SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1751 (10), Wednesday, March 20, 2013
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TITLE: Berezovsky Dies Amid Growing Woes
AUTHOR: By Howard Amos
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: As speculation swirled after Boris Berezovsky's sudden demise, friends and associates suggested that a series of personal and financial shocks suffered by the former Kremlin kingmaker and billionaire could have contributed to depression and mounting health problems.
Hints that Berezovsky may have taken his own life, or that British or Russian security services were involved, refused to disappear Sunday as British officials said a postmortem was not yet under way.
Berezovsky's body was not removed from his large house outside London where he was found dead on the bathroom floor on Saturday afternoon as it was checked overnight for chemical, biological and nuclear material, according to a statement by local police. No traces of such material were found.
A series of enemies of the Kremlin have died under suspicious circumstances in recent years in Britain, including ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko who died from polonium-210 poisoning in 2006.
"I would always assume the perfidy of the Chekists," London exile and cell phone tycoon Yevgeny Chichvarkin told the Dozhd television channel, using the name for the security service formed by the Bolsheviks after the 1917 Revolution.
"It is not impossible that Berezovsky could have been liquidated," said Sergei Markov, a member of the Public Chamber and deputy rector of Plekhanov University of Economics.
But there was also widespread evidence Sunday that a messy divorce, the breakup of a long-term relationship and financial losses in recent months had generated a strong homesickness, made Berezovsky's behavior increasingly erratic and caused a deterioration in his health.
On Jan. 18, in a nascent legal battle with former partner Yelena Gorbunova, a British judge said Berezovsky was "a man under financial pressure."
The court documents paint a picture of a debtor trying desperately to stay afloat.
Berezovsky has a tendency "to promise one thing in relation to particular assets … and then to do another," the judge said.
It was not Berezovsky's first public humiliation at the hands of a London judge.
In 2012, he lost the largest civil court case in British legal history to billionaire and former business partner Roman Abramovich, which left his reputation dented and a legal bill of millions of dollars.
The High Court savaged Berezovsky in its judgement in the case, characterizing him as "an unimpressive and inherently unreliable witness who regarded truth as a transitory, flexible concept which could be molded to suit his current purposes."
In 2011, his record divorce settlement with his second wife, Galina Besharova, cost Berezovsky, who has six children, between $260 million and $360 million.
In efforts to assuage his creditors, he has fired staff, shut an office in London's expensive Mayfair district, and sold property and his collection of antique cars. Last week, he auctioned off a silk Andy Warhol print of Vladimir Lenin to the tune of $202,017.
"He talked openly to me about his financial difficulties in connection with [former partner] Badri Patarkatsishvili's death and in connection with the defeat in court against Abramovich," Yury Felshtinsky, Berezovsky's friend of 15 years and co-author of a book about the Russian security services, said in an e-mailed statement.
Berezovsky reached an out-of-court settlement with Patarkatsishvili's estate last year.
The businessman and politician, renowned for his irrepressible energy, was reportedly suffering from health problems in the weeks before his death.
"It was a heart attack," Alexei Venediktov, Ekho Moskvy's editor-in-chief and a former colleague, said late Saturday. "For the last two weeks, he had had several."
The battle with Abramovich cost Berezovsky about $60 million, and it left him emotionally scarred, Venediktov said. "He was in a serious depression. He was being treated in Israel."
Berezovsky's melancholia appeared to come to a head in a meeting he had with Forbes journalist Ilya Zhegulyov on Friday.
"I have lost the meaning of life," he told Zhegulyov the day before he died. "I don't know what to do. I am 67 years old. And I don't what to do anymore."
Zhegulyov declined to comment further on Berezovsky's condition when contacted by The Moscow Times, citing the ongoing police investigation into the death.
Berezovsky left Russia in 2000 and watched from abroad as a series of criminal charges stacked up against him. The only official position left to him in Russia was his membership in the Russian Academy of Sciences.
"The hopelessness of his present situation, of course, brought full-scale clinical depression in its train," Mikhail Kozyrev, a journalist and colleague of Berezovsky's, told Dozhd television Sunday. "He suddenly, unexpectedly abandoned the hope that he would someday again see his homeland, which he loved a lot."
Berezovsky's enemies also highlighted his plight at the end of his life as poetic justice for a man accused of building a huge personal fortune by sucking the money out of successful businesses, such as national carrier Aeroflot, and virtually bankrupting them.
"He lived life in vain and ended up without family, without homeland, without money and without friends," Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov said in comments carried by state-run RIA-Novosti. "An absolutely appropriate finale."
Using his media holdings, including the ORT television channel, Berezovsky was one of the architect's of Zyuganov's defeat at the hands of Boris Yeltsin in the 1996 presidential election.
And former Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, another bitter political opponent of Berezovsky, said his death was a result of two reasons.
"The first was total political defeat and the second was, probably, financial ruin. … [It was the] denouement of a personal catastrophe," Luzhkov told Dozhd.
No details about plans for Berezovsky's funeral were available Sunday. But the Kremlin would not be opposed to considering a request for holding the event in Moscow, said President Vladimir Putin's press secretary, Dmitry Peskov.
British police appeared to be focusing on Berezovsky's emotional state. “The investigation team is building a picture of the last days of Berezovsky’s life, speaking to close friends and family to gain a better understanding of his state of mind,” Kevin Brown, the senior detective leading the investigation, said in a statement published late Sunday.
TITLE: Medvedev Calls Cyprus Plan 'Absurd'
AUTHOR: By Irina Filatova and Howard Amos
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday intensified his criticism of a plan by European financial authorities to rescue the Cypriot economy, labeling it as "completely absurd," in the most colorful response yet by Russian officials to the controversial measures.
The proposal to impose a one-time levy on deposits in Cypriot banks came as a surprise, with the scheme being "unpredictable and inconsistent," Medvedev said.
"I went online this morning; it turns out that yet another Plan B or C has been published," he told participants in the international conference on partnership with the European Union.
Nicosia is seeking to produce a new bailout plan after its parliament defeated an initial proposal to impose up to 9.9 percent in tax on bank deposits — a move that had been agreed upon with European finance ministers — or Eurogroup, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, but not with Russia.
Medvedev warned that measures that hit account holders' interests pose a threat to global financial stability, since they undermine confidence in the financial sector. He called for "all interested parties," including Russia, to be involved in producing a plan to resolve Cyprus' financial problems.
The Mediterranean country is placing bets on Russia's financial aid, as Cypriot Finance Minister Michalis Sarris held a second day of negotiations in Moscow with government officials on Thursday.
The meeting with his Russian counterpart Anton Siluanov and First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov on Wednesday proved fruitless, and no official announcements on any agreements came Thursday.
Meanwhile, Medvedev said Russia should take a back seat in solving the island's problems, which he said should be resolved by its own residents and the European Union and only then "by third parties with their own interests."
In exchange for cash, Cyprus is looking to interest Russia in stakes in its financial sector and offshore gas reserves, Sarris said Thursday, confirming rumors that swirled earlier this week.
The clock is ticking for Cypriot officials to win Kremlin support, with the European Central Bank having set a deadline for the start of next week to cut the cash flow to local banks.
The Frankfurt-based regulator will maintain the current liquidity volume it channels to Cyprus till Monday, with further injections to be made only after a new bailout plan is approved, Bloomberg reported, citing the ECB's statement.
A deal with Russia that involves the Kremlin negotiating access for Russian companies is possible, but it will be very hard to achieve in the timeframe dictated by the European Central Bank, said Dmitry Polevoi, chief economist at ING Bank in Moscow.
"All these deals [involving energy or banking assets] require intensive due diligence processes … and usually require much more time than Cyprus has," he said.
Commenting on possible gas deals, Medvedev said the issue requires careful consideration, since the value of the gas fields remains unclear.
"But we are clearly ready to listen to any ideas coming from the Cypriots, and we'll try to understand their argumentation," he said in an interview with foreign media Wednesday.
However, Russia's three largest state-owned banks, Sberbank, VTB and Gazprombank, were uncompromising, as they denied any interest in acquiring Cypriot financial assets.
"We don't, of course, have any plans of that sort," said Andrei Kostin, head of Russia's second-biggest bank, VTB, Interfax reported. "Our interests are that we are given the opportunity to carry out payments and access the accounts of our clients."
The head of Sberbank, German Gref, told journalists Wednesday night that he had been approached with an offer to buy into Cypriot banks but had turned it down.
Cyprus' crisis could be exploited very effectively by the Kremlin, experts said.
"Moscow has been gifted an opportunity to have a say in a sensitive intra-EU matter," Philip Hanson, an associate fellow at Chatham House's Russia and Eurasia Program, wrote in a research note Thursday. "It is quite likely that the Cyprus crisis will lead to Russia gaining a greater degree of influence."
Russian officials claimed earlier this week that imposing the deposit levy had been agreed upon without their consultation.
In an effort to justify the quick decision, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso pointed out that there was no chance to agree on the measures with Russia, since European officials had come out with the plan only during negotiations about the situation in Cyprus that ended early Saturday.
"Russia was not informed because the governments of Europe were not informed. Let's be completely open and honest about that issue. There was not a pre-decision before the Eurogroup meeting," he said at the EU-Russia conference. "The decision was the result of a compromise between the countries in the Eurogroup."
Barroso added he was "open to listen to the concerns of our Russian partners."
Barroso spoke amid protests by activists of leftist group Other Russia, who stormed into the Central Bank headquarters in the center of Moscow and blocked the doors from inside, demanding repatriation of Russian money from Cypriot offshore accounts.
In Wednesday's interview, Medvedev pointed out that the size of illegal Russian funds hidden in Cypriot bank accounts is exaggerated.
