SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1752 (11), Wednesday, March 27, 2013
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TITLE: 6 Killed, 18 Injured in Bus Crash
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: Police say a bus crash in northwest Russia has killed six people and injured at least 18 others, including orphans returning from a field trip.
Police in the Vologda region said Thursday the crash occurred after a truck veered into the oncoming lane, hitting a bus that was carrying 31 people including 25 children returning to St. Petersburg from a field trip. Among the six killed were the drivers of the van and the bus. Fourteen of the injured were children.
TITLE: NGOs Placed Under Increased Scrutiny
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Local non-governmental organizations were targeted last week in a wave of unannounced inspections, where they were asked questions about their alleged involvement in extremist activities and ordered to present detailed documentation of their work.
The NGOs and human rights organizations condemned the inspections — conducted by teams of prosecutors, Justice Ministry officials and police — as an attempt by the Kremlin’s to further intimidate the civil society in Russia.
On Monday, the Justice Ministry said the goal of the inspections is to reveal organizations acting as “foreign agents.”
On March 19, the inspection team checked Bellona, the local branch of the Norwegian-based ecological organization. The human rights law society Peterburgskaya Egida (St. Petersburg Aegis) and the Multiregional Trade Union of Car Industry’s Workers were inspected on the following day.
On March 21, inspection groups arrived at rights organizations Citizens’ Watch and Coming Out (Vykhod), as well as the NGO Development Center, the German-Russian Exchange, the Centre for Independent Social Research, the Institute for Information Freedom Development and the offices of the LGBT film festival Side by Side.
On Monday, the inspectors arrived at St. Petersburg’s Observers, an independent elections watchdog, even though the group was not yet officially registered as an NGO, Rostbalt reported. And on Tuesday, inspections were carried out at Sodruzhestvo Foundation and Strategy Center, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and the three local offices of Memorial.
According to Olga Lenkova of the LGBT rights organization Coming Out, the inspectors referred to the St. Petersburg Prosecutor’s orders “to create a mobile group to inspect […] the NGOs for compliance with the law on extremism.”
She added that the officials who spent more than six hours at Coming Out’s offices acted more inappropriately than when checking other organizations, making “unpleasant remarks and jokes” when seeing an LGBT flag, literature and a schedule of events on the wall.
Inspections continued in Moscow on Monday, affecting the Moscow offices of Amnesty International, the human rights group which earlier condemned the wave of inspections in Friday’s statement, as well as those of For Human Rights and Public Verdict. Memorial, one of Russia’s oldest and most respected NGO, was inspected last Thursday.
According to Agora human rights organization in Moscow, 76 NGOs were subject to checks across Russia by Tuesday afternoon, with hundreds expected to follow.
The state unleashed an attack on NGOs in the wake protests against electoral fraud which took place across Russia after mass instances of rigging were exposed and published on the Internet and in media independent from the Kremlin.
The pro-Kremlin media have been demonizing the NGOs as undermining “[President Vladimir] Putin’s stability” by organizing protests on the orders of Western sponsors.
In Sept. 2012, the Kremlin ordered the Russian offices of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which helped to finance such organizations as Golos — the country’s biggest independent elections watchdog, which exposed fraud during the Duma vote and subsequent March presidential election – to be closed.
The law requiring NGOs that receive financing from outside Russia to publicly declare themselves “foreign agents” — a term that evokes Stalin-era spy mania and repressions — was hurriedly drafted soon after police shut down the March for Freedom in Moscow held on May 6, 2012 and was signed by Putin in July.
It is one of a series of law imposing restrictions on civil society, opposition and organized protests.
The media connects the inspections to a speech by Putin, who told senior officers of the Federal Security Service to focus their attention on organizations that receive foreign funding condemning them as “controlled and financed from abroad, which inevitably means serving to foreign interests.”
During inspections of at least two organizations in Moscow, investigators arrived with a television crew from the NTV television station, infamous for blatantly propagandistic programs smearing the opposition and anti-fraud protests as allegedly financed from outside Russia.
The U.S. Embassy in Moscow said on Twitter on March 21 that it was concerned over the mass inspections by the Russian government and asked them to explain what grounds they were based on, while the Russian Presidential Human Rights Council protested about “unmotivated” inspections in a letter to Prosecutor General Yury Chaika.
“The scale of the inspections is unprecedented and only serves to reinforce the menacing atmosphere for civil society,” said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch in a statement Sunday.
“The Russian authorities should end, rather than intensify, the crackdown that’s been under way for the past year.”
Prosecutors are planning to conduct selective mass inspections of a number of the 5,000 NGOs that exist in St. Petersburg during the coming 30 days, Fontanka.ru reported, citing the prosecutor’s office. The prosecutor’s office’s press office did not answer the phone when called on Monday.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Record Cold Spring
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Russia’s meteorological service has said this March has turned out to be the coldest in the last 60 years.
The European part of Russia has not experienced such cold March weather since the early 1950s, said Roman Vilfand, head of Russia’s Hydrometeorological Center.
“We registered such cold temperatures only in 1942 and the early 1950s. According to our information, such cold weather happens once in 30-40 years,” Vilfand said on the Rossia 24 news channel earlier this week.
In the past few weeks meteorologists have registered unusually low temperatures, especially in the central regions of the European part of Russia. On Sunday night, temperatures dropped to minus 20 degrees Celsius.
Owl Lives in City Park
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — An undetermined species of owl has taken up residence in St. Petersburg’s Park Pobedy, Interfax reported.
The bird has chosen to nest in one of the fir trees next to the bust of Alexei Kosygin in the park’s Heroes’ Alley. During the day it sits motionless on one of the highest branches of the tree.
The owl has been living in Park Pobedy for several weeks already and has become something of a local attraction. Passers-by stop and take pictures of the bird on their cell phones.
The majority of owls are nocturnal and many of them fly at night. The flight of owls is soundless and they can approach other sleeping birds unseen. Owls typically feed on different kinds of mice or even insects. The majority of owls live in forests.
Rifles in Gatchina
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — An exhibition consisting of just one exhibit opened at the Gatchina State Museum on Saturday. The exhibition, titled “The Rifle and The Manuscript,” features a unique rifle from the museum’s collection in which museum employees found fragments of a parchment manuscript dating back to the 14th century. The manuscript bears text from the Bible in Latin.
The rifle was made in Germany in the early 17th century, clearly for a rich client. At a later point the rifle was taken to Russia, where it found a home at Gatchina Palace.
In December 2009, the custodian of the palace’s weapons collection, Yevgeny Rodionov, who studied the rifle in detail, discovered that the inner surface of the gun’s barrel was pasted with the fragments of a manuscript with text from the Bible.
TITLE: Conflicts Escalate at Leningrad Zoo
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Yulia Vasyutina, the deputy head of the Culture Committee of the St. Petersburg administration, served as a peacemaker in a meeting between a group of angry employees of the city Zoo and its director, Irina Skiba.
Over the recent months, the zoo’s staff has been busy writing complaints to the authorities accusing the organization’s management of ill-conceived policies that are leading it astray.
While various experts are assessing the efficiency of the Zoo’s policies, Vasyutina blamed miscommunication for the escalating conflict at the company. At the meeting the official defended the management and stressed that at least part of the frustration of the zoo’s employees is due to the fact that most people are not aware of the activities of other departments, and therefore cannot make a fair judgment.
Vasyutina promised that the results of the investigation will be made public, and any mistakes or managerial lapses, if found, will be corrected.
The official also recommended that the director informs every employee about the organization’s salary system. A substantial proportion of the complaints put forward allegations that the system used to determine salaries and bonuses is unfair and unclear.
The atmosphere at the Zoo heated up in January, when some of the employees started collecting signatures on a petition calling for the termination of Skiba’s contract, after Mikhail Bogaturov, acting head of the zoo’s entomology department, accused the director of trying to dissolve his department. In his job Bogaturov is replacing his wife, Anna, who is currently on maternity leave.
The department also houses more than 70 kinds of amphibians, and Bogaturov has warned that they would die as a result of the zoo’s restructuring that will see the department merge with another section.
Skiba, in turn, confirms that the zoo needs the merger but argued that the changes will only be beneficial. “The reasons are purely financial, and indeed, we are all not interested in damaging any of our species,” Skiba said.
The new St. Petersburg Zoo, whose construction is due to start this year, will be the biggest zoo in Europe once completed.
