SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #621 (0), Friday, November 17, 2000
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TITLE: Kronshtadt Collision Sinks Ship
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A Russian refrigerator trawler sank on Wednesday after being rammed by a cargo vessel, spewing fuel into the harbor near Kotlin Island where the town of Kronshtadt is located. 


The 1,500-ton Nortlandia capsized after the collision with the Panama-registered E.W. McKinley, spilling some three tons of diesel fuel from a total of 80 tons in its tanks. The boat was also carrying 300 tons of fish.

The collision occurred around 5 a.m., about 50 meters from the Nortlandia's berth at Kronshtadt, when the 130-meter-long McKinley hit the 67-meter-long Nortlandia's port side. The collision ripped a hole in the hull of the Nortlandia, which caused it to capsize and start spilling fuel, resulting in a slick. 

It is still unclear where the fault for the accident lies - with the navigators of the McKinley or the Nortlandia. 

Damage to the McKinley was limited to the cargo ship's bow, but the 11 crew members of the Nortlandia jumped into the icy water to escape their sinking vessel. 

They were shortly rescued by workers from the Emergency Services Ministry. Two were treated for hypothermia and other injuries. The remaining nine were pronounced healthy and sent home. 

Despite the spillage of the volatile diesel fuel into local seas, few Kronshtadt residents or ecologists were worried because the spill happened on the Kotlin Island's southeastern side, where the harbor is located. Water for municipal purposes is drawn from the northwestern side of the island, officials said. 

Vladimir Yegorkin, president of the Russian Sea Navigators Association, said that the leakage of fuel in Kronshtadt harbor is not that dangerous.

"The thing is that the water in the harbor is stagnant and it's easier to isolate the diesel fuel," he said in a telephone interview Wednesday. "It would be worse if it happened in the Neva river, since the current could carry it everywhere." 

By Wednesday afternoon, cleaning crews had arrived at the scene and boats had spread special fences around the area of the slick and begun to remove the chemicals with pumps and detergents. Divers had plugged the leaking holes in the hull of the Nortlandia. 

By Thursday afternoon two more boats had been called in, and together they had managed to pump about one ton of diesel fuel out of the water, according to Dmitry Makarkin, a representative of the St. Petersburg Reservoir Emergency Department. 

"We hope by Friday night we'll finish the work," he said.

Others experts who examined the spot, however, were not as rosy in their assessments. 

Yelena Yemelkina, deputy head of the Leningrad Regional Sea Safety Inspection, went to visit the spot and said that traces of oil are noticeable near the St. Petersburg Dike - a long dam that begins at Kotlin Island that prevents flooding in St. Petersburg. 

Yemelkina said at least 11 square kilometers of Kronshtadt Harbor is covered with a fuel film.

Vladimir Yevdokimov, head of the Russian North-West Fishing Department, said that the fuel spill can be bad for fish and fishing. 

"Even if the fish don't die, they will take on the oil smell and harmful ingredients and won't be accepted for selling," he said in a telephone interview Wednesday. 

"Usually, all these cleaning procedures are no more than 30 percent effective, he added. 

"And if Kronshtadt harbor has an undercurrent, all that pollution will end up in the Gulf of Finland." 

Galina Belkina, the Kronshtadt administration's ecologist said that, although the cleaning efforts seemed to be working, the spill is a "big and a very unpleasant one for the Kronshtadt area."

"Right now you can sense the smell of oil products in the district," she said in a telephone interview Thursday. 

The Emergency Ministry said the cause of the accident is still under investigation. The spokesman said the ministry was focusing on the navigators. 

Andrei Markelov, deputy of St. Petersburg Sea Port, said that a special commission has also been formed to investigate the collision. They, too, suspect a navigational error. 

"For now [the commission] thinks the accident happened because of a navigation mistake - not just on one boat but on both boats," he said in a telephone interview Thursday. 

He said that the captains of both ships have six days in which to submit their own versions of the collision. The commission, he said, would then complete its investigation within 25 days. 

After that, Markelov said, the owners of the vessel found guilty will have to pay for the clean-up work in Kronshtadt Harbor, salvage work, and damages to the fishing market in the area. 

The McKinley will have to remain in St. Petersburg until the investigation is completed, Markelov said.

TITLE: Veshnyakov Rebuffs Vote-Finance Charge
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalyev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Financial tycoon Boris Berezovsky - who has chosen to remain abroad rather than return to Russia and face questions about alleged embezzlement - has said President Vladimir Putin used foreign financial resources to gain election in March this year.


Under Russian election law, the use of finances from sources abroad is strictly forbidden. 

But in an open letter to the media published Tuesday, Berezovsky accuses Putin of taking the aid of Swiss companies channeled through Aeroflot Russia Airlines - the very company Berezovsky stands accused of embezzling from, and which he partly owns. 

Berezovsky, a long-time political insider in the administration of Boris Yeltsin, is charged with embezzling $1 billion from the airline. Though close to members of Yeltsin's literal and figurative family, he has fallen out of favor with the Kremlin under Putin and many analysts say he - like media-baron Vladimir Gusinsky - is the victim of a house-cleaning as Putin goes after the oligarchy. 

In his letter, Berezovsky - who is currently in New York - answered his accusers, writing that "the so-called Aeroflot case was made up by [former prime-minister Yevgeny] Primakov and then re-activated by Putin, who was not happy about my criticism of his policies." 

"Putin, being a candidate for president, was not disturbed when the profit of Swiss companies that worked with Aeroflot was used to finance [Putin's] Unity faction and the presidential election campaign."

Berezovsky named Andava and Forus as companies that had given profits to the Putin race, companies that Berezovsky himself had used to help finance ORT, which was behind Putin's advertising campaign, Berezovsky said in an interview on NTV on Wednesday. 

Central Electoral Commission head Alexander Veshnyakov was asked in an interview on Ekho Moskvy radio on Thursday if the election results would have to be nullified should hard evidence arise that foreign funding had aided the Putin campaign - like the sort that Berezovsky hinted at though never claimed to have. 

"That is our duty," said Veshnyakov. 

"In a case where we receive documents saying that there were financial violations during the process of a deputy's or president's elections, we have to check it and, if anyone is guilty, we take measures to make them answer for that."

But in this particular case, Veshnyakov was not impressed by Berezovsky's announcement, and said that the Central Election Commission would not be taking any steps to look into whether or not Putin financed his campaign with foreign money. 

"There is nothing to react to in the announcement in the interview that was made by Berezovsky," Veshnyakov said.

Political analysts also had doubts that the Central Election Commission would take action on Berezovsky's claims. 

"It is typical in many countries - including the United States - to prohibit the financing of election campaigns with foreign money, but nothing is going to happen here," said Leonid Kes sel man, political analyst at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

TITLE: Bank Hit In Raid By City Police
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg police raided the headquarters of Promyshlenno-Stroitelny Bank early Thursday as part of an ongoing criminal investigation by city prosecutors.


The bank, near the Moscow Railroad Station in the city center, was surrounded by dozens of armed police while 15 to 20 investigators searched the building for documents.

To the outrage of bank officials, the City Prosecutor's Office refused to justify the raid or give details of the case.

In a telephone interview, prosecutor's office spokesman Gennady Rya bov would only say that the raid was conducted entirely "within the law" and investigators had good reason for the search. "We are not in a position to elaborate," he said, commenting only that the raid was in connection with a criminal case that was opened on Tuesday.

Promstroibank (PSB) chairwoman Olga Kazanskaya said in remarks reported by Vedomosti that the bank also considered the actions of the investigators as "absolutely legal ... [and] in accordance with a criminal case."

"But the way in which the investigators decided to take action is, in our opinion, inappropriate for a bank with a trustworthy reputation," Kazanskaya said.

"What we do not understand is why they brought in a task force as if expecting a shootout," said PSB spokeswoman Irina Shapirova. "There are no client accounts in this office, which hosts only the senior staff," she said, marking the 26th call about the raid in her notebook. "We sound like a broken record," she added.

Viktor Cherkesov, the governor general for the Northwest region, told Vedomosti he thought the decision to stage raid was "probably taken on the basis of materials relating to the criminal case."

"As far as the actions of ... those [who carried out the raid] are concerned, then you must ask those who organized [it]," Cherkesov said.

Anatoly Morgunov, a spokesman for Banking House St. Petersburg, said the search was probably related to the commercial activities of one of PSB's clients.

But other analysts were quick to pin a political motive on the raid. A source in another St. Petersburg bank, who did not wish to be identified, said that an investigation into a single client did not warrant such heavy-handed tactics.

But while the source said that the raid would do PSB's image no good, it would not likely have long-lasting results since PSB is in a strong economic position.

The source added that the raid was probably carried out with either the backing or the tacit support of a person or group at a federal level, reported Vedomosti, and could be aimed at limiting support for the bank.

PSB has recently been expanding its activities to Moscow by increasing its branches and placing ATM machines in the capital - some of which are rumored to be aimed for the White House, the State Duma and other federal organs. 

PSB, which was set up in October 1990, and Bank Petrovsky are part of Banking House St. Petersburg, a holding company set up in 1997. 

A third bank, Petrovsky, left the alliance to join with BaltUneximbank - left from the collapse of Uneximbank. 

PSB, had equity of 1.3 billion rubles ($47 million) and assets of 15.9 billion rubles as of July 1 this year. It makes up 7.5 percent of St. Petersburg's retail banking market and 70 percent of the city's plastic card transactions.

PSB had a solid reputation until earlier this year, when information leaked that it had acquired defunct Inkombank's offices on Moscow's Lubyanka Ulitsa for a tiny fraction of its market value.

Media reports linked the acquisition to then-Prime Minister Sergei Ste pa shin, now head of the State Audit Chamber, whose wife worked at PSB until May, when she was appointed vice president of Banking House St. Petersburg to handle its Moscow operations. 

PSB's Shapirova would not disclose details of the real estate deal, but dismissed allegations of impropriety as groundless.

TITLE: Wife Found Guilty of Killing Duma Deputy
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - A Russian court on Thursday convicted the widow of a prominent Russian lawmaker of shooting him to death after a quarrel in 1998, sentencing her to eight years in prison. 


Tamara Rokhlina was arrested in 1998 and charged with killing her husband, retired Gen. Lev Rokhlin. Rokhlina initially confessed, but later said her husband's security guards killed him because of his fierce criticism of then-President Boris Yeltsin. 

In the town of Naro-Fominsk outside Moscow, Judge Lyudmila Zhilina found Rokhlina guilty after a month-long trial. 

Rokhlina, dressed in black, left the courtroom proclaiming her innocence, and denied that quarrels with her husband led to the crime. 

Lev Rokhlin, a career soldier, won wide praise for his performance at the beginning of the 1994-96 war in Chechnya. He later rejected a medal for valor in combat in the extremely unpopular war, saying he didn't want to be decorated for a war that involved attacks on fellow Russian citizens. 

He was elected to parliament's lower house in 1995, and gained popularity by exposing military corruption and calling for an opposition political movement in the ranks. 

He was shot with his own pistol while he was asleep in his dacha outside Moscow.

TITLE: Huge Cigarette Shipment Seized
AUTHOR: By Masha Kaminskaya
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Prosecutors are investigating the attempted smuggling out of Russia of $2.5 million worth of cigarettes, which were seized in a port west of St. Petersburg over the weekend.


A shipment of cigarettes bearing the Regal and Super Kings trademarks, but lacking excise stamps, was seized Sunday in the commercial port of Lomonosov. The Regal and Super Kings brands belong to the British-based Imperial Tobacco Group.

The contraband was apparently bound for Britain's black tobacco market. It is now in warehouses belonging to Northwest Customs.

"Northwest Customs ... will pass on materials [on Friday] to the Northwest Transport Prosecutor's Office to start the investigation," said the head of the prosecutor's department for customs law, Vadim Nepryakhin, in a telephone interview Thursday.

According to investigators, the cigarettes, which are believed to be counterfeit, were discovered in the hold of a ship called the Nika in three containers, each about six meters long.

The Nika, a 50-meter vessel with an eight-strong Russian crew, reportedly belongs to the Centar Holding Ltd. shipping company, which is officially registered in Belize in Central America.

According to the ship's customs papers, the hold contained 800 tons of metal scrap to be delivered to the British port of Blyth on the east coast. 

The Nika was due to set sail as early as Nov. 2. However, border guards, who had only examined the outside of the freight - the metal scrap - decided to unload the ship and have a closer look.

Nikolai Ovragov, a spokesman for Northwest Customs, said that the ship's crew - who are natives of St. Petersburg - denied border officers access to the freight, and the ship's 48-year-old captain, Andrei Solopov, insisted it would take too much time and money to unload.

On Nov. 4 the ship was placed under official arrest. That same day, Solopov reportedly had a heart attack that caused him to fall from the upper to the lower deck of the ship. He died in a hospital in the St. Petersburg suburb of Petrodvorets two days later. It was not clear if this case would be treated separately.

A week later, the ship was finally unloaded and the cigarettes discovered.

"This is a unique case," said Ovragov by telephone Thursday. 

"The shipment we seized is the biggest [and most expensive] in our service's history. No one here remembers anything like this happening in the past."

According to Sergei Poddubsky, deputy chief of Northwest Customs's Investigation Service, the identify of whoever masterminded the smuggling attempt is not yet known.

While unprecedented in its scale, this latest arrest is one of several attempts to smuggle British cigarettes, fake and genuine, across Russia's borders.

In the spring of this year, said Poddubsky, officials from Baltic Customs discovered 60,000 cartons of fake Regal cigarettes, with an estimated value of Pound1 million ($1.6 million), in one of their temporary storage warehouses. 

And in early November, police in the Kaliningrad region found a van in a forest containing $500,000 worth of cigarettes with Regal and Super Kings trademarks, but also lacking excise stamps. Both these finds and the Nika shipment were bound for Britain.

A pack of Regal cigarettes costs Pound4.17 (about $7) in Britain, according to Elizabeth Buckingham, communications manager for Imperial Tobacco Group.

Speaking by telephone on Thursday, Buckingham said she was aware of "a few minor instances [of counterfeited] Regal."

Imperial Tobacco also exports cigarettes to many different markets, and some are smuggled back because of the high rate of excise duty on cigarettes in Britain, she said.

It is estimated that black-market cigarettes - those on which excise duties have not been paid - now account for one in three cigarettes in Britain.

"We have been suspicious that there may be illegal production in Russia, but we have little evidence of any Russian product reaching the U.K. market," said Buckingham.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Porn Man Gets Jail


HELENA, Montana (AP) - A Russian man has been sentenced to 51 months in prison for downloading pornographic pictures - some involving children - to a computer at a local college.

Vladimir Mozhenkov was arrested last December after federal agents traced more than 37 pornographic images posted on the Internet to one of Carroll College's computer labs. 

Mozhenkov admitted to having child pornography on several diskettes and using computers at the college to distribute child pornography.

At the time, Mozhenkov was a lab monitor working at the college, where he was enrolled. Mozhenkov pleaded guilty in August to possessing child pornography.

He faces deportation after serving his sentence.



Two Men Steal Tower


KALININGRAD (SPT ) - Two men stole a water tower in Kaliningrad region in Dubrovka village and brought it to a scrap metal collection point to collect the proceeds, Interfax reported.

Local authorities have not yet located the tower, which they assume has been cut up and resold from the scrap metal station, Interfax reported.

They have however, made two arrests in the case: 30-year-old Sergei Toropov and 20-year-old Alexander Ivanov, both of who are still in police custody, the agency said. 

The value of the stolen tower, plus other damages, is estimated at 14,000 rubles ($500).



Health Protest


ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - On Friday, the St. Petersburg Committee for Health employees will appear in front of the Legislative Assembly in order to appeal to local lawmakers to make changes in the 2001 budget increasing expenditures in health care, Interfax reported. 

The protesters hope to draw the attention of lawmakers to how severely health care expenditures have dropped over the past few years, the agency said. 

They also hope to underscore how low their salaries are. At present health care workers work below the poverty level, Interfax said. 


Barge Vanishes


MOSCOW (AP) - A search helicopter spotted a Russian barge that has been drifting for more than two weeks in Arctic waters with one sailor on board but then lost contact with the vessel, an official said earlier this week.

Fierce winds and clouds prevented the helicopter from rescuing the man, Igor Shur, during the flyover in the Bering Sea on Monday, said Emergency Situations Ministry spokesman Andrei Ryabov.

The helicopter crew were able to contact Shur over a weak radio he had on the Meridian barge. The Meridian was blown out to sea on Oct. 30, Ryabov said.

After the helicopter left, the Meridian again drifted into a vast web of ice floes, and its position was not known Tuesday, Ryabov said.

The barge was first carried into the Chukchi Sea, north of the Chukotka Peninsula. It then drifted south through the Bering Strait between the Russian and U.S. coasts into the Bering Sea,

Ryabov said. Russian and Alaskan rescuers are cooperating in the search, he said.

TITLE: Navy Drops Depth Charges To Guard Kursk
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BRUSSELS, Belgium - Russia has no need to fear that underwater NATO spies are snooping around the sunken Kursk submarine, an official speaking for the Western Alliance said on Thursday.


Responding to news that the Russian navy was setting off small explosions to keep any prying eyes away from the wreck in the Barents Sea, he told reporters, "They have no need to worry about NATO snooping."

"The Kursk is still Russian. It is also effectively a grave for the submariners who so tragically died," the official added. "So they don't need to do this to keep NATO away."

The Alliance was apparently not advised in advance of the Russian decision to set off grenades - which were detected on Wednesday by Norwegian seismologists.

Asked if Russia was under any compunction to warn the Alliance, he said that would depend on the size of the explosions envisaged and any potential danger to people at sea.

Russia has repeatedly suggested that the Kursk was lost with its crew of 118 after an explosion triggered by an underwater collision with a U.S. or British submarine spying on naval exercises.

The United States, Britain and NATO have all denied involvement, but appeared to be growing somewhat impatient with the persistence of Russian charges, which they believe the Russian military must know are a fiction.

However, the NATO allies saw their delicate ties with Moscow plunged into deep freeze over the bombing of Yugoslavia last year and clearly wish to avoid a public quarrel over the Kursk.

A top Russian naval commander was quoted as saying Thursday that investigations were moving closer to establishing the truth behind the sinking in August.

Vyacheslav Popov, commander of Russia's Northern Fleet, told the military daily Krasnaya Zvezda that the probe into the disaster was leaning towards one of three explanations under consideration, but declined to say which.

The three likeliest causes are thought to be a collision with a foreign submarine, a World War II mine or an initial explosion on board which detonated the Kursk's torpedoes.

Despite the end of the Cold War, Russian and NATO submarines - some armed with nuclear missiles - still play a high-stakes game of cat and mouse under the oceans across the world.

Given that, NATO might be interested in having a closer examination of one of Russia's most modern naval war vessels to discover what technology it was using. But in the case of the Kursk, there is also the potential incentive of determining what actually caused it to sink.

TITLE: The Stars Say Gore Would Be Best for Russia
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW -George W. Bush is more impulsive than Al Gore and will not be as good a partner for Russia if he becomes U.S. president, a Russian astrologer said on Wednesday.


"He is not able to be versatile in the same way as [Russian President Vladimir] Putin or Gore in building relations with those around him," Alexander Zarayev wrote in the weekly Argumenti i Fakti.

He said Bush had a desire to achieve results quickly which could lead to conflict with Russia's plans. He also said Bush's astrological chart showed him to be a person prone to being impulsive and not always thinking through his actions.

"Between Bush and Putin, formal or even strained relations could arise," Za ra yev said.

But he was not unqualified in his praise for Vice President Gore.

"[Gore] does not have sufficient breadth of outlook and he needs good advisers. He will be a rather easily controlled president, but periodically he will try to break free of this," he said.

The astrologer also said serious changes in the global arena, and in particular with regard to America, would force Putin to operate more dynamically.

"In general in 2001 we will see another Putin - he will be more decisive and focused."