Cyprus is a "convenient jurisdiction for transactions," which makes it attractive to many domestic private and public companies, he said, adding that many Russian businessmen also have their money deposited in Cypriot banks. "Not all of them are trying to hide behind the screen of Cyprus' special jurisdiction," he said.
TITLE: Former 'Provocateur' Blames Police for Bolotnaya Clashes
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Kravtsova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – A man professing to be a former government operative has said that police officials, including the former interior minister, were involved in organizing clashes at an opposition rally last year, allegations that members of the Kremlin human rights council say could be trustworthy.
The online television channel Politvestnik posted a video interview on YouTube earlier this week with the man, who called himself Felix.
Felix said he had worked as a paid political provocateur for entrepreneur Bashir Kushtov, who allegedly worked for former Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev. He said he was offered money by Kushtov to create chaos at a rally on Bolotnaya Ploshchad on May 6, the day before Vladimir Putin's presidential inauguration.
The police wanted to provoke violence to show that they could work well in adverse conditions, thereby demonstrating that Nurgaliyev was an effective interior minister, Felix said.
"Kushtov told me that Putin guaranteed to Nurgaliyev that he would be interior minister for two more years, but he needed to make a good showing," Felix said.
The circumstances surrounding the clashes between police and anti-Putin protesters have been scrutinized closely by both authorities and the opposition, who each blame the other for organizing the violence.
About 20 people are accused of attacking police in the clashes, and opposition leader Sergei Udaltsov and two of his associates have been charged with organizing them.
Members of the Kremlin human rights council have placed the blame on police for initiating the confrontation and say they think Felix's testimony could be trustworthy.
"I'm sure that the clashes at Bolotnaya were carefully planned by authorities," Pavel Chikov, a human rights council member and the head of the Agora human rights group, said by phone. "There is enough evidence [of that]. That is why information provided by Felix could be true."
Felix said Kushtov offered him 50,000 rubles ($1,600) and an "unlimited budget" to hire people who would push participants of the opposition rally into fighting with police using flares, tear gas and creating bottlenecks in the crowd. He said he did not accept Kushtov's offer.
Fellow council member Ilya Shablinsky said that he considered the information to be trustworthy and that the council would take it into account in further investigation into the clashes, Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported Thursday.
Sergei Sharov-Delone, a member of the May 6 Committee, an independent organization conducting an investigation into the clashes, said it had done research on Felix and couldn't conclude that he was a reliable source.
"He indeed was a provocateur at multiple rallies — there are lots of videos on the Internet that prove it — but he's a shady man and we can't fully trust him," Sharov-Delone said by phone.
But he said there had been other reports of provocateurs being active at the rally.
"There were direct suspicions of provocateurs' involvement before this interview. I personally saw people who were standing inside police lines and attacked protesters, and police didn't detain them," Sharov-Delone said.
Felix said in the video that he started to organize provocations last April with a protest against United Russia Deputy Alexander Khinshtein, who opposed Interior Ministry policy.
Khinshtein told Nezavisimaya Gazeta that he had suspected Nurgaliyev of being behind the protests against him.
A member of the Interior Ministry's public council said Thursday that the council would discuss the information provided by Felix.
"State authorities and the public definitely must check all information, especially that which has social value," Anton Tsvetkov told Russian News Service.
A source close to Nurgaliyev told Interfax that he thought the interview was a fake. "A typical method of spreading false information was used in this case: First, it was put on the Internet and then picked up by newspapers," he said, adding that all the information Felix gave was "nonsense."
Journalist Alexander Sotnik, who conducted the interview with Felix, wrote on his Facebook page that the interview was published after Felix left Russia for an unidentified European country.
Sotnik said he believed that Felix had been mostly truthful in the interview.
"I'm ambivalent about the man: He is not sane enough, but it's possible he is being used to carry out someone else's plans," Sotnik said by email. "He loves money, so probably they fooled him and, having hard feelings, he decided to go to the other side."
"He's an adventurer. But that doesn't exclude that he told the truth, or most of it, and the rest decided to keep for a future story," he said.
TITLE: Gay Activists Strip-Searched at Pulkovo
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A leading local LGBT activist who was arrested, strip-searched and held in a police precinct and court for over 24 hours after the police detained him and two other men filming an interview inside the Pulkovo 1 airport terminal, was acquitted by a local court late last Friday due to lack of evidence.
Moscow photographer Mitya Aleshkovsky had traveled to St. Petersburg with Moscow LGBT activist Sergei Gubanov for one day in a failed attempt to interview British actor Stephen Fry, who was briefly in the city filming a BBC documentary about LGBT people across the globe. Aleshkovsky himself was interviewed by Yury Gavrikov, the chair of the local Ravnopraviye (Equality) LBGT rights organization and an organizer of the annual St. Petersburg Gay Pride event. During the interview, at about 8:15 p.m. Thursday, the three were approached by a police officer, who ordered them to switch off their video camera, Gavrikov said.
Gavrikov, who was recording an interview with Aleshkovsky about the Moscow photographer’s own photo project portraying gay men and lesbians at their places of work, said that the policeman argued that shooting videos in the airport was forbidden, because Pulkovo 1 was a “high-security” location.
When the three reasoned that the airport’s waiting room was a public space and that it was legal to take photographs and video recordings there, the officer called for reinforcements, who then took the men into the airport’s police office, strip-searched them and put them into holding cells until the morning.
“They constantly repeated that it was a high-security location in a high-security city, and we were requested to switch off the camera and go with them, making it sound as if we were on some military base, but as we understood, we were in a public space, in the airport waiting room,” Gavrikov said.
He said he later found out that the airport was on alert because of the impending arrival of President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko.
According to Gavrikov, the strip searches of the three were undertaken in order to find a memory card from the video camera, which was on during the exchange with the police, although the officers claimed they were looking for possible weapons and illegal drugs.
He said the officers checked and reformatted his memory cards and “stole” the one on which the police’s actions were recorded.
At 7 a.m. Friday the police charged the detained with “failure to obey a police officer’s lawful orders,” an offence punishable by 15 days in jail. Police reports also said the men used foul language, pushed the officers and humiliated them. The men were taken to the Moskovsky District Court in two police vehicles at 2 p.m.
However, in a three-hour hearing Friday evening, Judge Yeva Gyunter acquitted Gavrikov in a ruling which came as a striking exception to Russian legal practice, where judges tend to back the police and ignore the defense.
“The police reports were identical, with the same punctuation mistakes. Apparently they copied them from each other,” Gavrikov said. “They said we verbally insulted and pushed them, while I was said to be poking the microphone of my camera into the face of one of the officers, thus insulting his honor and dignity while he was on duty.”
He said the judge dismissed the disobedience charges, saying that the officers failed to provide sufficient evidence.
“She also listed many violations during the detention, the interrogations and in the police reports,” Gavrikov said. “Coupled with the police officers’ testimonies and my own remarks, these violations led to the ruling that I was completely innocent.”
The cases of Aleshkovky, who missed his flight to Moscow on Thursday, and Gubanov were sent to their respective district courts in Moscow at their request.
TITLE: Cancer Advance
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg oncologists have developed a unique method of diagnosing and eliminating small tumors. The discovery, made by scientists from the city’s Oncology Center located in Pesochnoye, represents a major medical breakthrough, the news website Fontanka.ru reported last week.
Until recently, cancer diagnostics did not allow doctors to detect and accurately diagnose cancerous tumors of less than 10 millimeters.
This discovery is particularly important for the diagnosis of cancer of the liver, which is one of the most prevalent causes of tumors. The major task facing doctors in fighting the disease was the development of a procedure to allow for the discovery and elimination of micro-metastatic tumors in the liver.
The new method lets doctors help patients who even have fourth-stage cancer.
Pavel Balakhnin, who headed the group responsible for developing the new methodology at the center, said that initially they had carried out a unique study of the peculiarities of blood supply to small tumors in the liver, work that became possible thanks to a new generation of equipment.
In addition, the new methodology also allows doctors to definitively identify the nature of any tumors and cysts in the liver. Until recently, identification of whether tiny growths were benign or cancerous was difficult, and often even impossible.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: 300 Million Stolen
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The Investigative Committee of St. Petersburg has opened a criminal case into the theft of more than 300 million rubles ($9.8 million) from the bank account of striker Alexander Kerzhakov, who plays for FC Zenit and the Russian national football team, Interfax reported.
The money disappeared from the account he holds with Gazprombank.
Kerzhakov could have become a victim of fraudsters who he had met abroad, his lawyer Igor Reshetnikov said.
“In early 2011, when Kerzhakov was in the United Arab Emirates, he met a man from the Voronezh Oblast who proposed that he become a partner in the construction of a number of oil refineries. The man suggested that Kerzhakov contribute about 100 million rubles ($3.25 million). When Kerzhakov returned home he began to transfer the money,” Reshetnikov said.
However, following this, money continued to disappear from Kerzhakov’s account.
As a VIP client of the bank, Kerzhakov could simply give orders to his manager. Kerzhakov’s lawyer said they therefore had suspicions that it was the manager who had got involved with those to whom the money was being transferred. The manager signed the payment documents himself, and the money was transferred without the client’s knowledge. The signatures on all the papers for the transfer of about 300 million rubles were faked, Reshetnikov said.
Aqua Park Accident
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The city prosecutor’s office is looking into a case of near drowning in which a 3-year-old boy was found unconscious at the city’s Piterland aqua park last Thursday.
The prosecutor’s investigation concerns potential safety violations on the part of the aqua park’s administration. They are also checking the speed with which the venue’s pool lifeguards responded to the incident.
The boy was at the aqua park with his parents and a sibling, who all come from Yemen. The boy’s father is a post-graduate student of the St. Petersburg Pavlov Medical University. The parents raised the alarm when they noticed that the boy was missing from the aqua park’s play area, where they had left him for a few minutes. They called pool lifeguards, who found the child unconscious in an artificial wave pool.
