The war was won, the blockade was over, and then Stalin started a case against the local city authorities, heroes who had managed Leningrad through the siege. So these are very painful questions. And I found that not so many people were used to [them]. This is not a subject that is raised very often I think, because it’s painful. 
The process of making the film wasn’t always easy, because sometimes I thought, “I am digging in such a painful past!” First of all, we cannot imagine even what the blockade was like, even if you see the film, it’s just incredible what happened. But secondly, because of all these controversies and people having different opinions, it’s also painful to dig into it. At some point I thought, “Should I be doing this?” But then I realized that they’re so old, and this generation will not be here so long. I also thought that the people who don’t have the general view, they also should be heard. They also should have a voice. That’s why I thought, “No, I think I have to do it.”

<b>Q:</b> What did you know about the Siege of Leningrad before coming to St. Petersburg?
<b>A:</b> I have been coming to, actually Leningrad, since 1989, when I was a 19-year-old myself, so I heard about the blockade quite early, because you cannot come here without hearing about it. Almost every family is connected to it. But to tell the truth, in Holland I learned hardly anything about the blockade of Leningrad before I came here. The blockade of Leningrad or the Battle of Stalingrad, it was the same, you know, I mixed them up. And when I was telling people I’m working on a film about the blockade of Leningrad, people went, “Ah, Stalingrad!” In the West, people know very little about it, not much was taught in school. I mean I learned in school that we were freed by the Allies — the French, the Americans, the English. Of course, I was told the Russians also fought very hard, but there’s not much attention put on that in our education, we know very little about what happened in Russia during the war.

<b>Q:</b> Did you see any other documentaries about the Siege of Leningrad before starting to work on “900 Days?”
<b>A:</b> Yes, I tried to watch everything I could get my hands on, but apart from one German film made in the beginning of the 1990s I could find nothing that had a similar topic. Most of it is about exactly what happened in the 900 days matter-of-factly and with an emphasis on the heroic defeat of the Nazis. But of course in those films you don’t see a lot of blokadniki themselves, really, talking about it, you don’t see them in their daily lives. Also there is, to my mind, a fantastic film made by Sergei Loznitsa, with only archive material, but it’s a completely different film. It shows the city, how it changes from a living city with people walking and shops to this completely frozen dead city. 

<b>Q:</b> Perhaps the most memorable person in the film is the artist Lenina Nikitina, whose mother and sister did not survive the siege. She recalls killing a cat named Stripey, which came to ask for food, in order to make soup — a scene that she would make into a haunting painting decades later. How did you meet her?
<b>A:</b> I was driving with a photographer, I was also making another film with him. I told him I was also making a film about the siege, and he told me, “Oh, I remember, 10 years ago there was an exhibition of Leningrad unofficial artists and there was one picture by Lenina that was so strong, and for me it became the image of the blockade. Unfortunately that was 10 years ago and she was really old, she must have passed away.” So we went to her apartment to check and there she was! She opened the door and she was very alive. That’s how I found her. And she was quite something. She died, by the way, on May 9, 2011, on [Russian] Victory Day, it’s quite incredible. 
She was 79 when we filmed her, she turned 80 in April 2011. She is quite well-known on the unofficial art scene, she’s a good painter. She did not make a lot of work but what she made was very impressive.

<b>Q:</b> She kept a lot of cats, who would come in and out through the window. How many did she have?
<b>A:</b> Every time I saw her, there was a different number, but I think 10, 15 sometimes. And there were four or five dogs, and she walked the dogs every day, but it was dangerous, because she could run into another stray dog, and it was always welcome in her house. But you can imagine the neighbors did not really like it.