TITLE: Russian Jets Shock U.S. Navy
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russian naval reconnaissance planes twice caught a U.S. Navy battle group off guard in the Sea of Japan and hovered over the Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier, photographing its deck, commanders said Wednesday.


Two Su-24MR planes spotted the group of U.S. Navy vessels on Oct. 17 and managed to fly over the Kitty Hawk before any of the carrier's fighter jets could take off to ward them off, air force chief Anatoly Kornukov told reporters in Moscow.

"The arrival of our planes came as a complete surprise to the Americans. Photographs show there was panic on the aircraft carrier's deck," he said.

The two planes from the Pacific Fleet repeated their stunt on Nov. 9, the commander said. In both cases they were accompanied by Su-27 fighter jets from an air force unit stationed in the Far East.

The results of the two reconnaissance sorties were "impressive" and the pilots who flew over the Kitty Hawk will be decorated, Kornukov said.

The U.S. Navy denied that the Russian jets had slipped past the Kitty Hawk's radar defenses. "The approaching Russian aircraft had been detected, tracked and identified for an extended period of time, and then escorted by U.S. fighters," said a statement released by the U.S. Seventh Fleet, The Associated Press reported.

A spokesman for the fleet, which is based in Japan, said the U.S. and Russian militaries often encounter each other without incident. "It's not unusual or unexpected to see Russian units while we're at sea," said spokesman Matt Brown.

It was unclear what impressive information the Russian military could have gained about the Kitty Hawk, which was commissioned back in 1962.

Also, the Russian air force and navy can not claim any credit for detecting the U.S. aircraft carrier as it can be easily spotted, and photographed, by Russia's intelligence satellites. The carrier's approximate location also can be determined with the help of its official Web site (www.kittyhawk.navy.mil/) on any given day.

The Kitty Hawk and its battle group, which remained in the Sea of Japan on Wednesday, were to have begun a joint naval war game with vessels of the Japanese navy when the second incident took place Nov. 9, according to this site.

Konstantin Makiyenko, deputy head of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, said the Su-24MRs do not boast any stealth characteristics or carry any equipment powerful enough to jam the radar defenses of the U.S. Navy battle group.

Thus, the pair of reconnaissance planes could have passed undetected only if the entire battle group had shut down its radar systems in order not to interfere in satellite communications with the U.S. Navy command, he said.

The Kitty Hawk, which has a displacement of more than 83,000 tons, has four different radar systems for air and surface search and an impressive arsenal of surface-to-air missiles, including Sea Sparrows that have a range of 55 kilometers.

The commander of the air force unit that sent up the Su-27s, Lt. Gen. Anatoly Nagovitsyn, told reporters in Moscow that the Kitty Hawk was being refueled when the two Su-24MRs advanced during one of the sorties.

This, he said, made it impossible for pilots of the F-14 and F/A-18 squad rons based on the Kitty Hawk to scramble off the deck until the Su-24MRs had flown over the carrier for a second time.

Nagovitsyn didn't specify whether it was during the Oct. 17 or the Nov. 9 sortie when the Kitty Hawk was being refueled.

Makiyenko said that it was possible that the U.S. planes were unable to scramble because the carrier was taking on fuel.

TITLE: Pope Prosecutors Insist Plans Were Classified
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW - Experts summoned by a Moscow court said Wednesday that data on Russian torpedoes obtained by U.S. spy suspect Edmond Pope were classified as secret.


"The commission has unanimously answered the court's question," Professor Yury Fadeyev, one of its members, told reporters outside the courtroom.

"It came to the following conclusion: Materials handed over to Pope were of a classified nature."

Pope, a former U.S. naval intelligence officer who works for Penn State University, was arrested in April and accused of buying secret data on the Shkval torpedoes from a professor at Bauman State Technical University, Ana toly Babkin.

The defense argues that the data was obtained by Pope through official channels and most of it had already been published.

"This data has never been declassified and we are not going to declassify it," Fadeyev said.

When Pope initially requested the materials, another group of experts determined that the materials were not secret.

But then a government commission was formed to review the case, and concluded that the plans, parts of which Pope received before his arrest, were in fact classified. The commission confirmed that finding in its testimony Wednesday.

"We again concluded that the materials were secret and had the most direct link to all programs for developing the Shkval," Interfax quoted another commission member, Ge or gy Log vi novich, as saying.

Defense lawyer Pavel Astakhov said the commission experts are biased because they have worked closely with the material in question.

Wednesday's testimony came as U.S. President Bill Clinton asked President Vla di mir Putin during a meeting in Brunei to release Pope on humanitarian grounds.

Pope, 54, suffers from bone cancer, which was in remission when he arrived in Russia but which his family says may be flaring up again. The court has repeatedly refused his requests to see an English-speaking doctor.

Russian medical experts summoned by the court have said that Pope's cancer is still in remission and that he is fit to stay behind bars and face trial.

However, Pope's lawyers say that Russian doctors have no experience in dealing with the specific form of cancer the American suffers from and could not make a qualified judgment.

A U.S. consular official was allowed a rare meeting with Pope in Lefortovo Prison on Tuesday when his health and prison conditions were discussed, although no further details of the meeting were released. 


- Reuters, AP

TITLE: Kursk Governor Issues Apology
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - The newly elected governor of the Kursk region, Alexander Mikhailov, apologized Wednesday for his recent statements, that appeared to have been deeply anti-Semitic.


Mikhailov, a Communist, said he was misunderstood in an interview to Kommersant when he spoke of a Jewish conspiracy and bragged of receiving presidential support in his fight against it.

"I publicly apologize to Rutskoi and his mother," Mikhailov said in a statement carried by Itar-Tass. "I sincerely regret that my answers to straightforward questions were understood negatively. From this I drew the necessary conclusions. I have always respected and still respect people independent of their nationality, be they Russians, Ukrainians, Jews or Tatars."

The apology was published after he met with Georgy Poltavchenko, the presidential representative in the Central Federal District.

The original comments attracted nation-wide media attention last week.

TITLE: Gusinsky's Peace Deal With Gazprom-Media Withheld
AUTHOR: By Andrei Zolotov Jr.
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The all-but-achieved peace between Vladimir Gusinsky's Media-MOST holding and state-controlled Gazprom-Media fell through Tuesday when Gazprom-Media general director Alfred Kokh suddenly withdrew his signature from the deal.


Kokh backed out just before the agreement, signed Saturday, was to be presented in court as settlement of a dispute between the two parties.

Media-MOST accused Press Minister Mikhail Lesin of playing a key role in breaking off the deal, which would have ended a months-long, politically charged battle for control of NTV and other media companies owned by Gusinsky.

Geralina Lyubarskaya, a lawyer representing Media-MOST, said Kokh's change of mind was connected to a decision made Monday by the Prosecutor General's Office to issue an arrest warrant for Gusinsky on charges of fraud.

Gazprom-Media lawyer Alisa Turova, who gave Kokh's letter to the judge, said the case should be postponed until the two sides reach a deal that is "in line with existing legislation."

Anatoly Blinov, a lawyer and member of Gazprom-Media's board, said the agreement violated the civil procedures code. He also said it was full of loopholes that would have allowed Gusinsky to back out of the agreement as he did in July. After agreeing to sign over his companies to Gazprom-Media for $473 million in canceled debts and $300 million in cash, Gusinsky was allowed to leave the country and embezzlement charges against him were dropped. He later said he signed the contract under pressure.

"[The current deal] was prepared by foreign lawyers who don't know the nuances of Russian legislation," Blinov said. "De facto, it cannot be executed."

Lawyer Alexander Berezin, who had signed the deal on behalf of Gusinsky, denied that foreigners were involved. "Something has happened since last night, and we don't yet know what it is," he said outside the courtroom.

Kokh could not be reached for comment Tuesday. A source close to the situation said on Tuesday that Kokh had changed his mind late on Monday night.

According to a text of the agreement published by the Lenta.ru Web site, a company affiliated with Gaz prom-Media would receive a 25-percent-plus-one-share stake of most Media-MOST-affiliated companies, other than NTV, as repayment of $211 million. A 25-percent share of each of these companies would be transferred to Gaz prom-Media as collateral for the $262 million in debt that matures in March.

As far as NTV is concerned, Gaz prom-Media would receive 16 percent, raising its total stake in the television company to 46 percent, and a 19 percent stake would be transferred as collateral. A 25-percent-plus-one-share stake of NTV, including the 19 percent transferred as collateral, would be slated for sale to a "recognized international strategic or portfolio investor" through Deutsche Bank AG London for at least $90 million.

Lesin denied any involvement in the recent negotiations, but he made it clear that he has been following them attentively.

TITLE: Squabbles Still Ahead For Draft City Budget
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalyev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Legislative Assembly passed the first reading of a 41.8 billion-ruble ($1.5-billion) budget this week, but with two more readings to go, the squabbles and amendments promise to continue. 


Even though some lawmakers haggled with City Hall last week for a 668-million ruble increase in social spending for schools and social and food programs, the budget still posted an expenditure line of 40.82 billion rubles - giving the city a 1-billion-ruble surplus.

The draft budget forecasts a 12 percent inflation rate, a 5 percent growth in industrial development and a 6 percent increase in the region's gross domestic product. 

Lawmakers also managed to secure their controversial reserve fund - a private fund of money given to each lawmaker to spend on projects in his district. Advocates of the fund say they can solve problems quickly without waiting for City Hall approval. Others say it is an invitation for corruption. 

Nevertheless, lawmakers each got 15 million rubles - down from the 25 million they got last year - in discretionary funds, which is an amount many plan to augment through amendments in later readings to of the budget. 

"We are going to work on it. There are two more readings ahead," said Vladimir Golman, a lawmaker with the Our City faction, in an interview on Wednesday.

Lawmaker Leonid Romankov was happy with the document as it stands. 

"Lawmakers offered 52 amendments and 80 percent were approved," said Romankov in an interview Wednesday. 

"Now we can say that the budget is more transparent and more socially oriented."

But while Stanislav Zhitkov, a lawmaker with the Communist Party and Unity factions, said he was pleased to see expenditures sink relative to debt, he proposed a cap on expenditures that would be 40 percent of the debt. 

"As we found out, the current debt is 18.5 billion rubles, or 43.3 percent of the total budget spending for a year," he said in an interview Wednesday. "This way we could end up without our trousers." 

More bitter squabbles, however, arose between the haves and the have-nots, as some lawmakers accused City Hall of stiffing assembly members who have poor ties with the governor. 

According to the Yabloko faction, lawmaker and head of the budget committee Sergei Nikeshin got 60 million rubles for his district, with which he plans to build residential buildings, a swimming pool and a police station. 

Meanwhile, Natalya Yevdokimova, a Yabloko faction lawmaker, got nothing for her district. 

Nikeshin was surprised when confronted by a reporter about this apparent variance in funding.

"What the ... where did you get this from?! Those people who came up with those figures, they just envy me," he said in an interview.

He then said that Yevdokimova had been absent during the summer when the budget was being drawn up. 

Yevdokimova said, however, that she had submitted her amendments during the summer, as well as in the spring. 

"It is clear that those lawmakers who are members of the budget committee lobbied their own interests while preparing the budget," said Boris Vishnevsky, Yabloko faction member, in an interview on Wednesday.

"At the same time other [lawmakers] were left with nothing," he said.

TITLE: Space Station Mir To Be Ditched at Last
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Isachenkov
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - The 14-year-old Mir space station, a symbol of Soviet space glory, will be ditched in February in a controlled descent that will send it hurtling into a remote area of the Pacific Ocean, Russia's cabinet decided Thursday. 


The decision came after months of wrestling over what to do with Mir, which Moscow can no longer afford to maintain. Mir is by far history's longest-serving space station, and Russians have been reluctant to let it go.

"Nothing can last for eternity, even Mir," Russian space agency chief Yury Koptev told reporters, warning that it would be unsafe to keep the rattling, corroding Mir aloft in its current state. 

The cabinet approved a plan to crash Mir into the Pacific 1,500 to 1,900 kilometers east of Australia on Feb. 27 or 28. The move comes after attempts to find investors to fund it failed, Koptev said. 

Officials said Russia should concentrate on the new international space station instead of Mir - something NASA has been urging for years. NASA is leading the 16-nation international project, which has suffered delays because of funding problems for Russian modules. 

To keep Mir aloft would require tests and procedures ensuring it is fit to orbit, which have not been done, Koptev said. "Any of Mir's systems may now fail," he said. 

The Russian government had decided to abandon the Mir earlier this year, but extended its lifetime after the private Netherlands-based MirCorp leased time on Mir and promised to pay for its operation. While MirCorp financed a mission to Mir earlier this year, it has failed to meet other commitments, forcing the government to divert funds allocated to the new international station to maintain Mir, Koptev said. 

"We cannot continue this game ... which I call Russian roulette. We simply don't have the right to do that, because we are a government agency responsible for the safety of Mir," he said. 

MirCorp representatives couldn't be immediately reached for comment. 

American businessman Dennis Tito, who had hoped to travel to Mir as a "space tourist" under a deal with MirCorp, will not be sent to the station, Koptev said. 

Mir was hailed as revolutionary when it went up in 1986, and has far surpassed the three to five years it was expected to last. But critics say it has also outlived its usefulness.

The inside is scarred by a 1997 fire and one module, Spektr, is sealed off after a collision that year with a small craft ferrying away the station's refuse. 

Abandoning Mir was an excruciating decision for the Russian space program, a force that put the first satellite in the cosmos, as well as the first man and first woman, but which now has no cash and no new projects that are entirely its own. 

Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov told Thursday's cabinet meeting that he considers safely discarding the Mir an international commitment.

In calling for careful preparation for the Mir's descent, Koptev recalled a Soviet satellite that crashed in northern Canada in 1978, in a major embarrassment for the Soviet leadership. Nobody was hurt but radioactive fragments were scattered over the wilderness. 

Koptev said an unmanned cargo ship would be sent to Mir in January and in February the cargo ship would fire its rockets to push the station quickly into the atmosphere. In case something goes awry, a crew of two Russian cosmonauts will be on hand to blast to the station and prepare its descent. 

The unoccupied U.S. Skylab space station fell to Earth in 1979 when its orbit deteriorated faster than anticipated, scattering debris over western Australia. No one was hurt.

TITLE: Experts Claim Russia Faces AIDS Epidemic in 5 to 6 Years
AUTHOR: By Tara FitzGerald
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW -The spread of AIDS could reach catastrophic proportions in Russia unless officials take quick action to reduce runaway growth rates of the killer syndrome, Russian and foreign experts said on Wednesday.


The joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), in a statement issued ahead of a two-day visit to Russia, put the number of HIV and AIDS sufferers at 130,000 at the end of last year. But there is broad agreement that the number is significantly under-reported.

Vadim Pokrovsky, director of the AIDS prevention center, told Ekho Moskvy radio that at the current rate of growth Russia could have up to a million infected cases in two to three years.

He said some consequences of the spread of the disease were already irreversible and if "a passive and indifferent attitude to this epidemic [continues] Russians will face many more serious problems and tragedies.

"The main plague will start in five or six years because people are dying on average 10 to 12 years after contracting the infection and the mass epidemic in Russia started in the 1990s."

UNAIDS said the largest share of funds requested for Russia would go towards preventing the spread of HIV - the virus that causes AIDS - through injecting drugs, by far the principal means of transmission in the country.

Resources would also be allocated for a growing problem - sexually transmitted infections, with efforts directed at young people and mothers-to-be.

"So far, the epidemic in Russia has been driven by drug users," Arkadiusz Majszyk, a UNAIDS representative in Russia, said in the statement.

"But a second wave of HIV infections spread by sexual contact could follow the current drug-driven epidemic and in just three to four years, Russia may well have a generalized epidemic."

UNAIDS said its executive director, Peter Piot, would meet high-ranking Russian officials and non-governmental groups on Thursday. The UN agency called on donors to allocate at least $20 million over the next three years to stem the epidemic.

Pokrovsky said the anti-AIDS programs in Russia were "surprisingly weak" and poorly financed.

He said Russia had spent 44 million rubles ($1.6 million) on its AIDS program this year, roughly 1,000 times less than that spent in the United States.

Majszyk also told Ekho Moskvy that Russia had the world's highest rate of growth of the killer syndrome.

"In the space of one month this year, 30,000 new HIV cases were uncovered, while last year this figure was three times lower," Majszyk said. "With so many cases we can begin to talk about a threat to national security."

The World Health Organization said this month the number of registered HIV infections in Russia had doubled annually for the last five years and it urged the country to take tough measures.

AIDS is the fourth biggest killer worldwide. About 18.8 million people have died since 1983, including 2.8 million last year, UNAIDS says. Nearly twice as many - 34.3 million - are living with HIV.

TITLE: Moscow, Minsk Discuss Stabilization Deal
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia and Belarus still can't agree on who will mint rubles if their economies are merged, and Minsk has been paying off a $227 million debt to Moscow partly with shipments of tractors.


But in an effort to keep the controversial Russian-Belarussian reunification drive alive, Prime Minister Mikhail Kasya nov announced Tuesday that Russia would loan Belarus another $100 million to help support the wobbly Belarussian ruble.

The loan was announced at a meeting of the Council of Ministers of the Russian-Belarussian Union, an organization set up to oversee the assimilation of Belarus into the Russian economy. 

At the end of this month, President Vladimir Putin and his Belarussian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko are expected to sign a treaty on unifying their national currencies. The merger itself would then still be five years off, but ultimately Belarus is to accept the Russian ruble as its national currency.

But before then, Kasyanov said, the Belarussian economy needed to be brought up to par with Russia's.

"It is time for Russia to support the Belarussian ruble and [help] a favorable trade balance with Belarus," Kasyanov said, in remarks reported by Interfax.

The loan is to be modeled after similar loans Russia has borrowed from the International Monetary Fund: It will be doled out in tranches, with each dependent on need and on Belarus adopting the economic policies Russia recommends, including Moscow's demands that Belarus reduce its budget deficit, bridle inflation, and stabilize the economy.

A first $30 million tranche of the loan could be delivered to Minsk by the end of December, Kasyanov said. 

The question of organizing a single mint will be more complex. Moscow has been adamant that there should be one mint with the keys to it kept in Moscow. 

Minsk recoiled at first, then accepted the proposal, though it later tacked on a provision that a subsidiary of the federal mint be located in Belarus and that issue volumes be agreed between the central banks of both countries. 

Neither Russia nor Belarus is prepared to back down at present as the matter is one of state sovereignty. Moreover, Belarus could only surrender the right to print its own currency if its constitution were changed. 


-AP, Vedomosti, SPT

TITLE: Agricultural Sector Said Slow To Reform
AUTHOR: By Yevgenia Borisova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Even some of the poorest former Soviet republics are ahead of Russia when it comes to the transformation of their agricultural sector, an international conference on agriculture in the Commonwealth of Independent States heard this week.


"In some respects Moldova and the Ukraine ... are considerably ahead of Russia," John Costello, president of Citizens Network for Foreign Affairs, or CNFA, told The St. Petersburg Times.

The Washington-based network organized the two-day Moscow conference, which was sponsored by agriculture machinery makers Caterpillar Inc. and Claas Co.

Costello said that Ukraine and Moldova had made more progress than Russia on the restructuring of former state farms and the privatization of land, the process of redistribution of land and property rights.

Robert Mitchell, the head of a delegation from management consultants Booz-Allen & Hamilton, which is implementing a U.S. Agency for International Development project to develop land and real estate markets in Moldova, said that the core of the land reform in Moldova was the creation of small plots that could be bought and sold. 

He said 790,000 Moldovans have received ownership certificates for 2.2 million plots, with the average plot covering 1.5 hectares.

In recent years, laws allowing land sales have been passed in Moldova and now two banks and six rural savings and credit associations are providing loans for agriculture producers. 

Mitchell said that when the Mol do vans received certificates on their land, they did not rush to sell it. Most of the land - 80 percent - has been leased to farms, while only 1,300 land parcels have been sold. 

Ukraine has also taken several crucial steps that enabled it to make visible progress this year. 