The zoo, which will be made up of six islands inhabited by animals from different continents, is expected to open in stages. The first islands containing species from Eurasia and Southeast Asia are due to open in 2015 and 2016, the press service of Intarsia, the construction company in charge of the project, said. The zoo will accommodate approximately 310 different kinds of animals, many of which will be large species.
The new zoo will cover 288 hectares, 200 of which will be a park area that people can stroll around. The zoo is planned to be built near the Yuntolovo nature reserve and is based to a design created by Beckmann-N’Thepe, a French architectural firm.
Established in 1865, the city’s Leningrad Zoo is the oldest in Russia. Being a historic zoo, located at the heart of the city on Petrograd Side, it suffers from a devastating lack of space, with most animals being kept in unconscionable conditions. The idea of expanding the zoo and relocating it to Yuntolovo originally emerged back in 1992 but owing to a shortage of funding the plans were put off until recently.
TITLE: Petersburg Artist Dies in Bali
AUTHOR: By Allison Geller
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Leningrad-born pop artist Vladislav Mamishev-Monroe died in Bali at the age of 43. The artist drowned in a hotel pool on March 16th, but the death was only reported last Thursday.
Monroe was a leading figure of the 1980s, perestroika art scene. The artist’s often controversial works are self-portraits of a sort: he is best known for his adoption of the personas of pop culture icons, from Marilyn Monroe to the Soviet film darling Lyubov Orlova.
Monroe’s oeuvre also extended to artistic, political and historical heavy hitters from Christ to the Mona Lisa to Putin. In recent years, his artistic role was joined by that of activist, for gay rights in Russia.
Monroe, who took his pseudonym from the American movie star who was among his first subjects, looked at each work as a complete transformation into the figure he painstakingly imitated.
“First I copy the face of the person from photographs, change my clothes and stand in front of the camera… And then — click! And for a few seconds, the essence enters my body,” he told Moskovsky Komsomolets in an interview the very week of his death.
Monroe spoke to the Moscow-based newspaper while on a visit from Bali, where he had been living since 2007. He had returned to Russia to launch his latest project, a collection of images from his role as Polonius in a production of Hamlet, at the Moscow Multimedia Art Museum. The museum has announced that admission to the exhibit, part of the larger Fashion and Style in Photography festival, will now be free until the end of its run on May 26.
Monroe will be buried in St. Petersburg.
TITLE: Easter Events in St. Petersburg
AUTHOR: By Alastair Gill
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Winter may still hold the city in its snowy clutches, but while St. Petersburg’s Orthodox Christians are busy digging out recipes from their Lenten cookbooks, the city’s Catholics, Protestants, and members of other denominations of Western Christianity are preparing to celebrate Easter this weekend.
The Protestant and Catholic Churches use the Gregorian Calendar, while the Orthodox Church follows the older Julian Calendar, meaning that the two churches usually celebrate Easter separately due to the 13-day difference between the two calendars.
For the city’s Catholic community in particular, this year’s celebrations will be of special significance, following the inauguration of a new Pope in Rome earlier this month. St. Petersburg Governor Georgy Poltavchenko recently sent a letter congratulating the city’s Catholics on the election of Pope Francis.
Unsurprisingly, the majority of St. Petersburg’s believers belong to the Orthodox church, but among representatives of Western Christianity the city can count small but significant minorities of Catholics, Protestants and Lutherans, among others.
Though not on the scale of the Orthodox Easter celebrations in the city, there are always a number of cultural and religious events organized to mark Western Christian Easter, and this weekend non-Orthodox Christians of various denominations can choose from a range of services and concerts taking place around the city.
For traditional Easter services, believers need look no further than the city’s oldest Roman Catholic church. St. Catherine’s Church, at 32-34 Nevsky Prospekt, will hold a Good Friday service at 7 p.m. on March 29, and a traditional Easter Vigil from 9 p.m. on Saturday. On Easter Sunday, mass will be given in English (9:30 a.m.), Russian (10:45 a.m., midday and 7 p.m.), Polish (1:30 p.m.) and French (5 p.m.).
Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of Lourdes, at 5 Kovensky Per. in the city center, offers a special Good Friday service beginning at 3 p.m. On Saturday, confession will be taken all day from 10 a.m. and churchgoers can bring Easter food to be blessed. Easter Vigil begins at 7 p.m.
On Easter Sunday, Mass will be celebrated (in Russian) at 8 a.m., 10 a.m., 12 p.m. and 7 p.m. The mass at 10 a.m. will be given in Polish. The church will hold a Holy Mass on Easter Monday at 7 p.m.
The city’s only Estonian church, the St. Ioann Evangelical-Lutheran Cathedral on Ul. Dekabristov, will put on a concert by the brass band of the City of Tallinn Firemen’s Society to music by Verdi, Bach and Beethoven at 2 p.m. Saturday, followed by an evening of Baroque music at 7 p.m.
The Evangelical-Lutheran Church of St. Maria, on Ul. Bolshaya Konyushennaya, offers a program of music by Bach at 6 p.m. Easter Sunday.
On the Petrograd Side, the St. Yekaterina Evangelical-Lutheran Cathedral on Bolshoi Prospekt offers a program of harpsichord and organ music by Bach and Louis Couperin on Good Friday from 7:30 p.m., while Easter Sunday sees a program of organ music by Bach, Gabriel Reinberger and François Couperin, starting at 4 p.m.
St. Petersburg may be a Russian city, but as Peter the Great’s “Window to the West,” it has had a Catholic and Protestant presence since its earliest days.
The first Catholic parish register for the city’s Catholic community dates as far back as 1710, and Peter the Great himself was the recipient of the very first Catholic baptism. The city’s churches were closed during the Soviet period but began to reopen in the early 90s.
Many of the city’s Christians will mark Easter by preparing special Easter dishes. In many countries a traditional Easter Sunday dinner consists of roast lamb, symbolizing Jesus’ sacrifice, though in the U.S., it is traditional to eat ham at Easter. In the Catholic countries of central Europe, sweet cakes are eaten on Easter, and eggs are boiled and painted as they are in Russia. Even the well-known German pretzel was also originally an Easter food, representing arms folded in prayer across a torso.
TITLE: Zenit Fan Killed in Brutal Attack
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg’s Kuibyshevsky district court has remanded Ilya Khubayev, who is suspected of having caused a fatal injury to a FC Zenit soccer fan, into pre-trial custody, the news website Fontanka.ru reported Sunday.
Yevgeny Dmitriev, known as Maresh, 28, died March 14 after three weeks in a coma following the incident on February 24.
Anton Zharuk, lawyer for the plaintiffs, said the suspect was a professional athlete and a master of martial arts. According to the plaintiffs, Dmitriev and Khubayev came into conflict after their shoulders accidentally collided in the street. Dmitriev was subsequently taken to hospital with a severe head injury. Police detained Khubayev on March 22.
Khubayev was defended by at least five lawyers at his first court appearance, who insisted that their client was not guilty and that the evidence was insubstantial. The lawyers also said that the identification of the suspect was in doubt, as the crime had been committed after dark.
Before the pre-trail hearing, about 200 soccer fans gathered in front of the court. However, after the lawyers informed the fans of the court’s decision on the arrest, the fans calmly dispersed.
Dmitriev was buried March 21. About 500 Zenit fans came to the cemetery to pay their last respects to him.
TITLE: Berezovsky’s Death, and Legacy, Scrutinized
AUTHOR: By Jonathan Earle
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — British police released a statement late Monday saying that the cause of self-exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky’s death “is consistent with hanging.”
Berezovsky, 67, was found dead on the bathroom floor in his estate near London last Saturday afternoon. Some sources have said that Berezovsky had been suffering from depression recently, apparently because of financial problems and a separation with his wife.
Nikolai Glushkov, one of Berezovsky’s oldest friends and a former deputy director of Aeroflot, said in a Guardian report published last Sunday that a scarf was found near Berezovsky’s body and that he may have been strangled. In the statement issued by the Thames Valley Police, investigators say there were no signs of violence. Toxicology and histology tests will be conducted but results will not be available for several weeks.
Berezovsky was best known for helping President Vladimir Putin attain power, though he later broke with the president and went to live in London in 2000, where he received political asylum three years later.
As the circumstances surrounding Berezovsky’s death continue to come to light, political analysts and scholars are busy scrutinizing the oligarch’s dubious career and questionable legacy.