<b>Q:</b> Since the film was made, you have taken it to many places around the world. What kind of reactions have you seen?
<b>A:</b> It was incredible how much interest there was in the film, because when I made it I didn’t think the regular audience in Holland would be interested. But somehow when it came out in Holland, it was in Dutch cinemas. Usually documentaries go off the screen very quickly, but it was [there] for many weeks, it was shown in more than 30 cities in Holland.
People who see the film, first of all they’re surprised and sometimes shocked that they know so little, so they’re interested to learn more about the Siege of Leningrad, and it also makes them think about their own history — not only about the siege, but also about the way memory works, the way we deal with history, so people find it interesting also to discuss their own version of history that they have.
But what was really interesting for me, because right after it premiered at IDFA, a documentary festival in Amsterdam, it was shown at ArtDocFest in Moscow, and I really thought I would get some angry or difficult reactions, but it turned out that the audience was really… It seemed like it was the right time to show it here. Also it was shown at Message to Man [a documentary film festival in St. Petersburg], and the same thing happened here.
In the audience, there are people who really like it and people who find it very difficult, but what I see, especially here in Russia, [is that] the audience starts to talk with each other. So I was there to answer questions, so I could answer some questions, but people were not so much talking to me about it; they started to talk more to each other, which of course for me is great to see.

<b>Q:</b> Has there been any negative reaction?
<b>A:</b> I had several reactions from Russians in the audience in Holland and also here, when people were saying, “This is not true, this can’t be true.” “These people who were giving you the medal, or this Lenina, maybe she’s lying, [because] she wants attention or maybe she’s never been through the blockade, she’s a psychiatric patient…” But then usually, when that happens, other people in the audience get up and say, “Why do you think it’s not true?” and then the whole discussion starts.
Actually it’s not that negative, I would say; people seem to be confused sometimes, when they see it. And I have never encountered that anyone was very angry personally at me, not that I saw. Maybe they are, but they didn’t tell me.
Maybe it has to do with the fact that I don’t think I made a film where I made one opinion. I am not saying, “This is the truth, this is the way you have to look at it.” There are different views, there are different ways of looking at it, and you can judge for yourself how you want to deal with it. 
I tried to understand everyone and I have respect for everyone in my film, absolutely equally, whatever they think or feel. 

<b>Q:</b> The subject of cannibalism touched upon by some interviewees can produce strong reactions, can’t it? Even if it is supported in the film by the once-secret Soviet statistics of cannibalism cases, citing 26 in December 1941, 366 in January 1942 and 494 in the first half of February 1942.
<b>A:</b> Yes, that’s the other thing that sometimes makes them get up and say, “It wasn’t true.” Of course there was some, but only really crazy people did it. [Such a reaction] is understandable, because it’s really a very difficult and painful subject, but the figures [of people convicted for cannibalism in the film] are from the NKVD archives; they wrote them down themselves.
I read a lot about it, I did a lot of research, and I also talked to historians about it. Cannibalism was not that much. It was absolutely not my aim to focus on it in the film, but of course, when you make a film about the siege and the things people went through, that’s a part of it and it came up. Actually, none of the time did I ask directly about it, it just came up, so I can’t leave it out; it would be strange. And from the research that I did, cannibalism wasn’t huge, considering the horrible situation the city was in. But yes, it happened, and of course, it happens that people turn on each other when they are in such a terrible situation. It happened, and I understand perfectly well, for people who went through it themselves. I understand that many might not have seen it, or not have encountered it, which doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. And also it’s so painful that maybe it’s better to stay away from it in order to be able to sleep or stay sane. That’s why I’ve never pressured anyone on this, because, you know, who am I to [do that]?

<i>“900 Days: The Myth and Reality of the Leningrad Blockade” will be shown and followed by a Q&A session with Jessica Gorter at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 31 at Dom Kino, 12 Karavannaya Ulitsa, tel: 314 5614, and at 1 p.m. on Friday, February 1 at ON Theater, 18 Ulitsa Zhukovskogo, tel: 929 6692. www.900days.nl</i>

