SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #615 (0), Friday, October 27, 2000
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TITLE: When Is a Spy Really A Spy?
AUTHOR: By Anna Badkhen
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Travelers should be aware that in Russia certain activities, which would be normal business activities in the United States and other countries, are still either illegal under the Russian legal code or are considered suspect by the FSB. Rules governing the treatment of information remain poorly defined.


- Consular Information Sheet issued by the U.S. State Department on Oct. 4, 2000.



MOSCOW - With U.S. businessman Edmond Pope on trial in Moscow on charges of espionage, foreigners doing business here - especially technically or scientifically oriented business - have good reason to wonder what counts as spying in Russia today.


The State Department travel warning continues that engaging in "any commercial activity within the Russian military-industrial complex" is particularly risky.

"Any misunderstanding or dispute in such transactions can attract the involvement of the security services and lead to investigation or prosecution for espionage," says the warning, which was inspired by the Pope case according to State Department spokesman Christopher Lamora.

One element that makes defining spying in Russia so slippery is that the new Criminal Code gives a broad definition of the term espionage, which leaves room for misunderstanding.

The law on state secrets offers some guidance, spelling out what kind of information is off-limits. But this law allows 36 ministries and departments to compile their own lists of secret information - lists that may be classified and that have been used by the Federal Security Service to bring charges of espionage. Some of these lists have been found to contradict the law and Constitution.

"These lists may contain anything at all, and we will never know exactly what," said Yury Shmidt, a St. Petersburg-based human rights lawyer." They may contain serious information - or a brand name of sparkling water."

Even though charging an alleged spy based on classified laws violates the constitution, the provision has been violated by the Federal Security Service, or FSB.

Take, for example, the case of Alexander Nikitin, a navy captain-turned-environmentalist who was arrested in 1996 and accused of espionage and treason on the grounds that he violated secret military decrees. Nikitin was finally acquitted in December by the St. Petersburg City Court, which based its decision partly on the illegality of the secret decrees.

Pope's lawyer, Pavel Astakhov, said the charges against his client are based on two presidential decrees and a government resolution so secret that neither Pope nor his lawyers are allowed to see them.

But even in cases where secret laws are not deployed, foggy laws on classified information ensnare scientific and technological specialists in months of grueling questioning and detention by the FSB. 

In 1997, U.S. telecommunications technician Richard Bliss was accused of spying after being detained in the southern city of Rostov with a global positioning system. According to his company Qualcomm - which had been commissioned by a Russian firm to do the work - Bliss was simply setting up wireless phone systems. The FSB claimed that he was mapping military sites. 

Bliss was released after spending 10 days in detention. His partner, Rob Holt, was also detained but immediately released. 

In October 1999, the Kaluga region's FSB arrested and jailed Igor Sutyagin, a researcher with the USA and Canada Institute. The same day, FSB agents searched the apartment of Sutyagin's American colleague, Princeton University researcher Josh Handler, confiscating Handler's computer and other research materials.

Handler was advised by U.S. Embassy staff to leave the country following the search, which he did. Meanwhile, an FSB spokesman in Kaluga would only say of Sutyagin's detentions that he could not reveal the exact nature of the accusation against Sutyagin - which his supporters say was inspired by his contributions to a book on arms control. 

Also risky is environmental activity, which in this country is closely intertwined with military issues.

The arrest in the Far East of Grigory Pasko, an environmental whistle-blower like Nikitin, was followed by the 1999 FSB case against Vladimir Soifer, who researched nuclear contamination in the Pacific Ocean. Soifer stands accused of mishandling classified documents.

The harassment of environmentalists, in fact, is the de facto official Kremlin line: In an interview to Komsomolskaya Pravda last year, then-FSB director Vladimir Putin said environmental agencies should be viewed as a tool of foreign intelligence.

Both Russian and foreign observers say that to do business in Russia, neither learning the law nor heeding the state department warnings may be enough.

When asked what forms of business were most at risk from FSB harassment, U.S. Embassy spokesman Michael Hurley replied that the travel advisory is all the information the embassy had. 

"It's written in Washington and there's not much we can do to revise it," he said in a telephone interview on Thursday. 

William Cohen, president and chief counsel of the Colorado-based Center for Human Rights Advocacy, who says he has closely watched the espionage cases Russia, said people may be accused of violating rules that they have no way of knowing about. "This is the essence of the repressive system," Cohen said in an interview from Boulder, Colorado. "They may target anyone."

Shmidt, who defended Nikitin, said the articles of the 1997 Criminal Code that refer to treason and espionage are open to wide interpretation.

Under the old criminal code, espionage and treason were defined as acts that were intentionally hostile to the state undertaken to undermine its sovereignty by collaboration with a foreign state. 

The new Criminal Code defines espionage simply as "delivery as well as collection, with intention to deliver to a foreign state, a foreign organization or to their representatives of classified information." It does not state that the suspect must have had an intention to harm Russia - a provision present in most Western laws, according to Norwegian human rights lawyer Jon Gauslaa.

"If they don't prove the intention, they have no case," Gauslaa said in an interview from Oslo, Norway.

The law also does not state that the foreign organization in question must be hostile to Russia.

"This means that informing the Red Cross on Russia's military losses may be giving away a state secret," Shmidt said.

FSB officials said they could not comment Tuesday on how many espionage cases have been opened in recent years, but the number is believed to be high.

In January, FSB director Nikolai Patrushev said that in 1999 his officers had disrupted the activities of 65 professional foreign spies and prevented 30 Russian citizens from passing secrets to foreign intelligence services.

TITLE: Divers Find Note in Wreck of the Kursk
AUTHOR: By Sarah Karush
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - At least 23 sailors aboard the Kursk survived the initial explosions that caused the nuclear submarine to sink and sat waiting in the dark at the bottom of the Barents Sea, according to an officer's note revealed Thursday.


Navy commander Vladimir Kuroyedov read the note, which was found on the recovered body of Lt. Capt. Dmit ry Kolesnikov, at a meeting with widows of the Kursk sailors in Vidyayevo.

The sailors who survived the blasts evidently made their way to the end compartment, but were unable to get out through the escape hatch there. They seem to have been alive for at least several hours after the explosions.

"The time is 13:50. All the crew from the sixth, seventh and eighth compartments went over to the ninth. There are 23 people here. We made this decision as a result of an accident. None of us can get to the surface," Kuroyedov quoted the note as saying.

Government officials all the way up to President Vladimir Putin have tried to dismiss the notion that the sailors were alive and calling for help while the rescue effort was stalled.

While officials at first said crew members were tapping on the hull to signal they were alive, they later denied this. In September, Putin said those signals were made automatically by "a mechanical device" and the sailors likely died quickly.

The chief of staff of the Northern Fleet, Vice Admiral Mikhail Motsak, said in televised remarks that the 23 crew members moved into the ninth compartment at 12:58 p.m. on Aug. 12, the day the boat sank. He said the note was written between 1:34 p.m. and 3:15 p.m. 

It was not clear whether Motsak meant it was written sometime between 1:34 p.m. and 3:15 p.m. or whether Kolesnikov stopped writing at 3:15 p.m. But Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov, who heads the government commission on the Kursk, said in remarks reported by Interfax that the note was dated Aug. 12, 3:15 p.m.

This was nearly four hours after a Norwegian seismic monitoring center recorded two explosions in the area - one just before 11:30 a.m., followed by a more powerful blast 2 minutes, 15 seconds later. Russian officials have not confirmed or denied this timing.

It was unclear Thursday how much longer the sailors could have been alive.

The note offered no clues as to the cause of the accident, which has yet to be determined. 

Kuroyedov said the first part of the note is written legibly. "Evidently, the emergency lights still worked," he said. 

But later, Kolesnikov scrawled a parting note to his wife in the dark.

"On the other side, where there is a personal note the handwriting is no longer legible," Kuroyedov said. "Everything he writes, 'I am writing blindly.' The time is there 13, dot, 5, and the last number is not clear."

Kolesnikov's body is the only one identified so far. NTV showed footage of him from a video one of the sailors had taken of the Kursk. A blond 27-year-old from St. Petersburg, Kolesnikov grinned broadly for the camera.

Kolesnikov's wife, Olga, appeared in front of cameras with tears streaming down her face and said she felt "enormous pain" on hearing Thursday's news.

"I had had a feeling that my husband did not die immediately, and that was painful for me. Well, this pain turned out to be justified," she said.

Motsak said that according to the note, two or three sailors were going to try to escape through the emergency hatch in the ninth compartment.

Igor Spassky, director of the Rubin military design bureau, said the sailors should have been able to escape and it was unclear what exactly prevented them from doing so.

"As we see the crew made an attempt to get out. The process of emerging is controlled inside the compartment, but something went wrong. I think the strike was so hard, they were seriously injured, and plus the psychological pressure, they had no strength to get out," he said at a news conference in St. Petersburg.

Igor Kurdin, chairman of the St. Petersburg Submarine Seamen's Club, said in an interview on NTV that the sailors may have been unable to use the hatch because of damage to the boat.

Motsak said one possible reason they were unable to escape through the hatch is that it was flooded. When Norwegian divers opened the hatch a week later, they found it flooded.

Klebanov said that even though the sailors remained alive for several hours, there was nothing rescuers could have done to save them. 

Kolesnikov's parents had been among a group of relatives of Kursk sailors who spoke out against the recovery operation because it was too risky for the divers. Instead, they wanted to wait until the submarine could be raised, something officials have said will happen next year.

Russian and Norwegian divers have pulled four bodies from the sub so far. They entered the Kursk on Wednesday night, but operations were suspended Thursday because of a storm.



Staff writer Andrey Musatov also contributed to this report from St. Petersburg.

TITLE: Group Fights for Time To Stand Still
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The clocks go back this weekend, which for most means a luxurious extra hour in bed.


But a group of Russian biologists, astronomers and other specialists will be continuing to argue against the time change, which, they say, is damaging to people's health, impairs productivity in the workplace, increases the number of road accidents, and drives some to drink, drugs, and even suicide.

"We have supporters in other regions, and believe we deserve to be taken more seriously," said Vyacheslav Aprelev, a St. Petersburg astronomer and chairman of the Committee for the Restoration of Zone Time in Russia. Calling the current time regime a weapon of mass distraction, Aprelev estimates that at least 70,000 people prematurely die in Russia every year of the consequences, while millions of people get sick.

The committee, which was founded four years ago, says its research proves that a number of health problems are sparked by moving the clocks back in winter and forward in spring.

It believes that Russia should live by its zone time - designated by the number of hours that must be applied in order to obtain the time at the Greenwich meridian. This would synchronize local time and the natural cycles of day and night, say the idea's supporters, which would be more convenient and less distressing to the body's internal clock.

The issue is complicated by the fact that Russia actually lives an hour ahead of its zone time in winter, and consequently two hours ahead in summer when the clocks go forward again. Only eight other countries follow the same practice: France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain and Tanzania east of the meridian, and Argentina and Chile to its west.

The upshot is that people have difficulty making the summer adjustment, as they begin the working day before their bodies have fully woken up.

"In order to prepare myself for the change in time, I turn my clocks back by half an hour just before October and April," said Valentina Shaposhnikova, a senior researcher at the Lesgaft Physical Culture Academy in St. Petersburg.

Shaposhnikova, who has written a number of books and articles on the subject of chronobiology, said that the problem is particularly acute in schools and kindergartens because children found the change much harder to absorb.

"Children suffer more from lack of sleep in the morning, and in the evening it is harder for them to fall asleep as it is not dark enough," she said in an interview this week. "This results in increasing number of neuroses."

While the latter may not be much of a problem in St. Petersburg, where the short winter days and the famous White Nights in summer make everything go haywire anyway - it certainly seems to affect the rest of the country.