The boy was taken urgently to a hospital and placed immediatly into intensive care.
G20 Airport Closure
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The Pulkovo 1 airport terminal will be completely closed to regular and charter flights from Sept. 4-7 due to the G20 summit taking place in the city, Interfax reported.
The Pulkovo 2 terminal will continue to operate at reduced capacity but will serve only domestic flights. During the summit there will be “windows” when the airport will be open for incoming and outgoing flights.
Meanwhile, St. Petersburg governor Georgy Poltavchenko has given an order to increase the number of trains from the city on the most common routes during this period to try and compensate for the lack of flights.
The G20 summit is to take place in St. Petersburg from Sept. 3-5. At least 33 foreign delegations have confirmed their participation in the summit so far.
TITLE: Abandoned Pets Put Up for Adoption
AUTHOR: By Olga Kalashnikova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg residents in search of a new pet have the ideal chance to snap up a furry friend this weekend at the Burevestnik Cultural Center in the city’s Nevsky district.
The city’s Rzhevka shelter for homeless animals is holding its “Road Home” adoption fair at the venue on Saturday, at which city residents will have an opportunity to adopt a new pet. About 25 dogs and 45 cats will be looking for homes at the event.
The shelter reports that all the dogs at the adoption fair will be of larger breeds. Due to a lack of demand for large dogs in the city, it is often difficult to find homes for the breeds which stand above knee-height.
The shelter also aims to assist disabled pets in finding homes. At this week’s fair, for example, visitors have the chance to adopt a blind dog that is looking for a family.
The shelter ensures that all of the pets available for adoption have been vaccinated and spayed or neutered.
A number of similar charity events for abandoned and stray pets have been held in the past at the city’s Loft Project Etazhi cultural center. Inspired by the success of the events at Loft Project Etazhi, the Rzhevka shelter has been holding its own “Road Home” events since 2010.
The aim of the shelter is not simply to find a home for the animals in its care but also to ensure that prospective owners are apable of providing their new pet with the care that the animal deserves. To adopt a dog or a cat, adoptive owners are interviewed and must prove that they live in St. Petersburg, have a job and own their own apartment. Renters must provide proof that the owners of their apartments allow pets. There are also age restrictions in place.
“We restrict the age of adoptive owners to between 27 and 55 years old. We put the upper age limit in place to avoid cases where people of too advanced an age want to take a pet. But we also understand that it could prove difficult for them to dedicate the next 15-20 years to the care of a cat,” said Victoria Kuzminskaya, the general manager of the Rzhevka shelter.
“If a person wants to take a pet home directly from the exhibition, he or she must have a special pet carrier for cats and a leash and collar for dogs. It is also necessary that they have arranged transport to take the pet to its new home. Otherwise we don’t let the animals leave our care,” said Kuzminskaya.
Yet even if a person meets all of the qualifications to prove themselves worthy of a pet, it is still not the end of the story. Shelter workers continue to follow the fates of animals that have been adopted, and can ask for photos or call and visit the new owners to be sure a dog or cat is being properly cared for.
This year’s event is the fifth such adoption fair to be held by the Rzhevka shelter since 2010. According to the general manager, the number of people applying for pets has fallen every year.
“I don’t know why it happens. Maybe we are running out of ‘good people.’ Our fair is a chance to show that there are lots of beautiful pets that need love and need to find a family and a home,” said Kuzminskaya.
One of the ‘good people’ that Kuzminskaya is talking about is Yekaterina Shitikova, who dropped into last year’s exhibition on the second day just to have a look around but ended up adopting a cat she fell in love with at the event.
“After our cat’s death, my husband and I couldn’t even think about getting a new pet for more than a year. A month before the ‘Road Home’ adoption fair we had begun to look for a new kitten, but were having trouble finding one. Just then my husband happened to notice a poster for the show and we decided to have a look. We ended up finding Tori,” said Shitikova.
“We were a little apprehensive about taking an adult cat, but we haven’t had any problems. A shelter worker helped us with understanding the cat’s behavior and looking after her health. I’m so grateful to the shelter for helping us to find the wonderful new friend that I had been looking for for so long,” she said.
Shitikova is going to visit this year’s “Road Home” event with plans to volunteer at the show and also, perhaps, find a new friend for her cat.
Organizers have arranged a free shuttle bus to ferry visitors to the cultural center from the Prospekt Bolshevikov metro station. Buses will leave both ends of the route every 15 minutes throughout the event.
The ‘Road Home’ adoption fair takes place Sat. March 23 at the Burevestnik Cultural Center, 38 Podvoiskogo Ulitsa. Tel. 583 1486. M: Prospekt Bolshevikov. More information on sheter programs is available from www.dogs-rzv.spb.ru
TITLE: City Gets New Art House Cinema
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Movie buffs in St. Petersburg now have the opportunity to enjoy world-class foreign cinema in the rarefied atmosphere of one of the city’s most elegant hotels, following the recent opening of a new movie theater at the city’s Angleterre Hotel.
According to the owners, the new art house cinema will offer local audiences a chance to view films that rarely make it into city theaters. All of the films at the cinema will be screened in their original languages with Russian subtitles.
Angleterre Cinema, which also goes by the rather confusing name of Theater & Cinema, opened its doors for the first time with the Shaded View on Fashion Film Festival at the end of last month.
The storied venue can hold up to 187 spectators. Its target audience is much wider than local expats and tourists — who will no doubt rejoice at the increased availability of foreign-language films in the city — and also includes local art lovers and film aficionados.
According to the project’s director, Stanislav Yershov, Angleterre Cinema will make a habit of hosting special events along the lines of the March 5 master-class led by the aspiring U.S. opera diva Nicole Cabell or the local premiere of Roman Coppola’s new comedy “A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III,” which was attended by the director.
The cinema is currently showing Artus de Penguern’s comedy “La Clinique de l’Amour” (The Love Clinic), which received critical acclaim at the 2012 Cannes International Film Festival. In his second film, de Penguern creates a witty and hilarious and take on American medical soap operas along the lines of “General Hospital.”
This parody about paramedics blends slapstick elements, like the improvised resuscitation of a bear, and melodramatic sentimentality.
“I intended the film as a parody through and through, from the female heroines’ almost identical make-up and shiny hair [which looks] as if it came straight from a 1950s Hollywood melodrama to the graphic, vivid, shocking, in-your-face scenes of surgery that American medical television series are notorious for,” the director said at the opening of his film at the cinema March 13.
In the film, de Penguern takes the lead role of the surgeon, who rescues the family business — a clinic — after his greedy and happy-go-lucky brother falls for a voluptuous brunette nurse who manipulates him into selling the hospital to a large medical holding with inhuman policies.
“With a farce-inspired story that includes everything from ricocheting bullets and alternative anesthesia methods to Canuck brown bears and plastic surgery how-to handbooks, this is the kind of film where the plot keeps thickening until the gleefully clichéd characters actually become affecting in their manic search for storybook happiness,” reads a recent review of the film by Variety magazine.
Upcoming offerings at Angleterre Cinema include Steven Soderbergh’s Freudian thriller “Side Effects” starring Jude Law, Rooney Mara and Catherine Zeta-Jones; Gilles Bourdos’s drama “Renoir,” based on the eponymous Impressionist’s last years at Cagnes-sur-Mer during World War I; and Pablo Berger’s silent black-and-white Spanish drama “Blancanieves,” inspired by the tale of Snow White by the Brothers Grimm. Berger’s fantasy drama won in ten categories at this year’s Spanish Academy of Cinematic Art and Sciences Awards, including taking home the prize for Best Film.
Angleterre Hotel, 24 Ul. Malaya Morskaya. Tel. 494 5666. M: Admiralteiskaya. For more information and a full schedule of screenings, visit the cinema’s website at: www.angleterrecinema.ru
TITLE: Zenit Knocked Out of Europa League
AUTHOR: By Daniel Kozin
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: FC Zenit St. Petersburg’s European campaign ended in disappointment Thursday, when the team was knocked out of the UEFA Europa League by FC Basel 1893 in a dramatic Round of 16 encounter at the Petrovsky stadium.
In what was the second installment of a two-leg tie that would take the victor to the quarter-finals of the competition, the St. Petersburg side was ultimately unable to upend a 0-2 deficit inherited from the first clash in Switzerland the week prior.
Zenit put in a battling performance from start to finish, and took confident control of the match after Axel Witsel’s goal at the half hour mark, sparking hopes of a comeback in the scenario of another goal, which would put the aggregate score at 2-2. A red card to Basel midfielder Marcelo Diaz just before half-time further enlivened the home stadium and players, and the shots rained in during a frenetic second half that become increasingly desperate as the clock ticked towards elimination.
Zenit’s Miguel Danny fired over when clear on goal, Vladimir Bystrov hit the bar, and Hulk fizzed a long-range shot inches wide. The moment of truth, however, came in the 86th minute, when a penalty awarded against Basel brought a thousands-strong sigh of relief around the stadium. The chance was ultimately squandered, however,as team captain Roman Shirokov’s shot straight down the middle was deflected by Basel’s goalkeeper Yann Sommer.
While the 1-0 victory brought an end to Zenit’s recent series of three straight defeats, a first under Italian coach Luciano Spalletti, the two-time Russian championship winning coach was visibly dejected at the post-match press conference when analyzing the performance.
“We left the Europa League today, but the team showed that we really have a strong group of players, capable of achieving significant results. But the feeling of defeat blocks out all other emotions and thoughts,” he said.
Despite speculation about the future of the coach as head of the team, the club issued a statement of “full support” for the Italian before the game, and a statement followed the defeat from Gazprom head and Zenit sponsor Alexei Miller, who cited a poem by Italian Noble Prize-winning poet Eugenio Montale in an expression of personal support.