“Is Boris Berezovsky the godfather of Russia’s godfathers? It sure looks that way,” Russian-American journalist Paul Klebnikov wrote in an article published in late 1996, the year a small group of Russian oligarchs, including Berezovsky, engineered President Boris Yeltsin’s re-election.
Berezovsky, then a billionaire businessman, objected to the portrayal, sued for defamation, and won an clarification from Forbes Russia stating that there was no evidence that Berezovsky was responsible for the killing of a prominent television journalist in 1995, “or any other murder.”
By the time Klebnikov himself was gunned down in 2004, Berezovsky had received asylum in Britain to escape a slew of white-collar court cases that he said were politically motivated, and investigators, officials and state-run media had made a habit of blaming him for crimes committed back home.
In numerous television programs and public statements, Berezovsky was shown as the embodiment of the wild 1990s. He made a fortune in part through the state’s highly corrupt privatization program and became a powerful member of Yeltsin’s inner circle and a key figure in President Vladimir Putin’s rise to power.
“The Russian government is convinced he killed Paul. It’s conceivable; he certainly was evil enough and unbalanced enough to do it. But we have seen no evidence from the Russian side,” Klebnikov’s brother, Peter, told Forbes shortly after learning of Berezovsky’s death.
Similarly, the government never charged Berezovsky with ordering the killings of Novaya Gazeta reporter Anna Politkovskaya and Chechen human rights activist Natalya Estemirova, claims made by a senior Investigative Committee official and Chechen head Ramzan Kadyrov, respectively.
More recently, Berezovsky was accused of being behind the 2006 poisoning death of former KGB agent turned Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko, as well as last year’s performance of the Pussy Riot punk band in a Moscow church. He denied both.
The sheer number of misdeeds attributed him over the years caused snickers among some onlookers. A cartoonist sketched Raskolnikov, the hero of Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” explaining to an officer that Berezovsky killed the pawnbroker and her sister.
But Berezovsky was neither a scapegoat nor a criminal — he was both, said Mark Galeotti, a professor at New York University and a leading researcher on Russian crime.
“Of course, he did not do everything of which he was accused, but to be honest he did a lot, from his cozy deals with corrupt officials and Chechen gangsters at AvtoVAZ, through to his role in the back-pocket privatization of Sibneft. Besides which, directly or indirectly, I firmly believe there was blood on his hands. I truly won’t miss him.” Galeotti wrote in an e-mail.
Berezovsky’s exact role in the 1990s may never be clear; the businessman did not leave any memoirs or personal diaries, a source close to him told Interfax on Monday.
Curiously, Berezovsky at times seemed to have enjoyed, even encouraged, the black PR.
In April 2007, for example, he told the Guardian that he was fomenting revolution in Russia. “It isn’t possible to change this regime through democratic means. There can be no change without force, pressure,” he said, earning a rebuke from the Kremlin and Britain’s foreign secretary at the time, Jack Straw.
“He thought it was better for people to say bad things about him then to say nothing at all,” analyst Vladimir Pribylovsky, head of the Panorama think tank, said by telephone.
Berezovsky thought that cultivating the image of an overseas puppet master would help him solve his problems, said Gleb Pavlovsky, a political analyst and former Kremlin insider.
“But this is evidence of the fact that he was not a communicative politician. He wanted to establish ties with people who could be useful to him, not with society,” Pavlovsky said by telephone.
Berezovsky’s financial and personal problems mounted in recent years, culminating with his losing a record $5.6 billion case against former protégé Roman Abramovich in London last year.
The battle cost him $60 million — a serious dent to his dwindling fortune — and left him emotionally scarred, Alexei Venediktov, editor-in-chief of Ekho Moskvy radio, said Saturday.
Russian officials appeared to show leniency toward the deceased, with Putin’s spokesman saying Moscow would consider allowing Berezovsky to be buried in Russia. But in other instances, it remained determined to punish him posthumously.
The Samara region government said it would continue to seek the return of 989 million rubles ($32 million) that Berezovsky and an associate owe the region, and the Prosecutor General’s Office announced that it would continue to seek the return of Berezovsky’s illegal assets, RIA-Novosti reported.
TITLE: Nationalist Zhirinovsky Re-Elected
AUTHOR: By Alexander Winning
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky was re-elected leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia on Monday, quashing speculation that he would hand over control to an anointed successor after more than two decades at the helm.
“I will be with LDPR for all eternity, forever. I will represent the party in elections as long as my candidacy is put forward,” Zhirinovsky said in a rambling speech laden with patriotic messages and anti-Western rhetoric at LDPR’s 26th party congress in Moscow.
“Unlike Boris Berezovsky, I still have a reason to live,” he said, referring to the self-exiled oligarch and prominent government critic who died in his home in southern England in unclear circumstances on Saturday.
Although LDPR delegates overwhelmingly backed their flamboyant leader as party chief at Monday’s event in Crocus City Hall, Zhirinovsky, 66, hinted that a party heavyweight could take over at LDPR’s next congress in 2017.
Zhirinovsky named his son, State Duma Vice Speaker Igor Lebedev; Smolensk region Governor Alexei Ostrovsky; Vladimir Ovsyannikov, deputy head of the party’s faction in the Duma; and LDPR lawmaker Yaroslav Nilov among potential successors.
Setting LDPR’s goals for the coming years, Zhirinovsky said the party should strive to attract young blood into its ranks and strengthen its work in the regions.
“We must rejuvenate ourselves,” he said, citing grassroots democracy as an essential tenet of LDPR’s party philosophy and angrily rebuffing rumors that Russia’s lower house could be dissolved.
“LDPR members should be patriots and love their country, we shouldn’t be jealous of foreigners. We aren’t rich in terms of the money that’s in our pockets, but we are rich with the arable land that feeds us. We have everything; they have nothing,” Zhirinovsky said.
Stepping up the anti-Western tone of his speech, Zhirinovsky said that the overriding aim of a European Union-led bailout plan for debt-ridden Cyprus was to “steal Russian money” and that critical national media including Moskovsky Komsomolets, Novaya Gazeta and Dozhd TV were paid to deceive Russian readers.
Special censure was reserved for the United States, which he accused of bringing corruption to Russia and sowing discord in Eastern Europe, and Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, whom he attacked for choosing the EU’s headquarters in Brussels for his first foreign visit.
“It pains us that we have a traitorous enemy in our native Slavic house,” Zhirinovsky, a qualified lawyer and five-time presidential candidate, said in reference to Yanukovych.
In more lighthearted comments, Zhirinovsky explained Russia’s low birth rate by the fact that Soviet authorities forced women to work “in factories wielding sledgehammers” and said Russians could take heart from the fact that Europe would suffer similarly harsh climactic conditions were the Gulf Stream to shift.
Zhirinovsky, who has headed LDPR since its creation in 1992 and co-founded the Liberal Democratic Party of the Soviet Union, steered clear of criticizing President Vladimir Putin in his speech, which lasted for more than an hour and was frequently interrupted by rapturous applause.
TITLE: Kremlin Backs Cyprus Bailout Deal
AUTHOR: By Howard Amos
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A deal between Cyprus and European lenders was backed by the Kremlin on Monday, even as top Russian officials unleashed a storm of angry rhetoric about a compulsory levy on local bank accounts included in the rescue package.
President Vladimir Putin “decided to support” the agreement between Cyprus and the European Commission, said his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov.
Russia will begin working on restructuring a 2.5 billion euro ($3.2 billion) loan given to Nicosia in 2011, Peskov added. Renegotiating the loan was a key aim of Cypriot Finance Minister Michalis Sarris when he came to Moscow for talks last week.
While Putin’s move appeared to suggest a tentative backing for the deal, other officials were deeply critical.
“They are continuing to steal what has already been stolen,” Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev told a government meeting, Interfax reported.
The phrase echoed Vladimir Lenin and continued a comparison already drawn by Medvedev between the actions of the European Union and Soviet-era expropriations of private property.
As part of Cyprus’ 10 billion euro “bail-in” hammered out in the early hours of Monday morning, depositors with over 100,000 euros in Cypriot accounts will be hit hard. The size of the loss is yet to be announced, with media reports suggesting that between 20 and 40 percent could be skimmed off.
Implementation is likely to have a disproportionately heavy impact on Russians, who are estimated to have $19 billion in Cypriot accounts.
Banks in Cyprus were closed all last week and remained shut for a public holiday Monday. As part of the deal, the country’s two biggest banks, Laiki and the Bank of Cyprus, will be restructured.