Ukrainian deputy Agriculture Minister Roman Schmidt said a flat land tax that is not affected by inflation has been introduced - as low as $4 per hectare. 

In 1999 all Ukraine's collective and state farms were privatized and - as in Moldova - people started to lease their land officially.

Last summer, Ukraine ended state control of agriculture prices.

Schmidt said privatization of the farms, creation of individually owned plots and liberalization of prices caused agriculture production to increase immediately.

He said growth in the sector had been a mere 0.2 percent for the first eight months of this year compared with 1999. After nine months it was already 1.3 percent and after 10 months - 2.1 percent.

Sales of local agricultural products increased by 25 percent in 10 months, he added.

In Russia, the Land Code is stuck in the State Duma where the Communist faction believes that sales of farmland is equivalent to selling the Fatherland. 

Some 117 million hectares, which belong to about 12 million peasants, are held in common in collective farms, which on paper are called privatized agriculture enterprises. 

The sector lacks a sound legal infrastructure to protect investments. 

Peter Sochan, senior policy coordinator with CNFA, said in an interview that when consultants from the United States started to assist CIS countries on agricultural reforms 10 years ago, there was no clear understanding on which direction to take.

"None of us really knew then how to make such big dramatic changes all at once," he said "We had a number of ideas and sometimes they were very different. We had an opportunity to experiment."

Commenting on why agriculture reforms in CIS countries - he named Moldova, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine - are ahead of those in Russia, he said that conducting experiments is much easier in smaller countries because the establishment to change there is not as big as in Russia.

Vladimir Bashmachnikov, president of the Russian Farmers Association, said that only activation of the land market could enable the mixture of the various necessary reforms in agriculture to take place.

"If we don't have land reform, our agriculture will rot," he said.

TITLE: Communications Ministry Finally Settles Frequency Row
AUTHOR: By Elizabeth Wolfe
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Pulling the final plug on the frequency scandal that erupted in mid-September, the Communications Ministry finally sent an official statement to Mobile TeleSystems and Vimpelcom this week confirming their right to the frequencies.


Vimpelcom announced Tuesday that it had received a letter "stating that the validity of its frequency permissions has been restored."

Mobile TeleSystems, or MTS, said that the company was "confident that this issue is completely resolved."

On Sept. 5, the ministry's oversight arm Glavsvyaznadzor, which is responsible for frequency allocations, sent letters to the two leading cellular operators stating that it would take back frequency channels in the 900-MHz bandwidth.

The move would have made room for newcomer Sonic Duo, which got Moscow's third GSM license without tender in May. Sonic Duo is 65 percent owned by Central Telegraph Mobile, which is a joint venture with Svyazinvest subsidiary Central Telegraph and a private firm. The rest is owned by Finnish company Sonera.

Vimpelcom would have absorbed the brunt of the damage, losing two-thirds of its bandwidth in the 900-MHz range. MTS was less outspoken on the threat, as the loss for them meant only the ability to extend their network underground, in the city's metro system.

When the news broke, Vimpelcom's stock plunged and a storm of outrage ensued, forcing Communications Minister Leonid Reiman to suspend the decision. Yet, without confirmation from the ministry that the frequencies were safe, neither of the companies was in the clear.

Vimpelcom's share price in New York on Tuesday rocketed 4.73 percent on the announcement, closing at $18.

As for the frequencies Sonic Duo was expecting, Chase Flemings UCB telecoms analyst Igor Semenov said the newcomer now has other options. He predicted that Glavsvyaznadzor would find room for the company in its ongoing feasibility study of the extended GSM (EGSM) bandwidth. Another option is that some bandwidth may be secured from the military, he said.

"I think the basic frequency story is definitely over, definitely this chapter in it," said Troika Dialog telecoms analyst Tom Adshead. "Then again, I don't think it means the end of risk in cellular business in Russia."

TITLE: Corporate Governance Rating Is Launched
AUTHOR: By Igor Semenenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - International credit rating agency Standard & Poor's on Tuesday launched its new global project to score businesses in emerging markets based on corporate governance.


"Corporate governance issues are most meaningful for emerging markets," says George Dallas, Managing Director for Global Emerging Markets with Standard & Poor's. 

S&P chose Russia to launch its new scoring system because of its huge market potential, the acute need to gauge corporate governance risks and S&P's presence in the local market, Dallas said.

"We will probably extend the project to Asia and Latin America next year," he said. 

Corporate governance scores will be assigned on a scale of CGS-10 to CGS-1, in a descending order, and will take into account corporate practices in four areas: ownership issues and affiliated party transactions; relations with foreign shareholders; overall transparency, and board procedures.

Based on the complexity of the analysis, S&P charges a fee to rate a company. Initially , the target customers for the new service are those firms already listed in the S&P/IFC index. 

Last year S&P bought the IFC stock market index from the World Bank group, which created it in 1993. The Russian portion of the index, which lists over 1,000 firms from around the globe, lists 19 companies that were selected to give a broad picture of the economy.

The new corporate governance ratings have already been tested on five corporations that represent various forms of ownership, scope of operations and exposure to international markets: cellular operator Vimpelcom; national long-distance carrier Rostelecom; oil major Sibneft; Moscow yeast plant Derbenyovka, and MostoTrest, a construction firm specializing in bridges.

Sibneft announced late Tuesday that it now plans to amend its charter in line with the new recommendations issued by S&P.

Companies planning to tap international markets showed by far better standards of disclosure, said Julia Kochetygova, marketing director and project manager at S&P's local office.

"But none of the companies was willing to disclose its financials in full," Kochetygova said.

For example, none of the companies listed how much its executives earn, only one reported its affiliate party transactions, and just two disclosed board members' compensation.

Officials at Standard & Poor's say that corporations and banks would be happy to get a corporate governance score because it would help them to stand out among the gray mass of local firms eyeing the capital markets, as investors would have an additional gauge for decision-making.

The ratings agency already has its first client for the new governance score - Investment Banking Corporation, or IBC - and has about a dozen prospective clients on its book of orders, officials said.

"We have long-term plans to raise funds in international markets," said Ga li na Rubina, vice president of IBC bank. "We want to make the bank absolutely transparent for potential investors."

TITLE: LUKoil To Create New Export Route
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - Top oil producer LUKoil is building a new export route through western Siberia to free itself from dependency on state pipeline monopoly Transneft, the company announced this week.


The project, dubbed Northern Territories, calls for the construction of a land and sea pipeline system with an initial capacity of 7.5 million tons of oil a year - or about 10 percent of LUKoil's total production. A second phase of construction could see the pipeline's capacity double.

The cost of the project has not been released, but LUKoil's Web site said it would create 2,000 jobs in the Nenets Autonomous District, where the main development will be.

LUKoil's partners in the project are second-tier U.S. oil firm Conoco and domestic oil and diamond firm Arkhangelskgeoldobycha, or AGD.

The new export route is likely to significantly reduce LUKoil's transportation expenses because LUKoil would no longer be forced to use Transneft's system.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Baltika Investment


ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - St. Petersburg-based Baltika brewery has announced plans to invest $26 million into it's Baltika-Don facility, in Rostov-on-Don, in an effort to increase production from 1.5 million liters in 1999 to 2 million liters by 2001, Renaissance Capital reported on Wednesday. 


"After Baltika brewery bought Baltika-Don in 1997, it immediately invested $30 million in its development," Lyudmila Fomitcheva, the press secretary for Taimuraz Bolloyev, the general director of Baltika said in telephone interview on Thursday.

"Investment in the Baltika-Don facility is a very effective move - the brewery's capacity will increase by up to 60 percent. This also brings Baltika closer to the large market in the south of Russia."



Bonum-1 Loses Suit


MOSCOW (SPT) - Vladimir Gusinsky's Bonum-1 company, which operates the U.S.-built satellite transmitting NTV Plus direct-to-home television, lost a lawsuit in the Moscow Arbitration Court Thursday, and will be charged $3.7 million for failure to meet its obligations to the Finance Ministry, Interfax reported.

Bonum-1 attempted in January to repay part of its debt to the state-owned Vneshekonombank with third-tranche MinFin treasury bonds, which the government defaulted on in May 1999. But the ministry refused to accept its bonds in lieu of cash and sued Bonum-1.

Vneshekonombank has demanded that either Bonum-1 or MOST-Bank, which guaranteed an $8.5 million loan in 1997, repay the debt, but to no avail, the news agency reported.

Gusinsky's Media-MOST holding, which includes Bonum-1, is heavily in debt, but accuses the government of using the debt as political pressure. Bonum-1 has 30 days to appeal Thursday's verdict.



Vodka Rights Secured


LONDON (Reuters) - British drinks group Allied Domecq PLC said Thursday it had secured the U.S. distribution rights to the Stolichnaya vodka brand from Russian brand owner and supplier Soyuzplodimport.

Allied's U.K. rival, Diageo, holds the U.S. rights to the end of this year, when Allied will take them over. Allied did not disclose a price.

Allied is also a bidder for Seagram's wines and spirits business. The rights to Absolut Vodka, the Swedish state-owned spirits brand, is one of the jewels in Seagram's crown. 



Norilsk Backs Almaz


MOSCOW (Reuters) - Mining and metals giant Norilsk Nickel said Thursday it could export platinum group metals, or PGMs, only through Almazjuvelirexport, or Almaz, the country's sole precious metals and gems export agent.

A Japanese trade house official said earlier Thursday that Norilsk's PGM department had offered it a term contract to sell palladium, from which the official concluded that Norilsk no longer needed Almaz's services.

"There is no talk about autonomous supplies," a spokeswoman for Norilsk's first deputy CEO Dmitry Zelenin quoted him as saying. "Under Russian legislation, all requests to sell precious metals are sent to Almazjuvelirexport. And an Almaz representative participates in all negotiations."

Almaz is a state company subordinated to the Finance Ministry.

Other Russian PGM holders are the central bank, the state precious metals and gems repository Gokhran and Vneshtorgbank, which is owned by the central bank.

TITLE: Finnish Minister Talks Ecology
AUTHOR: By Andrey Musatov
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Kimmo Sasi, Finland's minister for external trade, spent Monday and Tuesday in St. Petersburg talking about customs arrangements, investment laws and the ecology, and praising Russia's economic recovery.


Talks with St. Petersburg Gov. Vladimir Yakovlev and Leningrad Oblast Gov. Valery Serdykov focused on the ecology. In particular, Sasi raised Finnish concerns over three environmental concerns in particular: the oil terminal presently under construction in Primorsk, about 100 kilometers northwest of St. Petersburg; the handling of nuclear waste produced at the LAES nuclear power station; and the processing of toxic waste at the Krasny Bor facility. All three facilities are located in the oblast.

At a press conference on Tuesday, Sasi said that he had received assurances from Serdykov regarding safety procedures related to tankers entering and leaving the new Primorsk facility. Sasi also made references to Finnish aid in procuring funds for the construction of a water treatment plant in the city and for furthering work on the ring road around St. Petersburg.

Sasi also said that he had held talks with Vladimir Shamahov, the head of Northwest Customs Department, and that the two had discussed the possibility of opening new customs points on the Finnish-Russian border at Svetogorsk, in the Leningrad Oblast, and at Salla, in the Murmansk Oblast. According to Sasi, the construction will be financed as a part of the European Community's TACIS program, which provides funding for development projects in countries of the Former Soviet Union and Mongolia. The minister said that he hoped construction might be completed as soon as the beginning of next summer.

TITLE: Itera Threat To Stop Gas Leads to Talks in Ukraine
AUTHOR: By Elizabeth LeBras
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Ukraine's gas debts will be at the top of the agenda as Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov meets with his Ukrainian counterpart Viktor Yushchenko on Friday.


The Kiev brokerage Alfa Capital estimates Ukraine's debt for Russian gas at $2 billion to $2.5 billion, of which $80 million is owed to Itera. Yushchenko's estimate is $1.4 billion.

The talks will take place after private gas company Itera, the primary supplier of gas to Ukraine's private sector, threatened to cut off deliveries to Ukrainian power generation companies. Also this week, officials at natural gas monopoly Gazprom accused Uk rai ne of siphoning off about 7.5 billion cubic meters of gas.

Rumors were circulating that Yushchenko would resign if Itera cut off deliveries to the power stations.

He was saved from that eventuality after Ukrainian President Leonid Kuch ma intervened.

Speaking in light of allegations of corruption and a lack of preparation for winter in the power sector, Kuchma said Wednesday that no top officials would resign soon.

Kuchma telephoned Itera president Igor Makarov on Wednesday and managed to restructure the debt and give the stations some breathing room, Kom mersant reported.

This year, Itera has delivered 22 billion cubic meters of gas to Ukraine, of which 4.3 billion cubic meters were provided to thermal power stations, most of which are privatized. 

Artur Somov, an oil and gas analyst for the Kiev brokerage Prospect, said Thursday that in winter the Kiev government has no choice but to reach a quick compromise with Itera.

"Itera is in a good situation, because the Ukrainian government must supply heat to its citizens," Somov said. 

In the course of the consultations, Kasyanov is expected to propose that Yushchenko sign an agreement promising that the Ukrainian government will never again steal Russian gas. 

However, Valery Antonov, director of research at Alfa Capital, said that such an agreement would be meaningless and would not deter Ukraine from continuing to siphon gas in the future. 

"Would you sign an agreement with a thief?" Antonov asked.

Ukrainian officials maintain that only 60 percent to 70 percent of the debt is state-owned. By insisting that nearly all of the debt is state-owned, it is easier for Russia to demand payment for the debt.

The key energy issues to be discussed by Yushchenko and Kasyanov include the shipments of gas from Turkmenistan to Ukraine and the privatization of Ukraine's pipeline system.

Itera and Gazprom have been pressuring the Ukrainian government to provide them with a controlling stake in the country's pipeline system as a form of payment for the country's debts. 

The Ukrainian government is likely to hold on to a 51 percent stake in the pipeline system. Itera is believed to be the strongest contender in the auction for a 49 percent stake, which should take place next summer.

Kasyanov is expected to give Uk rai ne the option of either buying gas only from Turkmenistan or purchasing Russian gas at market prices. Turkmen gas, which Ukraine already uses, must be transported through Russia, a service for which Russia will charge $30 per 1,000 cubic meters.

TITLE: What Other Papers Are Saying
AUTHOR: by Ali Nassor
TEXT: President Vladimir Putin visited Mongolia this week to ban the free movement of cows between the two countries. He then went on his way to Brunei, where he taught various Asian and Pacific leaders how to make money in Russia, while his wife swapped domestic tales with the sultan's wives. Meanwhile, exploiting the president's endless absenteeism, prosecutors at home put a media magnate on the wanted list, while another tycoon expressed a preference for exile over imprisonment at home.




Bovine Exodus


An evasive Izvestia asks why Putin was in Mongolia - a country once regarded "the 16th Soviet republic" - for less than 24 hours, without drawing any conclusions. But it does note that no Russian top official had paid a visit to that country for 26 years, and that the pickings are richer in Brunei, Putin's next stop.


Russian-Mongolian trade (a collaboration in which Mongolia was more a recipient than anything else) has indeed declined four-fold since the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade ago, the paper notes. Nonetheless, Russia is Mongolia's major trading partner - involving millions of dollars in debt that it borrowed from the Soviet leadership. 

So the talks, brief as they were, boiled down to Putin asking for the money back, and President Natsagyin Bagabandi asking for a total write-off, or at least a restructuring, the paper says.



Good Behavior


Bagabandi reportedly even pointed to Mongolia's old alliance with the Soviet Union rather than with its communist rival, China. And when the Soviet government banned religion, Mongolia followed suit by outlawing its traditional faith, Buddhism, and only lifted the ban four years ago. Putin could even see for himself the strength of Russia's influence on a country that still uses the Cyrillic script, Izvestia says.


The two leaders ended up with a vague declaration on bilateral cooperation in the energy field, and by signing an agreement to create a special commission dealing with the flourishing business of ... cattle smuggling, the bane of the countries' 3,500-kilometer border, concludes the paper. Better not return the ones who have already crossed, however, otherwise Mongolia, where the number of cattle is estimated to be 15 times the size of the human population, will be overrun.



Tourist President


Putin had no alternative but to sign the agreement, as he was in a rush to get to the more promising sultanate of Brunei for a meeting with richer potential partners, says Komsomolskaya Pravda.


The fortunes to be mined at the APEC gathering justify Putin's endless travels, however, and make the many abrupt changes of climate more endurable (11 degrees below in Ulan-Bator, to 30 degrees above in Brunei, and back to Novosibirsk in a week).

Rossiiskaya Gazeta delights in the Russian president's success, as he employed his legendary eloquence to persuade more than a thousand delegates that Russia is a good place to invest. The paper quotes Putin speaking of Russia's Asian and Pacific credentials, and the advantages of bypassing the Suez Canal and the East-West corridor, going through Russian territory instead, thus saving as much as 10 days

And the president did not, of course, neglect to remind the crowd of his country's nuclear capabilities, and mentioned the leading role it should play in maintaining global security, fighting terrorism and combating economic crime.



Women's Talk


While Putin was engaging the men, his wife Lyudmila was in the company of the two wives of the Sultan of Brunei, an experience Moskovsky Komsomolets v Pitere bets she will never repeat.


The paper paints a picture full of exotic adventures and strange experiences, and asks its readers to imagine what it must be like to be caught between two competing sultanas with different outlooks on life and culture.



Back at the Ranch


Appeals to peace to all men were largely ignored back in Moscow, where what Vedomosti terms the Party of War sharpened its knives this week and set out in pursuit of two entrepreneurs they regard as Russia's biggest scoundrels.


State-run Gazprom and Media-MOST, Vladimir Gusinsky's holding company that has long been in hot water over its alleged debts to the former, seemed to have reached a compromise - but this was apparently not enough to call the political dogs off the magnate and get charges of embezzlement against him dropped, says the paper.

Instead, they declared Gusinsky a wanted man, and threatened to seek Interpol's help in repatriating him for his failure to turn up for questioning.

But Gusinsky has no intention of returning to Russia to answer charges similar to the ones that had him in the slammer for a brief spell in June, the paper quoted his defense counsel as saying. 

And the fact that Alfred Kokh, Gazprom-Media's general director, withdrew the agreement with Media-MOST a day after it was signed shows that the warlords in the Kremlin have their fingers well and truly in this pie, says Izvestia. 

Deputy Prosecutor Vasily Kolmogorov told the media that the agreement in fact had nothing to do with the criminal charges against Gusinsky, but that his no-show before the investigators was an insult, says Kommersant.

The paper asks why it was so difficult to ask Gusinsky questions in Israel (where he's a citizen) or, for that matter, anywhere outside Russia with the exception of Iraq, Libya and Cuba.



Financial Asylum


However, it suggests that regardless of how events turn out, Gusinsky is bound to emerge the winner, as Interpol is not likely to waste its time pursuing someone who's not wanted for crimes of global significance. Moreover, suggests the paper, criminal charges will die a natural death when Gazprom finally gets hold of Media-MOST.


But while Gusinsky employs delaying tactics, Boris Berezovsky, the tycoon who's allegedly connected to a $1 billion scam involving Aeroflot - and who also refused to meet prosecutors - resorted to his usual methods, according to Izvestia.

Berezovsky has challenged the authorities by saying there are no grounds for making a fuss over the Aeroflot cash, since it all went to finance Putin's presidential campaign and setting up the favored Unity faction, reports the paper.

Like Gusinsky, Berezovsky sees no reason why he should endanger his freedom by returning to Russia to be jailed, and told the press he would prefer political asylum in another land.

But Kommersant, the newspaper Berezovsky owns, says that he has nothing to fear - he hasn't been declared a fugitive yet. Moreover, a new scapegoat has appeared in the form of Roman Sheinin, the former head of a financial corporation who allegedly accumulated more than $700 million belonging to Aeroflot and transferred it to three of his own companies abroad.