According to a five-year investigation published in 1999 by Vyacheslav Khasnulin, director of the Health Care Program in Siberia, time changes cause headaches, insomnia, heart defects and minor disturbances of the body's hormone system.

Khasnulin found that the problem was particularly acute when the clocks go forward in spring. Heart-attack fatalities in Siberia jumped by 75 percent in the first five days after the change, while the suicide rate went up by 66 percent.

"As doctors, we think that changing the time affects people's health negatively, as it messes around with the body's clock, a highly sensitive mechanism," said Alexei Karpiev, head of medical aid at the Health Ministry.

Karpiev, added that Russia's existing time regime - in force since 1991 - was introduced without the ministry's approval.

The matter has caught the attention of both local and national politicians.

"I do not believe that changing the clocks is a crucial influence on things like the mortality rate," said Alexander Redko, former head of the City Health Committee, in a telephone interview on Wednesday.

"Living in accordance with natural rhythms would make the body function more harmoniously, but the problem shouldn't be exaggerated. If the situation can't be changed, then one should train oneself [to adapt]."

Last year, the State Duma's Health Care Committee organized parliamentary hearings on the issue, but made little progress.

"The question [of introducing zone time in Russia] is still open, and it's definitely on our list," said committee spokesman Vladimir Usanov in a telephone interview Wednesday. 

"But it is difficult to say when exactly we will get back to it - there are more urgent problems to solve."

But Aprelev and his allies are determined to fight on.

"Our committee will send as many reports to Moscow as it takes to convince the parliament and the government [to act]," he said.

TITLE: Foreign Media Faces Pressure From State
AUTHOR: By Ana Uzelac
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The Press Ministry is pushing for legislation that would ban foreign-owned media from operating in Russia, fueling fresh fears that the government might curb press freedoms.


Speaking at a conference on information policy, Press Minister Mikhail Lesin pushed for amendments to federal legislation that would make it more difficult for Western media to operate in Russia. 

"The legislation must be corrected to meet present day requirements, gazeta.ru quotes Lesin as saying on Tuesday. 

"As regards Western media, not all legislative issues have been decided, however, as they are linked to the work of certain companies." 

A representative of the Kremlin's influential Security Council threw in his support for the draft law Monday, saying Russian-owned media should be favored by the government.

"I would try to give a Russian journalist priority in access ... to the economically important parts of the information market," Interfax quoted Anatoly Streltsov as saying Monday at a two-day media conference.

Streltsov said the status of foreign-owned media and foreign journalists in Russia should be "defined more precisely ... possibly [by] a law."

The Press Ministry's draft law, which was recently presented to the State Duma, calls for a ban on all media that are wholly or partially owned by foreigners. The bill, if it is passed, would spell an end to dozens of electronic and printed media including Radio Liberty, CTC television, MTV Russia, The St. Petersburg Times and its sister paper, The Moscow Times.

The bill is being reviewed just a month after President Vladimir Putin signed the government's controversial doctrine on information security. 

The Press Ministry has also been preparing new legal procedures for licensing foreign media, gazeta.ru reported. According to the agency, the Ministry is not satisfied with the current procedure for revoking licenses and, according to Deputy Press Minister Andrei Romanchenko, the procedure must be radically simplified. 

Foreign investors hold stakes in 38 electronic and 66 printed media in Russia, Streltsov said.

The stated goal of the doctrine is to keep the media from becoming a threat to national security.

Critics are looking at the government's actions with concern, saying the proposed media law could drive millions of dollars in investment out of Russia.

"[Streltsov's] words have little legal value, but they are a clear declaration of [the government's] intentions," said Yele na Kondybina, a legal expert at the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations.

Wholly foreign-owned Radio Liberty, which works with U.S. Congress, is equally full of trepidation.

The radio station has had run-ins with the government before, most notably when one of its correspondents, Andrei Babitsky, was detained by the government for what Radio Liberty says was his portrayal of the Chechen side of the war. 

Radio Liberty's editor-in-chief Savik Shuster said the draft law on media would probably deal a serious blow to freedom of the press and the investment climate in Russia.

"If you want to ban media because they are 100 percent foreign-owned, you can forget about investments," Shuster said. "The government is scaring foreign investors off without giving it a thought. They're just too busy consolidating their power."

However, not all foreign-owned media are worried right now.

Derk Sauer, the CEO of The St. Petersburg Times' parent company Independent Media, said he doubted the bill would ever be passed into law.

"This is all not really new," Sauer said. "The draft has been circulating around for a while, but so far it hasn't made it to an official government policy and it's extremely unlikely it ever will since it would be a huge blow to the investment climate."

Apart from The St. Petersburg Times, Independent Media publishes the Vedomosti business newspaper and about a dozen glossy magazines.

TITLE: City Puts Marshrutki Under the Gun
AUTHOR: By Andrey Musatov
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Public transport safety regulations could take half of the city's marshrutki, or minibus taxis, off the streets come January.


But according to officials, this could be with good reason - for many of the vehicles thousands of people take to get around the city may be death traps.

"In a serious car crash, they would be flattened," said Mikhail Ivanov, deputy head of vehicle registration for the Automobile Safety Inspectorate, or GIBDD, at a press conference on Tuesday. 

Unsafe vehicles being targeted include GAZ and PskovAvto models in particular.

"We understand that it's impossible to pull all those minibuses that do not satisfy safety regulations off the road in one day," Ivanov said.

"However, if we give transport companies [who operate marshrutki] a time limit to have them modified before being banned, we can influence [the situation] effectively."

"We need to make businesses ... follow all the technical safety rules," agreed Igor Fedotov, head of information at the St. Petersburg Licensing Chamber. 

Police started their assault on marshrutki in May, declaring them unsafe and taking some off the road to be inspected.

Ivanov said at least half of the minibuses that had been inspected were found wanting in the safety department.

Since then, about 21 of 230 licensed minibus firms that have been checked out have had their licenses revoked, according to the Licensing Chamber. However, the chamber said it had issued a total of 562 licenses for marshrutki operators since 1998, meaning that hard work is still to come.

Ivanov said that approved minibuses have only eight seats installed by the factories that make them.

But some firms have been buying cheaper models, and then packing up to 13 or 14 seats in them, he said.

Also included on the GIBDD list of the GAZ model's shortcomings as a public transport vehicle was the absence of emergency exits and the lack of a reinforced frame between the floor and roof. 

A separate issue raised by the head of the Licensing Chamber, Sergei Vetlugin, was the lack of ticket machines that would register ticket sales to passengers - a ruse probably employed to mislead the taxman.

Ivanov said there are three special factories in the city that can modify marshrutki to bring them up to standard, at a cost of about 19,000 rubles (about $680) each. he said it was up to operating firms to ensure this was done.

"Marshrutki drivers and firms are blaming us for being too strict," Vetlugin said. "But we issued our demands after three accidents in which 10 people were injured each time."

"I don't understand what the fuss is, if you consider that it will save people's lives" said Mikhail Denisenko, director and chief engineer at the St. Petersburg Auto Repair Factory No. 2, in an interview at the plant on Thursday.

"Have you ever seen a car in flames? Because I have, and it takes a few seconds [for it to burn]. And when I'm sitting in a marshrutka taxi with the back door blocked, I feel pretty nervous."

TITLE: Chernobyl Liquidators Protest Benefit Cuts
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW - Dozens of men who took part in the clean-up after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster marched around the Kremlin on Wednesday to protest a draft amendment to a law that they fear would cut their benefits.


Televised reports showed the haggard protesters being turned away by police from one entrance to Red Square before they were allowed to enter from the Alexander Gardens. NTV reported that the men - most of whom were incapacitated to some extent by their work at Chernobyl - walked all the way from Tula, about 170 kilometers southwest of Moscow.

Many of them dumped the medals they had been awarded for heroism at the foot of a statue of World War II hero Marshal Georgy Zhukov, just outside Red Square. The medals were awarded for agreeing to expose themselves to radiation during the clean-up effort after the disaster. According to NTV, one man suffered a mild heart attack after the long walk.

As they marched, the Duma narrowly rejected the amendment and returned it to committee for further work.

The amendment is intended to simplify a complex system for compensating people whose health was damaged by radiation exposure from Chernobyl. It would provide monthly stipends of 1,000 to 5,000 rubles ($35-$175), depending on the clean-up worker's category of disability. Pay grades under the current system reflect the workers' previous salaries, the amount of time spent in the Chernobyl zone and the degree to which they have been incapacitated.

Labor and Social Development Minister Alexander Pochinok, who met with the protesters Wednesday, told Ekho Moskvy radio that 42,000 clean-up workers would benefit from the amendment, while only 1,500 would lose out.

But the protesters don't accept that.

"They constantly want to change our law and change it for the worse," Vladimir Naumov, head of Tula's Chernobyl-Russia Union, told ORT television as he marched with some 60 Chernobyl veterans.

Chernobyl clean-up workers have staged several demonstrations recently in various regions to protest overdue benefit payments. 

Naumov's group says that the territory polluted by the Chernobyl accident includes 13 regions and over 2 million people. Of the 250,000 clean-up workers, 50,000 have become disabled and about 15,000 have died. 

- AP, Interfax

TITLE: Witness: Pope Was Not After Classified Material
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW - A Russian weapons designer testified Thursday in the espionage trial of U.S. businessman Edmond Pope that the plans Pope is accused of trying to acquire illegally were not classified, the defense lawyer said.


Pope, 54, a retired U.S. Navy officer from State College, Pennsylvania, was arrested April 3 on charges of trying to buy classified blueprints for a high-speed torpedo. Pope's supporters have said the plans were for 10-year-old technology that has already been sold abroad.

Pope's lawyer Pavel Astakhov said he called one of the top designers of the Shkval torpedo, a professor at the Moscow Aviation Institute, as a defense witness in the closed-door trial.

Arsenty Myan din testified that the plans that Pope is accused of trying to purchase were not classified. Myandin authored a report on the Shkval that Pope had given Pennsylvania State University, and he testified to the court that he had used the report's data in university lectures for 15 years, Astakhov said.

Astakhov said the testimony would help Pope's case.

Previously, Astakhov was downbeat about Pope's chances of vindication in court. He said Judge Nina Barkina had turned down dozens of defense motions.

On Wednesday, Pope suddenly decided to testify. He was initially unwilling to answer questions in court because he considers the conduct of the trial unfair, but ultimately decided his chances of conviction would be even higher if he refused, said another one of his lawyers, Andrei Andrusenko.

In court Pope denied he gathered sensitive technological information for the U.S. government after ending his career as a naval intelligence officer six years ago and said he never sought any Russian state secrets, Andrusenko said.

Pope's defense, which Andrusenko outlined Wednesday in an interview, rests mainly on the assurances he says he received from Russian partners that they would provide him only unclassified information about the Shkval torpedo. 

One of those partners, scientist Anatoly Babkin, subsequently told the Federal Security Service that Pope was a spy, according to An drusenko. Bab kin will be called to testify, but may not appear because he is sick, the lawyer said.

Pope told the court he had teamed up with Bab kin, a professor at the Bauman State Technical University, in 1996. Pope said Babkin and a top university official both told him a special commission would review the information he received to make sure no secrets were disclosed, Andrusenko said.

While working at Penn State, Pope received four reports at a cost of $28,000. A fifth report was arranged as a transaction between a company Pope established and a Russian firm in order to get around a U.S. embargo on certain technology transfers, Andrusenko said.

According to Andrusenko, Da niel Kiely, a research laboratory official at Penn State who acted as Pope's technical expert, told Pope the information in the reports was general and mostly already public. Eventually, Pope decided he could not rely on Bab kin and to limit dealings with him, the lawyer said. Pope informed Babkin of his decision April 3. That night, he was arrested, Andrusenko said. Kiely was briefly detained. 

