SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #625 (0), Friday, December 1, 2000
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TITLE: Putin Cool on Lukashenko's Union Hopes
AUTHOR: By Larisa Sayenko
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MINSK - Russian President Vladimir Pu tin dashed prospects for speedy progress on a proposed merger with neighboring Belarus on Thursday, telling Be larussian President Alexander Lu ka shen ko that the project required careful thought.


The two leaders met in the Belarussian capital Minsk ahead of a summit of 11 former Soviet states. They walked out of the talks without the smiles protocol usually demands and said they would focus on economic cooperation.

They also signed the latest in a series of accords intended to move toward using the Russian ruble in both countries by 2005 and establishing a joint currency by 2008. Details of the introduction and use of the currency were still to be decided.

Putin appeared to pour cold water on Lukashenko's long-held desire for the union to assume a greater political role.

"The creation of a union state demands the voluntary renunciation of a certain amount of sovereignty, so we first need to think 100, or 1,000 times and only then act," Putin told reporters.

Lukashenko said the leaders had reached the "joint opinion that we should integrate on an economic basis. Unlike political decisions, we agreed on economic issues a long time ago." 

The Belarussian president has been accused in the West of eroding democracy. He made waves ahead of Friday's summit by sweeping through the upper echelons of his security forces with a list of sackings on Monday.

Putin, who as Russian leader is seen by analysts as holding more sway over Lukashenko than other leaders, said the firing of the head of Belarus's Security Council, the Prosecutor General and the chief of the secret police, or KGB, had been planned.

"I was not alarmed," Putin told reporters on his arrival at Minsk airport. "I had a talk with the president and he explained to me what, how and why.

"They were simply planned changes which the president had planned for some time."

Later on Thursday, the prime ministers of the Commonwealth of Independent States will meet before the summit.

Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasya nov said he would discuss with his Uk rainian counterpart Viktor Yushchen ko a memorandum on Kiev's gas debts to Moscow and future payment terms.

Friday's meeting of 11 of 12 CIS heads of state was expected to examine common policy on fighting terrorism and money laundering and setting down the organization's legal base.

Many leaders have said they expect little from the group, which has failed to implement most of its decisions since it was created after Soviet rule collapsed.

Lukashenko, irked by Western allegations that last month's parliamentary election fell short of international standards, has said he might ask the mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to leave. He also vowed tough action against those who threaten the established order.

TITLE: Letter Singles Out City Officials
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalyev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A violent Nov. 16 raid on Promyshlenno-Stroitelny Bank - played down by bank and city officials as an isolated incident - has turned out to be an inspection of 29 current and former City Hall officials' bank accounts, documents obtained from the City Prosecutor's Office reveal. 


A list of accounts and a letter, dated Nov. 17, from Deputy Prosecutor Boris Salmaksov, was sent to Promstroi bank, prosecuting officials said, and requested the bank's cooperation in handing over reams of documents regarding various bank accounts.

The list and letter, obtained by The St. Petersburg Times, was confirmed to be accurate by prosecutor's spokesman Gen nady Ryabov Tuesday. 

The letter requested information on the accounts of some of the most prominent members of in Gov. Vla di mir Yakovlev's government. 

It is as yet unknown whether all 29 of the targeted officials, whose names appear on a list compiled by prosecutors, have accounts with Promstroibank - which is linked to an alleged bribery case involving the City Maintenance Committee. Both City Hall and the bank vehemently deny this charge. 

Shortly after the Promstroibank raid, last Wednesday, Baltiisky Bank was raided by masked, gun-toting authorities the next day. 

Local television also said BaltUneximbank was raided last Thursday, but the bank denies this. The Prosecutor's Office also would not confirm the BaltUneximbank search, but did not deny it either. "If BaltUneximbank was searched it was linked to the same case as the Promstroi- bank search," said Prosecutor's Office spokesman Gennady Ryabov.

It is unclear whether any other banks in town have received the prosecutor's letter. 

The letter requests information on the accounts of some of the most prominent figures in the Yakovlev administration, among them: Vice Gov. Viktor Krotov, who currently heads the City Finance Committee; Vice Gov. Valery Malyshev, head of the City Sports, Transport and Communications Committee, and Alexander Yevstrakhin who formerly was in charge of the City Maintenance Committee, but now runs the Municipal Administration on Vasili evsky Island. 