TITLE: Napoleon dynamic
AUTHOR: By Tatyana Sochiva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A trash circus, a celebration of hedonism, a grotesque theatre: The performances of Berlin-based indie band Bonaparte, which returns to St. Petersburg this week, can be described in many ways, but one thing is certain — this is no ordinary band.
Bonaparte, renowned for its colorful performances in which a cheerful army of freaks wearing incredible costumes and masks amuse the audience to the accompaniment of songs by lead singer Tobias Jundt, brings its brand of dance-punk and electro rock enriched with carnival traditions to the city’s A2 Club on Feb. 2. 
The worldwide success of Bonaparte is primarily due to founder Jundt, a Swiss “dissident” whose original point of view and sense of humor is evident in his philosophical approach to life: “If I could only choose three things: Family, music and kizlyarka [Dagestani grape vodka], I am quite happy!” he said in an interview with The St. Petersburg Times ahead of the upcoming local gig.
The eccentric stage outfits worn by Jundt are a distinctive feature of the band’s concerts. 
“I never enjoyed looking like everyone else much, even as a child. Make-up and clothing and songs can give you a lot of strength,” said Jundt, who often appears on stage in black eyeliner, a flame-colored wig and a jacket reminiscent of the Napoleonic era. 
“I am not really afraid to do something silly along the way or use languages that I do not actually speak,” said Jundt. “You have to have fun. I am interested in what happens when the music hits the audience, if everything becomes one. Also I naturally combine sobriety and humor. I always felt that you should meet your topics wholeheartedly, but it doesn’t hurt to bring it across with a bit of irony or a twist in the roles,” he added.
Jundt founded Bonaparte in 2006 and the group performed its first show in the now legendary Bar 25 in Berlin. According to Jundt, the name Bonaparte made sense in the early days of the project. 
“I drove around Europe in my small sixties car putting little flags in places where I wanted to go to. It was like a calling. I was a bit afraid, when we first visited Russia, that we might encounter Napoleon’s fate from 1812, but we clearly did a better job than him, because we came with love in our hearts and music in our guns.”
Along the way, Jundt made new friends who wanted to take part in the project and now Bonaparte, which functions more as a collective than as a typical band, includes around 20 artists. The concert at A2, which is to take place a day after the group’s show in Moscow, is expected to feature eight of the group. 
“We all have a great passion for energy and performance, something all-encompassing, something handmade: Music, fashion, graphic art, movies, etc.,” said Jundt. 
“In many European countries, ‘entertainment’ is like a curse-word, but we really like to perform and entertain — life gets quite boring if you don’t try to exchange this energy between people.”
The band has released three studio albums to date: “Too Much” (2008), “My Horse Likes You” (2010) and “Sorry, We’re Open” (2012). 
“The last album is a lot about defining or accepting who you are, being an artist and trying to liberate yourself, and it also closes the ‘Berlin trilogy’ for me,” said Jundt. 
“In comparison to the first two albums, which I both wrote mainly alone in my room, I have tried to do some sort of a ‘community album’ this time, to invite more friends to the studio and see what happens. You need to listen to this album a couple of times to find all the details; there is more happening in the soundscapes, it’s a journey.”
Speaking about the creative process, Jundt told The St. Petersburg Times that he preferred to come up with his ideas without too much thought and he had no golden rule for creating things. “If I had one, I would only tell you in exchange for a Russian passport in my name!” he said. 
Bonaparte has performed in St. Petersburg twice before and Jundt speaks warmly about Russia: “We enjoy playing in Russia a lot. We love the audiences and usually people take us places after the shows… Last time when my mask was stolen in Moscow, three girls from St. Petersburg handmade a new one and brought it to the show (thank you again!). Your country seems cold on the outside and warm on the inside.”

<i>Bonaparte plays at 8 p.m. on Feb. 2. 
at A2 Club, 3 Prospekt Medikov. 
Tel: 309 9922</i>