- AP, WP

TITLE: Probe Into 1998 Crisis Names No Names to Fury of Federation Council
AUTHOR: By Yevgenia Borisova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A top prosecutor told parliament Wednesday that investigations inspired by the August 1998 financial crash had so far identified 170 Central Bank and Finance Ministry officials who appear to have played the GKO market and not paid taxes on their earnings.


Deputy Prosecutor General Vasily Kolmogorov also said "some" of those officials appear to have been involved in broad insider trading arrangements - under which they accepted money in return for well-timed hints to get out of the collapsing market in GKOs and OFZs, or Russian treasury bills.

"It is clear that some officials of the Central Bank and the Finance Ministry have received large monetary awards for what we could assume was the use of highly classified insider information," Kol mogorov told a hearing at the Federation Council, parliament's upper house. 

Kolmogorov said his office's investigations had also identified some Central Bank and Finance Ministry officials who held second jobs - and second salaries - at institutions like the Moscow Inter-Bank Currency Exchange.

But Kolmogorov declined to name names, saying that as a lawyer he felt his office needed "to find more proof" before it could consider charges against "the 170 suspects under investigation."

"We have received a zero result after two years of investigation," said Council member Vitaly Kotov, who is also chairman of the legislature of Vladimirskaya Oblast. "What we were told today does not clarify anything in terms of who was guilty in the crisis, or what was the real scale of the damage done to the country."

Legislators seemed particularly bent that the report was coming from a deputy prosecutor general: They had scheduled hearings to demand an accounting of the two-year-old investigation from Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov, but Ustinov had sent his deputy instead.

It was the upper house of parliament that first initiated the investigation. In the emotion-charged fall of 1998, as the ruble was collapsing and recriminations flying, the Council set up a temporary commission to look for criminal wrongdoing by the country's top financial officials. It also asked prosecutors to do the same.

The commission produced a 50-page preliminary report about six months later that alleged former prime minister Sergei Kiriyenko and former Central Bank chief Sergei Dubinin had abused their offices, and that former presidential envoy to the IMF Anatoly Chubais had passed confidential information about the looming crash to foreigners playing the securities market.

The commission recommended that those three, among others, be banned from future state service. It handed its findings to prosecutors and disbanded.

Today, that ban on state service would seem to affect directly only Ki ri yen ko, who is President Vladimir Pu tin's governor general for the Volga Federal District. Chubais is now head of the Unified Energy Systems power company, and Dubinin is a top official at the Gazprom natural gas monopoly.

But the allegations in the preliminary report were not well substantiated, as Federation Council members freely concede. Kiriyenko, Dubinin and Chu bais, among others, had declined at that time to talk to the Council's commission on grounds that it was pursuing a political vendetta and not an investigation. 

By handing the matter to prosecutors, lawmakers at that time said they hoped to squeeze more testimony out of top financial officials.

On Wednesday Kolmogorov spoke on this concern, albeit vaguely. He said his office had conducted "more than 50 audits" and interrogated "many officials," including Dubinin, his number two, Ser gei Alexashenko, and former finance minister Mikhail Zadornov.

He did not say whether Chubais and Kiriyenko had been questioned, and he declined to provide names of any of the 170 financial officials under investigation, saying he would only do so when the investigation concludes. He estimated that would be in mid-2001.

Not good enough, cried the Council. "We haven't seen anything," complained Kotov. "Kolmogorov has presented us with no paperwork on this matter. We don't trust them, they could take another 20 years to complete [the investigation]!"

"We haven't received a single answer to the questions raised by our [temporary] commission," said Vla di mir Fedotkin, who sat on the commission and helped prepare the report.

TITLE: 86 Dead in Army Plane Crash
AUTHOR: By Margarita Antidze
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BATUMI, Georgia - Rescue teams on Thursday picked their way through the burnt-out wreckage of a Russian military plane which ploughed into a mountain in ex-Soviet Georgia, killing more than 80 people including eight children.


The elderly Ilyushin-18, packed with officers and their families returning from holidays, crashed in flames on Wednesday night, 20 kilometers northeast of the port of Batumi, the capital of the autonomous region of Adzhara where Russia has a military base.

Russian soldiers and Georgian rescue workers at the site, which was sealed off to reporters, said the plane's wreckage was burnt out and few intact bodies had been found.

The fire caused by the crash could be seen several kilometers away. Film from the scene showed parts of the aircraft strewn over a large area. In places human limbs were entangled with twisted metal.

The crash occurred during a thunderstorm. The head of Georgia's air traffic control said radar screens showed that the plane, flying from Moscow to Batumi, had failed to change course before landing.

Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze travelled to the region and was due to visit the crash site later on Thursday, his spokesman, Kakha Imnadze, told Reuters.

Shevardnadze spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin by telephone and expressed his sorrow for relatives of the dead. The two leaders said they were ready to launch a joint investigation, Imnadze said.

The Kremlin said that Putin ordered the secretary of his influential Security Council, Sergei Ivanov, to set up a special investigation commission and told him to fly to Batumi later on Thursday.

A spokesman for Russia's Emergency Situations Ministry said 82 people including eight children and 11 crew were believed to have been on board the four-engine turboprop plane.

RIA news agency quoted air force commander Gen. Anatoly Kornukov as saying that altogether 86 people had died in the crash.

The plane flew twice a month from Moscow to Batumi, and was carrying officers and their families returning from holidays as well as some Georgians, said Temur Inaishvili, the head of Adzhara's emergencies department.

Russian soldiers, working in steady drizzle, sealed off the crash site on the 1,365-meter Mtirala mountain. Mtirala means "the weeping hill," so named because of frequent downpours in the area.

A spokesman for Georgia's air traffic control in the capital Tbilisi said that the plane's two black box flight recorders had been found, and that they would be taken to laboratories for analysis.

The Ilyushin-18 is a Soviet-era workhorse designed in 1955, capable of carrying 120 passengers. Production ceased in 1970.

Maj. Gen. Vyacheslav Borisov, the commander of the Russian base in Batumi coordinating the search effort, said that around 200 soldiers and rescuers were involved in the operation.

TITLE: Yeltsin Book Reveals Sobchak Witch-Hunt
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalyev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: In 1997, former St. Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak was facing arrest for alleged embezzlement, graft and corruption. According to his accusers, Sob chak had abused his executive privileges and filled posh addresses with his relatives and cronies.


But a passage in former president Boris Yeltsin's new book, "Presidential Marathon," while not absolving Sob chak of all guilt, nevertheless accuses the mayor's former enemies of orchestrating a witch hunt - and gives Yelt sin's own version of how former Sob chak lieutenant Vladimir Yakovlev came to power.

According to Yeltsin, the mayoral coup was arranged by Yeltsin's former confidante Alexander Korzhakov and other Moscow power brokers, who lavishly supplied Yakovlev with campaign financing, a theory supported by a handful of newspapers, including The St. Petersburg Times. 

"Moscow politicians were standing behind the gubernatorial candidate Yakovlev, the main figure being [former presidential body guard Alexander] Korzhakov," writes Yeltsin in the passage from the chapter entitled "Comrade and Prosecutor." 

Yakovlev won the election by a mere 2 percent. Two weeks after he was elected, Korzhakov and his allies in the administration were sacked in a scandal involving two of Yeltsin's campaign officials Sergei Lisovsky and Ar kady Yevstafev. Lisovsky and Yevstafev who were caught carrying $500,000 out of Yeltsin campaign headquarters. Their arrest was ordered by Korzhakov. 

"At that time there was a conflict between two major groups in the Kremlin," said Ruslan Linkov, head of the local Democratic Russia party, in a telephone interview on Thursday.

"Korzhakov and [deputy prime minister Oleg] Soskovets were on one side, and Chu bais was on the other. Both of them were fighting for access to Yeltsin and St. Petersburg appeared to be a part of the fight." 

Eventually, Anatoly Chubais - a close ally of Sobchak's - won out and convinced Yeltsin to dismiss the charges against Lisovsky and Yestafyev - and to fire Korzhakov. 

But even after his sacking Korzhakov continued to wield power within the so-called power ministries - the Interior Ministry and the Federal Security Service, or FSB. He also held sway over Prosecutor General Yury Skuratov, all of which allowed Korzhakov to continue his campaign against Sobchak, wrote Yeltsin.

"They wanted to get a lot of kompromat on Sobchak. To drag him into a serious corruption case," Yeltsin wrote. 

And so Korzhakov, with the help of Skuratov, continued to pursue Sobchak, Yeltsin wrote. Corruption allegations against the former mayor intensified. Prosecutors investigated and interrogations followed. Jail seemed imminent. Sobchak continued to protest his innocence, blaming Korzhakov of fabricating the corruption case against him. In an interview with The St. Petersburg Times, he said he feared arrest at any moment, and said his phones were being tapped and that he was being tailed - a fact Yeltsin confirms.

Then, during an interrogation in November 1997, Sobchak suffered an apparent heart attack. From the hospital, he was spirited out of the country to France, supposedly to a heart clinic. According to Yeltsin, the flight was arranged by the then-deputy head of the presidential administration, one Vladimir Putin. 

"Later on when I learned of what Putin had done, I felt great respect and gratitude toward him," Yeltsin wrote. 

After spending nearly 2 1/2 years in de facto exile in France, Sobchak was cleared of all charges and returned to Russia in July 1999. The following February, he died of apparent heart failure while on a trip to Kaliningrad. But his name had been cleared - and Yeltsin's book ostensibly cleared up any doubt that the graft and embezzlement charges had been politically motivated by Korzhakov & Co. 

"Anatoly Alexandrovich [Sobchak] spoke about this many times during the elections and after he came back to St. Petersburg from Paris he said it again," said Sobchak's widow Lyudmila Naru so va in a telephone interview Wednesday.

"But nobody believed him. Was it really necessary for Yeltsin to say something? It looks like Sobchak's words were not enough for you."

The City Hall press office was short on comment about the Yeltsin book and its implications for Yakovlev - though gubernatorial press officer Alexander Afanasiyev attempted to distance Yakov lev from the events of 1996 in a telephone interview Wednesday. 

"I don't think anybody in the current administration could comment on this because there's nobody left in City Hall, who participated in the gubernatorial elections in 1996," he said, adding: "You should have asked Yakovlev himself, but you can't because he's on a business trip to Cuba."

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Lower Life Expectancy 


MOSCOW (Reuters) - Officials painted a worsening picture of Russians' health on Tuesday, blaming poor social conditions and too much drinking and smoking. 

Oleg Shchepin of the Russian Academy of Sciences said life expectancy fell one year in 1999 to 65.5 years. Men lived an average 59.8 years and women 72. The death rate was 14.7 people per 1,000 while the birth rate stood at 8.4 per 1,000, Shchepin said. A report by the State Statistics Committee put 1998 figures at 13.6 and 8.8, respectively. Life expectancy in the former Soviet Union was around 64.3. It fell to a low of 57.6 in 1994.



Kursk Fund Frozen


MOSCOW (SPT) - The Murmansk region's governor Tuesday blocked the bank accounts of a regional fund set up to receive donations for relatives of the seamen who died aboard the Kursk nuclear submarine, and ordered inquiries into allegations of the misuse of funds.

Gov. Yury Yevdokimov signed a resolution temporarily prohibiting transactions on the fund's ruble and foreign currency accounts, Interfax reported. He also appealed to the audit chamber, the presidential audit department, and the Federation Council with requests to check whether the funds had been spent appropriately. 

Interfax cited the resolution as saying Yevdokimov made the decision in response to news reports that the donated funds may have been misappropriated.