“Rescuing someone at the expense of robbing depositors is something new,” tweeted Alexei Pushkov, head of the State Duma’s International Affairs Committee. “If they ‘rescue’ like this again, all the money will pour out of Europe — and the European Union will collapse.”
Russian businesspeople also said the new plan was both thieving and hypocritical.
“Russian business has been reminded of long-forgotten Soviet times,” said Alexander Galushka, co-chairman of business lobby group Delovaya Rossia. “It kills trust in Cyprus’ financial system and Europe in general … and shows the double standards of the European Union.”
Putin last week labeled the possibility of a compulsory levy on Cypriot accounts “unjust, unprofessional and dangerous,” but his position has since appeared to soften.
Peskov, his spokesman, declined to comment to The St. Petersburg Times on whether the Cyprus deal was positive — or not.
Putin has previously called for the “de-offshorization” of the Russian economy, and Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said Wednesday that “what is happening is a good signal to those who are ready to transfer their capital to Russian jurisdiction,” RIA-Novosti reported.
Nonetheless, the deal was likely to hit relations between Russia and the European Union, according to Arkady Moshes, an expert at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs.
“I don’t think that the Russian leadership was fully prepared to see itself ignored in such a downright manner,” he said. “The Russian reaction will be negative, and the bilateral relationship will suffer.”
Another consequence of the deal between Nicosia and the “troika” of the European Commission, European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund could be the destruction of Cyprus as an offshore banking destination.
So much Russian money is traditionally channeled through the Mediterranean island that it is the biggest foreign direct investor in Russia, according to the Russian Central Bank.
European officials have suggested that a significant quantity of those flows are generated by corruption and money laundering.
Capital controls likely to be implemented by the Cypriot authorities when banks open later this week could choke off this financial relationship, according to Peter Westin, chief economist at Moscow brokerage Aton.
“If the transit role that Cyprus has been serving is jeopardized, you will have Russians looking for alternatives,” he said. “Before Cyprus had beaches and banks, but it will be left with beaches.”
Legal firms, businesses and some of Russia’s richest men are busy assessing whether they will abandon Cyprus.
Some colleagues were unimpressed by alternative offshore destinations, such as the Netherlands and Latvia, and are likely to stay in Cyprus, said Yekaterina Manskaya, an offshore expert at Cliff Legal Services, but others just want out as fast as possible.
“The word Cyprus will frighten clients,” she said.
TITLE: China Snubs U.S. at Kremlin
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky and Jonathan Earle
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — In a veiled criticism of the U.S., new Chinese President Xi Jinping has denounced foreign governments that meddle in the domestic affairs of other countries, adopting rhetoric favored by President Vladimir Putin as he wrapped up his first foreign trip in Moscow.
Xi, who underscored China’s intentions to pursue a closer strategic partnership with Russia during his two-day visit, which ended last Saturday, also oversaw the signing of 35 agreements, many of which focused on energy.
“We must respect the right of each country in the world to independently choose its path of development and oppose interference in the internal affairs of other countries,” Xi said last Saturday during a speech at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, news agencies reported.
The school, known as MGIMO, is a training ground for future diplomats and includes former Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov among its professors.
While the Chinese president did not mention any country by name, both China and Russia, permanent UN Security Council members with veto power, have opposed the influence of the U.S. and NATO and have blocked three draft resolutions on Syria.
“The Chinese-Russian relationship is among the most important bilateral relationships in the world. Not only does it correspond to our interests, but it also guarantees the world balance,” Xi said.
During his visit, Xi also met with President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. The Chinese President spent seven hours with Putin, calling their meeting “productive.” Xi described Putin as his “old, good friend” and said the decision to make Russia his first foreign visit was a sign of the “strong and special nature” of Chinese-Russian ties.
Xi and Putin affirmed their intention to champion nonintervention and multipolarity on an international level.
Both country’s presidents presided over the signing ceremony of a memorandum between Gazprom and Chinese CNPC to supply gas to China. The project, expected to start in 2018, will see Russia supply 38 billion cubic meters of gas annually, with a possibility to increase the amount up to 60 billion cubic meters, Gazprom chief Alexei Miller said.
The two sides also signed agreements to cooperate on the construction of an oil refinery in the Chinese port city of Tianjin.
Igor Sechin, chief of the state-controlled Rosneft, said the company would boost oil deliveries. “We could achieve a level of 50 million tons,” he told Rossia-24 television last Saturday, referring to annual deliveries.
Sechin said the company currently supplies 15 million tons of oil annually to China, which desperately needs energy for its growing economy.
On Friday, Rosneft signed an agreement with the Chinese Development Bank for an additional loan of $2 billion for oil exports over a 25-year period. In 2009, Rosneft received a $25 billion loan under a separate agreement with the Chinese side.
Another deal, worth $2 billion, was concluded by En+ Group, Shenhua Group and China Development Bank to develop coal resources in eastern Russia, En+ Group said Friday.
Bilateral trade rose 11.2 percent last year, hitting a record high of $88.2 billion, and Xi’s visit was accompanied by a pledge to increase trade to $100 billion by 2015 and $200 billion by 2020, a statement on the Kremlin’s website said. China is already Russia’s largest trading partner.
Russia and China, which during the Soviet times engaged in a short-lived military conflict in a border dispute over the Damansky island, now describe their relationship as strategic. Both countries have joined forces against foreign intervention in Syria’s bloody civil war and pushed for restraint in addressing Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.
TITLE: Moscow Saves $850 During Earth Hour Blackout
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Moscow saved $850 by taking part in the international Earth Hour campaign last week, City Hall said Monday.
City authorities marked Earth Hour, part of the international campaign to show awareness of and appreciation for the environment, by shutting off the lights at 90 landmark buildings in Moscow, including the Kremlin, for one hour last Saturday.
By doing so, the city saved five megawatts of electricity and 26,000 rubles ($867), Interfax reported Monday, citing City Hall.
Pavel Livinsky, spokesman for the city’s fuel and energy management department, said that “the amount [of savings] was small because Moscow already uses energy-saving technologies in city illumination, including light-emitting diodes.”
Livinsky said turning the lights off for Earth Hour was largely a symbolic gesture aimed at drawing Muscovites’ attention to ecological issues and promoting energy conservation.
Earth Hour is an international event organized by the World Wildlife Foundation and celebrated on the last Saturday of March every year since 2007.
This year, Earth Day was celebrated one week earlier because of a switch to daylight savings time at the end of March in many countries and because Holy Saturday falls on the last Saturday of the month.
About 70 Russian cities and towns took part in the event this year, RIA-Novosti reported.
TITLE: Only Connect
AUTHOR: By Chris Gordon
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: On March 14 and 15, the Mariinsky Ballet and Orchestra were basking in the sunny glow of Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, in more ways than one. The troupe was there for their U.A.E. premiere and to open the international portion of one of the region’s annual arts festivals of global significance.
“It was really spectacular, just beautiful,” said Hoda Ibrahim Al Khamis-Kanoo, the founder of the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation and the presenter of the Abu Dhabi Festival. “We had a full house, with people wanting to come in, but now the hall is becoming too small for the Mariinsky. We have to get a bigger hall. We had a number of members of our ruling family and the royal cabinet who stayed for hours and hours and hours,” she said.
In celebration of its 10th anniversary this year, the Abu Dhabi Festival presented two performances of “Homage to Fokine,” the Mariinsky’s collection of short ballets by iconic choreographer Michel Fokine. These are the works that propelled Ballets Russes legends Anna Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky into the consciousness of world ballet and revolutionized the staid, predictable world of classical ballet over the course of two Paris seasons in the early 1900s.
On the program were “Schéhérazade,” “Chopiniana,” “Le Spectre de la Rose” and “The Dying Swan,” which was revived especially for the festival.
The performances took place on the stage of the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi, which is one of the world’s most spectacular and luxurious hotels.
The appearance by the Mariinsky Ballet and Orchestra also inaugurated the start of a unique, long-term strategic partnership with the festival.
Signed in 2011 between the Mariinsky Theater’s artistic director and principal conductor Valery Gergiev and Al Khamis-Kanoo, the agreement focuses on artistic cooperation, education and cross marketing.
The partnership, which is non-committal and non-binding with no specified end date, will see the Mariinsky Ballet, Orchestra and Opera appearing at the Abu Dhabi Festival every three years and may include the co-commissioning of new work. The next performance by the Mariinsky Theater will be in 2016.