None of these men was available for comment this week or returned requests for interviews. 

But Gov. Yakovlev defended the members of his administration. 

"[The raids and investigations] are part of certain people's pressure on those who have left Petersburg for [high-level posts] in Moscow," he said Monday. 

Yakovlev also dismissed reports investigators were looking into possible criminal activity by any of his current and former deputy governors. He called the reports "a fabrication," and added that law enforcement agencies might have to look into how such dubious information was spreading in the news media.

It is unclear when - or whether - all 29 people on the prosecutor's list will be questioned, Ryabov said. But one source, said Krotov had already been interrogated, though the source would not discuss what was said. 

Krotov, too, declined comment. 

The series of high-level bank raids began germinating as far back as Oct. 5, when the prosecutors initiated a case regarding a $100,000 loan that was taken out at Promstroibank in May 1999 by Vyacheslav Strugov, deputy head of the City Maintenance Committee. 

Then, according to documents obtained by The St. Petersburg Times, investigators visited Promstroi and took some 48 documents related to the Strugov loan, mainly receipts and interest rates, which were 18 percent, according to the documents. 

On Nov. 14, prosecutors initiated a second case involving Promstroibank management, saying that it bribed the committee, apparently in alleged effort to secure committes accounts. On Nov. 17 - the day following the initial raid regarding Strugov's accounts - Deputy Prosecutor Sal mak sov sent his letter and his list to Promstroibank officials. 

"The Prosecutor's Office Department of Extremely Important Cases is investigating criminal case No.31914, opened Nov. 14. We therefore ask that you URGENTLY surrender to the St. Petersburg Prosecutor's Office documents which contain information about the opening and existence of bank accounts and bank services, rendered by Promstroibank to the following persons," Salmaksov wrote, and attached the list of the 29 people. 

Legal experts, however, say he overstepped his bounds and opened grounds for dispute with what he wrote next:

"I would like you to urgently surrender a list of persons who received loans during a period of time from 1998 to 2000 and also those who made bank deposits," the letter reads. 

"[The second part] of an inquiry like that should point out names of persons they want get information on specifically," said lawyer Alexander Ulanov, a member of the St. Petersburg Lawyers' Board, in a telephone interview Monday. 

"Here, it appears [Salmaksov] is not talking about the 29 people in question, but about all clients in general. In this case the bank has the right to refuse." 

Promstroibank did, sending a letter of its own accusing prosecutors of violating depositors' rights with their final request. 

"We've got 300,000 accounts in our bank, held by people who have nothing to do with the criminal case and we are not going to pass on information regarding every account," said Irina Sharipova, Promstroi's spokesperson in a telephone interview on Thursday.

"It violates both human rights and the rights of bank confidentiality," she said, adding: "The request [of the Prosecutor's Office] should be put in an orderly, legal fashion."

She was backed up by the St. Petersburg Association of Commercial Banks, which has sent letters to the Prosecutor's Office, the Duma, the Central Bank and the governor general of the Northwest region, Viktor Cherkesov, protesting violent police raids on leading city banks.

The moves against the banks coincided with that of Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, who was summoned for questioning by local prosecutors about loans he secured to purchase flats for the City Financial Committee in 1995 and 1996, when he was committee head.

But Igor Artemyev, a Yabloko faction Duma lawmaker and former finance committee chairman for the Yakov lev administration who was questioned about the same case, said the raids had no link to Kudrin's case.

"It is clear that the City Prosecutor's Office has started to clarify the different suspicious cases the Maintenance Committee has been involved in," he said.

TITLE: City Deputies Given Increase in Personal Funds
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalyev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: After nearly five months of quarreling with City Hall, the city budget passed its second reading in the Legislative Assembly on Wednesday - with plenty of extra cash to spare for the deputies. 


The 41.8 billion ($15 million) budget is scheduled for a third and final reading - which it is expected to pass with flying colors - next week, just squeaking in before the Jan. 1 deadline. 

Aside from the fanfare of the budget's predicted success, however, it is fair to say that the document was made to order and paid for by a City Hall that packed it full of reserve-fund cash just to see it pass by the deadline. 