U.S. Denies Allegations


WASHINGTON (AP) - The U.S. State Department said Wednesday there was no secret deal by President Bill Clinton's administration allowing Russian arms sales to Iran. An agreement between Vice President Al Gore and then-Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin in 1995 was "announced publicly," said John Barker, deputy assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation control. Barker testified at a hearing called by Republican members of the committee to air allegations that the deal allowed Russia to sell weapons to Iran in violation of a 1992 U.S. law prohibiting sales to countries viewed as exporters of terrorism.

In Moscow, Chernomyrdin issued a statement Wednesday saying: "We found a decision that was in the interests of both the United States and Russia. What we did with Iran posed no threat to the United States."



8 Soldiers Killed 


NAZRAN, Ingushetia (AP) - Eight soldiers were killed and 12 were wounded when vehicles they were riding in struck mines in Chechnya, an official said Tuesday. In the three separate incidents, rebels lay in wait until the military vehicles were incapacitated by mines, then opened fire on the survivors, the official, a member of Chechnya's pro-Moscow administration, said on condition of anonymity. 



Deputies To Save U.S. 


MOSCOW (SPT) - Saying they are alarmed by "deep concern with the possible falsification" of upcoming U.S. presidential elections, nine State Duma deputies have cobbled together a two-page resolution that they say will help keep the vote fair.

The resolution, which is expected to be voted on by parliament Friday, calls for the government to send observers to monitor the Nov. 7 vote and to set up a foundation to protect U.S. democracy. 

"Why do Americans always teach everyone democracy? Why don't we go and see what kind of democracy they have?" Deputy Georgy Tikhonov, one of the resolution's authors, said Wednesday.

TITLE: Lenenergo Hikes Its Tariffs Again
AUTHOR: By Andrey Musatov
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Federal Energy Commission (FEC) will raise electricity tariffs by 31 percent and heat tariffs by 14 percent as of Nov. 1, instead of the 50 percent on electricity and 20 percent on heat requested by Lenenergo, Interfax reported last week.


On Aug. 21, Lenenergo filed its own request to the FEC to raise tariffs. According to Lenenergo general director Andrei Likhachov, the price of producing electricity for Lenenergo at present is 53 kopeks per megawatt hour, far above the 37 kopeks the company was allowed to charge in June.

Back at the beginning of June, Lenenergo put tariffs on electricity and heat up with the permission of the Regional Energy Commission, but then said that this was not enough to make the company profitable.

Lenenergo figures put company losses for the first half of 2000 at 60 million rubles (about $2.1 million).

"Our losses were caused by unrealistic energy tariffs," Likhachv said in comments reported by Interfax, after the FEC received the Lenenergo appeal at the beginning of September.

"However, our goal is to finish the year without losses, which is impossible to do without an increase in tariffs."

TITLE: Predictions Warn of Surge in Inflation
AUTHOR: By Igor Semenenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Inflation remains the government's major short-term economic concern.


"We must maintain macroeconomic equilibrium and not allow a surge in inflation when distributing extra budget revenues," Prime Minister Mikhail Kasya nov said Thursday at a regular cabinet meeting.

The primary budget surplus, which excludes foreign debt servicing, stood at a hefty 301.7 billion rubles ($11 billion) from January to September this year, while the total surplus amounted to 156.2 billion rubles, an equivalent of 3.3 percent of gross domestic product.

By year end, the government will run a surplus of 80 billion rubles, Prime-Tass reported Deputy Finance Minister Tatyana Golikova as saying. She did not explain what would be done with the extra budget funds accumulated in the first nine months of the year.

Kasyanov said Thursday that the bulk of additional revenues will be used to repay debts incurred by the government in previous years.

However, next year the government will enjoy less freedom in choosing expense items. According to the draft budget that was passed on its second reading last week, extra revenues will be split in equal portions between the government and the State Duma.

Inflation may get a further boost after the effects of increased money printing feed into the slowing economy.

"So far prices have been going up due to the increase in costs of electricity, transport and natural gas," said Natalya Orlova, an economist with Alfa Bank. "The effects of the growing money supply will be felt next year."

The Economic Development and Trade Ministry this week raised its inflation forecast for this year to a range of 21.5 to 22 percent from a range of 18 to 20 percentage points in the wake of an inflow of petrodollars and surging prices for natural gas, electricity and transportation.

In the past, inflation started to accelerate some three months after the government switched on the printing presses, but in recent months the time lag has extended to nine to 12 months due to high rates of economic growth that increased demand for money in the economy.

This, together with tight measures aimed to replace barter and various financial schemes that avoided cash payments, helped increase the share of cash transactions in the corporate sector.

National power grid Unified Energy Systems reported a cash collection of 96 percent in July to September this year, the highest level since the start of the market reforms.

However, as economic growth slows down, demand for additional money will inevitably decline, and rubles, printed by the Central Bank to buy export proceeds from sales commodities, will tilt the balance on the money market.

To let some steam out, the government is considering reviewing S-account regulations designed in the wake of the 1998 crash to lock proceeds from maturing state bonds inside the country in order to prevent further depreciation of the exchange rate.

International reserves were up $100 million in the week ending Oct. 20 to $25.6 billion.

Inflation has totaled 15.6 percent so far this year, having accelerated in recent weeks. "This is a seasonal hike," said Rodionov. "December is traditionally the worst month in that sense."

TITLE: Leading Russian Firms Eyeing Kiev's Assets
AUTHOR: By Elizabeth LeBras
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The nation's leading financial groups are eagerly eyeing the prize assets of Ukraine as Russia's neighbor launches a major sale of state enterprises, years after Moscow's criticized privatizations of the early 1990s.


Local companies have been particularly drawn to Ukraine's petrochemical and aluminum sectors, despite enterprises in those sectors being heavily debt-ridden.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko told Vedomosti recently that Russians were the main players as Kiev sold off stakes in Ukraine's enterprises over the past eight months.

On Monday, Russia's No. 1 oil firm LUKoil was declared the winner in the auction for a tender to set up a joint venture with Ukraine's largest chemicals factory Oriana. LUKoil and the Ukrainian government will each own 50 percent stakes in the venture.

The Oriana holding comprises 14 factories that produce chemical products. United Financial Group said in a daily report that LUKoil was particularly attracted by Oriana's ethylene and propylene plant, built in 1997, which is the newest in the Commonwealth of Independent States. This acquisition will consequently allow LUKoil almost to double its ethylene capacity. 

Ethylene is a gas used in plastic and resin preparation, in welding and cutting metals, and as an anesthetic, a refrigerant and a fruit-ripening accelerator.

The Oriana venture is part of LUKoil's plans to diversify its operations into the petrochemicals sector. LUKoil's president Vagit Alekperov has identified petrochemicals as an area for future growth for the company.

LUKoil's production of petrochemical products in 1999 was worth $345 million. The company intends to triple that amount over the next five years. 

The other contenders in the Oriana tender included the petrochemicals holding Sibur, which plans to merge with Gazprom and Alfa-Nafta, the Ukrainian branch of the Alfa Group. 

Konstantin Reznikov, an oil and gas analyst with Alfa Bank, noted that Gaz prom had expected to receive Oriana as part of the payment for Ukraine's gas debts to Russia. Reznikov predicts that LUKoil will somehow allow Gazprom to participate in the joint venture. 

Alfa-Nafta withdrew from the tender after the second phase. Reznikov explained Alfa-Nafta's withdrawal: "It was not profitable for Alfa Group. ... Better conditions were probably offered to LUKoil."

LUKoil's Ukrainian subsidiary, LUKoil-Naftokhim, has promised to pay off $1 million of Oriana's debt and invest at least $37 million in technical upgrades. 

LUKoil will also assist the holding to restructure its debts of DM240 million ($103 million) to German banks and $200 million to other creditors.

The joint venture marks a further step in LUKoil's plans to expand its presence internationally. 

"Oriana will give LUKoil a foothold in Eastern Europe," said Steven Dashevsky of Aton brokerage. Oriana has a technical link with the Hungarian chemical plant Tiszai Vegyi Kombinat, in which Gazprom has a stake.

LUKoil already owns the Odessa oil refinery, the Romanian factory Petrotel and a Bulgarian oil refinery. A LUKoil official announced on Oct. 18 that the company is considering buying Serbia's Novi Sad oil refinery.

Tyumen Oil Co., or TNK, made its largest investment outside the borders of Russia on July 19, when its Ukrainian subsidiary purchased a stake of 67.41 percent in the Linos oil refinery in the Lugansk region in eastern Ukraine. As part of the investment terms, TNK was obliged to pay off the refinery's debts to the Ukrainian state budget totaling $63 million.

A 25 percent stake in the former Soviet Union's largest aluminum plant Nikolayev Alumina will be sold off in three tenders before the end of this year. The first tender, for 5 percent, will be declared Thursday. The remaining two tenders will be for 10 percent each. 

Kamil Goca, the director of research at the Ukrainian investment bank Dra gon Capital, predicts that Siberian Aluminum, which already holds a 75 percent stake in the plant, will be the only serious contender. 

On Wednesday, Ukraine's State Property Fund announced a tender for the controlling stakes in the regional energy-supply companies, Kievobloenergo, Zhitomiroblenergo and Rovno obl energo. The stakes being offered range from 70 percent to 75 percent. 

Electric companies from France, Spain and the United States have expressed interest in the tender. Tenders will be declared for four additional energy companies before the end of the year. The fund plans to collect at least $132 million from the sale of the seven companies' controlling stakes.

No Russian companies have expressed their intention to participate in the tenders for the Ukrainian energy suppliers. Natasha Sazhina, utilities analyst with Alfa Bank, said Ukrainian energy companies suffer from the same problems as their Russian counterparts, particularly chronic non-payments.

TITLE: Russians To Rule New European Exchange
AUTHOR: By Richard Murphy
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: VIENNA - The nation's largest oil company LUKoil will be among a number of major local companies traded on the electronic New Europe Exchange, NEWEX, when it is launched Nov. 3, NEWEX said Wednesday. 


Russian companies will account for about half of the some 90 firms listed when the Central and Eastern European exchange, a joint venture between the Deutsche Borse and the Vienna Bourse, starts up. 

NEWEX aims to be a low-risk channel for western capital seeking investment in Central and Eastern Europe, but some bourses in the region see it as a competitive threat. 

NEWEX board member Erich Obersteiner said Western institutions were interested in the growth markets of the region but were often deterred by legal obstacles, low liquidity and problems with trading and settlement. 

Companies in the region had difficulty in finding enough capital to fund expansion. 

"There is interest in principle on the part of Western investors. Enough money is there," Obersteiner said at a news conference. "We aim to remove the obstacles as far as possible." 

NEWEX aimed to become a one-stop shop for trading Central and Eastern European shares, boosting transparency, liquidity and efficiency, Obersteiner said. 

Shares will be traded in euros and listed companies will have to meet Western standards for reporting. 

When trading starts on the Xetra electronic trading platform, NEWEX will offer trading in shares of around 80 companies from across the region. 

It named the initial participants in the so-called NX.plus "quality" segment as LUKoil, fellow oil companies Sibneft and Tatneft, Russian telecoms firm Samara Svyazinform, Austria's S&T System Integration & Technology Distribution, Slovakian drugmaker Slovakofarma and Hungarian canned-food maker Globus Konzervipari.

TITLE: New Property Tax Being Cooked Up by Ministry
AUTHOR: By Sergei Kochetov and Sergei Zharkov
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW - Property taxes may soon be applied to all the nation's homeowners, regardless of whether their properties are finished or not.


Under the law, property tax is not charged until a building has been registered by the state.

The state register of structures and facilities is kept by the Justice Ministry, but buildings cannot be included in the register until they have passed through the technical specifications bureau, which in turn will not give its approval until construction has been completed. A building may therefore be considered incomplete if a door handle is missing or if landscaping of the surrounding land has not been completed.

The technical specifications bureau keeps records on the progress and cost of property developments.

The tax authorities are preparing for the introduction of a single property register to include unfinished buildings, which previously had been one of the most common ways of dodging tax.