TITLE: THE DISH: Bengel & Zaek and Mertens
AUTHOR: By Allison Geller
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: <b>Room for dessert</b>
If you walk into Bengel & Zaek in the historic Dom Mertensa building on Nevsky Prospekt in search of real food, don’t be surprised if you decide that an &#233;clair, a couple of macaroons and an espresso counts as lunch. To bypass the sumptuous display of pastries that rivals that of any Parisian bakery to have lunch at Mertens, the adjacent restaurant, seems a needless act of will.
While the self-service Bengel & Zaek does have a few savory offerings — homemade, pre-wrapped sandwiches, which on our visit were available with salmon (180 rubles, $6) and chicken (160 rubles, $5.30), as well as a few pan-Asian dishes, like the pineapple rice (280 rubles, $9.30), and a rib-eye priced at 990 rubles ($33) — that’s really not the point. 
Try the financier (70 rubles, $2.30) and you’ll get the point. One bite of the chewy vanilla cake topped with slices of pear is enough to guarantee the quality of these delectable desserts.
For something a bit more fantastique, the pirozhnoe letnee (summer pie) priced at 120 rubles ($4), a beautiful pink dome topped with a white chocolate tablet with a bit of edible gold leaf, is hard to resist. A thin base of chocolate is topped with layers of white cake, raspberry filling and white chocolate mousse and coated with a magenta layer of tart raspberry glaze, offering the perfect combination of texture and flavors, with bitter notes to cut the sweetness.  
Breakfast pastries are also ripe for the picking, regardless of the time of day. The chocolate croissant (70 rubles, $3.20), while lacking the over-the-top buttery extravagance you find in the best genuine versions, had a delectable flavor, with the right tang to the croissant dough. 
The lemon and raspberry tart, or smetanik (80 rubles, $2.70) delighted with its bright lemon flavor that set off the thin layer of raspberry filling, all on the bakery’s tender tart pastry. 
Alas, it was impossible to sample everything — at least in one go — but other temptations included the brownie and the Napoleon, whose praises were being sung by the guests at the next table. 
The tea list includes a pleasant and light milk oolong (180 rubles, $6), but the coffees are far more interesting. The caf&#233; offers a number of interesting espresso options, including coffee with fig, berry coffee and a sitsiliyano (120 rubles, $4), a long espresso with sugar and a disconcertingly overpowering punch of fresh lemon juice. 
Tiny circular tables pushed close together and the slight jumble of d&#233;cor that includes gingerbread houses and shelves of decorative boxes create the right balance of charm and chic. 
If you are committed to a proper lunch, Merten’s, the two-story restaurant housed through the archway from Bengel & Zaek, is not a letdown. The set-up does prove a little confusing —you can’t combine your tabs, and while Merten’s accepts credit cards, Bengel & Zaek does not. (Luckily, with its location smack dab in the center of the city, a quick dash to the ATM isn’t out of the question.)
At Merten’s you’ll find such elegant offerings as warm salad with chicken liver (320 rubles, $10.65). The liver was extremely tender and not overcooked, still pink on the inside, and tossed in the slightly sweet, Asian-inspired sauce that dressed the salad, a mix of fris&#233;, cherry tomatoes, quail eggs and shredded Parmesan cheese.
Creamy soups always have the potential to wind up bland and heavy. The cream of mushroom soup (260 rubles, $8.65) was, however, surprisingly foamy and had a good, strong fungi flavor. 
Mertens has certainly spared no expense to create a stylish interior, but it’s done with a careful eye toward a clean, shiny hipness. The wood paneling is sponge painted in blue and red. Orange pillows soften the already plush purple booths. The exposed brick wall is covered in empty picture frames that hang between a few gilded wall sculptures. The focal point is the massive chandelier made of green glass bottles, shiny silver buckets and glass jars, which can be admired at leisure as guests sit at the restaurant’s balcony seating area.
No one will hold it against you, of course, if in lieu of taking in these details you rush through your meal and head down to Bengel & Zaek for the best part — dessert.