This is not to let deputies - who rejected earlier readings as too sparse in the reserve-fund department - off the hook. This version of the document means that each deputy will receive 20.2 million rubles ($721,500) in his or her reserve fund to spend on whatever pet project in their own regions of the city that he or she sees fit. 

"The reserve fund is part of the price to pay for the process of ... democracy," Alexander Afanasiyev, Gov. Vladimir Yakovlev's spokesman, said dryly in a telephone interview Monday.

"It is the simple truth that an element of trade takes place between [the Legislative Assembly and City Hall] in this case." 

Reserve funds were the brainchild of then-mayor Anatoly Sobchak, who in 1996 wished to reschedule the election date against Vladimir Yakov lev - something that can only be done by a vote of the Legislative Assembly. Thinking an earlier date would assure him reelection, Sobchak promised each deputy about $1 million for regional fix-ups - with the implicit understanding that they would vote to change the election date. 

In the same election, the title "mayor" was also changed to "governor," but Sobchak, despite his victory with the Legislative Assembly, lost the new job title - and the election. But Yakovlev used the same reserve fund ploy on the legislative assembly in the last elections to more success.

Since Sobchak's time, reserve funds have been a controversial part of every budget, subsidizing everything from kindergartens to parks to construction - but always begging the question: to whose, if anyone's, profit?

While many of the 50 Legislative Assembly deputies do put their reserve funds to community use, other deputies and observers say this system - which exists in no other legislative body in Russia - is an open invitation to corruption. 

So unorthodox is the practice that State Duma Deputy Oksana Dmitrieva introduced an amendment to the federal budget code banning local parliaments from maintaining reserve funds. 

Perhaps St. Petersburg's most notorious example of alleged misuse of a reserve fund belongs to Sergei Nikeshin, who, in 1996, arranged an $800,000 junket to Alicante, Spain for "workers in the arts, sciences and mass media." 

At the time, the media had a field day with Nikeshin's trip, and many newspapers reported that he owns a stake in a hotel there. 

But Nikeshin - who currently chairs the Legislative Assembly budget committee - has repeatedly protested his innocence, saying the expenditure was legitimate. And strictly speaking, he was acting within the vague letter of the law - given that he was allowed, by the city's reserve fund provision, to spend the money as he saw fit. 

According to Olga Pokrovskaya, a Yabloko faction member and observer of the Legislative Assembly, reserve funds are a dinner bell to corruption. She is preparing a report "Slush Funds for Legislative Assembly Lawmakers - Good for Districts or Source of Corruption?"

The report, delivered at a recent Yabloko conference, asked several questions of the reserve fund system that basically amounted to this: Why should taxpayers be subsidizing business opportunities for Legislative Assembly deputies? 

She described one instance - without naming names but which she said was based on her observations - in which one lawmaker apparently helped boost sales at a business owned by another lawmaker. 

"The scheme is very simple. One lawmaker, for instance, who owns a bakery in the city, transfers [reserve fund] money to organize cheap bread production for poor St. Petersburg residents." she said in an interview last week. 

"What company, do you think, receives a contract to produce the bread and who gets the profit?" 

She also pointed in her report to a number of organizations founded by various deputies with their reserve fund money that seem, in her assessment, to have virtually meaningless names. The Society for Social Justice, founded by lawmaker Igor Rimmer and The Society for Social Assistance in the Petrograd District, founded by Sergei Shev chen ko were among them. The Society for Social Assistance in the Petrograd District gets $470,000 of Shevchenko's reserve fund a year. 

According to Pokrovskaya, Shev chenko - who is currently under investigation for extortion and with his brother owns the Golden Dolls Club, Hollywood Nites and other swank nightclubs - founded several organizations "with socially significant names" in the Petrograd District. 

One of them, the White Bear - an organization founded to help the poor - is financed to the tune of $10,000 a month out of Shevchenko's own pocket, Shevchenko said. 

Both Rimmer and Shevchenko shrugged off criticism in interviews this week, saying their reserve fund money was spent entirely for social good. When asked about the White Bear and other organizations, Shevchenko said: "I am not poor, as you know from local newspapers."

Shevchenko said the Society for Social Assistance in the Petrograd District provides free medicine and food to the poor, and that the City Hall labor committee has found it guilty of no suspicious activities. 

"The last thing we would do is steal from wretched people," he said. 