A draft resolution prepared by the Tax Ministry proposes creating a single real estate register that will include both registered structures as well as "unfinished" buildings.

Deputy Tax Minister Dmitry Chernik said that the status of a property, and how close that property is to completion, must be constantly updated in the register.

"It is one thing if the building lacks a foundation and another altogether if a door handle is missing," he said.

He said "the meaning of unfinished and when taxes should be applied" must be clarified.

Tax officials propose that a means of assessing incomplete property be introduced. They are inspired by the experience of Bashkortostan and the Kha ba rovsk region where an experiment has already been conducted for simplifying tax bodies' assessments of unregistered buildings.

"We could create a federal center that would be responsible for developing the methods for assessing buildings and facilities," Chernik said.

The nation has more than 51 million property owners - 50 million of which are private individuals, according to tax officials.

In the first nine months of this year, real estate taxes generated 52.3 billion rubles ($1.87 billion) for state coffers. Private individuals' contributions came to 600 million rubles.

Random checks by tax officials have revealed that more than 5 million structures have been included in the technical specifications bureau's inventory, but are not on the state register, as well as more than 15 million structures that are already finished, but which have not been included on the bureau's inventory.

"The budget loses several billion rubles each year from this category of real estate," Chernik said.

Tax authorities have often tried to change legislation in order to exclude the provision on unfinished buildings, though they have been unable to overcome the barrier of the State Duma.

"There is nothing terrible about the register including incomplete objects and the assessment methods exist already," said Vyacheslav Shakin, head of the Russian Society of Assessors' board.

However, he added that "if the unfinished property belongs to private persons, the social consequences could be very severe."

There also could be possible political consequences for the tax officials. For example, in 1997 Tax Minister Alexander Pochinok lost his post when aerial photographs were taken of the Odintsovo region of Moscow.

It took the State Duma nearly three years to pass a law on experimental real estate taxation in the Novgorod and Tver regions.

TITLE: $75 Million in GKOs Is Auctioned
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW - The Finance Ministry was happy with the results of a three-month GKO treasury bill auction Wednesday that produced an average yield of 10.53 percent, but dealers said the sale was not an easy one.


"We are satisfied with the results," Deputy Finance Minister Bella Zlatkis said. She had previously said the ministry would not accept bids with yields higher than 10.50 percent.

The ministry sold GKOs with a nominal value of 2.11 billion rubles ($75.5 million), or about two-thirds of the bills that were on offer, as dealers said interest had been dampened by comments that foreign investors would soon be offered new ways to repatriate funds frozen since the 1998 financial crisis.

Zlatkis told an investment conference earlier Wednesday the ministry had on Tuesday sent a letter to Central Bank chairman Viktor Gera shchen ko asking him to consider three options for repatriating rubles frozen in the so-called "S" accounts of foreign investors in restructured domestic securities.

TITLE: Ukraine President Concerned at Gazprom Proposals for Pipeline
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW - Ukraine showed the first signs of unease Tuesday over plans by Russian and Western companies to build a gas pipeline bypassing its territory and said it hoped Moscow would continue using its territory for gas transit.


Gas giant Gazprom announced last week it had signed a letter of intent with Germany's Ruhrgas and Wintershall, France's Gaz de France and Italy's Snam to create a new export channel bypassing Ukraine to ship more gas to energy-hungry European consumers.

Ukrainian President Leonid Kuch ma, while admitting huge debts for Russian gas supplies and unsanctioned siphoning from Russian pipelines running via Ukraine, has stressed he was undaunted by the bypass project which might take a long time to implement.

But Prime Minister Yushchenko, who talked to reporters on the sidelines of an energy conference Tuesday, made it clear Kiev was concerned by a possible loss of lucrative gas transit.

The new, $2 billion, 600-kilometer Russia-Europe gas pipeline is expected to have a maximum capacity of 60 billion cubic meters of gas per year and would run through Belarus, Poland and Slovakia.

Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski said Tuesday that his government could permit the pipeline to bypass Warsaw's strategic ally Ukraine so long as Kiev shared in the plan's economic benefits.

Poland had previously objected to the Russian plan.

"We are deeply interested in having Ukraine involved in this project," Kwasniewski said in an interview.

But Ukraine need not be part of the project geographically, he said. "It can be involved in the economic sense as well, in some concept of a joint venture or a common company," the president said.

"I think this is a very clever compromise," he added.


- Reuters, AP, SPT

TITLE: EDITORIAL
TEXT: Russia's Lady Justice Seems Blind Indeed 


THERE is no justice. At least, that's the impression one gets watching the government and the Duma set policies on benefit payments to "privileged categories" of citizens.


For instance, on Wednesday dozens of men who participated in the cleanup of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster gathered near Red Square to protest government moves that they believe will reduce their benefit payments. Many of the protestors had walked more than 170 kilometers from Tula to fling down their medals in front of the Kremlin.

Wednesday's action was just the latest in a series of protests by Chernobyl liquidators. On Oct. 20, Pyotr Lyubchenko died near Rostov-on-Don while taking part in a mass hunger strike by liquidators demanding increased medical benefits.

Although this issue has been simmering for years, Labor and Social Development Minister Alexander Pochinok deserves praise for his reaction to the Red Square protest. He met with organizers and heard out their concerns. He also promised to go to Tula soon to continue the dialogue. This kind of responsiveness by a minister is, unfortunately, rarely seen these days, and it offers hope that an acceptable compromise will be found.

While the heroes of Chernobyl have been lobbying for justice, the families of the seamen who died in the Kursk nuclear submarine in August still await the compensation that the state promised them. Last week, Irina Lyachina, the widow of the Kursk's captain, quit the management board of the fund set up for the families, accusing authorities in Murmansk of misusing the funds. This week, the governor of the Murmansk region froze the fund pending an investigation. 

Yet against this distressing background, the Duma voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to extend official benefits to former members of the Russian Supreme Soviet, which then-President Boris Yeltsin dispersed with tanks in October 1993. When Yeltsin signed the decree that disbanded the Supreme Soviet, he offered generous benefits to any deputies who left peacefully. Those who chose to fight received nothing.

Now this "historical injustice" has been corrected. Communist deputy Boris Kibirev told the Duma that the Supreme Soviet deputies deserve full pensions as well as medical and other benefits for their "positive contribution to the establishment of parliamentarism in Russia."

The newspaper Segodnya noted Thursday that the estimated 6 million rubles that this measure will cost annually is just a fraction of the amount the government has saved in recent months by reducing benefits to the Chernobyl liquidators, victims of political repression and "other less-deserving categories of citizens."

Does that sound like justice?

TITLE: POWERPLAY
TEXT: Disaster Follows When Generals Lead the Way 


THE recent escalation of the violence in the Middle East prompted many to compare the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians to that between Russia and Chechnya. This comparison is false in many ways including the very nature of the conflicts. But one similarity is clear: It is a disaster for any nation when its leaders are people in epaulets.


Gen. Ehud Barak, Israel's most decorated soldier and the current prime minister of Israel, has done more than any of his predecessors to bring peace to the crisis-ridden Middle East. But when the crowds of angered Palestinians poured onto the streets with stones and, some, with guns in their hands, he did not think twice about responding with the force of tanks and helicopters to shut them down. The outcome was predictable: innocent people killed and more violence. The general's anger over the abduction and lynching of his soldiers overwhelmed his instincts as a politician, and as a result almost ruined the seven-year-long peace.

Yasser Arafat, a man who led terrorist organizations for 40 years, performed a great service to the Palestinian people by signing the Oslo Peace Accords and by pursuing a peace process that has allowed his nation to bet "everything on the future," as Arafat has put it. 

But when his leadership back home seemed to be challenged because of the failure of the negotiations over East Jerusalem, he did not think twice about inspiring ill-armed people and teens to vent their anger against Jewish settlements and soldiers. He got praise from Hezbollah leaders in exchange for the lives of more than 130 people.

Haven't we seen the same mentality that produced the recent Mideast crisis in the conflict between Russian and Chechen leaders as well? Russian President (and retired colonel) Vladimir Putin didn't hesitate to give the orders that turned Grozny into a city of the dead. 

Chechen President (and general) Aslan Mas kha dov is not concerned about placing his guerrillas among civilians and conducting assaults out of villages, although he knows that Russian troops will respond with shells and missiles that will kill primarily non-combatants. The training, lifelong experience and mentality of politicians in epaulets do not permit them to take into consideration the human costs of their actions. They consider the lives of children to be nothing but "unavoidable losses."

Gen. Ariel Sharon, former Israeli defense minister, criticized Barak's land-for-peace approach to the conflict, saying: "You ask any general - but not a politician - how much space is needed for a tank division to be placed, and he will answer: '50 kilometers.' How much space is needed for a tank army? '150 kilometers.'" And so it goes. 

A similar mentality regarding policy issues has been expressed by some Arab leaders in no less impressive epaulets calling for a "jihad," as well by their Russian and Chechen "brothers-in-uniform." They talk only in terms of space for tanks and seldom or never about space for living.

The results are inevitable: the never-ending war in Chechnya in one instance and the real possibility of another full-scale war in the Middle East. My recent conversations with ordinary people in Jerusalem have convinced me once again that none of these nations want war. But the fates of all these people lie in the hands of politicians in epaulets. 


Yevgenia Albats is a Moscow-based independent journalist.

TITLE: Modern Regimes Can No Longer Avoid Popular Will
AUTHOR: By Mark Clarence Walker
TEXT: OBSERVING the recent events in Serbia reaffirms my conviction that Reinhard Bendix got it right so many years ago when he wrote: "In our time, not only democracies but also military regimes, dictatorships, and even constitutional monarchies are legitimized by claims of popular mandate. Indeed, other ways of justifying authority have become inconceivable."


Modern democracies draw their authority not from kings or divine sanction but from the will of the people. This has become the case even more so after the fall of communism - one of the last ideologies, along with various theologies, that attempt to grant authority through a means other than the popular vote.

It is striking that one authoritarian ruler after another over the last two decades has had to recognize the will of the people, not simply in rhetoric, but has actually had to give up power, sometimes abruptly. Nicolae Ceaucescu in Romania comes readily to mind, but other regime changes linger in our collective consciousness as well. Gen. Augusto Pino chet's gradual concession to give up his dictatorship of Chile after he lost a referendum in 1988 is a fascinating example.

Authoritarian Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev was the target of a coup attempt by hardline members of the Communist Party in August 1991 and had to be bailed out by the likes of Boris Yeltsin, the first popularly elected leader of Russia. It was Yeltsin who stood up to the coup plotters and stared them down. 

Gorbachev, on his return from his short exile, thought that nothing had changed. But the Soviet Union was done; Gorbachev soon had to concede to Yeltsin that the old ways of regimes based on anything other than popular mandate were a thing of the past.

It is worth remembering that Yeltsin was able to foil the August coup attempt against Gorbachev and his reforms because of the legitimacy he had garnered from his election as president of Russia.

Similarly now, Slobodan Milosevic has had to cede power to the new president, Vojislav Kostunica, after losing a popular election for president of Yugoslavia. 

In this case, as in the Soviet Union in 1991, the people came out into the streets and confronted the police and the military, extolling them to resist the authority of their regimes and to recognize the legitimizing power of the people. 

Nevertheless, democracies are not made in a day. 

Most authoritarian leaders are quite smart, and have learned how to manipulate the nominally democratic institutions with which we believe we are so familiar: elections, legislatures, political parties, prime ministers, popularly elected presidents, and court systems.

Milosevic, I am sure, worked hard behind closed doors to remain in power after his electoral defeat, first calling for a runoff election and then having the courts invalidate the vote. He almost pulled it off.