TITLE: Russia Can Learn From U.S. Vote
TEXT: EVEN as the votes in the state of Florida are being recounted and the result of the U.S. presidential election remains up in the air, Russian politicians have been quick and joyful in pointing out the supposed flaws in the American system. No doubt some in the State Duma are regretting that they voted overwhelmingly last month not to send observers to monitor the election, especially since the proposal presciently focused attention on "Texas, California and other territories forcibly annexed to the United States," which would certainly include Florida.


The chairman of the Central Elections Commission, Alexander Veshnyakov, who was in the States observing the voting, drew this lesson: "Our presidential elections are conducted in a more democratic fashion and are more easily understood by voters."

President Vladimir Putin couldn't resist joking during a visit to Rostov that, "if necessary, [Veshnyakov] can tell his American colleagues how best to act."

Such remarks could be taken in good fun if not for the sorry state of elections in Russia and the role that Veshnyakov, Putin and many others in power locally and nationally have played in perpetuating that state.

In September, The Moscow Times published compelling evidence of massive fraud in Putin's March election victory. The only response to that investigation from Veshnyakov's commission has been to remove the vote results in question from the CEC Web site and to dismiss the story as an obvious manipulation. Likewise, there has been precious little response to the more than 2,000 complaints and 200 lawsuits that have been filed in connection with this vote.

Hrair Balian, head of the election section of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which observed the March election, has said that "the issue deserves a thorough investigation and a credible accounting." Putin and Veshnyakov, quick with jokes about the U.S. Electoral College, have been silent on this matter.

What lessons should Veshnyakov bring back from his trip to the States? He should note that he is seeing a system that has earned the confidence of the public in the past and therefore is able to weather this close election without creating a national crisis. He should notice that aggrieved citizens and political parties are getting a timely and thorough hearing in the courts. He should notice that the election itself was held when it was supposed to be held and not when it was more convenient for one or another of the candidates.

And when he returns to Russia, Veshnyakov should devote himself to earning the credibility that his commission will need to conduct the next election here.

TITLE: Is Persecution The Price of Achievement?
TEXT: BORIS Berezovsky finally seems poised to get his just desserts. The prosecutor's office is ready to make him account for the pillaging of Aeroflot. But let's look more closely.


In 1995, Berezovsky took control of the state-owned company Aeroflot. He did not buy any shares in the company, and he did not privatize it. He simply placed people loyal to him - Alexander Krasnenker and Nikolai Glushkov - in key posts at the company.

After that, all of Aeroflot's hard-currency turnover passed through two Swiss companies called Andava and Forus. Seventy-eight percent of the shares of Andava belonged to Glushkov and Berezovsky. It is believed that $580 million passed through Andava and slightly less through Forus. "We do not claim that all of this money was stolen," the former lead investigator on the case, Nikolai Volkov, told me, "but certain financial operations that took place have raised serious concerns."

There is one simple reason for this concern: Aero flot is a Russian company, but all of Aero flot's money stayed abroad. A series of middlemen sprang up between Aeroflot and its own money.

According to Volkov, one deal looked like this: Aeroflot engaged a Russian company called FOK to collect its foreign debts. FOK, in turn, hired an Irish offshore company and that company then collected the money from Andava. Naturally, FOK, the Irish company and Andava are all controlled by the same people. But in this particular case, FOK and the Irish company collected fees of $38 million. Basically, it was a scheme by which Aeroflot borrowed its own money and paid a percentage for the privilege.

And what happened to Aeroflot while these schemes were going on? Between 1995 and 1998, its annual passenger volume grew from 3.5 million to 4.5 million. Revenues grew from $1 billion per year to $1.3 billion. The company purchased 15 new Boeing aircraft. In 1995, a share of Aeroflot cost $7 and by 1998 it cost almost $185.

Did Berezovsky's people do anything illegal? No. There is no law against paying a middleman to perform a service, no matter how ridiculous the service or how high the fee. After all, it would just be stupid to try climbing over the barbed-wire fence of the law when the fence itself is full of holes plenty big enough to drive your Mercedes through.

And was paying the middlemen a smart move? If you examine Sibneft or Tyumen Oil or Norilsk Nickel, you will find the exact same thing. Instead of Andava, you will find names like Runikom, Crown Trading and Finance and Norimet.

The continued flowering of such companies depends on two factors. First, in order to funnel money into offshore companies, it must first be earned. In order to earn such sums, a company needs skilled, qualified management. Second, the generated revenues must be concentrated in the foreign companies. Otherwise, the efforts of the managers will come to nothing and any revenues generated will be consumed by Russian taxes.

This second factor is the one that, for purely political reasons, spurs on the prosecutor's office. After all, such schemes are inherently distasteful. 

But we should look carefully at the Aeroflot case. Anyone who is ready to condemn the Russian financial Mephistopheles for destroying this company should look again. Aeroflot's revenues are down since Berezovsky's team was dismissed.


Yulia Latynina is the creator and host of "The Ruble Zone" on NTV television.

TITLE: Old Legal Habits Are Dying Hard Among Today's Judges
AUTHOR: By Nikita Ivanov
TEXT: AFTER the 1917 Revolution, the old tsarist judges - contemptuously referred to as zakonniki or "legalists" - were dismissed and replaced with new "proletarian" adjudicators. It marked the beginning of a new era when judges were no longer bound by formal law, but only guided by their "proletarian sense of justice."


These judges happily embraced this idea, which provided them with virtually unrestricted discretion and powers. Perestroika and "democratic reform" in Russia have not changed much in this regard.

Under the 1993 Constitution, the state guarantees the rights and freedoms of all citizens. Freedom of association is undeniably one of the cornerstones of any democratic society and must apply equally to all individuals.

But this is not the case in Russia, where the exercise of this fundamental right depends on your ability to pass a kind of test on compatibility with proletarian morals. Instead of enforcing constitutional protections, more often than not Russian courts assume the right to decide who should enjoy a particular right and who should not.

Two recent cases demonstrate how "proletarian morals" often supersede formal laws in practice.

In August, a long-standing controversy between the management of McDonald's-Moscow and a self-proclaimed union of its employees landed in a Moscow municipal court.

McDonald's employee Yevgeny Druzhinin argued that he had been disciplined by McDonald's without a proper endorsement by the employees' union, of which he was a member. Formally, Druzhinin only requested the court to void the disciplinary action taken against him. However, it was obvious that a much more politicized issue was at stake - the recognition of the workers' union by a capitalist corporation.

McDonald's challenged the legitimacy of the union, pointing out that it had never been registered and didn't even have a charter. Druzhinin's lawyer responded that the charter was being drafted and the union's committee had been entered into a register of a Moscow trade unions' clearinghouse, which they argued was sufficient to legitimize its existence.

The judge rebuffed McDonald's arguments and held that Druzhinin had been wrongly disciplined. Nationalists and Communists began celebrating the victory of a "simple worker" over a "capitalist shark." However, if the issue is scrutinized strictly in terms of the law, the picture changes considerably.

The 1996 Russian Law on Trade Unions requires any trade union to submit its charter to the Justice Ministry within a month of its establishment. The McDonald's union was allegedly established in August 1998. It is hard to believe that two years were not sufficient to finalize the charter and register it - unless you really wanted to believe just that.

The judge apparently did. Her "proletarian sense of justice" suggested that anything goes in the struggle against McDonald's in spite of any requirements of formal law.

Another remarkable case was decided in the Siberian city of Omsk earlier this year. A community lesbian and gay group called Parus applied for registration. The local justice department took just four days to deny the request. Anyone living in Russia knows that such promptness is exceptional for a Russian state agency.

The rejection stated that registering the group would be "incompatible with established public morals and an offense to society as a whole." Parus appealed the decision in the Omsk district court.

At the trial, the representative of the justice department confirmed that the denial was grounded on "public morals" rather than on the law. The court readily embraced his point of view, ruling that "freedom of association provided in the Constitution shall not be unrestricted or used for anti-social purposes." The story was repeated in the Omsk appellate court, where the judge took only minutes to uphold the original decision - again without citing any formal legal grounds.

However, if we put the homophobia vs. morality confrontation aside and look at the law, the illegitimacy of these decisions is obvious. The 1995 Law on Public Associations requires that any denial of registration must be explicitly legally grounded. Although the list of legal grounds is exhaustive, "incompatibility with public morals" is not among them. Moreover, the law further prohibits invoking "considerations of inappropriateness" to deny registration.

Needless to say, both the Omsk justice department and the local judges did not care about these requirements. They had a "higher standard" - their own perceptions of what is good and what is bad from the standpoint of public morals. They substituted their proletarian sense of justice for the written law.

A 70-year-old tradition of administering justice cannot be eradicated in just a few years. The proletarian sense of justice still corrodes the Russian court system. Such prejudices are more pervasive and deep-rooted in our judiciary than we would prefer them to be; concerted efforts are required to staff courts with professional judges respectful of the formal law. Still, the goal is worth the effort, for the long road to the rule of law begins in the courtroom.


Nikita Ivanov is a practicing public interest lawyer. He contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.

TITLE: master and margarita gets petrov soundtrack
AUTHOR: by Galina Stolyarova
TEXT: Composer Andrei Petrov - who turned 70 this September and is still celebrating with an impressive musical festival which is being held all over Russia - has perhaps the longest history of affinity with Mikhail Bulgakov's novel "Master and Margarita" than any of his colleagues. And thus it comes as no surprise that the music for Russia's first film interpretation of the novel will come from this composer.


Petrov is the author of the symphonic fantasy "Master and Margarita," which he later transformed into ballet music for a production of the same name by the Boris Eifman Ballet Company. He has been constantly returning to the story throughout his life, though most of the projects collapsed owing to various reasons.

For example, legendary theatrical director Georgy Tovstonogov had in mind a production which would juxtapose Bolshoi Drama theater actors and the Mariinsky theater cast, but died before the idea had a chance to take any shape. Eldar Ryazanov's movie idea was refused on ideological grounds. Still, both directors gave Petrov a chance to meditate over the subject.

So when this year Lenfilm director Vladimir Bortko, responsible for the 1988 movie "The Heart of a Dog," also based on a story by Bulgakov, approached Petrov with a request to compose music for the movie, the composer felt close to the theme.

Interestingly, with the piece written many years ago, and a dozen directors, including Igor Talankin, Elem Klimov and Eldar Ryazanov once willing to try their hands at the film version of the novel, Russia is still waiting for the movie to come out.

The directors' hopes were crushed as all of their proposals were rejected by the country's culture bosses because of censorship restrictions. Bulgakov was regarded as an "unstable element" by the ideologists of the Soviet empire.

Now, Bortko - though being very careful with Bulgakov's prose - is planning to give his movie a somewhat unconventional, yet still thrilling angle.

The director doesn't add anything new to make his emphasis, but devotes particular attention to the episodes in the novel in which Voland, the devil figure, is present - either physically or mentally.

However, the idea of looking at events through the eyes of Voland doesn't intimidate the composer, who is looking forward to exploring Voland's intriguing and mysterious inner world. "No, there is nothing terrifying in trying on Voland's shoes. He is Bulgakov's devil, after all. This devil's view of life is sober, critical and healthy, not at all abnormal or perverted," Petrov said with a smile

Decades have passed since the writer wrote this novel, the composer points out, and quite a number of Voland's expressions have entered the language as pithy sayings.

Eventually, Voland's remarks obtained a special contemporary meaning, like his famous "Whatever you grab, everything is missing."

For Petrov, who has composed ballets, operas, symphonic works and the music to over 80 movies, including such hits as "Sluzhebny Roman," "Osenny Marathon," and "Beregis Avtomobilya," there was a time in his early career when romantic themes were the composer's priority, perhaps the most powerful source of inspiration.

"I am romantic by nature, and as a boy enjoyed the books of Konstantin Paustovsky and Alexander Grin," he said. "But in the years to follow, the naivety vanishes and you realize that in harsh real life there is less space for romanticism than it seems when you are young. So in recent years, I have been more interested in plots when evil forces throw a challenge to good forces, when there is some sort of conflict and rivalry between them, which is very much the case of "Master and Margarita."

Petrov, who received nationwide recognition primarily for his music in the lyrical comedies of Eldar Ryazanov and Georgy Danelia, feels very close to both directors' attitudes, both professionally and personally.

"The precious thing that I've learned from Danelia about movie music is that it shouldn't be connected with a particular episode, but should encompass the whole story," Petrov said. "And if you achieve this, the music can also live its own life as an independent piece, in addition to being a soundtrack."

Naturally, Georgy Danelia and Eldar Ryazanov have very different professional approaches and methods, while some of their movie personages seem alien to the composer, but what unites the two directors - and what Petrov finds extremely appealing - is their particular attention to and solid understanding of the inner world and troubles of ordinary people, who are often not regarded as deserving attention from artists.

What the maestro finds particularly attractive about composing music for a movie is the opportunity to speak to a much wider audiences that those of any concert.

But this kind of mild and human humour, which some vigorous critics may slam for being a little too sentimental or naive, is not in fashion these days, and it is getting hard for one of the country's most popular and respected composers to get much inspiration from the violent and brutal scenarios of the new Russian movies. And this explains why his name can now be seen less often in the credits.

"Cruelness and brutality, rather than compassion and soulfulness, have overtaken Russian cinematography, while directors show more interest in the problems of a limited circle of society, rather than those of ordinary people. But it is a result of a fashion, which is a temporary thing in its nature, and despite the current confusion of tastes in all spheres of art, including music and the art of cinematography, I still believe human values will win back their place."



The festival "Andrei Petrov and Friends" will be coming to St. Petersburg in December. One of the concerts at the Philharmonia will feature a premiere performance of symphonic versions of his film music. See future listings for details.

TITLE: penthouse gets toned-down local edition
AUTHOR: by Kevin O'Flynn
TEXT: The sexually explicit U.S. magazine Penthouse is being relaunched in Russia, but readers hoping to just look at the pictures may be disappointed.


In a move to pacify guardians of the nation's morals, the publishers of the new local edition have blurred many of the photos. 

"The U.S. edition is very heavy," publisher Dmitry Krimer said Friday night at a relaunch bash. "We couldn't just copy it because it wouldn't be accepted. It could be accepted by the general public, the men at least, but it wouldn't be accepted by the authorities."

"Mr. Krimer has decided that for the first issue it would be best to blur out the naughty bits," said Chris Calvosa, who is in charge of corporate development at General Media, Penthouse's U.S. parent company.

Still, the edition is no New York Times Book Review.

Noticeably raunchier than Playboy, its main rival locally, the local edition of Penthouse makes judicious use of a licensing deal that allows it access to 4 million images from the Penthouse library.

The magazine hits all the usual buttons of a men's magazine, including a story on a woman who slept with 157 men in 10 hours, but it also has more serious articles.

This is the second time Penthouse has been launched locally. A previous attempt in 1992 collapsed after a year.

Penthouse refused to say how much the initial circulation run was.

TITLE: soviet world unraveled in 'envy of the gods'
AUTHOR: by Tom Birchenough
TEXT: Vladimir Menshov's new film, "Envy of the Gods" (Zavist bogov), currently showing at the Avrora, may seem like a throwback to Soviet times.


Best known for 1980's "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears" (Moskva slezam ne verit), which won that year's Oscar for best foreign film, Menshov turned to a story set in 1983 for his latest project - one that would have been distinctly unacceptable 20 years ago. Not only does "Envy of the Gods" center around a love affair between Sonya, an unassuming news editor at Ostankino, and Andre, a French journalist, it also shows a considerable degree of their physical passion on screen into the bargain - certainly more than would have got past the censors back then.

With considerable affection and humor, Menshov captures the details of his heroine's familiar, stable Soviet world. Her trials are the everyday ones of relationships with friends and family, while the political atmosphere of the Andropov era comes across only in the daily ritual of trying to catch jammed foreign radio broadcasts.

The director admits to having softened the edges of the original script by writer Marina Mareyeva. "In the original version, the feeling was that everything back in 1983 was as bad as it could get - everyone afraid of one another, and apparently ashamed of living in the Soviet Union," Menshov said.

"[In the final version,] the impression - for all the negative, even lunatic elements in it, like the Komsomol groups that would make daytime raids on cinemas to check who was shirking off work - became more objective."

It's only on the emotional front that Sonya, played by Vera Alentova (Menshov's wife, who also starred in "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears"), feels her world is incomplete. Though she's happy living with her husband - a moderately successful, officially acknowledged writer - in an elite flat in the Taganka Stalin skyscraper, his ideas for improving their conjugal relation are as limited as her expectations of it. When friends bring over a smuggled video of "Last Tango in Paris" (the working title of Menshov's film was "Last Tango in Moscow"), she closes her eyes in shock at Marlon Brando's famous butter scene.

All that changes when Andre (Anatoly Lobotsky) accompanies a visiting French writer - played in an energetic though somewhat limited cameo by Gerard Depardieu - to what's supposed to be an informal meal at their flat. (In fact, it's been stage-managed by the local KGB stooge, who not only delivers the food specially, but even installs a new toilet to create the proper impression of everyday Soviet life.) But just as Sonya has thrown away everything for the chance of brief happiness with Andre, their fate is disrupted by the cruel political reality of the moment.

Though it avoids a happy ending, "Envy of the Gods" has plenty of the fairy-tale feel that Menshov believes will appeal to a popular audience - particularly its older female members - which, judging by reception at the first screenings, seemed very ready to believe in the romance, and none too put out by its erotic content.

Critical reaction has been another matter. In fact, there seems to have been less interest in some quarters in the drama itself than in whether Alentova - in her late 50s but playing a role 15 years younger - underwent plastic surgery for the part.



See listings for details.

TITLE: in brief
TEXT: griffith in re-hab

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Actress Melanie Griffith has entered a hospital program to treat an addiction to prescription drugs, her publicist said this week.

"My doctor has referred me to the Daniel Freeman Hospital to step down from the prescribed medication that I have been taking for a neck injury," Griffith said in a statement released to reporters through her publicist. "I appreciate everyone's concern and I am sure that you will respect my and my family's privacy." 

This is not the first time the 43-year-old actress has been in rehab. Griffith - who won a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination for her pivotal role as a savvy "bimbo" secretary in the 1988 film, "Working Girl" - struggled with an addiction to drugs and alcohol in the late 1980s. 

A hospital spokeswoman would not comment on Griffith's treatment except to say that patients at the nonprofit Catholic facility in the Marina Del Rey section of Los Angeles generally go through a 12-step in-patient program with time spent in fellowship and reading. 

In a message posted on her Web site recently, Griffith said she would be appearing on ABC's morning television talk show, "The View" this week. On Monday, Griffith called the show, which is taping in Los Angeles this week, to cancel her appearance, an ABC spokesman said. 

Griffith is the daughter of actress Tippi Hedrin, one of Alfred Hitchcock's favorite leading ladies. Known for her kewpie-doll voice and sultry good looks, Griffith has appeared in more than 50 films, including Brian DePalma's "Body Double" (1984), "Something Wild" (1986), "Bonfire of the Vanities" (1990) and "Lolita" (1997). She has been married four times, twice to actor Don Johnson, and she has three children. 

She met her current husband, actor Antonio Banderas, in 1995 while working with him on the romantic comedy film "Two Much." 



madonna sale


LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Pop superstar Madonna has sold her Hollywood Hills home to Jenna Elfman, co-star of the hit television sitcom "Dharma and Greg," and Elfman's husband, actor Bodhi Elfman, for about $4 million, the Los Angeles Times reported this week. 

Madonna put the 450-square-meter home, which she had owned since 1996, on the market in June, when she bought a house in Beverly Hills for $6.5 million, the newspaper said. 

Britain's Sun tabloid reported last week that the 42-year-old Madonna paid $9.9 million for a house in Notting Hill, one of London's trendiest suburbs. 

Madonna, who has a 3-month-old son with British film director Guy Ritchie, has said she wants to spend more time in England where Ritchie's career is based.



brazilian museum


RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) - A Guggenheim museum on Copacabana beach? It could happen, says museum director Thomas Krens. 