Rimmer said his money was spent baking bread at the Araut bakery for the poor. He also said the bakery had nothing whatever to do with his own business holdings, which he would not discuss.

TITLE: Nuclear Plebiscite Is Spiked By CEC
AUTHOR: By Anna Badkhen
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The Central Elections Commission on Wednesday dealt a blow to environmentalists' hopes of blocking the import of spent nuclear fuel into the country, turning down the 2.5 million signatures they collected in support of a national referendum.


Nuclear Power Minister Yevgeny Adamov has been aggressively lobbying for a change in the federal law that states that Russia cannot accept foreign spent nuclear fuel for long-term storage. He argues that by changing the law, Russia could earn billions of dollars that could be put to good use.

Environmentalists, including the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace, fear this would turn Russia into a nuclear dump and turned to a referendum to prevent the law from being changed.

The referendum would have asked whether voters opposed the importation of radioactive materials for storage, reprocessing or burying.

But citing numerous technical inaccuracies, the Central Elections Commission on Monday struck off more than a fifth of the 2.5 million signatures collected across the country this fall, leaving the environmentalists with just over 1.8 million signatures - 200,000 short of the 2 million needed to force a referendum.

A bill introduced by Adamov that would amend the law is tentatively scheduled for hearings in the State Duma on Dec. 19. Had the CEC agreed to accept at least 2 million of the collected signatures, the hearing would have had to have been canceled, as stipulated by the referendum law.

But now, environmentalists say, there is nothing to stop the Duma from passing Adamov's bill, which would allow his ministry to go ahead with a deal to accept up to 20,000 tons of spent fuel from 14 countries in Asia and Europe for 50 years of storage.

"The authorities do not allow people to use democratic means to prevent Russia from being turned into a radioactive dump," said Vladimir Slivyak, a leader of the Moscow-based Ecodefense! group, one of the groups behind the referendum drive.

A CEC spokesman said its experts disqualified the 600,000-plus signatures because of numerous violations: missing signatures, wrongly stated passport numbers, and so on.

But Slivyak and other activists said the real reason was that the election commission was ordered to block the referendum by the government.

"[CEC Chairman Alexander] Veshnyakov did as he was told [by the Kremlin]," said Thomas Nilsen, a researcher at the Norwegian environmental group Bellona, which supported the referendum drive.

Igor Farafontov of Greenpeace and Alexei Yablokov, former President Boris Yeltsin's environmental adviser, said they will challenge the CEC's decision in court.

"Of course, we will not get back all the signatures we need, but it will draw attention to the issue," Yablokov said. "It would be simply stupid for the Duma, for the government, to ignore the people's wish to keep their country clean of nuclear junk."

But according to Nilsen, chances of the Duma passing the bill next month "are very high."

"There are no more obstacles for the bill to be passed," he said in a telephone interview from Oslo.

The Nuclear Power Ministry could not be reached for comment.

By amending the federal law, Ada mov would nail down a spent fuel import deal he has been nursing for over a year with U.S.-based Non-Proliferation Trust. None of the spent fuel, however, would come from the United States.

The deal, Adamov says, would raise tens of billions of dollars, which could be spent on anything from cleaning up the sites of nuclear catastrophes to paying off the International Monetary Fund.

And under the deal, after 50 years the fuel is to be sent back to its country of origin. Speaking with foreign journalists on Tuesday, Adamov denied that Russia intended to import nuclear fuel for disposal.

Environmentalists, though, are skeptical that the spent fuel will ever be sent back. They have only to look to Kozloduy - a Bulgarian power plant that struck a deal with Adamov's ministry to have its spent fuel stored in Russia earlier this fall - that said in October that its fuel will never be returned to Bulgaria.

Reprocessing makes the fuel less dangerous but still produces uranium, plutonium and huge quantities of radioactive wastewater.

The referendum would also have asked voters whether they supported the existence of a separate state environmental protection agency and of a state forestry service.

In May, President Vladimir Putin by presidential decree closed the State Environmental Committee and the State Forestry Committee, handing their affairs over to the Natural Resources Ministry - the body that licenses oil drilling and metals mining, and which the green movement says is itself one of the major environmental violators.

TITLE: Yelagin Appointed Minister Responsible for Chechnya
AUTHOR: By Peter Graff
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin created a new cabinet post responsible for Chechnya on Tuesday, signaling his mounting frustration with the failure to end a costly war and refugee crisis.