Few observers predicted that the people of Serbia would come out into the streets in droves, invade and occupy the parliament building, and attempt to take over state television. Even fewer thought they would succeed by convincing the police and military to follow not their sworn leaders, but the leadership of the people.

As Kostunica will learn very soon, winning a popular election and running a country are two different things. Even if Kostunica dedicates himself completely to democracy, the practice of democracy consists of many different elements and processes. Experts agree that democracies must have most, if not all, of the following features in order to be effective: elections, political parties, individual rights, the rule of law, civil society, and, possibly, a middle class. 

If countries have all of the nominally democratic institutions but the people lack ultimate control over who the officeholders are, what policies they implement, and their own individual freedom and liberty as citizens, they still belong to a democracy, but perhaps one that can be described as "illiberal'' - as has been so well put by Fareed Zakaria and Robert D. Kaplan.

It took centuries for France, Britain, the United States and other countries to develop into the democracies we know today. That's why it does not make sense to ask whether Russia is a democracy or not, or at what point can we say that Yugoslavia has crossed that line. The question is what kind of democracies they will become and what degree of liberty we can expect. Some of us can say, for example, that Russia needs to find its own particular form of democracy, but what the heck is that?

We need a new lexicon and a new set of analytical frameworks with which to break down the concept of democracy into something that can be more meaningfully pursued. We need to understand the interaction between marketization and the consolidation of democracy within a country, and whether or not Western ideas of democracy can even be effectively applied in all countries that might have significantly different demographics, institutions, histories, and so forth.

Although academics have begun to tackle these questions, those who really need to figure these issues out now are the members of the media and the nongovernmental organizations, international organizations and other government agencies - especially those in Washington - who have the promotion of "democracy'' as their goal.

What is going on today is tantamount to lifting the hood of your expensive automobile with your buddies and tinkering around with all of the hoses and gaskets without knowing a thing about how this particular car is put together. We all think we know how it works, but I am not at all sure that we do. 


Mark Clarence Walker is an assistant professor at the School of International Service at American University. He contributed this comment to The Baltimore Sun.

TITLE: What Other Papers Are Saying
AUTHOR: by Ali Nassor
TEXT: A former mental asylum patient and would-be spy, who became a wanted entrepreneur of dubious reputation, escaped an eighth assassination attempt over the weekend as hitmen sprayed over 40 bullets in his direction. But a high-profile physician fell victim to yet more contract killers the same day. Meanwhile, as St. Petersburg's governor and local lawmakers are at loggerheads over ways to boost the city's declining population, the press suggests artificial means to go forth and multiply, that may even give rise to the Second Coming - next year.




Crime Academy


Entrepreneur Ruslan Kolyak, 41, who works for a local security firm, and a major character in the second Andrei Konstantinov book "Bandit St. Petersburg," survived a hit attempt on the weekend, reports Sankt-Peterburgskiye Vedomosti.


Kolyak's biography is that of a man infamous for his alleged close links to the city's notorious criminal circles involving city authorities.

Though born into a family of intelligentsia, Kolyak went down a darker path after his studies took him to four institutes of higher education, and to a degree in none of them.

A series of arrests followed in the late 1970s, until he was finally drafted into the army. Kolyak's method of avoiding recruitment into the KGB was reportedly to attempt suicide by slashing his wrists. He was then treated in a mental hospital, and upon his release he became a businessman, going on to reach his current heights. His past eight years have witnessed at least eight abortive murder attempts, including a bomb that blew up his car in 1993 when the contract murder trade in St. Petersburg was still in its infancy, the paper says.

According to the paper, he once boasted openly that he was untouchable - at the same time as saying he is certain to be killed. Furthermore, he knows exactly when the ax will fall - but is uncertain whether it will be an ax, knife, gun or garrotte, the paper said. Whatever the case, the asylum seems not to have cured his indecisive, not to mention contradictory, nature. 



A Charmed Life


Indecisive or not, he was able to determine which way to duck when the rain of 40 bullets blew upon him like a fall wind this weekend. Only three of them hit their intended target - and were lame shots. After standing up and brushing himself off, Kolyak set off for the hospital on foot. Three onlookers, by contrast - including one who was sitting inside the reinforced steel of a Mercedes Benz - ended up in intensive care, says Novaya Gazeta.


But bullet dodging might just be part of the entrepreneurial game, suggests Chas Pik. Kolyak, however, is a humble man, refusing to disclose either his enemies or the things he's done that somebody obviously wants to kill him for, the paper said. 



Meet the Deputy


Kolyak's brush with an offensive that would have made Ivan the Terrible blush led Argumenty i Fakty to speculate on the great mental patient's immortality. After all, the shoot-outs that occurred these past days of rest were for major stakes. Kolyak, the paper reports, is in cahoots with St. Petersburg's most famous alleged government shakedown men - Legislative Assembly deputy Sergei Shevchenko and his brother Vyacheslav, a former Duma deputy. The two representatives of the people, according to the paper, are implicated in about $200,000 worth of extortion jobs they allegedly pulled on local real estate firms Kredo Petersburg and Lyubimy Gorod - and a magazine publisher as well, the paper says. 


Some solace is to be had in the fact that deputy Shevchenko, who allegedly is a godfather in the feared Tambov crime syndicate, at least knows how to raise money - provided, of course, his criminal past is true. 



Kolyak's Travels


Kolyak fled the country in December 1998, allegedly over some extortion charges, Argumenty i Fakty reports. Apparently, he didn't extort that much, because he showed up back at home only a few months later. He was promptly arrested, not only for the extortion but for some sort of stock dispute with deputy Shevchenko. 


But never fear: Kolyak, as it turned out, had connections within the Yeltsin administration - namely with chief bodyguard Alexander Korzhakov, the paper says. Added to that clout were shadowy connections with the local Federal Security Service, or FSB, as well as a host of unnamed city hall big-shots, the paper said. 



Fish in a Barrel 


But if Kolyak walks on water, local fishmonger Vladimir Kozodoi of the Northwestern Air and Marine Health Inspectorate was live bait for a hit-and-run shooting that took his life, Argumenty i Fakty reports. 


Mild mannered and well respected, Kozodoi nonetheless had the unfortunate habit of not wanting to sell the smelly old spoiled fish - which were nonetheless worth millions of dollars - his suppliers often fobbed off on him, the paper says. 

But while prosecutors have opened criminal cases in both incidents, Smena suggests the alleged assassins have little to fear given the light sentences handed down to convicted murderers by the St. Petersburg Municipal Court, the paper says. 

But while the St. Petersburg population is drastically declining, partly due to these "investment deals," the city executive and legislative authorities are busy searching for ways to boost the declining population. 



Go & Multiply


Obviously, "business deals" are a contributing factor to St. Petersburg's declining population. But instead of introducing crime bills, city authorities are looking for ways to get the population busy making babies, Kommersant reports. 


According to that paper, legislators have proposed a bill to give new mothers 7,000 rubles. Yakovlev threw cold water on that, citing other expenses as the priority, namely for pensioners. 

But good old-fashioned whoopee is just one alternative, according to Vlast, which proposes in-vitro fertilization.

And for those who recall Dolly the sheep, Komsomolskaya Pravda says it's high time Russia just accept cloning as a viable means of reproduction. 

The paper also reports that American scientists are planing to clone Jesus Christ by Christmas. A better clone for Russia, however, may be the equally eternal Ruslan Kolyak.

TITLE: dva samaliota re-emerge from underground
AUTHOR: by Sergey Chernov
TEXT: Dva Samaliota are preparing to do something they haven't done for the past couple of years - play a full show at a large venue. They have also just shot the second video for their new album which will be released by the major Russian label Real next month.


The St. Petersburg ska band, which has kept a low profile over the past few years, owes its rise in popularity and a new surge of activity to "Cool" magazine and MTV Russia.

"During the sound-check of the band NOM [at Griboyedov, the club managed by Dva Samaliota] Anton [Belyankin, the band's bass player and lyricist] was leafing through Cool and suddenly started to chant a girl's letter he came across - to the drums," said the band's drummer Mikhail Sindalovsky.

The tear-squeezing letter about an unfaithful friend sounded like a full-fledged song and after a slight literary adaptation was included in the band's album - under the title "Podruga Podkinula Problem" (A Friend Gave Me Problems), the exact headline the magazine gave to the letter. The result was funny, cynical and instantly memorable.

Recorded in June 1999 and then tentatively called "Pisets '99," the album was recorded without the support of a record label, as the band tried to get Moscow record labels interested in the product, but got no immediate response.

After months of uncertainty, the band came up with the idea to make a video for the song, which was directed by the local director Pyotr Troitsky, who specializes in social ads.

"We were waiting for an answer from several big labels, such as Gala Records and Moroz Records for quite a long time," says the band's manager Stas Averkiyev.

"We'd speak to them, but they'd say, 'Well, come, say, in a month, and we'll try to decide something.' It was a similar situation with Real - we were supposed to be signing a contract for a long time. Then we thought, why don't we give the video to MTV, it might give us a boost. This is exactly what happened - it was chosen as MTV's Video of the Month in August."

The success of the video made Real Records, the Moscow-based major label specialized in "Russian quality rock and pop music," think again, and the band was offered a contract for the album.

Now named after the current hit, "Podruga...," will be released on Nov. 28, with an initial printing of 20,000 CDs and 100,000 cassettes, plus between 500 and 800 copies of more expensive, collectors' edition CDs.

According to a special agreement, the band is free to keep playing in Moscow and St. Petersburg clubs as they used to, while Real Record's promotional department, Real Concert, will be including the band in big concerts and festivals in other cities to promote the album.

Meanwhile, the band has undergone a more crucial change - with the return of original front-man Vadim Pokrovsky, who left in 1997.

The band has already recorded several tracks sung in Russian with Pokrovsky on lead vocals for the follow-up album to "Podruga...", tentatively tipped for release next spring. Now the band's concert set is split into two parts, reflecting the changing nature of the group's line-up - one with the ex-Stranniye Igry guitarist and singer Grigory Sologub, who later leaves the stage to Pokrovsky.



Dva Samaliota in concert at SpartaK at 8 p.m. Saturday.

The album "Podruga Podkinula Problem" is released by Real Records Nov. 28.

TITLE: russia's 2001 oscar nomination reveals domestic life of secretive writer
AUTHOR: by Kirill Galetski
TEXT: Ivan Bunin might seem like a difficult choice for the subject of a biopic, but then Alexei Uchitel's new film "His Wife's Diary" is not a straightforward docudrama. It contains elements of artistic license in its exploration of the author's private life, and as the title suggests, it is told from his wife's point of view.


Bunin is a revered figure in Russian literature. His prose is considered to be some of the most intricate and detailed in the Russian language. Most notable is his 1911 novella "Dry Valley (Sukho dol)" which evokes the tragic, gradual degradation of Old Russia. His attitudes toward Russia were appropriately complex. He was nostalgic for pre-20th-century Russia, yet was repelled by repressive aspects of Russian society. He also hated Bolshevism with a passion and emigrated to France while it was still possible. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1933, the first Russian writer to do so. Uchitel's film touches upon these themes. It provides us with an intriguing speculative portrait of the man, where no completely accurate picture is available, since Bunin forbade making his memoirs public.

Andrei Smirnov's Bunin is a tortured, vulnerable soul. The film infers that his outward talent and intelligence are only matched by his volatile character and passions. Smirnov did not look to be cast as Bunin - instead of finding the role, it seems the role found him. Uchitel went through many options before settling on Smirnov. When the film was still being negotiated as a Russian-French co-production through Gaumont studios, the French team even made the ridiculous suggestion that Bunin should be played by Omar Sharif. In hindsight, Uchitel feels that no one else could have pulled off the role with as much craft as Smirnov. 