The relationship with the Mariinsky Theater deepens and extends the concerns of both Al Khamis-Kanoo and Gergiev, who are both deeply and passionately devoted to education. The Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation’s commitment to raising a new generation of Emerati citizens to embark on careers in the cultural sector means that the two organizations may choose to create internships at the Mariinsky as well as other vocational projects.
To this end, in addition to the evening performances of Fokine’s ballets, the Mariinsky also performed in the mornings for students with the hope of inspiring younger generations to become involved in the arts. The students were given the opportunity to experience firsthand the artistry of what is possibly the world’s greatest ballet company.
“All this opens doors to new innovation, to a new form of art,” said Al Khamis-Kanoo, speaking to The St. Petersburg Times at the festival.
“I also see a growing cultural industry — this did not exist before — to be a stage manager, to be a lighting engineer, to have the interest to go into the cultural industry and study all of that,” said Al Khamis-Kanoo.
The Mariinsky Theater’s appearance is not the first time that Russian performers have participated in the festival.
As a festival of firsts and gateway to the U.A.E., the Abu Dhabi Festival under Al Khamis-Kanoo has seen performances by The Bolshoi Ballet and Orchestra, the Russian National Orchestra and The St. Petersburg Philharmonic. Valery Gergiev conducted a program of Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev with the World Orchestra for Peace at the festival in 2011.
In addition to performances of Fokine’s ballets by the Mariinsky, this year’s festival also presented Joshua Bell and the Czech Philharmonic, a concert by Placido Domingo and Ana María Martínez, an appearance by Brazilian legend Gilberto Gil and a gala performance of “Poème Orientale” by the acclaimed Franco-Lebanese composer and poet Bechara El Khoury with bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, Russian soprano Victoria Yastrebova and the Czech Philharmonic conducted by Jiri Belohlavek.
TITLE: 115 Degrees of Russian History
AUTHOR: By Tatyana Sochiva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: One hundred and fifteen years ago, on March 19, 1898, the first state museum of Russian art opened its doors in St. Petersburg. Today, the State Russian Museum is a unique repository of artistic treasures. Its collection contains more than 400,000 exhibits and covers the entire history of Russian art, from the 10th to the 20th century.
At a press conference on the museum’s anniversary last week, museum director Vladimir Gusev spoke about upcoming events, restoration work at the museum buildings and, of course, paid tribute to the museum’s longevity.
“The date is not round, therefore we celebrate it not with gala events, but with work,” said Gusev.
“Today’s main achievement is the developing dynamics of the Russian Museum, and this is clearly visible in our reports. This is not due to me, it’s due to the time with which we all have coincided. We have managed to restore and develop not only the Mikhailovsky Palace, but all of this huge complex, which is located in the historical center and approaches the size of the Vatican City,” he said.
Actually, the Russian Museum is one of the largest repositories of Russian fine art in the world. The museum complex encompasses the Stroganov Palace, the Mikhailovsky (Engineer’s) Castle, the Marble Palace and the Summer Garden, which includes the Summer Palace of Peter the Great.
This year the Summer Palace marks its 300th anniversary. Nevertheless, according to Gusev, the main thing is not the occasion, but the fact that the museum has received money to fund the first phase of restoration work, which will include design estimates and expert assessment of both buildings. This phase will complete the restoration of the Summer Garden complex, following last year’s reopening of the garden to visitors after two and a half years of being closed.
Additionally, the reconstructed Stroganov Palace and the two pavilions (guardhouses) of the Mikhailovsky Castle will reopen in early summer this year.
The Virtual Russian Museum, which has no analogue either in Russia or abroad, will be located in the western pavilion. The main idea of the project is to provide the public with an interactive demonstration of the unknown aspects of the museum’s activities and artistic work. The western pavilion will offer a new level of integration with the Russian Museum and its virtual branches.
The eastern pavilion will be dedicated to a project set up by the “Artdegardiya” children’s educational and recreational complex, focused on aiding the creative development of children and teenagers through the use of fine art and modern technologies.
A new initiative titled “The Russian Museum on Wheels” is also in the pipeline. One or two buses equipped with multimedia technology will be purchased, and will travel to remote settlements in the Leningrad Oblast, where experienced scholars of art will give presentations about Russian painting to local schoolchildren.
During the press conference, Gusev noted that the museum’s work is largely organized around sponsorship programs, and exhibitions abroad are held at the expense of the foreign museums in which they take place.
“Of course, the one who pays the piper calls the tune,” said Gusev. “But we always try to present our views and knowledge about Russian art,” he added.
Upcoming exhibitions of note to look out for at the museum include “Lamps of Old Russia” and “The 400th Anniversary of the Romanovs,” which will exhibit, among other works, Grigory Ugryumov’s monumental canvas “The Summoning of Mikhail Romanov to the Throne.”
The International Chess Tournament, held in memory of chess master Alexander Alekhine, and the sixth “Imperial Gardens of Russia” international festival of park and garden art will also take place at the Russian Museum this year.
For more information visit rusmuseum.ru.
TITLE: Re-Make/Re-Model
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: There is hardly anything more boring than seeing tribute and cover bands churning out some other band’s songs trying to sound as close to the original as possible — but an annual music event called Cover Party offers listeners something completely different.
The event, where the participating groups perform versions of music written by other bands, often in an unlikely manner, is created for the joy of it, according to organizer Yana Chudit. It is also free.
This year, the event promises to be bigger than ever and is being held at the A2 club, a huge venue launched last year.
“I don’t know when the idea occurred to me, it’s been forming for rather a long time,” Chudit said.
“I’ve seen that musicians like to sing other people’s songs when at parties, everybody likes it, it’s always fun. Another reason was that I wanted to sing myself, yet I didn’t write songs. I thought, ‘It would be great, I can sing on stage and fulfill my childhood dream. It all came together.”
Hailing from Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in Russia’s Far East, the 30-year-old Chudit (real name Yana Konnova) is the person behind Yana Chudit Music Management which manages Nina Karlsson and Non Cadenza, but at Cover Party events she performs with her own Yana Chudit Band.
Cover Party was first held in 2007 at Mod club’s former location on Konyshennaya Ploshchad, with Chudit’s musician friends performing. Unexpectedly, the headliners emerged shortly before the already announced event.
“I met an American named Jarlath McGuckin in a bar, and he told me that he sings with a band named Kino Proby (screen tests) in the U.S. I asked him if that had something to do with the Russian band Kino. He said, ‘Absolutely, we sing songs by Kino.’
“It was his first local concert, with the band, at Cover Party. It was very cool to have Americans singing our songs. Everybody was very surprised, and that’s when it became clear that the idea was good.”
Chudit said that with Yana Chudit Band she mostly sings covers of the British band Moloko, adding an occasional song by Whitney Houston, Cardigans or Maroon 5.
In addition to being free, the event does not feature cover bands and is open to different music styles.
“My parties, which I now call festivals because several thousand people attend, feature bands that have a repertoire of their own,” Chudit said.
“They function and perform concerts as such, but they also sing songs by some of their favorite bands specifically for the party. Cover bands, who do it professionally, do not take part. Secondly, there is no restriction as to genre; we can hear songs by both [Russian pop diva] Alla Pugachyova and Iggy Pop on the same night. These are two main differences; there are no cover bands and there is no theme.”
According to Chudit, the local band Iamthemorning was responsible for some of Cover Party’s most unlikely covers in the past.
“They play with cellos and violins and sound a bit like Icelandic bands — very melancholic, somewhat magic, dreamlike music — but for Cover Party they chose to play, for instance, Britney Spears and the ‘Mission: Impossible’ theme,” she said.
“It was surprising that they chosen the songs in the first place but also that their versions, with violins and cellos, sounded so great.
“I am also very happy when young people, 18- or 19-year-olds, chose songs form the other generations. It’s surprising that they know and love them, and sing The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop or even Rage Against the Machine.
“I think the party has a certain educational value, because after every event I post playlists on our social networks for every band, and many people write, ‘Oh, thank you, I discovered Moloko.’”
According to Chudit, the audience is diverse, featuring older generations as well as young students.
“For instance, my parents come to the parties, not only to see their daughter, but because they like it,” she said.
“My father likes it because he can hear songs by The Beatles, who are his favorite, or The Rolling Stones and Queen. He likes to see that young people know them, as it turns out, it’s like a balm for his soul.”
Since the first event in 2007, Cover Party has grown and last year attracted more than 2,000 fans when it was held at Kosmonavt.