Putin issued a decree naming former construction official Vladimir Yelagin, a minister without portfolio tasked with overseeing "socio-economic development" in Chechnya.

Kremlin Chechnya spokesman Sergei Yastrzhembsky made clear that Moscow was unhappy with reconstruction efforts under Akhmad Kadyrov, the Muslim cleric and one-time rebel guerrilla tapped to run the region after federal forces took control.

"In recent months social-economic questions in Chechnya have either gone unresolved altogether, or were resolved inefficiently," Yastrzhembsky said.

Kadyrov's administration had made little progress, Yastrzhembsky said, blaming "a variety of factors including some beyond its control."

"One would like to express hope and certainty that Yelagin, known as an experienced manager and administrator, can achieve more effective coordination among federal executive organs on questions of cooperation with Kadyrov's administration," he added.

The move comes a week after Putin upbraided his military brass for slow progress, telling an annual meeting of generals: "Long months are passing, the people are suffering and the anti-terrorist operation needs to be completed."

Russia is still looking to end the war 14 months after its forces poured into Chechnya. The military has imposed control over virtually the entire region, but has failed to stop rebel ambushes or catch top rebel leaders.

The destruction in Chechnya is monumental, and little has been done to repair the damage. Federal forces obliterated towns and villages in their path, especially in Grozny, once home to more than 400,000 people.

A second winter is beginning and nearly 200,000 people have yet to return from neighboring regions, where many are living in railway cars or tented camps. In Grozny, civilians are camped in cellars of bombed-out buildings with no heat or water. Russian officials and Chechens have complained that money sent to rebuild the region has disappeared.

Yelagin's appointment restores the pecking order in place early this year, when Russia's top Chechnya official, Nikolai Koshman, held the rank of deputy prime minister in Moscow. Koshman was left out of the new cabinet list after Putin's inauguration in May as part of an effort to give local ethnic Chechens more control over the region.

But little rebuilding has been achieved under Kadyrov, who has failed to win support from pro-independence rebels and has quarreled acrimoniously with a rival pro-Moscow leader, Grozny Mayor Bislan Gantamirov.

TITLE: Troops Destroy Central Market in Grozny
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: GROZNY - The central market in the Che chen capital was in ruins and nearby streets were all but deserted Wednesday after military vehicles smashed the market stalls into the ground.


Kremlin spokesman Sergei Yastrzhembsky said Grozny market, which was destroyed Monday, had become a danger to federal servicemen. An official in the pro-Moscow Chechen administration said 18 soldiers had either disappeared or been killed in the market in November alone.

The market was a key source of scarce food and supplies in the war-shattered city and provided income for thousands of traders.

"I had goods there worth about 40,000 rubles [$1,500]. For me that is a lot," said trader Zharadat Agayeva, who looked through the ruins Tuesday trying to find something to salvage. "I don't know how I am going to pay my debts."

Rebel attacks have been on the rise, and pro-Moscow Chechen officials had warned that bigger actions were being planned for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began Monday.

Troops sealed off the market Sunday. According to market workers, the soldiers drove people out of the area, but told the traders their food, clothes and other goods would be protected once they were placed in storerooms.

"But when I locked everything, they started to shoot the locks off with machine guns. Soldiers rushed inside and pilfered the shelves: sausages, butter, cheese," said Musa Akhmatov, owner of one of the storerooms.

Another storeroom worker, Tark han Sultayev, said soldiers "picked whatever they liked and would stash the goods in their bags, they would even undress and put on the new clothes."

On Monday, armored personnel carriers drove into the sprawling expanse and smashed the rows of makeshift kiosks and stalls. No injuries were reported, although traders said soldiers hit some of them with rifle butts.

The market's director, Ali Gantamirov, is the brother of Grozny Mayor Bislan Gantamirov, a controversial figure who had been jailed in Russia on charges of siphoning off money for Grozny's reconstruction after the 1994-96 war.

Bislan Gantamirov was released unexpectedly last year, took charge of a pro-Moscow Chechen militia and has openly feuded with the Kremlin's top official in Chechnya, Akhmad Kadyrov.