"It's kind of some place between a kind of done deal and a scouting expedition," Krens said when asked about reports in the Brazilian press that Rio had already been chosen as the site for the art museum's next branch. 

Krens and architect Frank Gehry, who designed the daring Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain, are heading a nine-member committee that will choose the site. They are also scheduled to visit the cities of Curitiba, Salvador and Recife. 

Krens said the idea of opening a museum in Brazil was part of the Guggenheim's "long-standing interest to become more involved with the culture of South America." 

The idea gained momentum in October when Krens went to Brazil to organize an exhibition on Brazilian culture called "Brazil: Body and Soul," slated to open in New York next fall. 

Edemar Cid Ferreira, an art curator and coordinator of the committee's tour, said a museum of the Guggenheim's stature would raise Rio's cultural profile and would help attract more international art exhibitions to South America. "As you know, all the great [art] exhibitions are above the equator. They travel to Paris, London, New York and Japan but never come down to the Southern Hemisphere," Ferreira said. 

Rio has a Modern Art Museum, but the collection, including several Picassos, was gutted by a fire in the 1970s. 

Krens said it would take six months before the museum has a more definite position about its plans for a Brazilian branch. 

"What's concrete is our interest in doing something in Latin America. What's concrete is that there are clearly a series of overlapping individuals and institutions in Brazil that are interested in doing something," Krens said.

St. Petersburg's Hermitage Museum and the Guggenheim closed a long-term cooperation deal in June, with an eye to building new display space for contemporary art at the Hermitage and building a series of museums all over the world to allow them to hold joint exhibits.




kiss gets sued


GRAND RAPIDS, Michigan (AP) - Kiss is being sued by a woman who said that she was injured after the rock band's trademark on-stage guitar smashing. 

Carly Miller said guitarist Paul Stanley threw pieces of his broken guitar into the audience amid a confetti storm and pyrotechnics during "Rock and Roll All Nite," which is the band's signature tune and usually their final encore. 

Miller said a guitar string became caught on one of her fingers, causing her to suffer damage to her hand as fans fought to grab guitar parts.

"It hit her hand and people were fighting over pieces of the guitar and somehow this guitar string got wrapped around her finger," said her attorney, Jason Barrix. 

He said she temporarily lost all feeling in her right middle finger and has a permanent scar. She also sustained bruises from being pulled over two rows of chairs, he said. 

She is seeking damages in the lawsuit, filed last week against the band, Van Andel Arena and three companies linked to the May 8 concert. 

A message left this week for Kiss attorney Bill Randolph in New York was not returned. Van Andel Arena general manager Rich MacKiegan declined to discuss the suit.


liechtenstein art


VADUZ, Liechtenstein (AP) - With a musical fanfare, Liechtenstein opened an imposing national art museum this week, offering a glimpse of rarely exhibited treasures from the collection of the ruling princely family. 

The sleek and shiny black basalt-fronted concrete building on the main street of the capital, Vaduz, cost some 30 million Swiss francs ($17 million) and took two years to build. 

The Liechtenstein Art Museum is exhibiting works from the royal family's private collection of Rubens, Van Dyck and other old master paintings, few of which were on show until now at the existing gallery in Vaduz. 

The tiny but wealthy country's long-contemplated new museum focuses on its own collection, centered on the 19th and 20th centuries and ranging from Gustave Courbet through Wassily Kandinsky to Joseph Beuys and James Lee Byars. 

It has an annual budget of 500,000 francs ($282,500) for acquisitions. 

The 60-by-25-meter building was designed by Swiss architects Meinrad Morger, Heinrich Degelo and Christian Kerez. With six galleries, the building has 1,750 square meters of exhibition space. 

"We didn't want to put up a museum that ... obsessively puts architectural ambition to the fore and neglects functional needs," Morger said. "We're looking for a dialogue between architecture and art." 

Some 85 percent of the funding came from private sponsors, who in 1996 set up a foundation to build the museum. They imposed the condition that it should be ready this year as a "millennium gift" to the country. Liechtenstein's ruling Prince Hans Adam II and his family hold one of the world's most important art collections, which is permanently housed in the royal castle above Vaduz. It was last exhibited on a large scale in 1985 at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

TITLE: x-men mutate into cinema stars
AUTHOR: by Elvis Mitchell
TEXT: Cyclops (James Marsden) unleashes bolts of energy from his eyes and has to wear shielding glasses to keep those rays in check. Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) is telepathic and telekinetic. Storm (Halle Berry) can control the weather, conjuring lightning bolts to do with as she will. The hotheaded, confrontational Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) has superstrength, healing abilities that allow him to recover from almost any injury, and a metal alloy grafted onto his skeleton that gives him claws he can project from his knuckles. And Rogue (Anna Paquin) absorbs the essence of others, which makes her an energy vampire; she discovers her power when she steals her first kiss and almost kills the boy.


These are the X-Men, at least the ones that made it into Bryan Singer's movie adaptation. It's disheartening to see the X-Men depicted so earnestly here, given what they've been through - the cancellation of their comic book and their resurrection as the most popular characters in Marvel Comics history. Clumsy when it should be light on its feet, the movie takes itself even more seriously than the comic book and its fans do, which is a superheroic achievement.

In the movie, as in the comics, mutants - Homo superior - are the next evolutionary stage for human beings, and they're persecuted because (gasp) they're different. The X-Men are mutants and misfits shepherded into altruism by the compassionate mutant Prof. Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), who has the ability to read minds and affect the thoughts of others. It's a part Mr. Stewart was born to play: He has the vocal command to convince you that he knows what you're thinking. (His name went out as perfect casting in Internet chat rooms as soon as talks about an X-Men movie materialized.)

Xavier's nemesis is his former mutant friend, Magneto (Ian McKellen), whose roiling syllables make you want to see him square off against Mr. Stewart. Listening to them trill their vowels at each other is one of the movie's few pleasures, since the parallels to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Xavier) and Malcolm X (Magneto) are made wincingly plain; Magneto promises to defeat his opponents "by any means necessary." Stewart and McKellen are a pair of austere hams, and their wrestling is the only consistently enjoyable note in the film. When they go golden throat to golden throat, it is like watching members of another species in action. Most of the other battles in "X-Men," fights between Xavier's team and Magneto's Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, consist of stuntmen taking blows and being jerked across rooms the length of high-school cafeterias.

When Sen. Robert Kelly (Bruce Davison, using a pinched voice) leads a charge against all mutants, he causes a boiling fury in Magneto, a Nazi concentration camp survivor.

After the X-Men were created in 1963, almost 20 years passed before this aspect of Magneto's character was written into the comics, and it makes sense to use it in the movie. His goal is revenge against anti-mutant bigots, which elevates Magneto above the routine motive of world domination. But his methods are so uncontrollable they cause death.

Magneto's forces include the mountainous Sabertooth (Tyler Mane, who brings his mast-size World Wrestling Federation persona to the role); the Toad (Ray Park), who leaps and unleashes a tongue several feet long, and the shape-shifter Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos). In the best piece of super model casting of all time, she is deep-sea-blue, with scales pasted onto her body; you can almost hear Dennis Rodman sighing in envy. She moves well, too.

The movie does an extensive job of cramming in much of the mythology from the comics, loyal dollops of exposition that are both touching and ponderous, a setup to a sequel. The compassionate Xavier wants to reach an accord with both Magneto and the human race, with peaceful coexistence as his goal. At his private school, Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters (and before you giggle, that name is right out of the comics, too), where he houses and trains young mutants, there are cameos by X-Men like Bobby Drake, the Iceman. (When he speaks, wisps of frost emanate from his mouth.) When Wolverine comments on the black leather X-Men outfits, which look like something you would see on the counter staff at a bondage version of McDonald's, Cyclops responds, "What would you have us wear? Yellow spandex?" The line will get a laugh from comics fans, since the original X-Men and Wolverine costumes featured that fabric.

The filmmakers' love for these characters and their histories is obvious, but it's just as obvious that they don't have any distance. There are elements that work on the page that just don't lend themselves to film. The tortured, shy Cyclops is reduced to a decent-guy cipher in the movie, and he is made even more vague because his eyes are never visible; his suffering is clear to comics readers because of interior monologues provided via thought balloons. (Storm and Jean Grey are less defined.) That's the kind of problem that devotion to the source material doesn't help.

The two-fisted Wolverine, well played by Jackman, is perhaps the only other semi-rounded character who animates the picture besides Xavier and Magneto. He lives to fight, a boisterous tragic hero without complication. (Bits of his background story, lifted from the "Weapon X" comic series, are suggested here.)

Things have changed quite a bit since 1963, or 1975, the year Wolverine and Storm first showed up. It might have been better to have the characters express themselves through action rather than having to explain themselves in the style of their comic book origins. The bold strokes of comic books are needed.

The X-men comics' creators, Stan Lee (who is also given a cameo) and Jack Kirby, had a genius for such touches. The "X-Men" series was a precursor of the WB televison network; the comic book was one of the few popular venues in the 1960s in which complex teenage characters were focal points instead of bland grown-up do-gooders like Superman, the world's only well-adjusted split personality.

Perhaps that was the reason "X-Men" comics struggled and failed initially; the world wasn't ready for misunderstood young martyrs with special powers saving the world and living through unrequited flushes of love. The alternation of nonstop-action and lower-lip-chewing heartbreak - action melodrama - was what Mr. Lee pioneered in "Spider-Man" and fried to a crispy crunch in "X-Men." (It may be what attracted the film's producer, Lauren Shuler Donner, since her husband Richard's "Lethal Weapon" brought the same thing to the big screen.)

In 1963, when the threat of nuclear radiation was filling the screens of drive-in theaters with monsters from Japan and in our own backyard, Marvel Comics came up with a benevolent spin and the X-Men were the result. To make the film work, someone needed the same inventiveness. This movie is proof that imitation is the sincerest form of flattening.



X-Men is currently playing at the Crystal Palace. See listings for details.




- NYT

TITLE: 'what lies beneath' more exhausting than terrifying
AUTHOR: by Kenneth Turan
TEXT: Claire Spencer (Michelle Pfeiffer) looks to have an enviable life. Consider the stunning Vermont lakeside house, the sympathetic friend, the spacious SUV, the swell daughter who's just off to college. And the husband, don't forget about the husband.


Norman Spencer (Harrison Ford), a brainy geneticist who heads his own university research lab, is also a ruggedly handsome type who still looks like he belongs in his Rolling Stones T-shirt. 

Norman and Claire make each other laugh, not to mention sharing an active romantic life. Think it's just a little too good to be true? You must have peeked at the title.

For this new film by director Robert Zemeckis is not called "On the Surface" or "Appearance Is Reality" or even "What You See Is What You Get." 

No, this is "What Lies Beneath," and once its more-twists-than-a-Philadelphia-pretzel plot and "Scream"-for-adults scare moments finish unfolding, an awful lot will be called into question.

In general outline, the film's Clark Gregg script (based on a story by Sarah Kernochan and Gregg) follows the classic Hollywood dynamic of presenting characters who seem better off than the audience but turn out to be in considerably more dire straits. Under the surface, a lot more is going on - maybe even too much.

For "What Lies Beneath" is several different films, some even contradictory, all trying to coexist, like the Israelis and the Palestinians - or "Scream" and "Poltergeist" - in the same physical space. It's not easy.

On one hand, "Beneath" is a neo-Hitchcock suspense thriller with a Bernard Herrmann-esque score by Alan Silvestri accentuating a brisk succession of bump-in-the-dark moments. But while Hitchcock in general scorned the supernatural, this film shoehorns the ingredients of an old-fashioned dark-and-stormy-night ghost story into its plot dynamic.

"Beneath's" cultural politics are equally divided. On one side you have the traditional movie exploitation of a defenseless-looking woman (well-played, as per usual, by Pfeiffer), pale and fragile in her nightgown or in a bathtub, very much in peril. But the film simultaneously takes a protofeminist stance, implying that no horror is greater than what men do to women and mocking those who underestimate a woman's strength or try to dismiss genuine concerns as a warped bid for attention or a product of the empty-nest syndrome.

The only thing holding all this together, and it is no small task, is Zemeckis' directing skills. An Oscar winner for "Forrest Gump," Zemeckis has apparently long had a yen to do a tale of suspense, and his impressive filmmaking and storytelling gifts make this one efficient, at least from moment to moment. Working with his regular team, including cinematographer Don Burgess and editor Arthur Schmidt, Zemeckis has gotten the placement of those squeal-inducing surprises (the Audrey Hepburn-starring "Wait Until Dark" is more of a model than Hitchcock) down to such a precise science that the film feels genetically engineered. But though Zemeckis gets a lot out of this scenario, "What Lies Beneath" is not completely persuasive.

Initially, the only blemish on Claire's life, aside from the departure of daughter Caitlin (Katharine Towne), are Mary and Warren Feur (Miranda Otto and James Remar), new neighbors who have a weakness for abusive arguments in the driveway. One day, having a little cry on her own, Claire hears a sobbing Mary and has a brief conversation with what is from all appearances a quite terrified woman. Who promptly disappears.

Though the evidence seems flimsy to Norman, way preoccupied with putting the final touches on a genetic breakthrough that will put humanity deeply in his debt, Claire is soon convinced that Mary is the victim of foul play and that husband Warren is the foul player. 

She enlists Jody (Diana Scarwid), the flaky pal every movie heroine needs, to help her, even buying a Ouija board at the local Wal-Mart to assist with her investigations.

If nothing else, the state of things in Claire's own house would make a person suspicious. There are radios that turn themselves on, doors that won't stay closed, pictures that fall again and again, places a suspicious dog simply won't go and a bathroom that gets as foggy as 221B Baker St. With neither Sherlock Holmes nor Bill Murray's Ghostbusters available to investigate, Claire must get to the bottom of this on her own.

Spooky with a polished kind of creepiness added in, "What Lies Beneath" nevertheless feels more planned than passionate, scary at points but generally unconvincing overall. 

With questionable character motivations and a heavy dependence on happenstance and coincidence, "What Lies Beneath" pushes the envelope of plausibility too much, until we are second-guessing the film even while we're watching it. 

The best scary movies, like roller coasters, exhilarate as well as terrify; this one, its evident skill notwithstanding, tends more toward exhaustion. 



"What Lies Beneath" is currently playing at the Avrora cinema. See listings for details.




- LAT

TITLE: on death and burial, soviet-style
AUTHOR: by Frank Brown
TEXT: Russia's best-known and best-preserved dead body, Lenin, is a leading character in Catherine Merridale's Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia, an ambitious, broad-reaching look at how his and millions of other corpses were rendered, treated and remembered in the Soviet Union. Lenin died in January 1924, a time when the Bolsheviks were hastily destroying centuries of accreted religious tradition and building a new world that man, not God, would shape.


Death, of course, was beyond the Bolsheviks' grasp. Their treatment of Lenin's corpse is telling, writes Merridale. First, there was the Funeral Commission, the Immortalization Commission and, finally, the Institute for the Study of Lenin's Brain. With loving detail and the occasional flash of wry wit, Merridale chronicles the petty ideological bickering that accompanied the funeral preparations, the worrisome decay of the body and the hope that someday science would reach the point where it could bring Lenin back to life.

After relating the gruesome details, poking some fun at nervous Party functionaries and reflecting on the people's genuine grief, Merridale dwells on the rich symbolism and profound implications of choosing to construct the massive granite mausoleum on Red Square.

In death, Merridale, an English academic, has taken on a topic that could easily have been rendered in dry, abundantly footnoted prose. Instead, she takes the reader on a colorful, sure-footed journey spanning the disciplines of history, demography, psychology and sociology. 

"Night of Stone" is a tightly woven account based on scores of interviews, Soviet archival sources and contemporary literature. Merridale's simmering anger at the millions of needless deaths gives the narrative an edge and, often, a sweeping eloquence. She is wise, however, to avoid letting her indignation turn into the patronizing righteousness that often creeps into Western accounts of the wars, famines and mass executions that led to 50 million deaths between Russia entering World War I in 1914 and Stalin's exit from this world in 1953. 

The urge to make martyrs of those who died unjustly is supremely tempting. Merridale rejects it forcefully at the book's end, writing, "to make them into icons for freedom, consumerist democracy or loosely defined human rights is the most complacent kind of moral tourism." 

The suffering and death deliberately caused by the state was accompanied by silence and secrecy, robbing the victims and their families of a context for grieving. This is one of the central themes of Merridale's work: the changing value of death. From the late 1930s until the beginning of World War II, state executions were kept secret, in part, because the "basic message was that human life, without the state, was worthless."

Terror enforced the silence and secrecy. Sometimes, though, the evidence of massive, violent death intruded on everyday life and language. Merridale writes of Ukrainian children playing soccer with famine victims' skulls, of Siberian children collecting blueberries with gulag prisoners' skulls, of the important distinction among the starving between the Russian verbs for "people eating" and "corpse eating."

The sheer enormity of the number of needless dead and Merridale's relentless chronicling can make the mind search for a way out, a way to blame it on the peculiarities of the time and place and people of 20th-century Russia. Merridale resists this. She is convinced that Russia is not an anomaly, a place where the people are genetically, historically or culturally destined to kill each other off. Today's Russians are wrong when they blame it on the "so-called Asiatic tradition or the legacy of the Tartar yoke."

This, Merridale writes, is lazy thinking: "It is far harder, after all, to imagine another kind of truth ... that their history of violence did not grow from some national eccentricity, like a taste for eating chunks of salted lard, but from particular combinations of events and circumstances ... they are not members of a different humanity."

Merridale is keenly aware of the baggage she carries as an academic from the West, where life, death and justice mean something else. She is contemptuous of Western therapists and counselors who see Russia as a vast nation of victims in bad need of time on the couch. Nor does Merridale have patience for Russians with a similar view that the people suffer en masse from post-traumatic stress syndrome. Perhaps the greatest mistake of all is for the West to seize triumphantly on Russia's "suffering, courage, tenacity and repeated disappointment" as the victory of one set of beliefs over another.

Something went horribly wrong here, especially in the first 30 years of the Soviet state - one of the most disturbing and revolting periods in human history. The response, so far, has been muted and confused, especially when compared with the emphatic "Never again!" evoked by the Holocaust.



"Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia," by Catherine Merridale. 512 pages. Granta. On sale at Anglia, 40 Nab. Reki Fontanki, Tel: 279-82-84, priced 1,250 rubles ($45).

Frank Brown is a journalist in Moscow specializing in religious affairs.

TITLE: brodsky in english: a literary heroic failure?
AUTHOR: by Sergei Roy
TEXT: When the Soviet regime began persecuting Joseph Brodsky, eventually packing him off into internal, and then external exile, Anna Akhmatova let drop one of her famous bon mots: "What a biography they [the KGB] are writing for the red-headed one!" As I was reading Joseph Brodsky: Collected Poems in English, I was inclined to think that Anna Andreyevna's comment might be acute but not quite relevant. The jail, the exile, even the Nobel Prize could be the work of social-political circumstances - but they had little impact on the poet's oeuvre. The salient trait of Brodsky as man and poet, his nonconformism, was existential rather than social or political: His prime concern was not the times but Time and Self, and what Time did to Self - a fact that Brodsky formulated quite clearly and explicitly in his interviews (recently collected in Russian by Zakharov press).


Interviewers often pestered Brodsky with questions about the way his work was affected by his brushes with the Soviet system, his exile and his emigration. He would patiently, and at times impatiently, explain that the 18 months he spent in exile were the best in his life; that the focus of his life were strophes, not catastrophes; and that movement through space was nothing while movement through time, everything. 

There was, however, one kind of spatial adventure that affected Brodsky profoundly - the movement from the Russian linguistic space to the English one illustrated in the volume under review. I must say outright that this adventure ended in failure, though not a very tragic one. Putting it succinctly, Brodsky in Russian is a great poet - practically all his work has that halo of greatness, which not even his detractors or people who plain hate his guts can deny. Brodsky in English is, well, patchy and not often recognizable. It's all quite unlike the uniformly superb texture of his Russian verse, which by now has permeated the work of countless mini-Brodskys in Russia. 