Free entrance is a matter of principle for the event, Chudit said, although a limited number of tickets for the VIP zone are available for as cheap as 200 rubles ($6.50).
“If we borrow other people’s work, it would be strange to make money out of it,” she said.
“It’s primarily a pleasure, for the musicians, too, because they can relax and have a rest from their own concerts.”
This week’s Cover Party will feature Vasya Vasin, Segodnyanochyu, Nina Karlsson, Auroraw, Half Dub Theory, Surtsey Sounds and the Moscow band Moremoney, among many others.
“I select bands that are professional, that play well and definitely have good taste,” Chudit said.
“I know that I won’t hear anything cheesy or some song that I would not want to hear. I don’t give any recommendations about what song they should choose — that’s up to them.
“I am doing this party, because it’s a big festival and fun too. And I want to leave a bit of this fun for me too, so I don’t ask them what they will play beforehand, so that I will be surprised as well. They have absolute carte blanche.”
Cover Party is scheduled to be held at 8 p.m. on Thursday, March 28 at A2, located at 3 Prospekt Medikov. M: Sportiv-naya, Gorkovskaya. Tel. 309 9922.
TITLE: Tallinn Rocks the Region With its Music Festivals
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Once again Tallinn is becoming a hotspot for St. Petersburg fans of rock music. With Tallinn Music Week, a three-day music industry event and festival, being held early next month, it has been announced that the legendary Soviet-era outdoor rock festival Rock Summer is to make its return to the Estonian capital this summer.
Tallinn Music Week, opening in Tallinn on April 4, will be a three day-long collection of performances from 233 bands and artists, including 164 Estonian acts, performing in all music styles and genres at 30 different music venues and locations around the city.
One of the event’s highlights is 21-year-old five-time Estonian Music Awards nominee Iiris, who will perform 34-year-old film composer Ülo Krigul’s critically acclaimed composition “Luigeluulinn” (Swan Bone City) with the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra.
A major cultural event for the Baltic country, last year’s Tallinn Music Week was opened by Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who delivered an informed speech about rock music and freedom in support of the Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot, whose members had been arrested three weeks earlier in Moscow. He concluded by dramatically putting on the “Holy Mother of God, Drive Putin Away” video, which was banned by a Moscow court as “extremist” earlier this year.
Launched in 2009, Tallinn Music Week is one of the biggest indoor festivals in the Baltic region. The mission of the festival, taking place for the fifth time, is to raise the profile of Estonian music, to enhance the international development of the local music industry and to promote Tallinn and Estonia as a cultural tourism destination.
This year, the program will be bolstered by the addition of a restaurant festival that will showcase 10 to 15 top local restaurants offering afternoon tasting menus.
Tallinn Music Week features indoor concerts in proper music clubs and concert venues, such as the cozy and artistic Von Krahl in the Old Town or the spacious and more straightforward rock-oriented two-room Rock Café, located near the Tallinn Bus Station, but also in theaters, shopping malls, bookstores, a hotel suite and the offices of Skype.
While Tallinn Music Week is held in and around Tallinn’s Old Town, Rock Summer is a stadium event, although it takes place at the Tallinn Song Festival Grounds, which were built to host traditional Estonian song festivals rather than sports events.
When Rock Summer was first held in 1988, Estonia was officially part of the U.S.S.R. and there was a direct night train from St. Petersburg’s now-defunct Varshavsky Railway Station and no border to cross. The three-day free rock festival looked like something drastically un-Soviet and apparently the closest thing to the West that a St. Petersburg fan could get to.
With “Glasnost Rock: Rock for Peace!” as its second name, the first festival, in August 1988, was headlined by Sex Pistol John Lydon’s postpunk band Public Image Limited (PiL) and drew some 190,000 people to Tallinn’s Song Festival Grounds.
The arrival of the former frontman of the Sex Pistols — the band which was the arch-scapegoat for Soviet propaganda — was a true breakthrough and cannot be overestimated. In many ways, it was a mind-opening and symbolic experience, signaling the approaching end of the Soviet regime and liberation for Estonia. Importantly, for the first time in 40 years, the festival had the previously banned Estonian national blue-black-white tricolor flag at the top of the radio tower of the Song Festival Grounds. Many small flags were in the audience.
The location is closely linked to the Singing Revolution, a commonly used name for the events that led to the restoration of the independence of the Baltic countries in 1991.
The term was coined by an Estonian activist and artist, Heinz Valk, in an article published a week after the spontaneous mass night-singing demonstrations at the Tallinn Song Festival Grounds in June 1988, two months prior to the first Rock Summer festival.
From then on, the festival ran annually until 1997 — featuring acts such as The Jesus and Mary Chain, Blur and Super Furry Animals — when the promoter went broke and the event was discontinued.
This year’s event will celebrate the 25th anniversary of that first festival, and its lineup — some of which was announced late last month — will feature John Lydon’s Public Image Limited, just as it did back in 1988.
Tallinn Music Week is held on April 4, 5 and 6 in various Tallinn venues, see www.tallinnmusicweek.ee for times and locations. Rock Summer 25 will be held at the Song Festival Grounds on June 15 and 16, see www.rocksummer.ee for more details.
TITLE: An Icon by Any Other Name
AUTHOR: By Natalya Smolentseva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The enfant terrible of the Russian art world, gallery owner and curator Marat Guelman is renowned for organizing large-scale art exhibitions which challenge established notions of art in Russia.
Now Guelman, who opened Russia’s very first private contemporary art gallery in 1990 and also founded PERMM, Russia’s first museum of contemporary art outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg, is throwing down yet another challenge to ignorance by bringing the exhibition “Icons” to St. Petersburg. The show, which attempts to engage viewers in a dialogue about art and the church, will finally open at the Tkachi gallery this Friday.
The exhibition was scheduled to open at the Rizzordi Art Foundation in October of last year but was abruptly cancelled by the curator in reaction to a request from the venue to put off the show’s opening because of what they saw as an “extremely unfavorable atmosphere” in the city.
On the eve of his second attempt to open “Icons” in St. Petersburg, Guelman spoke to The St. Petersburg Times about the new exhibition and about contemporary art in Russia.
“There are people in every city who can be called obscurantist, but in St. Petersburg they have received messages of support from power. It seems paradoxical because St. Petersburg is a cultural city, but it turns out that the image of the city is formed by people like [St. Petersburg lawmaker Vitaly] Milonov, rather than people like [cultural historian] Lev Lurie.”
People opposed to the increase and spread of knowledge may exist, but they shouldn’t be able to dictate what other people can do, thinks Guelman. And despite some people’s distaste for Guelman’s particular brand of provocation, it is Guelman who is having the last laugh, with support for some of his past exhibitions in the city coming from the Russian Museum.
“There are two reasons for these [regressive] people to be so active today,” explained Guelman. “One is a signal from Smolny and the other is connected with the Pussy Riot issue.”
Many priests oppose Guelman’s exhibition simply because he offered support for the three women who created such an uproar with their punk “performance” in Moscow’s main cathedral last year.
“I didn’t say that what they did in the cathedral was great, but I began to defend them once they were arrested because I think it was done unlawfully,” said Guelman. “But when the priests came to my exhibition in Krasnodar they said it was a ‘great exhibition.’”
The situation in St. Petersburg has changed since last October, according to Guelman. St. Petersburg’s arts community has recovered from the shock of the initial cancellation of his exhibition and the curator received invitations from several institutions to host the show, saying that if his “Icons” exhibition were not held in the city it would leave “a kind of open wound.” So the exhibition seems more important for the city and Tkachi, said Guelman, than for himself.
Speaking about drawing public attention to religious subject matter in contemporary art, Guelman noted the leading role of the mass media in the process: “Of approximately 20 exhibitions per year I only have two which may be contentious, and it seems that these are the only ones that ever capture the attention of the media, so that’s why people have an image of me as a scandalous gallerist.”
“Interest [in the subject of the exhibition] has indeed grown but it isn’t connected with Pussy Riot, rather with the increasing role of the church in our daily life. Art is a mirror and while it is perhaps a false one, it still reflects our life.”
Guelman also said there is a second, deeper reason for a religious theme to surface.
“The contemporary artist is constantly in dialogue with other artists, including artists from the past. And in Russia before the 16th century, all the art was religious, so by entering into a dialogue with art history, contemporary artists are bound to deal with religion.