Spalletti’s men followed up on their performance in Sunday’s 1-0 home victory against FC Mordovia Saransk in the Russian Premier League, as the team shifts their sights towards retaining their domestic crown.
TITLE: Commission to Assess Gudkov’s U.S. Visit
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Kravtsova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Four State Duma deputies asked the assembly’s ethics commission on Friday to evaluate former Just Russia Deputy Dmitry Gudkov’s speech that he gave at a Freedom House forum in the United States this month.
In his speech, Gudkov spoke out against repressive Russian state policy, supported the Magnitsky Act and asked the U.S. to help President Vladimir Putin to battle corruption within Russia, which Duma deputies considered a call for intervention in Russia’s internal affairs.
“Dmitry Gudkov’s actions demonstrate his defying the requirements set for members of the Russian parliament, ignoring his deputy duties and betraying national interests,” Duma Vice Speaker Sergei Zheleznyak told reporters on Friday.
Human rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva and Mikhail Kasyanov, co-chairman of the Republican Party — People’s Freedom Party, also spoke at the forum, where the main topic of discussion was how to stop corruption within the Russian government.
Gudkov said the request might mean an attempt to kick him out of the Duma. The acting head of the ethics commission, Andrei Andreyev, told RIA-Novosti that he could not predict the commission’s decision, but hinted at disciplinary measures, such as being denied the right to address the lower house of parliament for a period of time.
Zheleznyak, who initiated the request, initially announced that all four Duma factions had signed it. But the Communist and Just Russia parties later said they had not made any requests about Gudkov.
“I am the head of the faction, and I don’t know anything about the request. I didn’t sign it,” Just Russia leader Sergei Mironov said in comments carried by Interfax.
But the signatures of one Just Russia member, Svetlana Goryacheva, as well as one Communist, Oleg Denisenko, are indeed on the request. Igor Lebedev of the Liberal Democratic Party was also among those who signed it.
“I want to hear the official position of the dedicated commission, so it would be not faction or party assessment, but an assessment of the Russian parliament. After the ethics commission, the whole house will vote for it,” Zheleznyak told RIA-Novosti.
A hearing of the ethics commission will take place on March 20. “On Wednesday, the ethics commission will consider me. I haven’t been invited yet but am going to visit it,” Dmitry Gudkov wrote on his Twitter blog on Friday.
At a news conference on Thursday, Gudkov said the main goal of his trip to the U.S. was to visit American families that had adopted Russian children.
“I wanted to find out whether Americans indeed eat our children,” he joked.
Gudkov was one of a few deputies who voted against Russia’s ban on U.S. adoptions. Gudkov and his father, Gennady, were expelled from the Just Russia party on Wednesday for being members of the opposition’s Coordination Council.
Some observers said the real reason for the dismissals was Gudkov’s U.S. visit.
“The thing is not what he said, but that he did that in the U.S. when there are tensions in U.S.-Russian relations, and the fact that he communicated with American officials pretty much was perceived as a provocation,” said Maria Lipman of the Carnegie Moscow Center.
Experts did not exclude that eventually the younger Gudkov would be kicked out of the Duma — his father was kicked out last year — and that such a fate might await a Gudkov ally in the protest movement Ilya Ponomaryov, who said he would suspend his activity in A Just Russia after the Gudkovs were ousted.
“The situation when people from the opposition use deputy immunity doesn’t serve the Duma’s interests,” Lipman said.
Dmitry Gudkov has participated in the protest movement since December 2011 and not once has he said the Duma should be disbanded.
“The State Duma has turned into a rubber-stamp parliament, a ‘mad printer’ as we call it. It passes harsh anti-constitutional laws enforcing punishment for protest activist,” Gudkov said in his Freedom House speech, which he published on his LiveJournal blog.
Upon the request of A Just Russia’s Nikolai Levichev, a linguistic analysis of Gudkov’s speech was conducted.
The undisclosed author of the analysis asserted that the speech was written by a native speaker, which spawned allegations that it had been prepared by the U.S. for propaganda purposes.
However, at the forum, Gudkov apologized for having a poor knowledge of English. He later said he prepared the speech on the way to the U.S. and only an adviser helped him write it.
“Gudkov always says more or less the same things,” said Gleb Pavlovsky, a political analyst and former Kremlin insider. “They just want to introduce a new censorship measure for deputies’ speeches and actions, which is illegal.”
Pavlovsky said Gudkov’s potential expulsion from the Duma would fully depend on the Kremlin.
On Thursday, A Just Russia conducted a meeting with representatives of the presidential administration, including its first deputy head, Vyacheslav Volodin. Levichev told RIA-Novosti that the meeting was “friendly and fiduciary.”
“It was decided to find fault with Gudkov, the U.S. visit became just a good reason,” Pavlovsky said. “It’s obvious that Gudkov is a target; the question is what means the Kremlin will choose to hit it.”
TITLE: Deputy’s Threats Against Newspaper Trigger Fierce Internet Dispute
AUTHOR: By Oleg Sukhov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — State Duma Deputy Andrei Isayev on Friday appeared to threaten Moskovsky Komsomolets staff, coming under fire from journalists and activists and triggering a scandal in the blogosphere.
The presumed threats came after the daily published an article criticizing several female deputies of the parliament’s lower house. Pavel Gusev, Moskovsky Komsomolets’ owner and editor-in-chief, said he would file a complaint with the Prosecutor General’s Office against Isayev in an effort to “protect our newspaper’s journalists.”
“A tabloid has organized a filthy, mean, dirty attack on three female deputies,” Isayev tweeted in a post that went viral. “The villains who did that must know: We won’t forget and won’t forgive!”
“You small scum, relax. We don’t care about you,” Isayev wrote in another Twitter post, apparently referring to opposition-minded commentators. “But there will be a severe retaliation against the editor and author.”
Gusev said he was surprised with Isayev’s reaction.
“A top United Russia official’s hysteria and agony testify to that party’s approaching demise,” Gusev said.
“Rebar?” journalist Oleg Kashin quipped in a response to Isayev’s tweets, referring to the reinforced steel rod that the then-Kommersant reporter was allegedly beaten with in 2010. At the time, Kashin said he suspected Kremlin-connected officials of organizing the attack.
The Moskovsky Komsomolets article, titled “Political Prostitution Changes Its Gender,” features three female United Russia deputies — Irina Yarovaya, Olga Batalina and Yekaterina Lakhova — and accuses them of frequently changing their political position to please the Kremlin.
Both Isayev and Yarovaya have been at the center of high-profile scandals reportedly involving property violations.
Isayev has been recently criticized for failing to declare a hotel that his wife owns in Germany. He said in March that his wife was prepared to sell the hotel.
Meanwhile, a scathing expose published in the New Times magazine earlier this month claimed that Yarovaya, head of the State Duma’s Anti-Corruption and Security Committee, had failed to declare a multimillion-dollar apartment allegedly owned by her daughter.
TITLE: Twitter Agrees to Cooperate With Russian Blacklist
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The popular microblogging site Twitter has agreed to block access to accounts or posts that have been blacklisted by Russia’s Federal Service for Supervision in Telecommunications, Information Technology and Mass Communications, a statement posted on the watchdog’s website said last Friday.
Since early March, the administration of the microblogging site has “actively been engaged in cooperation” with the information watchdog, already deleting one user’s account and restricting access in Russia to “five information materials” at the request of the information watchdog, the statement said.
“Two of the materials, according to experts’ conclusions, [were restricted] for assisting the distribution of narcotics, and three others — for promoting suicidal thoughts.
Another account was deleted for advertising a network for the distribution of drugs. The service was notified of this today,” the statement said.
The statement also noted that negotiations had been under way with the social platform for some time now, but were complicated by the social network’s “management’s lack of practice in interacting with foreign authorities in respect of removing or restricting illegal content.”
According to Izvestia, the negotiations began last November, immediately after a controversial law prohibiting the distribution of certain materials was passed to protect children.
“The management’s constructive attitude has now allowed us to formulate a mutually acceptable scheme for interaction, allowing for the further processing of information from the register in acceptable terms for the Russian side,” the watchdog’s press service said.
The microblogging site identifies Russian users by IP address and restricts access for those users to materials contained on the watchdog’s blacklist.
TITLE: U.S. Scraps Part of Its Missile Defense Shield
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: WASHINGTON — Newly appointed U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the U.S. will scrap part of its European missile defense shield, which has faced major Russian opposition.
The U.S. intends to cancel the fourth phase of the missile defense system, which can in theory shoot down some Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles. The first three phases, which target medium- and short-range missiles, will remain intact.
Hagel, who made his announcement at a Pentagon news conference Friday, said that instead of deploying SM-3 IIB land-based missiles in Poland, the U.S. will put 14 ground-based interceptors (GBIs) in Alaska by 2017.
The cost of the new deployment will amount to $1 billion, The Associated Press reported, citing U.S. Officials. U.S. authorities also said no interceptors would be deployed to Romania, another planned site.
Hagel said the decision was made due to military funding cuts and the potential threat from North Korea. The totalitarian country has announced recently that it had cancelled a peace treaty with South Korea, a U.S. ally.
Hagel said that, by deploying additional interceptors in Alaska, the U.S. “will be able to add protection against missiles from Iran sooner while also providing additional protection against the North Korean threat,” the BBC reported.
A U.S. official told Itar-Tass on Sunday that the U.S. had informed Russia about its missile defense plans after Hagel’s announcement. He spoke on condition of anonymity.
Meanwhile, Pentagon spokesman George Little told The New York Times on Saturday that Hagel’s announcement was “in no way about Russia.”
The deployment of the missile defense shield in Europe has been opposed by the Kremlin, which has seen it as a potential threat against its nuclear forces. Moscow called on the United States to provide written guarantees that the shield is not aimed against Russia.