Despite his frequent denials, Brodsky apparently wished to out-Nabokov Nabokov and see his work as part (maybe an important part) of the American-English poetic landscape. Thus in publishing "So Forth," Brodsky identified the translators separately from the poems, which Ann Kjellberg, the editor of the present volume, "understood as an invitation to the reader to consider the poems as if they were original texts in English," and followed the same principle here. Now, those of us who know the originals cannot help comparing them with the translations, and those who don't probably cannot help wondering about the disparity between the stature of a Nobel Prize winner and Poet Laureate and the quality of some of the poetry.

The factors responsible for the disparity are easiest to find in the case of the 33 poems written by Brodsky in English. These fall under two headings: vers libre and classically structured poems complete with rhyme and meter.

In Russian, Brodsky avoided vers libre, for a very good reason that he himself carefully explained to an interviewer: When you pour modern content into classical form, a powerful tension arises, which gives proper scope to the novel things you have to say. I couldn't agree more - only it didn't work out that way in Brodsky's English poems. It was all right as long as Brodsky wrote light verse. Trouble arose, though, when Brodsky tried to squeeze serious content into the rhymed iambic tetrameter of "Reveille," where he got a rather unwanted jingling, dancing effect.

One wonders whether Brodsky felt the jarring effect of the discrepancy between the weighty content and the lightweight medium, for as often as not he retreats into vers libre - and you know what? The "tension" is gone! As Brodsky himself put it, "Hence these somewhat wooden lines in our common language."

As you read, say, "At a Lecture," you get the impression that Brodsky could go on stringing those "somewhat wooden lines" indefinitely, at no particular danger or profit to himself or the reader, except of course for the brilliant line and a half at the end: "As the swan confessed/ to the lake: I don't like myself. But you are welcome to my reflection." Only he had expressed that disgust with himself and indifference to humanity with greater power and at greater length in many of his Russian poems, including his magnum opus, "Gorbunov and Gorchakov."

Now for the translations that form the bulk of this volume - authorial translations, first of all. Brodsky said in an interview that a poetic translation, at best, conveys about 75 percent of the original. In this business, though, that 25 percent gap is crucial. You might comb Brodsky's entire Russian oeuvre in search of stopgaps - words put into gaping slots to cover up absence of thought or emotion or just sense - and you'd be lucky to collect a handful. In his English translations, stopgaps occur with irritating regularity.

The bane of anyone who has ever done poetic translation from Russian into English is the disparity in the length of words. English words are much shorter, so if you wish to translate equisyllabically, that is, keeping the same number of syllables as in the original, you have to do some padding, introducing ideas that are not there in the original. When the author does the translating, he is under no obligation to be true to the original - and the padding sometimes produces a striking thematic development, as in one of Brodsky's more optimistic poems, "May 24, 1980," where, toward the end, the rather anemic Russian line, tolko s gorem ya chuvstvuyu solidarnost ("I feel solidarity only with grief") erupts into this striking English one: "Broken eggs make me grieve; the omelet, though, makes me vomit."

This, however, is a felicitous exception rather than the rule; the padding often becomes disastrous when the translation is not done by the poet himself. Take Richard Wilbur's rendition of one of Brodsky's finest, "The Funeral of Bobo." I doubt Brodsky authorized or even read that one. Here, the line v nepovtorimoi perspektive Rossi ( "in Rossi's matchless perspective") becomes "in Rossi's matchless, long, and tapering street." Now, St. Petersburg's Ulitsa Zodchego Rossi, the fairest in Russia, is exactly 220 meters long (I'd say that's short for a street) and 22 meters wide, and it has this magic effect that things, as Brodsky says, "do not dwindle but quite the reverse." 

For Brodsky, the poet is an instrument wielded by language, not the other way round, as common sense would imply. Brodsky was superb, he was great, as long as Russian wielded him. English was not his native tongue, and it refused to wield him to the best advantage. With time it might become his life blood - there were clear signs of that. Joseph Brodsky really should have lived longer.



"Joseph Brodsky: Collected Poems in English," ed. Ann Kjellberg. 540 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $30. On sale at Anglia, 40 Nab. Reki Fontanki, Tel: 279-82-84. Sergei Roy is editor in chief of Moscow News.

TITLE: boris akunin wins over nation's reading public
AUTHOR: by Lyudmila Polshikova
TEXT: Boris Akunin - that literary trickster straddling the 20th and 21st centuries - has conquered the heart of a demanding Russian public. His works are everywhere: at lectures, over tea, in the metro - even on the Internet. Soon his wildly successful "Adventures of Erast Fandorin" are to be released as a pocket book so that Akunin may nestle next to the very hearts of grateful readers. Continuing to ride the wave of his rising popularity, Akunin has crafted a new hero in his recently released novel "Altyn-Tolobas: The Adventures of a Master of Humanities."


Seamlessly shifting back and forth between the 17th and 20th century, the book opens in Moscow before the days of Peter the Great, where events unfold like a Steven Spielberg "Indiana Jones" screenplay. Under the whip of the Roman inquisition, the secret of a fifth gospel - the Gospel according to Judas - has been revealed to be hidden somewhere in the caverns of the Third Rome. Who will find the archive - the valiant Captain van Dorn, forefather of Erast Fandorin, or the cunning ne'er-do-well intent on thwarting our hero?

Fast forward to a more modern Moscow, where we are introduced to Erast Fandorin's grandson Nicholas, a British subject. Taganskaya Ploshchad. Ulitsa Mokhovaya. The Beskudniki suburbs. Bodies in the basement of an old house. The melody of a song about a girl from the Caucasus named Suliko. Before long, Nikolai Fandorin forgets quiet England for the homeland of his forefathers. 

Akunin's new book is destined for immortality. Why? Because the novelist is capable of appealing to different readers for different reasons. First of all, he appeals to the joy of the familiar by weaving cultural fragments from Russian fairy tales, Georgian folk songs and international cinema throughout his text. Secondly, he appeals to the lovers of historical novels, who place their edition of Akunin on their bookshelf somewhere between Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. Finally, the book is useful for students of Moscow, from schoolchildren to foreign visitors. In the near future all those seeking to enter Russia will be presented with a copy of an Akunin novel along with their visas. They should read it.

Meanwhile Grigory Chkhartishvili - the man who writes under the pen name of Boris Akunin - sits in his office. Our contemporary gazes intently into the monitor of his computer. No - he is not making adjustments to a new novel about the adventures of Master Nicholas, nor is he admiring the Internet version of his "Adventures of Erast Fandorin." He is doing what he truly loves: writing about classical Japanese poetry. This may be the author's first love, but Chkhartishvili's calling is not likely to pose much of a threat to Boris Akunin at the bookstores.




Akunin's books can be found in most bookshops in the city. Unfortunately, he still awaits an English translator.

TITLE: warning: gay scene in trouble
AUTHOR: by Tom Masters
TEXT: The Pink Ruble may finally have arrived in St. Petersburg, if the hectic round of new gay venues opening throughout the city recently is anything to go by. Enthusiastic doyens of the Petersburg gay scene would have us believe that the northern capital may soon rival the actual capital - long Russia's gay Babylon - as the country's homosexual epicenter.


DINKIs - Double Income, No Kids, a buzzword in Britain and North America during the nineties, are finally feeling their influence as St. Petersburg's entrepreneurs aim new, increasingly pricey establishments in their direction.

Those not looking at things through rose-tinted Gucci glasses, however, remain skeptical. Indeed, they have a right to be, as unlike any self-respecting metropolis, St. Petersburg doesn't even have any gay bars - as opposed to clubs - and the concept of a gay "community" is still embryonic.

Despite being a magnet for gay people from all over the Northwest region and beyond, detractors point out that the "out" proportion of the city's gays is being spread too thinly across ever increasing venues. This situation is about to be further compounded by the closure of one of the city's most popular and notorious clubs.

Skeptics further point out that a scramble for DINKI cash is premature in a gay culture that is made up more of single men, prostitutes and tourists than wealthy thirty-something couples.

Like Russian nightlife in general, gay clubs are still dominated by the oldest profession, which makes a sad joke out of any notion of community.

Even sophisticated and pleasant venues such as Mono (where Alla Pugachyova had her birthday party last year) will propose the services of a young lad to those with foreign accents, while a stroll through Jungle will reveal a gallery of underfed teenagers aggressively touting for trade.

Since the none-too-lamentable decline of Mayak, the city's first gay club in the mid-'90s, change has been the only constant among gay venues. Amazingly, the dinosauresque Jungle - celebrating its fifth birthday on Saturday - still struggles along, operating in a cold, damp ex-Palace of Culture on the Petrograd Side, while the bright young things now sip cocktails at Club 69, Greshniki and a host of "gay-friendly" clubs such as Monroe and Metro.

Club 69 - for all its faults undeniably the best gay club in town - was a sensation when it opened over three years ago. Sleek, fashionable but largely mobster- and prostitute-free, it represented a sophistication in gay nightlife that even Moscow was unable to rival. By organizing and sponsoring events, it quickly became the center of the city's gay scene rather than just a nightclub and this position it still holds despite swiftly rising cover and drink prices.

It was therefore a great blow to the optimistic school when it became an open secret that Club 69 will be closing its doors in January next year. New competition, rumors have it, means that the club can no longer afford to pay its hoards of tireless go-go boys, transvestites in fright-wigs and costumed bar staff, and when entry can cost 250 rubles, this is saying something.

Greshniki, 69's only serious rival, is case in point of a club seeing the financial advantages that the gay public can offer. A failing straight club with dwindling clientele, under new management it last year made the sage decision to provide playing fields for the other team. Its cheap beer, central location and relaxed atmosphere have made it a big hit. Despite its chronic lack of toilets, superannuated strippers and lame floor shows, Greshniki survives due to a so-far-loyal public. It has not been a smooth journey however, and whether Greshniki remains gay long term or swaps allegiances yet again if profit margins drop remains to be seen.

Optimists point out a number of new ventures: A new club-restaurant, Kletka dlya Ptashek (The Birdcage), which opened last month on Kazanskaya Ul., claims unsurprisingly to be the first restaurant in St. Petersburg to serve Chinese, Vietnamese and Russian food in one place. More significantly it is St. Petersburg's first official gay restaurant, open for lunch as well as all night. However, anyone having made the effort to see the new establishment will have been sadly met by an empty dance floor, glum staff and the excitement of a mid-80s Intourist hotel bar.

Similar to Greshniki's conversion, the former Smolninsky Baths have been renovated and now operate as the salubrious "Narcissus" Sauna - a copy of those that exist all over the world, where it is perhaps safe to say that bathing takes second place to other sweaty activities.

There is now even a gay travel agency (Magellan), and for those who cannot stand to have any contact with heterosexuality, a gay pager provider, Kompas-Telekom. Even the Moscow club moguls have their eye on this developing market. Ilya Abaturov, owner of Moscow clubs Central Station and Three Monkeys was recently visiting to look into the possibility of a new club venture up north.

But is this rush for the pink ruble realistic? The likely answer to this question is no.

Whether or not the closing of Club 69 is a PR stunt on the part of the canny management - who regularly attract some of Russia's most famous pop stars to their stage - only time will tell. While still busy on the weekends, it is no secret that the management has been despairing about the empty dance floor Monday through Thursday.

If Club 69 really is in trouble, then St. Petersburg's gay scene will be set back years. No matter how many theme restaurants, gay-friendly clubs or saunas open, the lack of a central, openly gay and enduringly popular club at the heart of the city's gay nightlife will leave a vacuum that will be hard to fill, no matter how much gold the business community believes lies at the end of the gay rainbow.



See club guide for details.

TITLE: spartak takes inspiration from amsterdam venue
AUTHOR: by Kirill Galetski
TEXT: The connections between St. Petersburg and Amsterdam are multifarious. Some are strong, historical and direct, others are tenuous but quietly intriguing nonetheless, almost like ragged fragments of a parallel universe. One of these types of connections is the existence of two clubs - Spartak in St. Petersburg and Paradiso in Amsterdam - each with striking similarities and important differences.


The building that now houses the Spartak cinema and club was one of a number of Lutheran churches built in the 19th century. Beginning in the late 1930s, when the state appropriated the building, it was turned into a cinema. Until the early 1990's it was the official screening hall of the State Film Foundation (Gosfilmfond,) which is the government's film archiving and preservation body. From 1992 to 1997, a German Lutheran group held services on Sundays. The group wanted to take the church back, but the City Cultural Committee would not relinquish it. The problem of who would occupy the church was solved in 1997 when the Lutheran group was given a church on Nevsky.

The Spartak cinema is the city's premier art house cinema. It is almost literally a temple to fine films. Spartak has been known as a movie theater for a while, but has only recently been known as a club. The "club" element came in because of a number of reasons. Owing to a decline in filmgoing, the Spartak cinema fell on financial hard times and needed to rent out the hall, and certain groups with a dastardly attitude and money to burn were steadily invading the city's cinemas, steadily turning them into casinos, pool halls, and dance clubs. One such group started renting the hall for concerts every once in a while, eventually increasing the frequency of its schedule of mostly Russian bands and now has begun reconstructing the club, which includes bars on the ground and second floors. More extensive reconstruction is planned for next summer, including refurbishing the main hall.

Despite the fact that these groups bring revenue to the cinema, the two organizations are at odds with each other and exist in uneasy cohabitation. The cinema staff, who asked not to be individually identified, appreciate the resources poured into the building's renovation. However, despite having progressive tastes in cinema, do not like most of the musical programming, and the dates chosen for booking bands frequently fall on weekend nights, which are normally prime cinema-going times.

The difference is that the Spartak cinema survives due to the efforts of its well-informed, well-connected staff and a dedicated local following. The team includes a film critic and historian who has been developing foreign film culture contacts through such organizations as the British Council, the Goethe Institute and the Italian Consulate.

Paradiso's history is markedly different, but no less interesting. As hippie culture was gaining momentum all over the world, in Europe it had a particularly strong presence in Amsterdam. Hippies from all over the world camped out in a park near the center of Amsterdam. There was not a specific building in the city that was a hippie hangout until 1967 when a Protestant church was squatted in near Leidseplein, one of Amsterdam's main squares. It was originally built in 1879 by architect Gerlof Bartholomeus Salm by request of the "Vrije Gemeente," one of the many Dutch Protestant factions. The building had been abandoned for a few years, and was due to be demolished. The squatters were kicked out, but the building demolition was indefinitely postponed. Somehow other groups of young people negotiated to use the building's space, and in 1968, the club was born, albeit in an informal capacity. This little pleasuredome in the heart of the city, received the rather obvious nickname "Paradiso." Little by little the bohemian gatherings were overtaken by a tendency to have live rock and jazz bands play there, plus a weekly film night was introduced.

The creative spirit of the club was furthered in 1971 when yoga classes and open art workshops were added to the musical and cinema events. The late '70s brought a punk and new wave metamorphosis to the program, and by the '80s the club's program was about as diverse as it is to this day. Alternative bands such as the Tragically Hip and Bad Religion have played there. The club is well-rounded, with a plethora of mainstream acts playing there regularly. An upcoming date is Slash's Snakepit, featuring Guns 'n' Roses guitarist Slash.

Despite the effort to book diverse international acts, the club has a substantial focus on local music. On a typical Saturday night after a concert or when there is no live music, one can see people of diverse backgrounds gyrating on two different dance floors, arranged in the main hall of the former church, and upstairs. The latest development at the club to support the local, and perhaps international, music industry is a contemporary 24-track recording studio located on the premises. The club most likely has had its ups and downs and personnel conflicts, but the aforementioned advancements would not have been possible without workable cooperation between the various elements involved.

Despite its more formal beginnings, Spartak as a club has a long way to go until it can become something like St. Petersburg's version of Paradiso. The path ahead is full of challenges, the biggest of which is overcoming the current disputes. Its history as a club is relatively short, but it has as much potential as Paradiso has realized.



See lisitings to find out who's playing at Spartak this week.

TITLE: country's chief brain prefers life as cartoonist
AUTHOR: by Tatyana Patina
TEXT: Best known as the creator of Petrovich, the beloved cartoon character who first graced the pages of the Kommersant daily 10 years ago, Andrei "Petrovich" Bilzho started his career on an entirely different path - psychiatry. Having worked for several years as a psychiatrist at Kashchenko, the country's best-known psychiatric hospital, the doodling doctor gradually gave up medicine for drawing. His fictional fool is now the honorary host at the popular Petrovich, a club dressed in irony and nostalgia. As for Bilzho himself, he graces television screens each week as NTV's "glavny mozgoved" - or chief brain of the country. He spoke with The St. Petersburg Times about the rise of Petrovich and his future singing career.




Q: How did you become a cartoonist? 

A: I don't even remember, because I have been drawing for quite a long time. My first caricature was published in 1975. And I think the 15 years that followed were a kind of prelude to this new career. When I was a student and later a psychiatrist, my work ran in various newspapers. This was a period of caricatures without words featuring different bureaucrats - a realm of Aesopian language. It seems history chooses our genres, as well as our path in life. I think the changes in our history changed my life a great deal. For the first time it was possible for me to devote myself to painting and graphic arts. And then by degrees I left psychiatry and indulged more and more in caricatures.




Q: Are you now in a field that is right for you?

A: Yes, no doubt about it. But I have always felt that I was in the right business - no matter what. It doesn't matter to me what I do as long as I get pleasure and satisfaction from it. Even if, in the past, I got involved in something that did not really seem like it was my business, it turned out to be a positive experience. The television program "Itogo" is one example, and we won a TEFI [Russian television award] prize for it. 




Q: When did you draw your first cartoon? 

A: I began drawing as a child. I have always loved to draw, but never learned how to do it professionally. But if I have a piece of paper and a pencil at hand I always draw. 




Q: How do you define caricature? 

A: It's difficult to say. Our definition of caricature differs from that in the West. There, what I draw would most probably be considered cartoons. But here it caught on as caricatures. This genre gives me the opportunity to comment on the concrete events of our life today - on the absurdity - and give the issue a more global meaning. Caricatures have an important place in our newspapers, because they serve as articles without words. A picture sometimes influences readers more effectively than words. The reader's eye catches the information quickly and will remember it for a long time. Caricatures are like spices that make food more delicious. 




Q: When did your character Petrovich first appear, and what, exactly, does he symbolize for you? 

A: Petrovich showed up about 10 years ago, when I started working for Kommersant. If our national folk hero, Ivanushka-Durachok, is a country fool, then Petrovich is a city lunatic. He is, in many ways, a composite character - an optimist who finds himself in many embarrassing situations, as does everyone in our country. But in spite of all the difficulties he faces, he maintains his self-respect. Sure, he may break his arms and legs occasionally, but he recuperates quite quickly. He is a strange fellow. 




Q: For a brief period last year an animated version of Petrovich appeared on [ORT] television. Where did he go? 

A: Leonid Parfyonov [NTV's director of special projects], a man whose excellent taste I respect, originally wanted to arrange for Petrovich to appear on NTV. But something went wrong. I still don't understand what. By that time the work had already been finished, and it seemed a pity to let it go to waste. Instead, we started to look around for a solution and signed a contract with ORT. Petrovich aired five days a week for six months. And then the contract was finished. That was it. After that ORT [director] Konstantin Ernst wouldn't see us any more, and NTV didn't want to talk to us [after Petrovich aired on ORT]. 




Q: When and how did the idea for your popular Club Petrovich come about? 

A: The idea had been there for a long time, but the club only came into being three years ago. There were many components that led to its opening. Petrovich became more and more popular - almost legendary. And then there was an exhibition dedicated to his favorite things - clothes, food and so on - at the Roza Azora gallery. They featured all sorts of things from our Soviet past - things we now associate with nostalgia. And, finally, Moscow had no clubs for its cultural, art-loving audience. We wanted to create a restaurant, gallery and museum all in one - a place that had a homey atmosphere, surrounded by all the objects of our childhood and youth, but with a twist of irony. And no politics. This is how Club Petrovich began, and why it continues to be successful. 