The women in the film are phenomena all to themselves. Olga Budina plays Galina Plotnikova, Bunin's illicit love. Her character is actually an amalgamation of three real-life women. Galina Tyunina as Vera Nikolayevna arouses empathy as the long-suffering yet emotionally supple wife. Yelena Morozova, recently touted by a fashion magazine as one of a young generation of future stars is sultry as Marga Kovtun, the lesbian seductress who woos Galina away from Bunin.

The film is incredibly balanced, and in a curious way, very light. This seems contradictory given the nature of the story, but it works. The production values are strong, with elegant costuming, attention to period detail, tight editing, rich cinematography by Yury Klimenko and an appropriately subdued soundtrack by Leonid Desyatnkov. The film's budget was more than the average Russian film, according to Uchitel.

Uchitel is a director with a mostly documentary background, mostly covering progressive movements in art. His 1988 film "Rock," which is eponymous to his studio, is a seminal record of the development of the St. Petersburg rock music scene. "Mitkis in Europe" was a chronicle of the Mitki-VKHUTEMAS art collective's international adventures. His first fictional feature film was "Giselle's Mania," which featured some of the same cast members as "His Wife's Diary."

The film is also attracting an impressive degree of international attention, having been shown at the San Francisco Film Festival. Even director George Lucas, of "Star Wars" fame, expressed his appreciation of the film. Moreover, the film has been nominated for this year's Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. There are more screenings planned in New York, Washington D.C., and Seattle.

"People can be unfamiliar with Bunin," asserts Uchitel, "but it is impossible to fully understand his work without looking at his life."




"His Wife's Diary" is now playing at Dom Kino. Tickets cost 50 rubles.

TITLE: miss julie given new life at baltiisky dom theater
AUTHOR: by Natasha Shirokova
TEXT: Alexander Galibin, who recently premiered August Strindberg's "Miss Julie" at the Baltiisky Dom Theater, is one of the more unpredictable directors in St. Petersburg. After he staged the pompous "The Story of Tsar Peter and His Murdered Son, Alexei" in the Alexandrinsky Theater, he switched to a neorealistic production "The Billiard Cannon," at the Theater on Liteiny, which tells the story of family relations. But his production of "Miss Julie" is worth separate discussion.


A hundred years have passed since playwrights were thrilled by the possibilities that Freud's theories revealed to them. But nowadays the major conflicts of "New Drama," such as the relations between the sexes and the role of heredity, seem old fashioned and the material itself bulky. But nevertheless, attempts to cope with such plays are still made frequently. Galibin manages to make a surprising interpretation of the psychoanalytical text of the play and directs a mysterious and subtle production. 

In explaining his choice of play Galibin says that he was provoked by the fact that most contemporary versions of Miss Julie are failures, and that he wanted to rediscover it. In this sense the director has managed to breathe new life into Strindberg's play.

Galibin treats the whole story as the folly of a Midsummer night. This pagan holiday is not just the time when a lady seduces her own servant, which finishes with the death of the heroine, but it is also a time when the forces of nature awake and interfere with people's lives. 

This becomes the key to the whole production. In the prologue there is a scene involving witchcraft, where the maid of the house lights candles and places them in a circle, and then puts a straw puppet into a clay tub, casting a spell over it.

The scenery by the prolific St. Petersburg stage designer Emil Kapelush, emphasises the idea of witchcraft, which dominates the story. In the hut, where the servants live, there are bundles of wood, clay dishes, and coal. The light is scattered and dim. Through the whole of the production, the spectators hear the sound of streaming water, which actually runs through the gutter on the stage. The water is the source of life, which by the end of the performance runs out.

"Staging this play is impossible if you don't have the right actress. For me, Miss Julie is just the way we have her," says Galibin.

Irina Savitskova's acting in the part of Miss Julie differs from usual interpretations. Usually, the main focus is on the love affair, and the part is interpreted as an extravagant, lighthearted and unbalanced aristocrat, who can't survive an uneven, plebeian affair. 

Irina Savitskova's character is in fact strong and unsentimental. In this part she manages to exist within the framework created by the director and the stage designer. She is doomed from the very beginning. But at the same time she consciously tempts her destiny, not her lover. It seems that she is attracted just by the meanness of the affair, as she thinks it will help her to break through the routine of the noble house, and destroy the order of everyday life. She speaks words of challenge, not of love, and coldly observes her own actions. When she imprecates her lover, who is just an ordinary man, she damns the whole order of life.

Savitskova, who received the prize for best female role at the recent Baltiisky Dom Festival, is the star of the production. Although the acting ensemble is perfect in the performance, they merely serve to accentuate her role.

TITLE: bach festival a modest triumph
AUTHOR: by Giulara Sadykh-zade
TEXT: This year, the entire cultural world will be marking the 250th anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach's death with respect and gratitude for the legacy left by the composer.


No composer in history has been able to equal Bach's achievements, and therein lies the secret of his music's uniqueness, which is only rarely rendered with any intuition by the more outstanding interpreters of Bach.

It is therefore important that St. Petersburg - standing as it does on the cultural crossroads between east and west - is not standing on the sidelines during Bach's Jubilee year. The city has taken part in the worldwide celebration of his art in the form of a festival entitled "Bach - Mendelssohn: The continuation of traditions."

The musical director of the festival, the German conductor Leo Kramer, has for five years regularly worked with the Philharmonic chamber orchestra and has been Russified to the extent that he has successfully managed to transpose Bach's music into a context specific to St. Petersburg.

The three main concerts of the festival at the Philharmonic's Great Hall consisted of three works: Bach's St. Matthew Passion and Mendelssohn's Elijah and High Mass in B minor. Grouped around these performances were the chamber music programs of the Small Hall, where the Brandenburg Concertos and the Klavier ubung were performed, as well as Orchestral Suite No. 2.

Not all the concerts were of equal merit. Best of all, though somewhat paradoxically, was the performance of Mendelssohn's oratorio: powerful, clear and impressive with beautiful choral sounds and expressive solo episodes. Illi Zigmund Nimsgern sang the part wonderfully. On the whole, the reception of the work, last performed in St. Petersburg in 1848, was excellent, the harmonic base turned out to be wonderfully inventive and avoided triviality, the thematic base truly memorable and varied. The inheritance from Handel and Bach was organically developed by Mendelssohn and resulted in an unexpected union of the romantic and baroque eras.

Bach's mass was performed with less enthusiasm but was nonetheless completely satisfactory. Andrea Reuter sang her soprano part superlatively. The German trumpet player, Wolfgang Basch filled the hall with such joyously virtuoso passages in Gloria that the timbre of his instrument produced an extremely inspirational effect.

The toughest ordeal for audiences was the St. Matthew Passion, which lasted for 3 1/2 hours. Under the conductor's baton, the musical genius of the work turned into a tiresome burden. The work was defined by the indistinct mumbling of the choir and the boring orchestra and interpretation, devoid of energetic delivery. It was not surprising then, that people left the hall during the performance.

Regardless of differing musical impressions, it has to be admitted that the Bach festival has vindicated itself with this cultural event. Yes, the Philharmonic does not have the means to invite first-rate stars of the music world to perform in St. Petersburg, yet this is no basis for being left out of Bach's Jubilee festivities. Therefore, on the whole, the Bach-Mendelssohn festival proved to be both positive and pleasing. Events undertaken with modest means are better than no events at all.

TITLE: getting cosy in yugoslav style
AUTHOR: by Galina Stolyarova
TEXT: It is not as easy as it seems to find the right place to get cosy with an old friend. We phoned each other three times before we agreed on Drago. The trip took us far from the center, to Primorsky Prospect, but we still had no regrets about the time we spent at St. Pete's first and only Yugoslavian restaurant - in terms of food, service and atmosphere.


The interior was indeed very cosy - country style, abundant with natural flowers, branches of artificial grapes, fragments of tile roof as well as multiple wicker accessories. 

The dining halls would have seemed rather narrow, but the design incorporates mirrors into the white brick walls. The place is especially romantic in the evening, when lights glimmer softly through wicker lamps, and are reflected in large mirrors.

We seated ourselves beside the fountain, next to a large window with an excellent view of Kamenny island. We shared fried cheese served with toast, slices of fresh oranges, apricot jelly and vegetables in a cheese sauce (115 rubles).

Thankfully, the music - an inevitable part of most dining establishments in Russia - turned somewhat jazzy as the evening progressed, which added to the relaxing atmosphere.

An appealing selection of Yugoslavian vodka - or rakiya as it is known - caught my eye when I was scanning the menu, but my dining companion refused to order any alcohol on the grounds that she was driving. She opted for mineral water (25 rubles). I, however, decided that a glass of burgundy (150 rubles) was what I needed to accompany "Drago," the restaurant's eponymous dish (300 rubles).

When I find myself dining at a new place I always think that I should probably give up the stupid habit of ordering title dishes, but all the same, logic, along with curiosity, do their work: a title dish has to be something the place can be proud of, something that lives up to their diners' expectations.

With "Drago," I didn't regret not being in an experimental mood: a combination of beef, chicken and veal topped with tomato and mushroom sauces and served on toast with a selection of vegetables was well worth its title dish status.

My friend, who thrives on taking culinary risks and who was less traditional than I had been this time, continued being unfaithful to Yugoslavia, ignoring Serbian and Croatian recipes and ordering a Norwegian dish instead, tender salmon topped with delicious creamy sauce, with a juxtaposition of shrimp, pickles and tomatoes, served with boiled potatoes (320 rubles). The renegade to Yugoslavia enjoyed her choice enormously. But, still, it was the variety of the menu at Drago - also containing an impressive selection of grilled dishes - which made my friend look north.

It is always so difficult for both of us to skip desserts - in fact it is nearly impossible. My friend followed the recommendation of our waiter Sergei - who thankfully was very helpful, also advising me on the burgundy - and went for the cheese cake (70 rubles) served with mild lemon jelly, while I ordered Black Forest cherry gateau. These desserts, along with cinnamon and mint tea (10 rubles), were exactly what we wanted to crown the evening.

We still have at least two reasons to be back to Drago: my friend has yet to discover the ethnic cuisine, and we are both yet to try the rakiya. Next time, someone else can drive us there!



Drago, 15 Primorsky Prospect. Open noon to midnight. Credit cards accepted. Lunch for two with alcohol for one 1050 rubles (about $38). Phone: 430-69-84. Reservations recommended.

TITLE: chernov's choice
TEXT: With no hugely interesting events on Friday, the weekend really opens with Mumii Troll on Saturday. The Trolls came to the city twice in the course of their 1999/2000 "Rtut Aloe" Tour - to promote last year's album "Toch no Rtut Aloe," and now return with the "Bez Obmana" Tour - to promote the recent single of the same name, which contains, well, mostly songs and remixes from last year's album. Some of these songs still sound good, but the star quality of Ilya Lagutenko has withered a little because of the shrewd frontman's habit of sneaking into every teen or lifestyle glossy magazine, not to mention television. The inventor of "rockapops" - as Lagutenko describes his style - has also introduced to Russia the idea of repackaging and releasing singles which contain released songs, unreleased songs, live versions and remixes (fans will buy them all), and the dubious practice of following stadium shows with performances at lush night clubs. So from the Ice Palace, the Trolls will head to the Plaza nightclub and restaurant, where the audience can rattle its jewelry. Ice Palace, Saturday, Oct. 28.


DDT will celebrate the band's 20th anniversary with a stadium show called "20:00" at the same venue next week. No member of the original line-up, which first got together in Ufa in 1980, has made it to the current outfit, with the notable exception of frontman and songwriter Yury Shevchuk.