President Vladimir Putin said in December that the European missile shield would render the Russian nuclear potential useless, which would upset the global strategic balance. In 2011 then-President Dmitry Medvedev said Russia could deploy Iskander missiles to the Kaliningrad region as a response to the U.S. plans.
The U.S. had argued that the shield was aimed against a possible missile threat from Iran. In March 2012, Ellen Tauscher, a State Department official, shared some information with Russia on European missile defense, but Russian officials called it “useless,” Kommersant reported at the time.
Poland, the country where the interceptors were to be positioned, borders Belarus, a Russian ally.
It is the second time the Obama administration has backed down on some of the U.S. missile defense plans in Europe. In 2009, the U.S. scrapped a missile defense site in Poland and a radar in the Czech Republic in favor of sea-based missile defense systems. The move was welcomed by Russia.
Tom Collina, research director at the Arms Control Association, said the intention to scrap SM-3 IIB missiles was a “win-win” situation for the United States, adding that the cancellation gave the country an opportunity to further negotiate arm reductions.
“We give up nothing since Phase 4 was not panning out anyway,” he told the AP on Friday.
But Fyodor Voitolovsky, head of North American studies at the Institute for the Global Economy and International Relations, said the situation could “open a window of opportunities” to improve U.S.-Russian relations, but would hardly lead to any new arms reductions.
“Strategic nuclear arms reductions are currently not on the agenda,” said Voitolovsky, adding that the cancellation of the fourth phase of the missile defense system was motivated primarily by the self-interest of the Americans.
Though the Kremlin has not yet reacted publicly to Hagel’s announcement, analysts said the Russian authorities were unlikely to treat it as a significant concession.
“Russia understands that the United States needs a national missile defense system. But if it is positioned in France or Germany, it won’t be a problem. The problem is that it will be close to our borders,” military expert Igor Korotchenko, head of the National Defense magazine, said Saturday.
“The Russian position on European missile defense will remain the same and I believe that neither Putin nor the chief of staff have any illusions about the U.S. plans,” Korotchenko said.
He added that the problem of the European missile defense might further complicate U.S.-Russian relations by 2020, when the shield is to be completed.
Independent political expert Georgy Bovt also said the plan to scrap the final phase of the missile defense shield can “lower the temperature” of Russia’s talks with the U.S., but the problem would remain and resurface in “the near future.”
He called the move a “tactical concession.”
“The Americans are relocating their money to a place where they see a threat,” he said, adding that it currently comes from North Korea.
Voitolovsky said the shift in the U.S. administration’s attention to North Korea, which is backed by China, was also connected with its suspicions regarding Chinese military might.
“The priorities of the U.S. security policy are shifting toward the Asia-Pacific region,” he said.
TITLE: Dancer Denies Conspiracy
AUTHOR: By Ivan Nechepurenko
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Bolshoi Theater dancer Pavel Dmitrichenko called on his friends and colleagues “not to believe anyone” about his alleged role as the mastermind of an acid attack on Bolshoi Ballet chief Sergei Filin, in what investigators say could be an attempt to soften his potential sentence.
Dmitrichenko was arrested on March 5 along with two suspected accomplices, Yury Zarutsky and Andrei Lipatov, and confessed the following day to having organized an attack on Filin. But he said he did not order the Jan. 17 attack “to the extent that it happened,” insisting that he never told anyone to throw acid on Filin’s face. In comments attributed to Dmitrichenko posted Friday on the Facebook wall of his girlfriend, fellow Bolshoi dancer Angelina Vorontsova, he said that throwing acid is not something a “true man would do” and that he would “never do that,” RIA-Novosti reported.
But, he added enigmatically, he was “obliged to agree to many things.”
Police say Dmitrichenko paid 50,000 rubles ($1,600) to his pair of accomplices. Lipatov allegedly drove Zarutsky to Filin’s apartment building to carry out the attack.
All three suspects have denied that it was a group effort.
“The three suspects did not conspire to commit the act they are being accused of,” Sergei Zhorin, Lipatov’s lawyer, said by phone.
“Dmitrichenko’s acts cannot be qualified as intentional infliction of a grave injury,” Zhorin said, and thus “the investigation will have to change the wording of the accusation.”
On Tuesday, Zarutsky said he was the sole organizer and executor of the attack. He said he did it because of personal enmity toward Filin that developed after Dmitrichenko told him about Filin’s “corrupt practices” at the theater, Izvestia reported.
Investigators have said they have evidence that the attack was in fact a coordinated effort. In an interview published Friday in Izvestia, one of the lead investigators in the case, Alexander Kuligin, said: “We have proof that there was a solid connection between the three suspects.”
Each of the three suspects faces up to 12 years in prison if found guilty of being part of an organized group that planned the attack. The maximum sentence would be eight years for an attacker acting alone.
Bolshoi administrators and artists said last week that they believed someone other than Dmitrichenko was ultimately behind the attack on Filin.
Speaking last Friday at a news conference from a clinic in Aachen, Germany, Filin said that Dmitrichenko was “among the people he suspected” and that he is ready to have a “face-to-face interrogation” with him.
Filin said he was in daily contact with his deputy at the theater by telephone and had no fear about going back to work. “As soon as I can see, I will go back and do the same work,” he said. “I am not afraid.”
Filin’s lawyer, Tatyana Stukalova, said Filin was preparing to file a suit against the suspects to compensate him for his ongoing medical treatment and all related expenses, Interfax reported.
According to Dr. Martin Hermel, a surgeon at the Aachen University Clinic, Filing could return to his job only in a few months’ time.
TITLE: Astronauts Land Safely
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KAZAKHSTAN — A Soyuz space capsule carrying an American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts landed last Saturday morning on the foggy steppes of Kazakhstan, safely returning the three men to Earth after a 144-day mission to the International Space Station.
NASA’s Kevin Ford and Russia’s Oleg Novitsky and Yevgeny Tarelkin had been scheduled to return March 15, but the landing was postponed by a day because of bad weather.
Live footage on NASA TV showed all three men smiling as they were helped out of the capsule and into reclining chairs to begin their acclimatization to Earth’s gravity after nearly five months in space.
Vladimir Popovkin, the head of the Russian space agency, described the crew as “giving off good vibes, that they are a united and friendly team,” the Interfax news agency reported.
TITLE: Local Debt Ratings Agency Downgrades U.S.
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia has begun to publish its own sovereign debt ratings in a move that is widely seen as a challenge to the grade given to Russia by U.S. rating agencies, which the Kremlin has said is not completely fair.
Domestic rating agency Expert RA issued its first sovereign debt ratings this week, with Russia receiving an A- grade – higher than its current BBB rating assigned by U.S. majors Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings.
Russia has also has the third-lowest investment grade, Baa1, from Moody’s.
“It’s already abundantly clear that the work of all three American agencies is directed toward inflating the U.S. rating and lowering ratings for emerging economies,” President Vladimir Putin’s economic advisor Sergei Glazyev, said at the presentation of the rating, Bloomberg reported.
He pointed out that Russia should stop relying on the ratings issued by the three U.S. agencies, since domestic analysts are no worse than foreign ones.
“Expert RA has analyzed the main problems of ratings, based on the example of the latest two economic crises, and offered an approach minimizing the effects of those problems on the grades,” the rating agency said on its website.
The key difference in approach is giving separate assessments to a country’s government as a borrower and its credit climate – the overall credit risk level, the agency said.
Expert RA assigned the United States an AA+ grade, below its top AAA and Aaa grades by Fitch Ratings and Moody’s, respectively. America saw its triple-A rating by Standard & Poor’s cut a notch to AA+ in 2011. Austria and Canada earned the same assessment.
The highest AAA grade was assigned by Expert RA to Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.
TITLE: Russia’s Fertile Grounds for Homophobia
AUTHOR: By Victor Davidoff
TEXT: For Vitaly Milonov, a deputy in the St. Petersburg legislature and author of the law against homosexual propaganda, his meeting with author and gay activist Stephen Fry on Thursday was, in his words, “fascinating, like contact with an alien civilization.” Milonov is probably the only regional politician in Russia with nationwide name recognition. Now, his nonstop war against Russian homosexuals has given him worldwide notoriety.
Milonov is like that broken clock that is right twice a day. His comment about an “alien civilization” is, in fact, true. Fry comes from a world where an openly gay man could be asked by the BBC to do a documentary film on homosexuals in the developing world. According to Milonov: “The authorities should think about the socially valuable population and not about the problems of perverts, like AIDS. Fighting against sodomy is an essential public health measure.”
For Milonov, the universe isn’t a comfortable place. In his version of Star Wars, the battle of good and evil is being won by evil, especially in the West. Milonov has asserted through Twitter that in Europe “sodomites have taken over the mass media. … By modern European standards a Christian family is less desirable than a sodomite colony.” He also wrote that Britain “has been destroyed by liberalism.”
But the rest of the world is also in danger. “After the death of the Great Hugo [Chavez], Americans want to execute another color revolution,” Milonov tweeted, and that “the gray smoke of fire and brimstone seeps through every crack” of the Internet.
Milonov’s world wasn’t always so black and white. He began his political career in the early 1990s as a libertarian and published books about libertarianism in St. Petersburg. Then he followed the path of the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus. Milonov had his first revelation when he was an aide to a State Duma deputy for the now-defunct Christian-Democratic Union. Apparently, Milonov had a vision that he couldn’t enter Russian politics with libertarian views so he quickly seized onto religion, first joining the Baptist Church. Shortly before Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999, Milonov had another vision and converted to the Russian Orthodox Church. As a twice born-again Christian, he was elected to the St. Petersburg legislature.
But if Apostle Paul stopped his persecution of dissidents after his revelation, Milonov got started with persecution after his. He has been the author of the virulent law against gays in St. Petersburg and gained global notoriety for trying to bring the singers Madonna and Lady Gaga to court for their performances in his home city. He thanked the prosecutor’s office for banning the child-free groups on the Internet and demanded that these “creeps be prosecuted and isolated from society.”