Q: And what about your new Petrovich-Puteshestvennik [Traveling Petrovich] restaurant? 

A: If at Petrovich we are traveling back in time, then Petrovich-Puteshestvennik is dedicated to traveling through space. We created a menu representing Petrovich's different journeys, cooking the food he tried in various countries. He was in Africa, England, etc. where he found that all people are equal.




Q: What do you have to do to become a member of the club? 

A: You need to have a sense of humor. If you can smile at yourself, come to the club, fill in the form and you'll get a card. 




Q: You appear every week on Viktor Shenderovich's "Itogo" program on NTV, giving commentary from "a small mental hospital." What is it like being the glavny mozgoved, or chief brain, of the country? 

A: It is very pleasant working with such a nice group of people. We are friends and were friends before the program. Our union is a creative one, and it is nice for me to use my psychiatric knowledge. And I like it when people recognize me and call me the country's chief brain. 

Q: What creative plans do you have for future? 

A: I have a lot of plans, including music. I am recording a CD of 10 songs, singing together with the group Posledny Shans (Last Chance). The working title of the disc is "Moscow's Little Tragedies," and the songs are quite idiotic. They are about mobile phones, pagers - about everything we see around us and more. 


At the same time, I am working on an album at the Kit Art studio with Nikita Golovanov, the chief artist at Kommersant. This should come out in the new year. And recently I finished illustrating an alphabet book for children published by Vagrius. 



Q: Do you have anything else to tell our readers in conclusion? 

A: I find it very interesting when people approach me with different ideas and activities. I was offered a role in a movie playing the part of a psychiatrist, for example. What I would say to your readers is do not to be afraid to try to prove yourself in different fields. If you don't get results, it's not so terrible. If a surgeon can't do his job well, it's bad. If a nuclear warmonger makes mistakes, it's very bad. But in fields that are less dangerous, you should put yourself to the test.




Andrei Bilzho can be seen on NTV's "Itogo" program at 10 p.m. on Sundays.

TITLE: kirpichi's new album celebrates capitalism
AUTHOR: by Sergey Chernov
TEXT: Kirpichi, one of the most high-energy and popular local club bands, released its third album last month, but is preparing to present it to local audiences at a full-length concert at SpartaK on Friday.


"Kapitalizm OO," released on Moscow-based Gala Records on Oct. 23, has been conceived as a study of Russian capitalism. Originally "OO" stood for the year 2000, but as time passed the meaning has changed - now the title reads "kapitalizm oh, oh."

Kirpichi started in 1995 as a hard-edged guitar-based band with the occasional rap, but during the past two years the hip-hop element began to dominate.

"It portrays Russian capitalism. It isn't a parody, it's rather an ideology, though the album is very funny," says Vasin. "Money, capitalism, politics, though many songs are about booze, chicks and friends - the usual rock and roll subjects."

"Capitalism influenced us very strongly - we are absolutely not what we were, say, five years ago," says Vasin. "We've got a perfect example in Danila [Smirnov]. He is an ideal person in every respect. He doesn't drink or smoke, he's a sportsman, he'll have a doctor's degree one day. He's also handsome, a virtuoso on bass guitar and a rock star."

"I think he is a bourgeois type, he's a self-made man, he does everything to succeed. Apart from that, he is Russian, he's got the Russian style."

Smirnov, wearing a starched white shirt, was chosen to represent Russian capitalism - after the band decided that photos of shaverma, which had originally been intended as the symbol of capitalism, were not good enough.

Formerly they were a trio, but now there are two main members of Kirpichi - guitarist Vasily Vasin, or Vasya V., and bassist Danila "Danny Boy" Smirnov, since drummer Yevgeny "Jay" Nazarov died of heart failure on Feb. 18. They are backed with guest musicians and a DJ.

Kirpichi is a clash of opposing musical tastes. Smirnov is a heavy metal fan, while Vasin listens exclusively to "roots" black rap, his favorites including 2Pac, Run DMC, Snoop Doggy Dog, Guru and Busta Rhymes.

On this album, Vasin's influence obviously prevails. "We can't play rock forever, so we did our third record in a totally different style. It's a natural development, in my opinion," he says.

"In content it's a rock album, but formally it's not rock at all, it's more of an experiment. We played in a heavy style before, now we are more hip-hop."

Typically for Kirpichi, the album contains snipes at "chicks" and "faggots." "If you're not a faggot, you're a friend to me," goes the song "Pro druzhei" (Friends), musically based on Police's "Every Breath You Take."

"It's a joke, but there's a bit of truth in every joke," says Vasin. "Of course there is certain homophobia and sexism. But what political incorrectness can there be in Russia? There are no blacks here, and few faggots - and they don't have a movement here, like they do abroad, at least not legally."

Vasin admits that the album lacks political correctness musically as well.

"People who have been into hip-hop for a long time would be scared to do some of things we've done. Also our music's very Russian, it's very patriotic - it's not Western hip-hop, or an attempt to copy black musicians. They have influenced us, but mostly just subconsciously."



Kirpichi play in concert at 7 p.m. at SpartaK on Friday.

TITLE: maly pulls out all the stops with bayadere premiere
AUTHOR: By Slava Gepner
TEXT: The State Mussorgsky, or Maly, Theater premiere of La Bayadere, which took place on Oct. 21, was this season's first ballet premiere in St. Petersburg and could be compared in its grand production scale with the premiere of Sleeping Beauty at the Maly in 1995.


Any new production, while providing a breath of fresh air for the dancers, also shows the condition of the company and thus demands a lot of work from the ballet coaches.

One could question the possibility of staging such a demanding classic by a theater, which is not called "Maly," or "small," for nothing.

La Bayadere is one of Marius Petipa's productions staged for the imperial ballet in 1877 to the music of Leon Minkus and danced by such famous ballerinas as Natalya Dudyenskya and Margot Fonteyn. The first staging outside of Russia took place in Covent Garden in 1963 by Rudolf Nureyev for The Royal Ballet.

The piece continues the line of Petipa's work, synthesizing melodramatic structure with a romantic ballet scheme. In this way, La Bayadere is full of splendor, majestic dances and virtuoso variations.

The performance should keep the audience's full concentration focused on the plot, the dancer's virtuosity and technical preparation. Unfortunately, the young dancers did not pay sufficient attention to the dramatic line of the performance.

The challenge of performing La Bayadere is not only owing to the virtuoso technique demanded of the dancers, but also to its particular style. All the performers have to convey the special atmosphere of ancient India.

They should believe it and express it. Otherwise, how can we, the audience, feel the mystery of the dance and music?

The second act is a kind of preparation for the culminating dance of Nikia the bayadere. The atmosphere of a feast is underlined by the monumental introductory march, when the stage is gradually filled by all the dancers. This is a feast with many surprising variations, an effective dance from the drummers, the unforgettable golden idol variation and the final variation of Nikia.

However, not everything was perfect. Probably the biggest fault was that not enough attention was paid to the pantomime parts - the result being a lack of style and sometimes a misunderstanding of the plot.

Another disadvantage was the stage decorations, which were a mixture of original scenery and that of other productions. While many companies in this country are struggling in the current difficult economical situation, all the same it is important to maintain quality in these kind of productions.

Still, there were attempts to achieve a colorful impression. Much of that success is thanks to Natalia Spychina, who helped artists in directing them to smoother and more lyrical ways of moving.

Worthy of attention are also Oksana Shestakova-Gamzatti, who balances her play with proportional expression and technique, and Elvira Habibulina, the bayadere, missing sometimes the dramatic line but still showing improvement in her professional skills. Kirill Myasnikov has strong classical training, but it seems that this drove him, particularly in the last scene, to lose his dramatic motivation.

As usual for La Bayadere, the roles of the slave and the golden idol were taken by highly professional dancers, as the role of the idol, played by Denis Tolmachiev, requires extreme precision and the part of the slave, played by Dimitry Shadrukhin demands strong acting and technical qualities.

In general, the impression from the performance was positive, and it is a hopeful sign from everybody responsible for the training of these artists that they are ready to go even further.

TITLE: ambitious new club opens in student hostel
AUTHOR: by Sergey Chernov
TEXT: A new art venue, which threw a great opening party last Friday, boasts ambitious plans, but as always in such cases it is hard to say how long it will last.


Called Art Spirit, the club plans live concerts, dance parties, art exhibitions and seminars.

Leonid Fyodorov of Auktsyon who was listed as performing at the opening, did not appear as, it was explained, he was leaving the city that very night, but promised to play a gig some day in December. Instead, the night was dominated by Sergei Shnurov's quartet 3D, which was followed by some vinyl spinning. The sound - the painful point for local clubs - was decent enough.

The first day drew an audience of over 200, but it was the opening and a performance by one of the hottest local bands - the program for the rest of the month is not at all that exciting. Take the boring art-rock outfit Barocco Flash or the remnants of the uninspired pop/rock band Prepinaki, who now perform as Tu-Tu 134.

The place turned out to be not quite ready for such a number of people - there was a 15-minute long queue to the bar, a queue to the ladies' room and a queue to enter.

The owner kept a low profile, serving beer at the bar, which offered quite reasonable prices, with Flagman vodka going for 13.5 rubles for a shot, while Armenian brandy cost 40 to 50 rubles. Sandwiches with smoked sausage cost a mere 10 rubles, while cabbage-stuffed pirozhki were free.

The interior is quite modest, though. Quite honestly, it looks like a hastily redesigned bar, which, in fact, it is. Previously it was known as " The Black Hole" and was largely neglected.

The venue expects between 200 and 300 people every night, though the sitting capacity is limited to about 45. There is a long room, which includes both bar and stage and a narrow billiard room with one table. In the fashion of the local club scene, there are also plans for an Internet cafe.

The place is located at the university hostel for foreign students - part of the three-building complex which is said to accomodate over 3,000 - and is thus oriented toward students, including foreign ones.

However, there was only one obviously foreign-looking couple who came over in the middle of the show but left in 10 minutes, evidently scared by wild music and behavior.

The club's official's web site at www.artspirit.nm.ru contains nothing except the animated GIF logo, and the word "news," though there's no news in sight. The link "Club Opening" leads to a blank page. There have been seven hits at the site since it was launched.

The place is located about 15 minutes walk from the Primorskaya metro, which with the icy wind from the nearby Gulf of Finland could be quite an ordeal.

There are dangers - such as a black iron ladder that you could easily fall off after downing a few drinks, especially when it's covered with snow and ice. 

Live concerts start at 8 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays and are usually followed by dance parties with DJs, which last until 6 p.m. The bar is open from 2 p.m. daily.




Art Spirit, 20 Pr. Korablestroitelei, M: Primorskaya, 355-31-67.

TITLE: zebra and ostrich for all at james cook pub-cafe
AUTHOR: by Molly Graves
TEXT: If you haven't already discovered it yourself, there's a new dining option to explore in town - the James Cook Pub and Cafe, named after the famous British explorer who discovered, among other things, Australia and New Zealand. The pub and cafe are divided into two separate sections - with "coffee to the left, beer to the right" - and ads further tempts us by boasting that on either side, "there are things to try."


My dining companion and I opted to head right - to the pub section - which, with low, arched brick ceilings and wood-and-brass fixtures, is warmly styled in the fashion of a British/Irish pub (though, unfortunately, the temperature didn't match the decor, and I wished I had not checked my sweater in at the door). Our table was interestingly decorated with small piles of the restaurant's business cards and even courtesy JC-logo matchboxes - which came in handy when our table started to wobble a bit. We also noticed a few small artifacts, loosely based on a sea-adventure theme, housed in museum-style cases hanging on the walls - presumably for pre-dinner musing. Behind our table, for example, was an encased set of antique-looking fishing rods and reels.

All in all the pub menu is rather fishy as well - divided into the main sections of beer snacks, salads, cold snacks, hot snacks, soups, and something called "let's eat hot" (which is noted to be especially "for those who are afraid of losing weight") - with dishes featuring items such as smoked salmon, shrimp, sturgeon, and various other seafood specialties. 

Our meal started off with complementary carbo-munchies - croutons and a bread plate, garnished with artistically sculpted garlic butter. 

First, I ordered the "Zebra salad" ($4.5) - which, fear not, actually contains chicken as the main ingredient - and my companion opted for an order of poached eggs ($6) from the cold snacks menu, served on toasts with smoked salmon, caviar and Hollandaise sauce. Both items were carefully presented and quite tasty, though portions were minimal.

Moving on to the hot snacks, I decided to try the "Ostrich hands barbecue" - yes, that's marinated ostrich with barbecue sauce - available in orders of 1/2 flock (my choice at $5), all the way up to 2 flocks ($8). These were a tasty choice, but a bit on the messy side. My companion - who claimed he was a bit afraid of losing weight - went for the pork medallions ($8) from the "let's-eat-hot" section. These, he said, were less impressive than his first dish, and a bit on the dry side.

For drinks, we ordered from the beer menu - which is a bit pricy, with local beers Nevskoe and Botchkarev at $2 for 0.5 liters, and Guinness and Heineken ranging from $4 to $6. We also decided after dinner to explore the cafe menu, which we then discovered to be several times the size of the pub menu! I had an Irish Coffee ($6), and my companion had a caffe con leche ($2.50). Both were excellent, though heavy on the whipped cream. Coffee drinks listed ranged from basic espresso drinks around $1 to $1.50, to alcoholic coffee drinks around $6.

Though we only had a peek, the cafe side in general seemed a quieter affair, with wicker chairs and tables instead of the wood and brass of the pub, and the croonings of Sinatra replacing Eric Clapton and Sting - or later the thumping house and techno - that we had dined to on the pub side. For coffee lovers, the cafe does have something to try. You can buy whole-bean coffee from a large selection - something not available everywhere in town - and the dessert menu looked tempting, though we were already quite full.

The verdict? If you're looking for mounds of no-nonsense cheap-eats, James Cook is probably not your best bet - however, if you're more interested in presentation and quality (if not quantity), you will definitely find "things to try" here. 

Prices are high, but not unreasonable. And they claim to stay open "till last man standing" - which seems ambitious, seeing as the combination of caffeine and alcohol available here, with a little bouncing back and forth from pub to cafe, could probably keep a man standing comfortably for quite a long time.




James Cook, 2 Shvedsky Pereulok. Dinner for two with alcohol, 924 rubles ($33): Open from 8 a.m. "till last man standing." Tel: 312-32-00.

TITLE: old russia meets britney spears
AUTHOR: by Andrey Musatov
TEXT: I have never been in a Russian-style restaurant abroad, but I should imagine that, if the Shury-Mury tavern - not to be confused with the Shury-Mury on Galernaya Ul. - were located somewhere in Western Europe, it would definitely include colorful waitresses dressed in sarafans and kokoshniks (a Russian woman's headdress), as the restaurant has a very consciously traditional Russian theme.


However, Ul. Belinskogo in St. Petersburg is pretty far from Western Europe, and it's probably for this reason that the tavern owners, advanced in such aspects of the Russian mentality, decided to avoid stereotypical Russian attributes such as vodka dominating the menu, live bears and singing gypsies. 

The restaurant, which calls itself "a tavern," is in the style of turn-of-the-century Russia, with old advertising posters and pages from books printed by methods that existed before the polygraph machine made it to Russia.

Thanks to that, Shury-Mury makes one feel really comfortable with its old Russian atmosphere. Its slogan might well be "nothing exotic - just good, old-fashioned atmosphere," were it not for Ace of Base and Britney Spears screaming on the sound-system.

Unfortunately I haven't seen any places in St. Petersburg, excluding music clubs, that really care about background music. At first I felt uncomfortable sitting in the medieval hall of the Don Jon bar on Vla di mir sky Prospect and listening to Europa Plus and watching TV. However, I can understand the Shury-Mury management - it's much easier to find pop and rock music than to find music that would suit a 100-year-old Russian tavern.

Meanwhile, another thing that was mildly distracting - though not the end of the world - was the over-attentive waitress, politely asking every five minutes if we required anything else (which may well be likely, thanks to a thick menu listing about 50 dishes).

Making your choices can be further delayed because of the colorful names given to the dishes - a popular trend among newly-opened eateries - attracting your attention and making you realize the emptiness of your stomach.

Take, for instance, in the case of the Boltliviy Dvoretskiy (Garrulous Butler, 65 rubles), which is beef tongue cut into pieces with horseradish and greens - the associations with butlers do not, however, harm the taste.

A really good choice, which I also made because of the name, was Postoyaly Dvor (Coaching Inn, 110 rubles), a dish of roasted pork covered with mushrooms in melted cheese. No garnish needs to be ordered, as the portion is big enough and some sauerkraut is also added.

Further choices included the Lovelace salad (45 rubles) and zakuska zamorskaya (overseas snack, also 45 rubles.) The salad was unfortunately an over tender and sickly-sweet mass of mayonnaise, ham, cucumber, paprika and celery, while the overseas snack was an eggplant stuffed with carrot and nuts.

In general, the eatery thankfully seems to prefer Russian cooking traditions to less fortunate Soviet ones, and the menu contains old favorites such as bliny and pelmeni. All in all, Shury-Mury presents a good opportunity to have an inexpensive and pleasantly habitual dinner. 



Shury-Mury, 8 Ul. Belinskogo. Dinner for two, 550 rubles (about $20). Open daily from 11 a.m. (They don't say when they close.) Tel: 279-85-50.

TITLE: russian st. john's passion comes as true revelation
AUTHOR: by Giulara Sadykh-zade
TEXT: Valery Gergiev gave what may have been the concert of a lifetime at the beginning of this month. The Russian premiere of Sofia Gubaidulina's St. John's Passion, performed in the composer's homeland on Nov. 1 as part of a major project undertaken by the Bach Academy in Stuttgart, is an event not likely to be forgotten in the near future.


As part of Bach's Jubilee celebrations, the Academy commissioned four well-known composers from different countries (Germany, Russia, the United States and Spain) to write a Passion each for one of the evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

The conditions were that performances of the passions in Germany would then be followed by a performance in each composer's home country in their own language. Thus Gu bai du lina's Passion is the first Passion to be written in Russian.

Gubaidulina, conscious that Passions belong to the Catholic tradition, nonetheless attempted to build hers into an Orthodox context. Her Passion is not a lay one at all, but fully in keeping with Church liturgy.

The music of her Passion is notably defined by a Russian intonation system and a heavy concentration on objective storytelling on the part of the narrator (wonderfully realized by the superlative Mariinsky bass, Gennady Bezzubenkov). The tenor (Viktor Lutsyuk), baritone (Fyodor Mozhayev) and soprano (Natalya Korneva) sing to an extensive solo of cello, viola and flute.

Momentary blasts of the choir (from the Mariinsky, reinforced by the The Nikolai Kornev Petersburg Chamber Choir) cut through the swirling mist of the Garden of Gethsemane, commenting on the action while angry trombones proclaim the onset of the Day of Judgement and drum rolls accompany the doleful ascent to Golgotha.

Biblical and evangelical texts chosen by the composer add polyphony as well as commenting on events and producing a unique effect of two mutually penetrating realities - those of heaven and earth.

The beginning of history - the birth of Christ, and the end of history - Judgment Day - are thus linked together.

Gubaidulina's music is sensual and gets across the feeling of the here and now very distinctly. Historical time is compressed in the Passion until the moment of revelation.

God looks down from above, surrounded by cherubs and seraphs, exactly as in the paintings of the old masters.

Gubaidulina's archaic world view is very relevant to the composition: It allowed the author to create a work full of significance, strength and authenticity. It is precisely such a deficit of these qualities that has long revealed the corruption of skepticism and lack of faith in contemporary art. In this sense, Gubaidulina is a relic, an anachronism of past epochs, who above all values sincerity and integrity of expression. This is what makes her work interesting.