“Then, when an artist enters into a dialogue with Leonardo da Vinci and makes a version of ‘The Last Supper,’ how does this concern the Russian Orthodox Church? It doesn’t – it doesn’t even concern the Gospel; it only concerns Leonardo da Vinci,” said Guelman.
Lectures and round tables to build a dialogue between contemporary art and the church will be held as part of the “Icons” exhibition.
“People who are against artists turning to religious themes seem to think that there are so-called canons that define the way in which religious art can be made. And that everything else should be disallowed. But in fact these canonical images have never existed. Before the revolution, devotional and secular art developed in tandem. Then, in the Soviet Union, religious art was forbidden and a new tradition of copying was born 20 years ago.”
“The concept of spirituality both in Russia and the wider world until the 19th century was associated with the concept of searching. The spiritual man is engaged in soul-searching – asking himself questions – and it is artists who create their own reality. Here in Russia it seems that spirituality must be something dead, and any living thing is blasphemy. To take things further, every sentence written in the Old Slavonic language is spiritual, but contemporary society’s search for, and sometimes even doubt in, faith is blasphemy. Everything has been turned on its head,” said Guelman.
At the same time, artists can often be found working with the church elsewhere in Europe. In Vienna, the Long Night of the Churches invites artists to create work within the context of devotional spaces. Meanwhile, countless houses of worship have been designed by contemporary architects, including Peter Zumthor’s Bruder Klaus Field Chapel in Switzerland. Germany’s most important living artist, Gerhard Richter, has even designed a stained-glass window for Cologne Cathedral.
Guelman thinks his exhibition can be appreciated by everybody, labelling it “very democratic.”
“In contemporary culture, the artist is not on a pedestal. He reduces the distance [between the viewer and himself] — he is an ordinary man. It can be experienced at different levels of depth: For somebody who is deeply conversant with art, the exhibition is easily apprehended, while for others it may be read casually. The language spoken by contemporary art is the same as the language of life. There are many more barriers in place in classical art. People who say that they understand Rembrandt yet do not understand contemporary art are being cunning.”
One of the problems with contemporary art is that it is not considered to be art at all by the majority of people, as it doesn’t match people’s preconceptions about what art should be. There are numerous ways in which philistines deny a work of art its legitimacy.
“There is the argument that ‘it is not art because it can not be hung on the wall,’ which comes from an understanding that art is something that has weight and depends on a wall for support, and contemporary artists definitely want to get off the wall,” said Guelman.
“There is also the ‘I could do that’ school of criticism, which seems to hover around works of art like Malevich’s “Black Square” and other abstract art.” But the fact of the matter is that it is not the paint on the canvas that is so important, but rather the idea behind it. It took a visionary to even consider making “Black Square.”
“And even to make a halfway decent copy, a special talent is required, so that argument does not work either,” explained Guelman.
“The answer to the question ‘what is art?’ can only be found by looking at art,” said the curator. “Because the era of objective criteria is long past, the very process of determining what is and isn’t art has become part of the artistic dialogue itself.”
“Icons” will run from March 29 to April 21 at Tkachi, 60 Nab. Obvodnogo Kanala, Pyotr Anisimov Factory, Tel. 922 6642. M: Ligovsky Pr., Obvodny Kanal. Daily 12-8 pm.
TITLE: Fashion by the Book
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A new book that has been published this month takes a close look at the history of Russian fashion and costume in the times of Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II.
Titled “Costume and Fashion of the Russian Empire: The Era of Nicholas II,” the volume contains around 800 rare archive photographs from private collections. Many of the images have been published here for the first time. The core of the collection belongs to the author of the book, St. Petersburg historian Olga Khoroshilova, who teaches at the St. Petersburg State University of Technology and Design.
The book embraces three decades of Russian fashion and places a strong emphasis on uniforms. While the publication gives a fair idea of the designs that were worn and favored by the members of the family of Nicholas II, the reader is also given a glimpse of a vast range of professional clothing — from military uniforms to cook’s garments to the dresses of students attending all-female schools.
“Back in the times of Nicholas II the absolute majority of Russians wore uniforms for their work,” Khoroshilova said. “This “corporate gear” gives an inkling of people’s lifestyles, social hierarchy, fashion trends and what life was like on the whole for the Russian people at that time.”
“The Russian Belle Epoque would always come to me through the images of eternal winter as rendered by the members of ‘The World of Art’ group of artists in their stage designs,” Khoroshilova wrote in the book’s preface.
Photography studios were hugely popular, and the city was home to thousands of them. Some of them, of the caliber of Karl Bulla and Boissonnas et Eggler catered to the aristocracy and wealthy merchants. The more modest and inexpensive ones served the poorer circles of society. Hundreds of elegant prints made by the photographers of these studios make up the visual foundation of Khoroshilova’s improvised encyclopedia of pre-revolutionary Russian costume.
Olga Khoroshilova recalls a chance visit to a second-hand bookshop on Liteiny Prospect back in 1990s. When admiring the ancient folios, she glanced at a stack of pale photographic prints. “The noble features of those portrayed on them and the low price persuaded me to make a purchase,” the writer remembers. The more she looked at the images, the better sense of the epoch she was getting. Little by little, the portraits began to tell the historian their silent stories.
“At first these were ordinary faces, and ordinary garments; but as I studied them — their hair styles, accessories, the photographic studios where the pictures had been taken — the most incredible metamorphosis occurred,” Khoroshilova remembers.
“It became clear why a particular gentleman was wearing a particular suit or why his tie had a certain knot. The whole human story could emerge through a meticulous and scrupulous examination of a picture.”
The book is divided into eight chapters that are devoted to specific types of costumes, from the garments worn by the members of the imperial family to military uniforms to ministerial suits.
A special chapter discusses women in uniforms. Pupils of grades 5, 6 and 7 at the Smolny Institute, which accepted only girls of noble birth, wore brown dresses. The coffee color of the dresses earned the pupils the tongue-in-cheek nickname “coffeeshki.” As the students grew older – from the 7th grade onwards – the colors of their dresses were gradually transformed into light blue, grey and, finally, white.
As Khoroshilova points out, the fashion of the time treated women like flowers. “Women were sublime, elegant and aristocratically silent; the dresses and accessories would do the talking, from the gorgeous milky pearl necklaces to lacy fans to the crisp taffeta frills,” the historian writes.
Khoroshilova has researched far more than the designs themselves. The historian offers some precious insights into the attitudes towards them. “As one witty satirical writer pointed out in the beginning of the 20th century, a foreigner living in St. Petersburg and not wearing a uniform felt slightly inferior,” Khoroshilova writes in her book.
“Regardless of their background, Russian officials of any rank adored their uniforms and awards, which defined their universe.”
As Khoroshilova’s book reveals, back in the time of Nicholas II uniforms carried much more weight than fashion trends. “Uniforms would tell you almost everything about a person — their origins, rank, social status, their level of income and personal achievements,” she said. “A uniform was like a language with hundreds of rules and exceptions and people needed to speak that language throughout their lives.”
TITLE: THE DISH: Farm-Fresh and Fashionable
AUTHOR: By Allison Geller
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: There are times when, as a foreigner, you realize that concepts that are familiar in your homeland have a distinctly translated touch when you find them in Russia. Such was the experience at CoCoCo, a recently-opened restaurant in the city center, owned by Leningrad singer Sergei Shnurov and his wife. With its emphasis on locally grown food — a familiar concept in the U.S. and elsewhere — here “eating local” means small portions of hearty, traditional dishes, liberal use of root vegetables and a lot of buckwheat.
Hearing us speak English, the servers were thrilled at the opportunity to show off their English-friendliness, deftly swapping the paper menus on our table with English versions before we had even sat down. The menu, printed on rough brown recycled-looking paper, contains notes about where the food is sourced from, with the claim that “gastronomy starts when the ingredient reigns over the recipe.” The dishes are centered on products from local farms that are a part of the Lavkalavka farmer’s co-op — for example, milk from one of 60 cows tended by Olga, which graze in open pasture.
We rang in the meal with thimbles full of vodka (100 rubles, $3.25) served with pickled cucumber and garlic and a tiny piece of toast, one of several ways the restaurant offers Russia’s favorite aperitif. For teetotalers, house-made sea buckthorn juice (100 rubles, $3.25) or lemonade (160 rubles, $5.20) offer non-alcoholic refreshment.
The appetizer portions are uncommonly generous — especially when compared to the rather petite main courses. An appetizer of holodets (270 rubles, $8.75), or jellied pork, was smartly presented as small cubes coated with fresh, grated horseradish. While aspic itself can only inspire so much excitement, the cubes are a perfect vehicle for the outstanding whole grain mustard garnish.