TITLE: Students Create Online Tourism Marketplace
AUTHOR: By Allison Geller
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: With travel hospitality websites like Airbandb and CouchSurfing spurring a fast-growing trend of travel based on interaction with locals, a young team of city tour guides is attempting to show visitors to St. Petersburg a fresh view of the city. 
Sptnik offers tours of the city’s metro stations, a Soviet architecture tour and excursions devoted to different kinds of cuisine, as well as pub crawls and other themed tours.
It was co-founded by Alexandra Skorobogatova and Alexander Kim as the final project in their masters program in technological entrepreneurship 18 months ago. 
Kim, an active traveler and couch surfer, said he wanted to form “a marketplace for tourism activities.” 
“Anyone can host an excursion and sell it, and tourists can come and take an excursion,” he said.
Each guide determines the price of their tours, which range from free to 3,000 rubles ($100), usually falling around 500 rubles ($17). The model makes it possible for St. Petersburg residents or professional guides to launch tours that they are passionate about, but don’t have the time or resources to market themselves.
Now the company has evolved to include tours that showcase traditional St. Petersburg highlights as well as quirkier takes on the city. 
“There should be some tours that all people like. Everyone wants to see the Hermitage, some squares and palaces. They need that and ask us for it,” Skorobogatova said.
One of Sptnik’s excursions is a vintage shopping tour, led by a professional stylist who takes tourists through the best of St. Petersburg’s many second-hand shops. 
“She helps to create an image for people and it’s a really nice, unique experience,” said community manager Nadezhda Sinyutina-Nagle.
Photography excursions and winter bike rides have also garnered interest. 
“Community’s very important — we check every guide who comes to us,” said Skorobogatova. “We don’t want soulless tours. When the guides feel they’re a part of something, they really do a better job.”
The tours are small, with ideally no more than five people and never more than ten; often tours are comprised of only two tourists and a guide. 
This philosophy is what’s behind the name, Sptnik, which evokes not just the satellite, but the Russian word for a fellow traveler or partner. Kim wanted something that would have a Russian ring to foreigners.
“We couldn’t call it vodka,” he joked.
While St. Petersburg sees large numbers of foreign tourists in the high season, most tourists to the city are Russian. The company, which started with only English tours, has now launched excursions in Russian, and even a few in French.
While the city has modernized since the Soviet era, the tourism industry largely has not, according to Sptnik’s staff. 
Mike Vinogradov, who is in charge of the company’s marketing, is faced with the challenge of connecting Russians of older generations to an online, credit card model of booking. 
He is also confronted with outdated attitudes to tourism that are prevalent among many Russian visitors to the city. Visitors from other Russian cities usually use agencies to book the same outmoded, Soviet-style tours that were offered in the ’50s and ’60s, he said.
“They never know there is some other life,” said Vinogradov. “They will never know there is a hostel where you can pay less and get more. They never know that there are interesting places to try different types of food, not only the stolovaya in the horrible hotel. They never know that there are some interesting excursions and young and interesting people.”
“There are no hipsters, no unusual shops, unusual places, no art galleries [in standard excursions], just the Russian Museum and the Hermitage. They get just to Leningrad. That’s what we have to change somehow,” he added.
Kim and Skorobogatova were in for a surprise when it came to the company’s target demographic.
“We thought our target audience would be young people,” Kim said. “But we were kind of wrong.”
Recounting one of the company’s first bookings, Kim said: “We were really surprised when a couple from Germany in their 60s wrote a girl who was 20 to ask what she could offer them.”
Instead of the 18-30 crowd the founders expected, their clients are generally aged from 35 to 40. 
“We realized that young people don’t really go on excursions,” said Kim. “They can do things on their own.”
Rob Perkins from Melbourne, Australia, tried out Sptnik tours last September on a five-day trip to the city with his wife and another couple.
“As with many cities, you can go and see the famous sites but it is really difficult to meet local people and have good conversations with them if you do not speak the language. Sptnik gave us that opportunity,” Perkins said. The travelers’ four tours included an Uzbek food tour led by Kim himself, and the Soviet architecture tour. 
Perkins highly recommended the enthusiasm of the guides. 
“They are immensely proud of their city and country and are happy to sit and talk about it with you. That is worth a great deal compared with simply visiting the sites and not getting a chance to have even the briefest of conversations with local people,” he said.
For those who want to experience St. Petersburg nightlife, tour guide Violetta Podkopayeva is eager to share her favorite party spots. 
Podkopayeva led a group of four German tourists on her first pub crawl with Sptnik. “When I met them I was so surprised, because they were 40-year-old guys,” she recalled with a laugh. “We drank a lot, we danced a lot, we discussed a lot of things. I was so tired at 4 a.m. I said, ‘Now guys, I’m going home,’ and they said, ‘Why so early?’”
Those looking for a drinking experience that doesn’t include thumping dance beats can book a tour with Timur Okhinko, who leads visitors to examples of the St. Petersburg ryumochnaya, or vodka bar.
“Ryumochnayas come from Soviet times, when workers could come and just have a shot [of vodka] before work, or after work, or any time,” Kim explained. “It has this special atmosphere which is not like in a bar. It’s a Russian Soviet-type pub where people gather to talk.”
Okhinko knows the city’s ryumochnayas inside and out, and brings curious tourists to enjoy conversation and a drink — often served by the same waitresses who once poured shots in Leningrad — in a living example of Soviet history. 
What tourists want, Kim says, is not just to learn facts about the city’s history. “It’s not about information you get. This is about experience.”