TITLE: bastion of avant-garde triumphs
AUTHOR: by Natasha Shirokova
TEXT: Only a few of Russia's avant-garde theaters, which first appeared around 1990, still exist. Some were adopted by theater mainstream,while others like Anton Adasinsky's " Derevo" are based abroad and occasionally tour here. One true survivor of the movement is the Formal Theater, though its director Andrei Moguchy finds the label is no longer relevant. 


"There is no theater avant-garde movement in Russia," he says. "There is no division into mainstream and underground anymore.There is the need for a personal message in contemporary theater. It's very valuable when the core of the theater is individuality. I would call it egoclassicism instead of underground."

The Formal Theater is currently celebrating its tenth anniversary with a new project with the Baltic House Theater. On this occasion they will perform the interactive "Hamlet Machine" by Heiner Muller, Aristoso's "Orlando Furioso," and their latest work, Sasha Sokolov's "The School for Fools," which has already been called the best small-stage performance of the year.

If we were to look for the predecessors of the Formal Theater, it would be absurdist works from the '50s or '60s. It is significant, then, that the first performance the theater gave was Ionesco's "The Bald Singer," which is one such work. But there is also another tradition to be seen, which goes back to medieval mysteries and miracles, which in their turn can be traced further to more ancient rituals.

The Formal Theater creates "live" theater, which awakens the individual imagination of spectators and involves them in the action. They often perform outside - "Orlando Furioso" is played both in the theater and at the Peter and Paul fortress.The performances combine dancing, circus, fireworks, acting, and cinema. Logical connections like place of action, order of events and time are deliberately broken and reorganized associatively, as if in a dream.

The prose of Sasha Sokolov, author of "The School for Fools," seems to be the perfect material for the Formal Theater. Sokolov's book is a unique phenomenon in Russian literature, but still has not received adequate recognition from readers and critics.The interpretation by the Formal Theater is a rare example of harmony between the original and the stage version.

The childhood recollections of a boy who attended a school for mentally disabled children are illogical and poetic, designed as an illustration of the idea that the world is too complicated to be percieved by human beings. The boy's personality is split into two on stage, and he thus is portrayed by two actors, Dmitry Vorobyev and Sasha Mashanov.

The world through the eyes of a mentally disabled boy is a vortex of immediate impressions. Childhood recollections are exaggerated, but are not made frightening. Memory brings to life grotesque figures such as the young, impossibly sexy teacher, the monstrous toothless neighbor, the illiterate and cruel headmaster of the school, and the barefoot geography teacher.

In short, the Formal Theater's latest production is a triumph. Moguchy manages to preserve the rhythm and atmosphere of Sokolov's unusual book and make it into a true piece of theater art.



"School for Fools" is next showing at the Baltiisky Dom on Saturday. See addresses and listings for more details.

TITLE: tales of hoffman set to become mariinsky favorite
AUTHOR: by Galina Stolyarova
TEXT: With her rendition of "The Tales Of Hoffmann" which premiered last weekend at the Mariinsky Theater, Martha Domingo created just what she wanted with this unfinished work by Jacques Offenbach - a romantic, magic tale of a poet caught in an eternal choice between his muse and romantic relationship.


Domingo's experience is enviable - wife of the great tenor Placido Domingo and initially a singer herself, she has seen an immense number of interpretations of operatic masterpieces, lesser or better known. This proved fruitful for her as an opera director, and her new staging contained no obvious flaws, while it did not offer an unconventional approach.

Her enchanting staging - a co-production with the Washington Opera and the Los Angeles Opera, where her husband is artistic director - with only some slight touches of the occult, makes for quality opera entertainment with no excessive mystification and more of an illustrative bent, rather than a philosophical approach. The sets by Giovanni Agostinucci were fancy, ornamental and decorative, and suited Domingo's artistic goals well.

The production seems, in fact, to be an ideal show for introducing younger members of the family to the world of operatic theater.

Meanwhile, initiated viewers may suspect that Olympia, Antonia and Giulietta are nothing but incarnations of the same woman, Stella. But there is barely a hint in the director's work linking the three, and nothing in the show to make the viewer sense a possible connection - neither in the characters' outlooks nor in their stage personalities, while this was what those familiar with the libretto might have desired to see.

On the opening night, Mariinsky tenor Viktor Lutsyuk, who last year gave us an astounding Semyon in the theater's "Golden Mask"-winning production of Sergei Prokofiev's "Semyon Kotko," was facing more pressure than the rest of the cast. Singing in front of Placido Domingo, a dazzling Hoffmann himself, was a challenge indeed, and Lutsyuk, whom the maestro's presence exposed to criticism in advance, performed far beyond his abilities.

Though Lutsyuk's is not the widest range, nor the richest timbre, and the power of his voice does not bear comparison with that of opera legend Domingo, that evening his skills, experience and professionalism won through. Lutsyuk's Hoffmann has spark, and is very attune with Martha Domingo's concept of juxtaposing humor and lyricism.

Larisa Yudina excelled with her high-pitched notes in a promising and memorable debut as mechanical doll Olympia, offering a comical, yet touching take on the role.

Sergei Aleksashkin's was a fearsome doctor Miracle, while Gennady Bezzubenkov's triumphed as Coppelius.

Anna Netrebko's captivating performance of Antonia was the genuine highlight of the production. Over the last few years, Netrebko has evolved from a newcomer with impressive potential into a dazzling, versatile performer, not only showing technical excellence but also capable of offering original interpretations of the roles.

On the opening night Netrebko stunned and fascinated yet again.

Her tormented Antonia suffering over the paths she had to choose was pierced with despair, and her physical tortures from a mysterious disease appeared secondary. Vocally overwhelming and technically adroit, a head above the rest of the cast, artistically she seemed a little detached.

At this point, Netrebko thrives in playing vivacious and joyful characters, like Susanna in Mozart's "Marriage Of Figaro," or as a playful Natasha in Prokofiev's "War And Peace."

These characters come more naturally to Netrebko - again, in sheerly artistic and not vocal terms - than tragical roles like Lucia in Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor," which don't quite suit her personality.

A promising trend seen in the most recent Mariinsky opera productions is the impressive variety of young singers rehearsing for the roles. Thus, the audiences will soon have an oppportunity to compare Anna Netrebko's Antonia with those of Tatiana Pavlovskaya and Irina Dzhioyeva, Larisa Yudina's interpretation of Olympia with Olga Trifonova's and Svetlana Trifonova's approach to the character.

The increasing number of younger talent on the acclaimed Mariinsky stage comes through the theater's Academy Of Young Singers, brainchild of Valery Gergiev and established in 1998. Perhaps the only prestigious venue in the opera world to allow gifted 22-25-year-olds on stage in plum roles, the Mariinsky is getting more and more attractive for vocal stars from all over the country, deprived of any chance to perform on stage.

The Mariinsky symphony orchestra demonstrated tremendous rapport with conductor Gianandrea Noseda, and those desiring more sophistication and enigmatic work from the director could turn to the stories unveiled by the orchestra, which were full of mystery, magic and unhampered fantasy.

All in all, the two premiere performances enjoyed the warmest public welcome, and the production has every chance of becoming one of the company's most popular productions. 



"The Tales Of Hoffmann" plays next on December 5.

TITLE: city's zoo: more than just a bunch of animals
AUTHOR: by Molly Graves
TEXT: 
"Someone told me it's all happening at the zoo. I do believe it - I do believe it's true."




Simon and Garfunkel once wrote a song entitled "At the Zoo" about the wonders the zoo has to offer as an outlet for rainy-day activities - but as delightful and entertaining as their "fine and fancy rumbles" to the zoo may have been, we can be assured that they were not referring to the St. Petersburg zoo. 


Especially on rainy, cold, blustery days, a wintertime trip to the zoo here in St. Petersburg is not likely to raise one's spirits - that is, unless the time is right.

That said, perhaps the best time to visit St. Petersburg's Zoopark is when the animals are least visible - that is to say, after dark. Strangely enough this is actually possible - with a trip to the Leningradsky Zoopark Concert Hall, which is located - you guessed it - inside the zoo itself. 

Specializing in live rock and folk concerts, the concert hall - with glowing black lights that greet you at the door - is small but not lacking in atmosphere. 

Simply the stage itself is a sight to see - surrounded by a papermache-type awning styled like molten metal, with the word "Zoopark" dripping over center-stage, and featuring a drumset, which depicts a monkey bursting out of the bass drum. Additionally, the cozy size means all seats are quite good.

The small venue also means you will probably be treated to features other than the concert itself - such as the lone, inebriated dancer who decides to add his talents to the show free of charge, dancing directly in front of the lead singer while the band plays on unruffled - or, definitely, the female groupie who sits in the front row, zoom-less camera in hand, and periodically inches up to the stage to snap close-ups of the performers at point-blank range. 

Yes, "it's all happening at the zoo" - all this and more. And to get there (just like Simon & Garfunkel) your "light and tumble journey" from Metro Gorkovskaya will take you on a short walk through (no, not Central, but rather) Alexandrovsky Park to the Zoopark entrance gate. Prices are reasonable, around $1 to $2, with cheap beer & snacks sold inside.

One final trick to know is, if it's your first time at the zoo at night, try to follow someone from the entrance gate - to make sure you actually make it through the maze of cages and find the concert hall itself. (Otherwise you could spend the evening wandering among the lions and tigers and bears.) Also, when planning a nighttime excursion to the zoo, remember to wear your black leather - and, this time, leave the kids at home.




See listings for upcoming acts. Concerts start at 7 p.m., or 7:30 p.m. on Thursdays, and tickets can be purchased prior to shows starting at 6 p.m. at the ticket booth located outside the Zoopark entrance gate.

Entrance to the concert hall itself is only between 6:30 and 7 p.m. (Afterwards, the Zoopark gates are locked.) Address: 1 Alexandrovsky Park, M: Gorkovskaya, Tel: 232-31-45, http://chz.da.ru

TITLE: Solution Proposed to Pyramids Riddle
AUTHOR: By Patricia Reaney
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON - It is a mystery that has perplexed the world's top scientists for more than a century.


But a British Egyptologist believes she may have solved the puzzle and figured out how the ancient Egyptians aligned the pyramids of Giza to true north and roughly when they did it.

The heavenly alignment of the pyramids, one of the seven wonders of the world, is precise enough that scientists were convinced the Egyptians had to have a good knowledge of astronomy even though there is no record of it in ancient texts.

The best estimate of the age of the royal tombs, roughly 4,500 years old, is based on chronologies of the period and the reign of kings and is only accurate to within 100 years.

Kate Spence, of Cambridge University, estimates the building of the pyramids began between 2,485 BC and 2,375 BC and that two stars helped the Egyptians to align them to true north, important to them for religious reasons.

"The correspondence between the archaeological data and the astronomical modelling is extremely compelling. It is very rare in archaeology that you get things that you can model that closely," she said in a telephone interview.

"This is a much more convincing argument than has been put forward in the past," she added.

In addition to solving a long-standing mystery, the findings reported in the science journal Nature add to the study and chronology of the ancient Egyptians and in the understanding of their technical ability.

Their building expertise is beyond doubt, but Spence said her findings show they were poor astronomers.

"This does show they did not have a sophisticated observation of astronomy," she said.

The Egyptians were trying to find true north but they didn't have a star marking the pole. So they used two stars, Kochab in Ursa Minor or the Little Dipper, and Mizar in Ursa Major, or the Big Dipper to find the pole.

"It [the pole] is on a line between those two stars. You measure when the two stars are basically on top of one another and if you line them up with a plumb line that will give you true north," Spence said.

According to astronomical data, 2,467 BC is the year in which the line that goes between the two stars passes exactly the trajectory of the pole.

"If they had started building on that date we would have a pyramid which is absolutely aligned to north. But the fact is they seemed to have started work about 11 years before that, which means it is still a few minutes off north," Spence said.

In a commentary on the research in Nature, Owen Gingerich of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, described Spence's research as an ingenious solution to the long-standing mystery of how the great pyramids were so accurately aligned in relation to north.

"So it is not preposterous to believe that Spence can calculate dates for pyramid construction to within five years or so," he added.

TITLE: Taleban Chokes Heroin Source
AUTHOR: By Kathy Gannon
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KHOGIANI, Afghanistan - Zulmai Khan has planted wheat instead of poppies this year, and expects his income to plunge from $10,000 to $400. 


For Khan, it was switch or go to jail. Like many other Afghan farmers, he finds himself at the sharp end of an edict from the country's Taleban rulers, who have decreed it's not Islamic to farm poppies for heroin production. 

"Of course it's because we are afraid," Khan said angrily of his decision to comply. "That is the only reason. It wasn't against Islam before, so how can it be against Islam now?" 

"It was big profits for us. Now what are we supposed to do? They have spies everywhere. We'll go to jail," he added. 

The Taleban has aroused Western disapproval for its harsh strictures on the freedom of women, as well as for harboring Osama bin Laden, whom the United States accuses of running a worldwide terrorism network. 

Its uncompromising attitude toward drugs may win it some points, but it also puts Taleban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar's credibility on the line. 

If spring comes and the fields are awash with crimson poppies, the reclusive leader's claim of absolute authority will be debunked. 

But if his edict is obeyed, it will cut off the world's biggest source of heroin and reinforce the Taleban's hold over a country ravaged by 21 years of war. 

"I tell you, I think it can be done," said Shams-ul-Haq Sayed, an officer of the Taleban drug control office in Jalalabad, capital of the eastern opium-growing province of Nangarhar. 

He pointed to the Taleban's success in controlling the number of weapons openly carried in the streets. 

"Twenty years ago I would have thought it impossible to take weapons away from people," he said. "But look in every city where the Taleban are in control: people don't carry guns," though there is no ban on weapons possession. 

Opium is converted into heroin in laboratories tucked away in remote tribal regions of Afghanistan and smuggled out through Pakistan and Central Asia, according to UN reports. 

Last year, Afghan farmers produced over 4,000 tons of opium - more than the rest of the world put together, according to the United Nations. 

The edict last July was typical of the way the Taleban run the country in the absence of any democratic procedure or public input: sudden, harsh and irrevocable. 

"We were surprised," said Mizan-ur-Rehman Yuzufzai, a UN Drug Control Program officer in Nangarhar province. "We had been talking to the Taleban, but we did not expect a total ban. But now they are bound by it," he said. 

The Taleban have threatened to jail anyone who defies the ban and already 22 farmers have been arrested in Nangarhar province alone, according to Sayed. The Taleban are keeping farmers in jail until they agree to destroy their crop, he said, and if they refuse, the crop will be destroyed and the cost of its destruction charged to the farmer. 

The Taleban says the outside world should help prevent impoverishment of the farmers. 

"We have done what we can. We have banned poppies. Now ... if they really want to combat drugs and if they are really honest, they will help," said Sayed. 

But the ban unhappily coincides with the United Nations' decision to close its drug control program in eastern Nangarhar province, citing lack of funding. 

"Our credibility is under question," said Zalmi Sherzad, a program official. "They will say, 'You have no right to tell us not to grow. You give us nothing."'

TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: U.S. Election Battle


TALLAHASSEE, Florida (Reuters) - Battling for the U.S. presidency in the courts, and in the court of public opinion, Al Gore and George W. Bush forged ahead on Thursday with legal challenges to Florida's disputed votes, while offering competing visions to end the impasse.

Vice President Gore's legal team vowed to mount a swift challenge in the Florida courts on Thursday after the state's Republican secretary of state on Wednesday refused to add any more hand counts to Florida's official presidential tally.

Texas Gov. Bush's lawyers filed motions in the U.S. federal appeals court in Atlanta on Wednesday to end the recounts, saying they would prolong the outcome of the election, and could ultimately nullify the votes of all Floridians.

The final tally won't be clear until state election officials receive, count and certify thousands of overseas mail-in ballots on Saturday.



Clinton in Vietnam


BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN, Brunei (AP) - President Clinton flew to Hanoi Thursday night, bearing his promise of "a new page in our relations with Viet nam" - where he avoided fighting in America's longest war. 

Clinton said the best way to honor the Americans and Vietnamese who did, and died, "is to find a way to build a better future and that's what we're trying to do." He said those warriors, their weapons stilled by Communist victory in 1975, "believed on both sides that what they were doing was right." 



Angola Air Crash


LUANDA, Angola (AP) - At least 40 people perished Wednesday when an Antonov 24 airplane crashed into a field and exploded into a fireball shortly after takeoff. It was the second Antonov to go down in this southwest African country in the past two weeks.

There were no survivors from the crash of the Soviet-built plane, which went down about four kilometers from Luanda international airport. By Wednesday evening, 34 bodies had been recovered, including those of six children. 

An Antonov 26 crashed on Oct. 31 in northeastern Angola, killing 48 people. After that crash, the government ordered all Antonov aircraft grounded. It was not clear whether the plane in Wednesday's crash was licensed to fly. 



Iraq Poetry Fest


BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Iraq revived one of its oldest cultural traditions Wednesday when more than 250 poets and intellectuals from Arab and other nations gathered for the opening of the Mirbad International Poetry Festival. 

The festival, which has a heritage stretching back more than 1,400 years, was opened by Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, who praised the role of poetry in Arab society. 

The original Mirbad poetry gathering dates to the early days of the Islamic state more than 1,400 years ago, and was itself a revival of a pre-Islamic poetry festival known as Suq Ukaz, which was held in the Arabian Peninsula. 

The festival was halted in the Middle Ages, and was not held again until 1971. 



Malaria Outbreak


BUJUMBURA, Burundi (AP) - A malaria outbreak in the past month has killed 818 people, including at least 100 children, a medical official said Monday. 

Most of victims died "either by refusing to treat the disease and turning to traditional medicine, or because they lacked the money to go to a doctor," said Health Minister Stanislas Ntahomvukiye. 

Malaria is transmitted by the bite of the Anopheles mosquito, which carries the Plasmodium parasite. There is no vaccine to prevent malaria, but it can be suppressed by taking daily or weekly doses of antimalarial medi cines. Most Africans cannot afford these medicines. 



White Farmer Jailed


PIETERMARITZBURG, South Africa (AP) - A white farmer who had a black farm worker tied to his pickup truck by the neck and then dragged him to his death was sentenced to 25 years in prison for killing him, police said on Wednesday. 

Eicker Henning ordered a worker to tie Ndelwa Kepisi Mgaga to his truck in January 1997. He then dragged Mgaga along a gravel road and left his dead body lying next to it. Henning was found guilty on Tuesday. 

Before the killing, Henning tortured Mgaga because he suspected him of stealing some farm equipment, police Inspector Roshan Banawo said. 

"He was struck with an iron rod on the head, he was [whipped], he was shocked with a cattle prodder," Banawo said. Mgaga confessed because of the beating, Banawo added. 



West Bank Hit


JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel launched overnight missile strikes on five West Bank towns, killing a German resident, and Prime Minister Ehud Barak told Israelis on Thursday to prepare for a long fight with the Palestinians.

He poured cold water on prospects for a three-way meeting with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and President Clinton to try to halt violence that has killed at least 228 people, nearly 90 percent of them Arabs, in seven weeks.

Israeli troops killed eight Palestinians on Wednesday as protests flared on the 12th anniversary of Arafat's symbolic declaration of an independent state from exile in 1988.

The Israeli army said its helicopters fired missiles at offices of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's mainstream Fatah movement in Jericho, Hebron, Tulkarm and Salfit, as well as on targets in Beit Jala on the outskirts of Jerusalem.



Beatle Attacker 'Mad'


OXFORD, England (AP) - A man who stabbed George Harrison because he believed he was possessed by the former Beatle was ordered confined to a mental hospital Wednesday after being acquitted of attempted murder by reason of insanity.

Judge Michael Astill said Michael Abram would be held "without time restriction" and must gain the approval of a mental health tribunal if he seeks release.

Abram, 34, had been accused of breaking into Harrison's home in Henley-on-Thames, west of London, and stabbing him repeatedly, puncturing a lung. He also was charged with attacking Harrison's wife, Olivia, when she came to her husband's defense.

In a statement read outside Oxford Crown Court by the couple's son, Dhani, the Harrisons criticized the "ancient lunatic law" that allows acquittal on mental grounds.