While Akvarium's Boris Grebenshchikov is often compared with Bob Dylan by foreign listeners, Shevchuk is seen as Russia's Bruce Springsteen and even has a song "Born in the U.S.S.R." (DDT's teenage fans are supposed to wave red flags when they hear the song's familiar riff.) He went to Chechnya to sing for Russian soldiers and to Belgrade to protest last year's NATO attacks. Amidst the current hectic search for a new national anthem to replace Glinka's "unmelodic" and allegedly "un-Orthodox" tune, a critic suggested Shevchuk's song "Autumn" as something totally opposite to Glinka, and loved by everybody. Shevchuk's "I Am Going to My Motherland" could be also considered. Though lyric-conscious, Shevchuk uses a plethora of disgusting diminutive suffixes, and is largely responsible for the fact that the term "Russian rock" now means unshaved middle-aged men wearing sailors' striped shirts or workers' garments, an excess of pomposity and a total lack of style. Ice Palace, Wednesday, Oct. 1.

More foreign tours come from Biohazard, who will play the Lensoviet Palace of Culture on Nov. 9, Motorhead on Dec. 1 (Yubileiny Sports Palace), and then Soulfly on Dec. 10 again at the Lensoviet. On a more interesting note, Tuxedomoon's date is set. The band will perform at the Estrada Theater on Nov. 27.



- by Sergey Chernov

TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: U.S. on Alert


ADEN, Yemen (Reuters) - U.S. officials went on alert on Wednesday night following unspecified threats against Americans in the southern Yemeni port city where 17 sailors were killed by an apparent suicide bombing of a U.S. destroyer this month.

A senior U.S. official said on Thursday the warning came at night, and they woke up Yemeni officials to ensure security around U.S. personnel investigating the Oct. 12 attack on the USS Cole was at the proper level.

"We got some information we considered as serious. We contacted the Yemenis and immediately took some efforts to sort of go around and make sure that our security posture was what it should be," the official told reporters in Aden.

The official declined to describe the nature of the threat or how the Americans were alerted to it, but said that "there was no imminent danger" to the hundreds of U.S. investigators, military personnel and journalists in town for the investigation.



IRA Shows Arms


BELFAST, Northern Ireland (Reuters) - The IRA announced on Thursday a new inspection of its arms dumps by foreign observers coinciding with a visit to the British-ruled province by Prime Minister Tony Blair to bolster foundering peace efforts.

"We specifically announced that we would repeat the inspection of a number of arms dumps by third parties to confirm that our weapons are secure," the Irish Republican Army (IRA) said in a statement distributed to the media.

"We now wish to confirm that this reinspection has taken place and thank those involved for their co-operation."

The guerrilla group, which is on cease-fire after a 30-year war against British rule in Northern Ireland, on Wednesday promised to reopen its arsenals to outside observers Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa and Martti Ahtisaari of Finland who first examined them in June.

President Clinton has joined Britain and Ireland in applauding the IRA decision to give the two foreign observers a fresh look at hidden arsenals to assure Protestant unionists that they were no longer in use.

Confirmation of the re-examination came as British Prime Minister Tony Blair arrived in Belfast for talks with rival political leaders.



Hunt for Montesinos


LIMA, Peru (AP) - Looking like a general directing his troops into battle, President Alberto Fujimori shouted orders to members of an elite police force, deploying them in a manhunt for his feared former intelligence chief.

Vladimiro Montesinos' unexpected return from exile in Panama on Monday has plunged Peru into political turmoil, and Fujimori was determined to put an end to it, taking personal command of the search for the man who was once his close aide.

But Montesinos, once described as a man who prefers the night, slipped away Wednesday as darkness fell over the resort town of Chaclacayo, in the foothills of the Andes 35 kilometers east of Lima.

Fujimori resumed the search before dawn Thursday, leaving the Government Palace and returning to Chaclacayo with his daughter Keiko, his butler and his personal cook, giving the impression he was settling in for a long stay.



Whites on Trial?


HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) - With the opposition trying to impeach him and his popularity at an all-time low, President Robert Mugabe has lashed out at Zimbabwe's white minority, threatening genocide trials for all who fought against him in the independence war.

Mugabe told supporters Wednesday that Ian Smith, the white leader he helped overthrow two decades ago, and all whites who fought against black guerrillas would face trials for war crimes.

"Ian Smith and his fellow whites committed genocide during our liberation war. They will stand trial for their crimes,'' Mugabe said.

Smith, 81, was the last white leader of the former British colony of Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was known before independence. He was in Britain on a lecture tour Thursday, his son Alec said.

Mugabe said the nation's 70,000 whites - less than 1 percent of the population of 13 million - mostly opposed his government and had spurned offers of forgiveness and reconciliation.



Ivory Coast Violence


ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (Reuters) - Supporters of Ivory Coast's President-elect Laurent Gbagbo and political rival Alassane Ouattara fought bloody clashes in Abidjan Thursday over a demand for fresh presidential elections.

At least 10 people were confirmed dead in the violence that erupted the day after huge "people power" protests swept military ruler Gen. Robert Guei from power in the West African country.

Ouattara took refuge in the German Embassy after paramilitary security forces opened fire on his home and his private security guards fired back.

Youths loyal to Ouattara, who was excluded from Sunday's presidential election, took to the streets in districts across the city, erecting barricades, burning tires and demanding new elections. Supporters of Gbagbo, who spearheaded the anti-Guei protests Tuesday and Wednesday, staged rival demonstrations and clashed bloodily with Ouattara loyalists.

The army said it would enforce a 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew in force until Monday morning, extending emergency measures first put in place by Guei.

"Consequently, all people found in the streets put themselves in danger of being shot on sight," chief of defense staff Diabakate Soumahila said on state radio.



Hate Crimes on Rise


BERLIN (AP) - Anti-Semitism is on the rise again in Germany, new statistics confirmed Thursday as authorities took the first step toward banning a far-right party accused of fanning hate.

"A country that had gas chambers for the annihilation of millions of Jews cannot tolerate organized anti-Semitism," Interior Minister Otto Schily said Thursday at a Duesseldorf meeting of ministers from Germany's 16 states.

In Duesseldorf and at a later meeting of state governors in the eastern city of Schwerin, all but two states voted to ask the country's highest court to ban the National Democratic Party.

The action is the government's most visible response to Germany's worst wave of neo-Nazi violence since reunification a decade ago.

A July bomb attack at a Duesseldorf train station injured 10 immigrants, six of them Jewish, and plunged the nation into months of soul-searching about whether Germany has learned the lessons of its Nazi past.

Anti-Semitic crimes doubled in the three months from June to September of this year compared to the same period last year - from 146 to 291, according to statistics released Thursday in parliament.

TITLE: U.S. Race Is Going Down to the Wire
AUTHOR: By Alan Elsner
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: WASHINGTON - Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore both claimed momentum on Thursday in their neck-and-neck presidential race, which is turning into a war of attrition in key states with 12 days to go.


Interviewed on NBC's "Today Show," Bush, the governor of Texas, said both he and the vice president had been up and down in polls recently. The latest Reuters/MSNBC poll gave Gore a slender two-point lead, but other surveys show Bush ahead.

"I like our chances. However, I take nothing for granted. There's a lot of work to do and there's a lot of people we've got to get to the polls. I am heartened by the size of our rallies, the spirit of our crowd," Bush said.

Gore, on ABC's "Good Morning America," was asked whether Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, currently drawing about 5 percent in national polls, could be handing the election to Bush.

"I don't like the argument that a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush. It may be true, but my argument that I much prefer is I want to convince all of the voters to support me with enthusiasm, and where issues like the environment are concerned, I'll put my record up against anybody's," the vice president said.

"This is the closest race since John Kennedy won by a margin of one vote per precinct around our country [in 1960]. I think partly for that reason, the interest is building, and what some have predicted about turnout I think is going to be wrong this year. I think people are tuning into this," he said.

Gore said he would make no more joint appearances with President Clinton until Election Day on Nov. 7.

"Look, I'm campaigning as my own person. I am who I am. I'm running this race on my own vision and agenda for the future," Gore said.

TITLE: Suicide Bombers Preying on Israeli Nerves
AUTHOR: By Howard Goller
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: JERUSALEM - He could be a passenger on an Israeli bus. A shopper at a market. A man disguised as a woman. Or a man on a bicycle.


The bomb strapped to the person's chest or back could go off at any time.

So it was that Israeli nerves were frayed on Thursday by a Palestinian suicide cyclist from the Islamic Jihad movement who blew himself up beside an Israeli army outpost in Gaza, lightly wounding a soldier.

The return of the suicide bombing - the choice weapon of Islamic militant groups - heightened fears in Israel that a month of conflict was entering a dangerous new stage.

Army spokesman Yarden Vatikay said he believed the attack increased the likelihood of similar attempts inside Israel where people, fearing an incident, have been avoiding crowds and buses.

Israel has sealed its borders with the West Bank and Gaza Strip to try to prevent would-be bombers from entering the Jewish state.

Since an eruption of clashes in which at least 132 people, nearly all of them Arabs, have died, Israel's security forces have said militant groups - such as Islamic Jihad and Hamas - could also try to carry out suicide missions.

Scores of Israelis have been killed or wounded in suicide attacks. Fifty-seven people were killed in the bombings in 1996 over some of the bloodiest nine days in Israel for years.

The suicide bombings were halted because of efforts by the Palestinian Authority, which jailed militants, and Israel.

The army spokesman said militant groups had the three components they needed to launch attacks - the ability, the will and a "green light" from the Palestinian Authority, which freed dozens of militants after violence flared.

Maj. Gen. Abdel-Razek al-Majaydeh, director of public security in the Palestinian Authority, dismissed the Israeli claim as "lies, fabrications and groundless accusations."

But analysts said the Islamist groups could again be inspiring young men to strap bombs to their chests and blow themselves up.

Palestinian President Yasser Arafat says he is not involved in such attacks, but Israeli analysts said Hamas attacks could still work in his interests.

Marwan Kanafani, an aide to Ara fat, said Israel should accept the blame for the suicide bombing because "Israeli aggression" had caused the tensions which provoked it.

Israeli experts said the bombers normally fit a certain profile.

"For the most part the guys who actually do it themselves are marginal or peripheral characters in society, they are usually single, usually poor, not very well-educated, and may have had some kind of problem that can be exploited [by militant leaders] - a relative hurt or killed in some confrontation with Israel," said Mark Heller, a senior researcher at Israel's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies.

"They are driven by religious belief that they are serving the holy cause and they are going to go to heaven and be martyrs after they carry out what they are going to do," he added.

Besides trying to torpedo Middle East peacemaking, the Islamic militants aim to strengthen their own standing in Palestinian politics, hoping to rival Arafat's Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization which has played a leading role in clashes with Israeli troops, Heller said.



***

The Israeli and Palestinian leaders appeared on Thursday to be in no hurry to head to Washington for meetings proposed by President Clinton to try to end nearly a month of fighting.


Prime Minister Ehud Barak's security adviser Danny Yatom said the Israeli leader would not go to Washington so long as there was still violence, in which at least 132 people have been killed, mostly Palestinians.

Clinton is trying to coax Barak and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat to the U.S. capital for separate meetings to end the bloodshed. A pact reached last week in Sharm el-Sheikh failed to stop the unrest in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

"We need to see how events unfold. The most important thing now is the cessation of violence, which has not yet been achieved," Yatom said just before an Israeli soldier was wounded in an attack by a suicide bicycle bomber in Gaza.

Arafat's adviser Nabil Abu Rdainah said the Palestinian leader, who blames Israel for the clashes, would not meet Barak at this time.

"A meeting between President Arafat and President Clinton is always welcome. We made clear that it was still too early for a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak,'' Abu Rdainah told Reuters.

Clinton said on Wednesday that Arafat could do more to halt the violence which prompted Barak to call a time-out in peacemaking.

Yatom said Clinton had not formally invited Barak to Washington for talks.

"He threw out an idea," he said. "In the present circumstances, if there is violence it's almost certain there won't be an invitation. If violence recedes, there will be an invitation."