<i>For more information about Sptnik tours, visit www.sptnik.com</i>

TITLE: On 75th Birthday, Legend Vysotsky’s Iconic Status Endures
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: In a grim Soviet reality, he lived the lifestyle of a playboy. While not a dissident, he sang satirical songs. While not writing a single song that would praise the authorities, he wrote ballads about World War II and was a symbol of patriotism for many Russians.
Vladimir Vysotsky, a bard singer, poet and actor who would have turned 75 on Friday, still remains one of the nation’s most outstanding icons. His birthday was widely marked by Russian and foreign fans over the weekend.
Several concerts and exhibitions in honor of Vysotsky took place across Russia, including in Tambov, Penza, St. Petersburg and Moscow. In Rostov, fans placed a rock on the spot where they will later erect a monument to the singer.
Vysotsky’s son, Nikita, attended the opening of a museum to his father in Yekaterinburg, where locals and visitors can see the poet’s restored Mercedes, his wax statue, clothes and personal trinkets.
Even if they did not manage to get access to the festivals, Russians could watch a variety of Vysotsky-related television programs to mark the day. Channel One showed the film “Vysotsky: Thank God I’m Alive,” which is based on a real-life episode in the artist’s life. Meanwhile, Kultura and TV Tsentr broadcast his documentary footage.
The celebrations were not limited to Russia. The staff of Poland’s Vladimir Vysotsky Museum in Koszalin held an international festival of documentary films and organized an exhibition of archived materials, including footage of Vysotsky rehearsing his role in “Vishnyovy Sad” and photographs from his Taganka Theater’s French tour in 1977. Festival guests came from as far away as Iran, Jordan and Oman.
One of the documentary films shown on Rossia 1, titled “Vladimir Vysotsky: A Letter to Warren Beatty,” shows Vysotsky appealing to the acclaimed American actor in English. The film was recorded in Moscow and was the Russian singer’s introduction to an actor who was considering him for a role in his film “Reds,” about the life of the American communist journalist John Reed.
Vysotsky, who died in 1980, has cult status in Russia. The legendary Soviet chess master Boris Spassky never crossed paths with the singer but explained his appeal the best.
“He was able to find a path into every heart. This unique gift made him the people’s singer,” Spassky said Saturday during an interview on a television show dedicated to the poet’s legacy.
“His songs made many people think, ‘Do we really live in the world’s best country?’ Under the influence of his songs, I started to realize that that was not the way it was,” said Vera Shirokaya, a retired railroad company employee from Irkutsk.
Shirokaya said she remembers retyping a short book of Vysotsky’s poetry, which was published by the underground press because it was not possible to obtain it officially. Shirokaya gave the book to her colleague, who later lost it.
“I felt very sad, not because I valued my labor so much but because we couldn’t read it ourselves. We were typing fast and had no time to get the essence of the poetry,” she said.
But while a large part of Shirokaya’s life took place in the period that Vysotsky sang about, critic Yury Saprykin lamented in an article in Afisha magazine that the younger generation doesn’t recognize a lot of the famous quotes from the poet’s songs.
“There are no playlists combining his songs on VKontakte,” he wrote, referring to the popular Russian social networking site.
Saprykin stated in the article that when trying to present Vysotsky to a younger audience, movie producers have depicted him as an action hero of the “drugs, sex and rock-n-roll type.” One such depiction can be seen in the 2011 film “Vysotsky: Thank God I’m Alive,” which collected $27.4 million in theaters  but disappointed critics.
The film, based on the real-life episode of Vysotsky’s clinical death in Uzbekistan during a concert, focuses more on his romantic relationships and love of racing his Mercedes than on his songs.