TITLE: Duma Considers Bill To Allow Some Governors a 3rd Term
AUTHOR: By Sarah Karush
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - In a move that seems to undermine legislation passed this summer to limit the power of regional leaders, the State Duma on Wednesday gave preliminary approval to a bill that would allow many governors to seek a third term in office.


Though introduced by a group of deputies, the law is widely regarded to be the initiative of President Vladimir Putin and his concession to the still-powerful regional bosses, particularly to Tatarstan President Mintimer Shaimiyev.

The bill, an amendment to the law on regional government, which took effect Oct. 16, 1999, defines a governor's first term as that which he was serving on that date.

The 1999 law stipulates that governors are limited to two elected terms. But some people had argued that it was vague about when to start counting.

In Shaimiyev's case, the amendment would mean his first term, which began in 1991, won't count. By 1999, he was well into his second five-year term, which expires in March 2001.

Other regional leaders who could benefit from the amendment are Oryol Gov. Yegor Stroyev, Bashkortostan President Murtaza Rakhimov and Chuvashia President Nikolai Fyodorov.

But the bill will not save all the governors. Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, for example, will not be able to run for a third term since he was elected to a second term after the October 1999 cutoff. Thus, both his terms will count toward the official limit.

The Duma voted three times Wednesday before cobbling together the necessary majority of at least 226 votes. In the end, the bill passed in the first reading by a vote of 240 to 155, with seven abstentions. The bill still must pass a second and third reading.

Alexei Titkov, an expert on regional politics with the Moscow Carnegie Center, said it was clearly the Kremlin's work.

"The amendment was passed mainly thanks to pro-presidential Unity and People's Deputy, so there's every reason to assume it was done with Putin's blessing and even at his bidding," he said.

The president began cracking down on the regional elite in the spring when he posted seven presidential representatives around the country.

His next step was to introduce a packet of legislation, which was passed in the summer, that deprives the governors of their seats in the Federation Council, or upper house, and gives Putin the right to fire governors who disregard federal law.

"I see here only inconsistency," Du ma Deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov told Mos kovsky Komsomolets earlier this month after the bill was introduced.

"It contradicts what the Kremlin was saying in May and June of this year about the domination of the regional elite, the 'regional barons,' lawlessness, corruption and the need to strengthen the 'vertical power structure' in order to fight against all that."

But Titkov said it was a logical compromise. "Neither governors nor Putin wants open conflict right now."

Another deputy, Vladimir Lysenko of the Russia's Regions faction, echoed what many other politicians and media have been saying about the law.

"I think that in large part today's law was made for Mintimer Shaimiyev," he said during the Duma debate.

Few doubt that Shaimiyev - who governed Tatarstan even during the Soviet era when he was first party secretary there - intends to run for re-election, although he has been coy about his plans.

During his tenure, Shaimiyev has built a system of government that largely ignores democratic principles. He appoints the district administration chiefs instead of holding elections, and in his own bid for re-election he ran unopposed - also a violation of federal law.

"This is an undemocratic decision," said Rashit Akhmetov, editor of the opposition newspaper Zvezda Povolzhya.

Akhmetov said that instead of building federal-regional relations based on law, Putin was dealing with governors individually. As long as Shaimiyev remained loyal, he said, Putin would let him remain in power.

But, Akhmetov added, should Putin change his mind, he could always arrange for his ouster - the same way the Kremlin is credited with the removal of the former Kursk governor, Alexander Rutskoi, who was struck from the ballot by a court the day before the election.



Ana Uzelac contributed to this report.

TITLE: Collapsed Metro Gets Loan Lifeline
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The visit of Italian President Carlo Ciampi to St. Petersburg this week brought good news to the city's ailing metro, with the announcement that a $35.9 million loan to complete repairs to the collapsed section of tunnel in the city's northeast has finally been cleared.


The news will be a relief to 500,000 St. Petersburg citizens, who until recently had thought that stalled funding and local and federal budget snags would mean the tunnel could not be repaired before 2002, as the Metro po litan's director Vla di mir Ga ryu gin announced on Nov. 10.

But at a press conference with Ciampi and Russia's Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin on Tuesday afternoon, a visibly cheerful Gov. Vla dimir Yakovlev - who promised to have the tunnel fixed by 1999 - said that "final work could even start tomorrow."

"With this [financial] help, repair works may be over in a year or two," Kudrin said - a day after Ciampi's visit to Moscow had apparently smoothed the way for the Finance Ministry to sign credit guarantees for the loan.