Given all this, it was no wonder that the Milonov-Fry summit was a meeting of representatives from different galaxies. They couldn’t even find a common language. Milonov concluded that “Stephen Fry has a very small lexicon. Throughout our conversation he just kept saying, ‘Are you serious?’”
Of course, homophobic freaks like Milonov aren’t a solely Russian phenomenon. They can be found all over the world, from Alaska to Kamchatka. The problem in Russia is that Milonov isn’t an exception. A recent poll done by the Levada Center showed that 85 percent of Russians were against single-sex marriages, and 87 percent didn’t want gay parades. But that’s good news in comparison with the rest of the survey results, in which a significant part of the population not only disapproves of gays and lesbians but wants fascist measures to be used against them. 16 percent want to isolate them from society, 22 percent want compulsory treatment for them and 5 percent want to “liquidate” them.
But Russian society’s attitude towards homosexuals is just part of its overall xenophobia. Comments on Fry’s visit on the blogosphere mentioned that he was Jewish as often as that he was gay. The blogger lelik wrote in his blog on the Moskovsky Komsomolets site: “I recently found out that 10 percent of Jews are gay. That’s why they’ve come out of the closet and gotten so bold and obnoxious. Before you couldn’t tell if someone was Jewish. But now you see them
everywhere.”
State homophobia is flourishing in this fertile soil. Using the St. Petersburg law as its model, the Duma has already passed in the first reading a draft law banning “homosexual propaganda” nationwide.
Meanwhile, the meeting with such a prominent gay activist as Fry seems to have inspired Milonov to new heights. Now he wants to prevent teenagers from attending an upcoming concert of Adam Lambert in St. Petersburg. In his letter to the prosecutor’s office, Milonov wrote that Lambert might commit “illegal acts” during his show since “he is a homosexual and flaunts it.”
So the Milonov Show is not over. Maybe Milonov agrees with Queen’s legendary soloist Freddie Mercury that “the show must go on.” Too bad for Milonov, Mercury was gay, too.
Victor Davidoff is a Moscow-based writer and journalist who follows the Russian blogosphere in his biweekly column.
TITLE: comment: Putin Could Lose Big If He Dissolves Duma
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Frolov
TEXT: Could President Vladimir Putin benefit politically by disbanding the State Duma and calling an early parliamentary election?
A recent report by Governance and Problem Analysis Center, a conservative think tank co-chaired by Putin ally and Russian Railways president Vladimir Yakunin, hints as much. It says the 2011 Duma election results were falsified with the Communist Party finishing first with 30 percent, while United Russia came in second with a paltry 21 percent.
But the upside for Putin of getting rid of this Duma may seem substantial. It would defang the opposition’s key demand of new and fair elections. It would remove the discredited group of deputies whose glaring hypocrisy and undeclared foreign luxury real estate holdings infuriate the public and undermine Putin’s authority.
In addition, disbanding the Duma would take full advantage of the new election rules according to which half the Duma will be elected in single-mandate districts, a move that will help secure an overwhelming pro-Putin majority in the Duma.
It would also undermine United Russia as a possible political base for Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and his team of “United Russia liberals.” It would also embellish Putin as a crusader against crooks and thieves. Finally, it could remold Russia’s political elite in Putin’s image by drafting Popular Front nationalists with no compromising exposure to the West.
But risks of dissolving the Duma are huge. First, this would delegitimize the entire power structure, including Putin himself, since it would mean his 2012 election would have been held under an ostensibly illegitimate political regime.
Second, a new Duma election may create a rallying point for the anti-Putin forces within the disgruntled elites to field a viable opposition ticket to shatter Putin’s dominance.
Third, sacrificing United Russia for the Popular Front could be devastating to Putin’s entire system. United Russia is an essential element in Putin’s vertical-power structure. Humiliating the United Russia elite would exponentially increase the number of people holding a grudge against Putin.
The Popular Front is a motley collection of sycophantic opportunists and anti-Western fanatics. As such, it would be impossible to transform the front into an effective party of power. More ominously, it might signal the transition to a personality-driven totalitarian regime.
This could backfire against Putin because he himself could be expendable if the elite do not consider him to be brutal enough.
It’s a dicey bet.
Vladimir Frolov is president of LEFF Group, a government relations and PR company.
TITLE: The Sound of Opening Doors
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Stockers!, a high-energy yet melodic indie rock band from Helsinki, Finland, will make its Russian debut this week with concerts in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Described as “modern rock which falls somewhere between Editors and White Lies” in their official biography, Stockers! was started in 2007 by a group of high school friends after they saw a concert in a Helsinki club together.
“It’s always nice when somebody compares you to these kinds of big bands, but I still think that we have our own style. But of course bands have always been compared to other bands, there’s nothing bad about it,” guitarist Anton Morelli said in a recent Skype interview with The St. Petersburg Times.
“Maybe I wouldn’t cite those bands because we didn’t listen to them very much, so it’s kind of funny. Like, Editors – we’re very often compared to them, but this band was never close to us.”
In their twenties now, the members were 17 or 18 when the band played its first concert in a garage at a local youth center in Laajasalo in southern Helsinki, the neighborhood where the band’s members grew up.
The gig featured five songs plus a cover version of “Get On” by Finnish rock legends Hurriganes.
“It took us one year to learn how to play instruments, get things right and be able to play some shows,” he said, adding that singer and guitarist Heikki Petrell is responsible for the band’s English lyrics, while the music is written by all the members, who also feature Eetu Dammert on bass and Tuomas Kaitanen on drums.
“We do it together,” he said. “Someone comes [up] with an idea, then we take it to our rehearsal space and just put it together, and everybody gives his own [to the] songwriting.”
According to Morelli, the band chose to sing in English because of its original interest in performing outside Finland. There are no Finnish-language versions of their songs.
“Maybe because we’re heading to international music fields, our future is not connected with Finland so much, and it’s kind of hard with Finnish words,” he said.
Having made its international live debut at Tallinn Music Week in Estonia in 2012 and done a small Baltic tour of Estonia and Latvia earlier this year, Stockers! have yet to break through internationally.
In October 2012, Stockers! released their first full-length album, “We Are the Numbers,” on the Helsinki-based Stupido label.
“We played at a Stupido Club party at Lepakkomies in Kallio, Helsinki, and we were invited by a friend of ours, who runs the club and saw us a week before at a different place,” Morelli said.
“Joose [Berglund, the head of Stupido Records] happened to be there and was excited about us and our songs, but it took about a year [for the band to get signed to the label] because there were a lot of different things going on.”
Recorded at Seawolf Studios in Suomenlinna, Helsinki, the 10-track CD contains both old songs written by the band three years ago and more recent ones written at the time of the recording sessions for the album – and includes a Polaroid photo of the band inside.
“There’s no specific concept for the album, it’s just a mixture,” Morelli said. “There are many different kinds of songs on the album. We think it’s cool that they’re not all the same and you can hear our different sources of inspiration.”
“All of us are listening to slightly different styles — maybe indie rock is a big influence and also all kinds of good music. Of old music, I like Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground very much, and old punk bands from Great Britain, Joy Division and stuff like that. Even Dusty Springfield, she’s awesome.”
What differentiates Stockers! from many other bands is simply the sound, Morelli reckoned.
“I think we have managed to create our own, recognizable sound, which is pretty hard nowadays. I think we also have this special kind of energy. I am not talking only about what you can see on stage, you know — it’s invisible. We’ve just got this certain chemistry and when we all four hit the stage it comes together. I’m not saying that it makes a difference between us and the other bands, but it is the main reason we keep doing this, for sure,” he said.
“And we have great songs, and we just play them together very well.”
According to Morelli, Finland’s own indie scene is on the rise these days.
“French Films is the biggest indie act from Finland at the moment,” he said.
“There are also a few other very interesting bands which are operating on a bit of a lower level. I’d like especially to name the one called Neat Neat. They sound a bit like Muse but are still very unique and the singer is pretty awesome. There are also a lot of small labels that have started in the past one or two years, and they’re doing very well.”
Finland’s Stockers! – who found their name “in a dictionary or something,” according to Morelli – must not be confused with the Canadian garage punk band called The Stockers.
“They actually sent us an email a few years back where they said, “Never take away the exclamation mark!”
Stockers! will perform at 8 p.m. on Friday, March 22 at Dada, 47 Gorokhovaya Ulitsa. M: Sennaya Ploshchad, Sadovaya. Tel. 983 7050.
TITLE: Talk of the Town
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg meets Las Vegas this week, and the rendezvous has a distinctly gastronomic flavor: Through March 23, the miX restaurant in St. Petersburg is hosting Bruno Riou, an exciting guest chef from Alain Ducasse’s miX in Las Vegas.
Bruno Riou, who currently works as executive chef at the miX restaurant on the top floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort’s THEhotel, has gained international recognition for the contemporary way he interprets chef Ducasse’s classic and refined cuisine.
Riou was first introduced to the art of gastronomy by his family, with his interest in the culinary arts emerging early in his life, inspired by the excitement of wild boar hunts, foraging for mushrooms and a consuming passion for gardening.
Riou has worked at several of Ducasse’s restaurants — including Spoon and Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester, both in London — and has managed a Michelin-starred team. In St. Petersburg, the chef will treat local diners to a sophisticated six-course tasting menu conceived with an eye towards reflecting the essence of Las Vegas, with its particularly American variety of flamboyant bravura.
The menu will feature Thai chicken and coconut soup, a spicy, zesty dish featuring prominent accents of lemongrass and ginger; spicy king crab salad with guacamole, cucumber and cilantro; Atlantic sea bass with celery root fondant, shellfish and parsley jus; beef tenderloin with barbecue marmalade, a buttery potato galette and stuffed piquillo peppers; a mango passion martini with warm coconut foam; and miX’s Candy Bar, served with coconut and lime sorbet.