The highlight of the meal was the calf’s liver terrine (330 rubles, $10.70). Here, thick slices of terrine are served with rye bread, pickled red onions and a few tiny baked potatoes, with a wedge of pickle on the side. This is food that is “rustic” in the best sense of the word: Hearty food that may be provincial in origin, but is made elegant and memorable by the use of high-quality ingredients.
CoCoCo serves only wild fish. Reading the menu a little more carefully might have swayed us to order the pike, which is delivered fresh daily, but the more interesting accompaniments saw us order the cod from the Barents Sea, which we were assured was flash-frozen on board the fishing vessel (490 rubles, $15.90). The fish was served on a bed of beet and salted lemon-infused mashed potatoes, and sprinkled with dried herbs. The dish was more artistic than delicious, inspiring more conversation about what this garnish actually was than enthusiastic feasting.
Rabbit, a rare find on a Russian menu, is served at CoCoCo in a sour cream sauce with buckwheat porridge and glazed vegetables (590 rubles, $19.00). While the hindquarter verged on miniscule, the meat was juicy and perfectly cooked. A touch of smetana added to the buckwheat porridge made for a savory and satisfying main course.
We also tested the chef’s inventiveness with buckwheat with a serving of kasha and spiced pumpkin (180 rubles, $5.80). The smokiness of the kasha paired well with the roasted pumpkin, though probably wouldn’t convert anyone who isn’t already a devotee of Russia’s most beloved grain. The portion size-to-cost ratio was also laughable: Two cubes of pumpkin amounted to 60 rubles.
We skipped over the buckwheat selections when it came to dessert (in this case, hidden in puff pastry). Instead we opted for a baked persimmon (250 rubles, $8.00), which was served on a shortbread pastry crust spread with sweet, whipped cream cheese. The fruit was dressed up with a seductively crunchy, caramelized layer of sugar and surrounded by a few dots of hazelnut butter and nut halves, hitting all the right notes. Sweet enough to honor the key ingredient, not mask it, the dish exemplified the restaurant’s abiding philosophy.
It remains to be seen if local residents will soon demand all-organic produce and the first and last names of the chicken that was ground into their cutlets. Almost as unusual as the focus on local food, though, is that the wait staff at CoCoCo are eager to answer questions and actually seem to want you to like it. As much as you can mock the cozy conventions of urban “local food,” the fact is that you will probably want to like it, too.
TITLE: Enjoying Winter’s Last Hurrah in Finland
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg residents make frequent pilgrimages to nearby Finland for a number of reasons: Aesthetes visit the capital for performances by the renowned Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, the romantics spend weekends at art nouveau cottages on the outskirts of the capital, while shoppers opt for day trips to the malls of Lappeenranta. The town of Kouvola is a magnet for nature-lovers, who take long walks and go fishing all year round in this peaceful town halfway between St. Petersburg and Helsinki.
While the list of summer activities is topped by the adrenaline-pumping rides at Finland’s third-largest amusement park, Tykkimaki; the rhododendron blossom festival in June; and blueberry and mushroom picking in August, the winter pastures offer their own thrills in the form of skating on the lake and cross-country skiing through pristine landscapes.
One of the most thrilling options available is to go skating or sledging on the Kuusanlampi lake.
Special skates designed for skating on lakes can be rented at the Sportia KT-SPORT shop. The skates are essentially strap-on ice-skating blades, at least twice as long as ordinary skate blades, that are attached to regular boots. These clip-on blades have to be rented together with poles — similar to those used in skiing — and it would be very hard to maintian either balance or speed without the poles.
The picturesque lake, surrounded by woods and private cottages, makes a breathtaking location for skating. Make sure you have tested your skates at the shop: In case of problems, you would have to drive all the way back, tempering the excitement of the experience. Also, bear in mind that there are no cafes by the lake, although private catering can be arranged through the local travel company Tervarumpu, which can send its staff to the site, serve food in a tent and also assist with arranging transport to the lake and all manner of activities.
The focal point of Kouvola’s wintry fun is Mielakka, a ski resort located only two kilometers away from the railway station and the city center.
Mielakka boasts ten slopes for downhill skiers and snowboarders of different levels in addition to a tubing slope and a sledding hill.
For the snowboarders, the center has the annually refurbished Street, SuperPipe and Cross courses, which were constructed in cooperation with Finnish snowboard professionals and the local snowboard association.
St. Petersburg businesspeople use Mielakka for negotiations, which can be followed by an exciting bit of shusshing and — perhaps inevitably for Finland — a visit to the sauna.
Stocked with skis and snowboards of various calibers, Mielakka’s rental center also keeps a good number of vatrushki — tubes used for sledding reminiscent in their shape and appearance to the Russian pastry of the same name. These are kept primarily for the center’s Russian visitors. The trick with a vatrushka is that you cannot really steer it, and once you have started your descent down the hill, you have to rely purely on luck.
“Quite honestly, it has never really become clear to us what the ‘vatrushka’ thrill is about, but we respect the tastes and the habits of our Russian guests, so we made sure that we have some of these available,” said Jukka Setala, the manager of the Mielakka skiing center.
A cross-country ski track leading from the Mielakka parking lot connects with the other ski tracks around the city. “While the slopes close at 6 p.m. on weekdays and at 8 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays, the lights on the cross-country ski trails stay on until 9 p.m., leaving plenty of opportunity for people to ski after work,” Setala said.
On all of the routes the tracks are lit no less generously than park paths, and they are busy with skiers not only on weekends but also after work during the week. Cross-country skiing is hugely popular with Finns, who are not lazy when it comes to putting on their ski boots after a long day at work. Many people find skiing a much more engaging alternative to exercising in fitness centers.
Hardly any trip abroad for anyone who lives in Russia would be complete without some sort of shopping. And indeed, Kouvola’s vast shopping centers offer much better deals than are normally found in St. Petersburg.
The brand-new Veturi shopping center, which opened in September 2012, currently ranks as Finland’s sixth-largest mall, and the biggest in southeast Finland. Located within three kilometers of the center of Kouvola, Veturi is within easy reach, has more than 90 shops and a wealth of Russian-speaking staff. During the peak tourist seasons, the store’s management is considering showing films with Russian subtitles at one of the center’s cinemas.
Local artisan shops often conceal little marvels — for example, look out for the Pentik and Kymenpaviljonki store that works with local designers — while the stores on the pedestrian Manski street at the heart of the town easily covers all the basics, from clothes and shoes to kitchenware.
Very few Russian visitors to Kouvola can resist a trip to what is known as the world’s largest Prisma hypermarket. Unlike in Russia, where Prisma mainly sells food, the flagship store in Kouvola has sections with sports equipment, construction materials, electronics and fashion items. Prisma loyalty cards issued in Russia are not valid here, but all Russian catalogs have special discount coupons that can be used for purchases in Finland.
Where To Eat
• Kasarmiravintola (Barracks)
Located in the former Officers’ Club, this upscale restaurant offers good Finnish and European cuisine.
5 Paraatikenttä
FI-45100 Kouvola
Tel. +358 20 729 6782
• Restaurante Ole
One of the more expensive eateries in Kouvala, Ole is renowned for its Spanish and Mediterranean dishes.
34 Kouvolankatu
FI-45100 Kouvola
Tel. +358 05 3116961
• Fransmanni restaurant
This popular restaurant at the
Sokos Hotel Vaakuna is a favorite with city residents as well as hotel guests, serving reasonably priced local fare.
2 Hovioikeudenkatu,
FI-45100 Kouvola
Tel. +358 20 1234 651
How To Get There
The high-speed Allegro train (St. Petersburg-Helsinki) has four services per day.
A full schedule is available at:
www.poezd-allegro-train.ru/
Russian citizens require a Schengen visa.
Where To Stay
Sokos Hotel Vaakuna
A comfortable 4-star hotel located in a peaceful, green area in the heart of the city with three saunas and jacuzzis.
2 Hovioikeudenkatu, 45100 Kouvola
Tel. +358 20 1234 651
www.sokoshotels.fi
USEFUL INFORMATION
Kouvola Tourism Board website:
www.visitkouvola.fi
www.mielakka.com
www.tervarumpu.fi
www.repovesi.com
www.pentik.com
www.kymenpaviljonki.fi
www.tykkimaki.fi