The dishes are available both as part of the tasting menu and a la carte.
In the meantime, the Borsalino restaurant has appointed an aspiring new head chef, Tonio Greco, who had a thrilling debut at the venue designing a special menu for Valentine’s Day that included shrimp and strawberry risotto, gnocchi with cheese, walnuts and pear sauce and an array of desserts, from sorbets to Sicilian cannoli pastries to chocolate soufflé.
In the near future, Greco will introduce sugar-free desserts, gluten-free dishes and grilled seafood. Every two weeks the chef will refresh his menu based on seasonal products. He is also preparing a series of culinary master-classes for children that will be launched in the coming few months.
His current favorite dishes include Italian chickpea soup, a savory and rich Umbrian dish that takes around six hours to make; linguini with clam sauce, shrimp and zucchini; and a hefty portion of perfectly grilled squid with green vegetables and cherry tomatoes.
A native of Sicily, Greco has worked in some of Italy’s best restaurants from Palermo to Sardinia. His goal as the new chef is to bolster Borsalino’s menu with innovative takes on traditional Italian dishes, including exciting new renditions of pasta, pizza and desserts. Greco has said he will rely strongly on local produce and said that he never blends more than seven ingredients in a single dish.
TITLE: A Window on Russia
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: One of the leading experts in Russian-Dutch relations in Europe, Professor Emmanuel Waegemans, teaches Russian Literature, the History of Russia and Slavic Civilization at the respected Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.
Author of more than 200 books and articles about Russian history and literature, this scholar has devoted special attention to Peter the Great, who is featured in several of his extensively researched works. Waegemans’ expertise is valued not only in Western Europe but also in Russia, where the reforming tsar is almost openly worshipped and many people find it hard to assess Peter the Great objectively. Professor Waegemans spoke to The St. Petersburg Times about his upcoming book about Peter the Great’s second trip to the Netherlands, which is to be released later this year.
Q: What aspects of Peter the Great’s second trip to the Netherlands do you focus on in your work?
A: In my book, I not only create a detailed account of Peter the Great’s visit to Holland in 1717 but also go on to reconstruct the Russian tsar’s network of contacts, and the circle of people he was meeting on that journey. Readers will get to know the kind of Dutchmen who kept Peter the Great company, who worked for the tsar and actively promoted his ideas; the people who recruited specialists for him, who purchased guns for him, and who were on the lookout, on his behalf, for paintings by the Flemish and Dutch masters.
Q: What is the main difference between Peter the Great’s first visit to Holland, which is known as the Great Embassy, and his second trip to the country?
A: On his second trip to Holland, Peter the Great expressed a greater interest in the arts and architecture, and made more trips to palaces and parks. While gathering material for the book, I have come across a number of literary works about Peter the Great, including a few pieces of satire, as well as several odes that praised the great reformer and his initiatives aimed at bringing innovations to Russia.
The book has many illustrations. In general, I would say that I have employed a complex approach to telling the story of Peter the Great’s trip. The book covers the diplomatic aspect of the visit, and, in particular, the intricate and convoluted diplomatic games that went on at The Hague. It covers family matters, such as the birth of his son Pavel and the dramatic escape of his son Alexei; the folklore element, which is researched through studying the style of the Russian receptions that were held; the ceremonial side of such festivities, and traditions of firing shots from a cannon; and also the literary aspect. Peter the Great was featured in a number of literary works and I cover the historical and cultural sides of this very important state visit.
But I do not turn a blind eye to certain negative features and details — there was no shortage of negative opinions among Peter’s contemporaries. The book discusses the irritation with Peter in some circles of Dutch society and the espionage carried out on the tsar by Swedish and other European secret services during his stay in Holland.
As the book shows, Peter the Great felt disappointment in people whom he had once regarded as his friends.
Q: Who is your target audience?
A: Although the book is based on archive material from Belgian, Dutch, French, British and Russian sources, it is addressed to a rather wide audience — and is not at all aimed exclusively at historians. While a wealth of research has been published about the Great Embassy, no actual books are to be found about Peter the Great’s second trip to Holland in 1717.
The book follows in the footsteps of my 2007 work, “Peter the Great in Belgium” which was translated into Russian and published by the St. Petersburg publishing house Giperion. In that work, I give an account of Peter the Great’s stays in my country during his trips to and from France in April and July 1717. The new book offers a much greater store of material because I was able to dig up a wealth of recollections, commentary and discussions in connection to the second Dutch trip. I have familiarized myself with all existing sources documenting Peter the Great’s visit to Holland.
Q: How is Peter the Great regarded in the Netherlands?
A: There is still a tendency to look at Peter the Great as a pupil, an understudy. After all it was Holland that served as an example, as a model for the young, emerging Russia that had aspirations to become a great state. Therefore the Dutch are in fact very proud of the fact that Peter was studying shipbuilding and naval matters in their country.
Q: What originally sparked your interest in Peter the Great?
A: What appeals to me in Peter the Great is the fusion of the Russian character and the Westerner in him. A figure of the Enlightenment, he fought against superstition and backwardness in all forms, and sought innovations that would help his country to advance. At the same time he really was finding it impossible to accept the idea of the freedom of the individual that lies at the foundation of Western civilization. Peter was a worker and a ruler all at once. He was a stunningly multi-skilled monarch. I would find it hard to imagine his French counterpart Louis XIV building a naval ship with his own hands. It is Peter the Great who laid the foundation for Russia’s transition into the new Russia, the country that we know today.
Q: In your opinion, what are Peter the Great’s biggest achievements and failures?
A: Peter laid the foundation for the new, strong Russia that combatted Sweden’s Charles XII, who had until then been considered invincible. He built the city of St. Petersburg, and he brought innovations from the West.
Unfortunately, though, while he imported the techniques and the external sides of our culture — we did not impose them on him — he failed to see the point of Western civilization, and therefore did not bring the essence of it to Russia.
He could have introduced Russia to the principles of freedom of the individual. By contrast, his system was rooted in authoritarian rule, where one person decides everything. And this is exactly how things have continued right up to the present day.
Q: Are there any stereotypes about Peter that you would like to dispel? What are the key differences between the way Peter the Great is regarded in Russia and Western Europe?
A: I was amazed to read the results of a nationwide sociological poll that was held in Russia in the mid 2000s, where he was voted the greatest ever Russian man. I find it strange that the Russian people still regard a tyrant and a semi-barbarian as their greatest compatriot. Certainly, Peter did a lot for his country. But at times, I must admit, it is interesting to fantasize about what Russia would have become if Peter had never ascended the throne. This tsar deserves our closest attention but not our blind adoration. There are more than enough dark aspects of his biography. Why would he not leave his son Alexei in peace? Who needed that family drama? It is exactly that tragedy that caused many Dutch and European admirers of Peter to turn away from him, however great their fascination with his reforms.
TITLE: Kandinsky’s Transformations
AUTHOR: By Larisa Doctorow
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: One hundred years ago, in 1913, the work of Russian painter Vasily Kandinsky was first exhibited in Belgium at the recently-opened Georges Giroux Gallery in Brussels. It was the artist’s first experience of the Belgian capital, as well as being the first time the Belgian public had seen his art.
To commemorate that visit, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels has organized a monumental show of works by Kandinsky and his contemporaries for which the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg has provided most of the exhibits. Several important works have been loaned from other Russian museums, with Belgian, French and Swiss collections providing the remainder.
Perhaps the single most important and unexpected piece on display from outside Russia arrived just minutes before the opening. The artist’s “White Circle,” painted in 1911, and considered to be the first abstract work in the history of art, was loaned by the Tbilisi Art Museum.
Russian art is not particularly well-known in Belgium. Apart from icons and the odd work of art, there is little chance to see it in public museums. Private collections are a different matter, however, and many contain work by artists of the Russian avant-garde, alongside icons and work by contemporary Russian artists.
In 2005, the Belgian public had the opportunity to become acquainted with a wide spectrum of Russian art during Europalia, an art festival that is organized every two years in the Belgian capital. For that show the Russian Museum also loaned most of the works.
The Kandinsky exhibition currently on view has been organized chronologically, and includes work from 1901 to 1922 — the year that Kandinsky left Russia and settled in Europe, first in Germany and then in France, where he died in 1944.
Opening the exhibition, Yevgenia Petrova, Deputy Director of the Russian Museum, explained the logic behind the exhibition.
“We tried to connect the art of Kandinsky with his life and to show the reflection of his life in his paintings. Thus, a great deal of attention is devoted to the sources of the painter’s inspiration, such as folk art, the cult of shamanism and the work of his contemporaries,” she said.
Of the over 150 items on display, Kandinsky is represented by 50 works; canvases and graphic works are placed alongside the folk objects costumes, traditional musical instruments and icons that inspired him and his contemporaries.
In 1897 Kandinsky traveled to Germany and spent several years near Munich. There he founded a number of artistic societies, the most influential being The Blue Rider. At that time he was fascinated by traditional German reverse-painting on glass, which reminded him of Russian folk scenes, and he created a number of works in that style. They are well represented at the exhibition and also come from the Russian Museum.
Kandinsky’s works are also accompanied by a display of pieces by his contemporaries: Mikhail Vrubel, Nicholas Roerich, Nikolai Kul’bin, Ivan Bilibin, Natalia Goncharova, Alexej von Jawlensky, David Burliuk and his German colleagues from The Blue Rider.
Kandinsky himself was a successful attorney before he became a painter, and his work is highly intellectual. In planning the current exhibition, the curators chose to provide newcomers to Kandinsky’s art with extracts from his seminal work “Concerning the Spiritual in Art,” which was published in 1911.
To foreground this important aspect of Kandinsky’s work, visitors to the exhibition are presented with the interior of a Russian izba , a traditional Russian countryside dwelling, in which a corner was customarily decorated with icons and embroidered towels. Kandinsky considered the izba to be a spiritual space one needed to enter in order to purify the soul.
The thoughtful way in which the works in the exhibition are presented offers visitors a chance to draw parallels between the different artists, and between the objects that inspired the artist and his paintings.
The massive “St George II,” for example, is set alongside an icon of the same saint and allows viewers to see how closely Kandinsky followed the conventions of icon painting. In spite of its abstraction Kandinsky’s oil painting shows a knight, a dragon, a sword, as well as expressing the mood of the battle and the final victory.
Like his contemporaries, Kandinsky was fascinated by Russian folklore. He collected it, studied it and borrowed some of its features for his own work. Fairy-tale elements, naïveté and a luminous brightness are obvious in several of his smaller paintings. In their color scheme they resemble the decorated spinning wheels exhibited in the same gallery.
Shamanism also exerted an strong influence on Kandinsky, and the show contains an engraving in which the painter juxtaposed trees and wooden totems. This itself is juxtaposed with a vitrine containing four similar idols.
The traditional Russian musical instruments on display have been loaned by the Brussels Museum of Music Instruments, and several of the exquisite icons included in the show come from the Brussels Museum of Fine Arts.
The exhibition also contains two notable canvases, one by Kandinsky and the other by Malevich. The two painters were involved in endless dialogue and dispute. Kandinsky’s “Composition on a White Background” depicts a set of small black squares set among bright abstract forms and church towers. In its own way, it is a citation of Malevich’s “Suprematist Composition,” which is hung on the opposite side of the gallery.
One of the features that distinguished Kandinsky from Malevich is the former’s musicality. That music played an important role is obvious even from the titles of the works, which often include the terms “fugue,” “composition” and “improvisation.” This very feature brought him into contact with the composer Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg was also a very earnest painter and the two shared similar concerns. Four canvases by Schoenberg give viewers a chance to see how the composer tried to turn music into color and form.
Kandinsky frequently sought to express spirituality in his canvases through line, shape and color but without reference to physical objects. Because of this, visitors to the exhibition are invited by the artist to enter the universe that he created, and to negotiate a relationship with the works that is highly personal and intimate.
‘Kandinsky and Russia’ runs through June 30 at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels, Belgium.
TITLE: Picturing Emotion
AUTHOR: By Tatyana Sochiva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Anew film festival that opened last week at the city’s Erarta Museum and Gallery of Contemporary Art is aiming to draw audiences’ attention to what is generally considered to be cinema’s ancestral art form — painting.
The first E(rarta)Motion Pictures festival, which opened March 15, is dedicated to short films about painting and features work by filmmakers from Russia and abroad.
The organizers of the festival, which is possibly the first of its kind, hope to boost public interest in painting and popularize the fusion of different art genres and interaction between art forms.
“Now it’s hard to say where the idea for the festival came from,” said Denis Rubin, Erarta’s director of programming.
“We have a very active program that is associated not only with painting, but also with the other arts. Many concerts, performances and film screenings take place at the Erarta Museum,” he said.
“In addition we also create our own projects and festivals. At present, the idea for the festival seems perfectly obvious. The museum has a large collec collection of paintings; therefore it’s only fitting that we should create a festival devoted to the subject. And the fact that Erarta is an international project [with branches in New York, London, Zurich and Hong Kong] has affected our desire to position ourselves on the world stage and attract foreigners,” he said.
As a result, both Russian and foreign short films by veteran filmmakers and newcomers alike will be presented at the festival. Nearly 200 films about artists, paintings and galleries were submitted to the festival’s selectio committee, which watched them all and prepared the long-list of 48 films to be submitted to the public.
“Just like contemporary painting, the films are all very different. On the one hand, the world of contemporary painting requires new techniques; on the other, it also employs the traditions of the past. Thus we have films about modern artists and their outrageous works as well as about traditional painters,” Rubin said.
“The documentary film category contains more or less similar works. As a rule, these are the films that tell the story of a specific artist. Fictional films offer more examples of experimentation. There are even some films that are difficult to classify,” he added.
The festival jury will select 20 works from the long-list that will then compete for prizes in two categories: documentary short films and fictional short films. It is possible that a third category will be created for animated shorts, but for the present they are included within the fictional film category.
The awards themselves take the form of miniature replicas of the sculptures “Era” and “Arta,” the originals of which stand near the entrance to the museum. Both the originals and the copies were created by St. Petersburg artist Dmitry Zhukov.
The members of the festival jury include such important cultural figures as Alexander Sokurov, who won the Golden Lion at the 68th Venice Film Festival for his film “Russian Ark”; Alexander Zagoskin, who was awarded the prestigious Golden Eagle by Russia’s Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences for best art direction for the film “Poor, Poor Paul”; Sergei Yevtushenko, a famous composer for films and a founder of the State Hermitage Museum’s Music Academy; Carmen Gray, a film critic, arts journalist and active member of FIPRESCI, the international federation of film critics; and Ari Alexander Ergis Magnusson, an Icelandic artist and filmmaker nominated for the Nordic Council Film Prize in 2005 for his film “Screaming Masterpiece.”
The jurors will not only select the winners, but will also take part in the non-juried parts of the program, which will consist of lectures and workshops as well as screenings of films about art.
Among those films scheduled to be shown are “Bridge over the Abyss” and films by the State Hermitage Museum’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, on the museum’s collections. The program also includes Magnusson’s “Screaming Masterpiece,” and “From the Planet Not the Island,” an Icelandic movie about painting.
Every evening after the screenings, contemporary electronic music artists such as Do-Re-Mi-Orchestra and Ilya Baramia will perform for festival participants and museum visitors alike.
The E(rarta) Motion Pictures festival runs through March 31 at the Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art, 2, 29- aya Liniya, Vasilyevsky Island. Tel. 324 0809. M: Vasileostrovskaya. For a full program visit motionpictures.erarta.com
TITLE: THE DISH: The Real Deal
AUTHOR: By Allison Geller
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Freeman’s is one of the more recent additions to the long list of European restaurants scattered across the city. The particular combination of cuisine served in many of these restaurants is probably unknown anywhere else in the world, least of all in Europe, and tend to be a catchall for Russian crowd-pleasers from spaghetti carbonara to cream of mushroom soup.
Located a stone’s throw from the Kazan Cathedral, at first glance Freeman’s resembles most other trendy European-style restaurants in the city — from its preciously unfinished walls to the rectangular slate dishes that seem to be appearing in the city’s fancier eateries.
But within a few minutes of sitting down, it’s evident that Freeman’s is making a quiet effort to set itself apart.
The interior is enhanced by unique touches like the Portuguese wine glasses on the tables and the framed butterfly specimens that decorate the toilets. The wait staff are warm and attentive. Details like the complimentary amuse-bouche — on this occasion, a smoked fish spread on squares of dark bread — confirm that the restaurant places the diner’s palate at the center of the experience.
The real thing that puts Freeman’s a cut above, though, is the food. The dishes, often inspired by traditional combinations, are thoughtfully conceived and executed with quality ingredients.
The foie gras with figs in port (390 rubles, $12.70) was a standout, beautifully presented on the aforementioned chalkboard-like plate. A tower of toast rounds and a mound of fig compote surrounded a slice of silky, house-made foie gras, the trio sprinkled with a few coarse grains of salt. The fig compote was a tad too sweet and threatened to overpower the foie gras, which is a shame, as its subtle flavor and buttery texture provided a much-appreciated moment of gastronomical clarity.
Another bright spot was the tuna with pesto and olive tapenade (350 rubles, $11.40). Slices of thinly-sliced, raw tuna served over a bright, basil-infused tapenade, complimented by a glass of Italian Pinot Grigio (380 rubles, $12.30), were enough to make us believe, if only for a moment, that we were somewhere sunny and far warmer than St. Petersburg.
After contemplating the dish of the day, a parmesan-crusted dorado (350 rubles, $11.40), we took the unsolicited advice of the man dining next to us, who appeared to be a frequent patron, and went with two different takes on scallops (each 350 rubles, $11.40). Comparing chef Dmitry Blinov’s distinctive uses of the same ingredient offered a glimpse of his skill and creativity.
Scallops with chunks of warm pumpkin, orange, and figs were another spot of sun on a blustery March day. The ones accompanied by a foam-like milk chocolate mousse and chestnut cream, though, edged toward the subversive. Both savory and sweet sides of the plate were thoroughly enjoyable in and of themselves, but together, such wildly divergent elements were confusing on the palate. The scallops in each dish, however, were tender and perfectly seared. Blinov clearly knows what he’s doing, and better to err on the side of daring than to churn out monotonous, uninspired dishes.
Dessert – a single, large profiterole with chocolate cream (120 rubles, $3.90) and a white chocolate cake (190 rubles, $6.20) — were pleasant, but unexceptional. The best, and most unexpected, thing about them was that they were free. Between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. on weekends, any diner who orders a starter and a main course is treated to complimentary coffee and dessert.
Other more unusual features on the Freeman’s menu include a variety of savory tidbits to start out your meal, including tapas-like bites such as artichokes, olive tapenade, and hot peppers stuffed with tuna (all 120 rubles, $3.90), and a refreshingly extensive list of nonalcoholic drinks, including house-made lemonades, mors, and smoothies (100-400 rubles, $3.25-$14.00). Additionally, any of the dishes can reportedly be made vegetarian on request.
The restaurant seems to ask its patrons to savor their dining experience, as the starters and salads are priced the same as the main courses, and are all modestly sized. Small plates, quality ingredients and original re-workings of classic dishes might just be the definition of good food. If it’s now the ideal definition of the European cuisine being served in the city, one can only hope that other restaurants will be quick to adopt it.