The tunnel collapse occurred in 1995 as a result of pressure from an underground river. 

Workers have struggled for five years to bore two tunnels from Les naya and Ploshchad Muzhestva metro stations. Now, final repairs stand with the Italian contracting firm Impreglio/NCC International AB.

Both Garyugin and Yakovlev had previously said that the Russian government had refused to guarantee the $35.9 million, which was meant to come from Italian banks. The government, which has put up very little cash for the repairs, told St. Petersburg to find the necessary money itself.

Of the 50 million rubles ($1.8 million) St. Petersburg was promised this year from the federal budget, it has only received 5 million. In 2001, however, City Hall has said it plans to spend 1.5 billion rubles ($53.57 million).

Impreglio had stopped work on the tunnel apparently because it lacked confidence that the city could cover the remaining $82 million - out of a total of $126 million that the Italian company is charging.

Sergei Zrentyev, deputy chairman of the St. Petersburg Transport Committee, said that the whole project will total about $187 million, with additional work by Metrostroi costing $61 million.

The metro project was at the center of Ciampi's meeting with the St. Petersburg administration, which also covered possible co-projects such as the manufacture of Italian Breda buses in St. Petersburg, equipment for Russian sports aircraft, and the opening of an Italian Trade Center in the city.

TITLE: 'Immigrant-Friendly' Projects Proposed
AUTHOR: By Alexei Germanovich
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW - Imagine government-run "holding pens" outside Moscow and St. Petersburg for tens of thousands of immigrant would-be workers. Or empty-yet-hospitable towns summoned, by Kremlin fiat, out of the steppes of Siberia, ready to embrace new worker-citizens. 


Stalinist policy in the postwar era of population redistributions? No, these are projects under consideration by the current government as ways to halt the slide in Russia's population.

President Vladimir Putin is among those who have expressed concern about the demographic crisis - which has most recently been highlighted in a stark report by the Economic Development and Trade Ministry suggesting the Russian population will have fallen by more than 30 percent by 2050.

The natural decline in the Russian population - led mostly by a birth rate that trails a death rate - works out to about 1 million fewer citizens each year. Putin has suggested one solution lies in adopting policies to encourage more immigration.

"We must attract the labor resources of the countries of the former Soviet Union," the president said at a recent meeting in Novosibirsk.

Such talk has sent officials running to the drawing board.

Georgy Poltavchenko, the governor general for the Central Federal District - one of the seven "super districts" Putin ordered into existence soon after taking office - has proposed setting up special immigrant camps outside Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Poltavchenko dubbed such camps otstoiniki, or "holding pens." (Otstoi niki also refers to massive parking lots for trailer trucks, and also to cesspools.)

Poltavchenko sees such camps outside Moscow and St. Petersburg accommodating up to 100,000 people at a time, most of them immigrants from former Soviet republics.

Residents would be able to live in the otstoiniki for six months, after which time they would either have to find permanent work somewhere in the provinces, or might be offered unpopular jobs in Moscow and Petersburg, such as street sweepers or law enforcement officers.

The idea is a tough sell for some, including Vladimir Iontsev, a Moscow State University demographer who heads the economic faculty's department of national populations.

"After getting used to big cities [immigrants] won't want to go anywhere else," Iontsev said. "They'll stay there, albeit at the lower levels of society. They are more likely to get involved in crime than till the soil somewhere out there. It seems like a bad idea."

Similarly dramatic schemes are under consideration at the Federal Migration Service.

A national program on migration will be prepared next year, said Olga Vorobyova, head of the department for migration at the Migration Policy Ministry. (The ministry this year was absorbed by the Federal Migration Service.)

The draft prepared to date proposes that new towns be built in far-off regions, and that willing immigrants be shipped out to those towns for shift work. The program must be approved by May 2001 if it is to be included in the next federal budget, Vorobyova said.

"Look at the south of Siberia. You can grow watermelons in Khakassia and parts of Buryatia. From there people can be moved out for shift work [to various mineral-rich regions]," said Sergei Podgorbunsky, head of the Migration Policy Ministry's press service. "A brigade flies in and works 20 to 30 days, while another group rests."

It is no coincidence that Siberia is so much discussed. In Novosibirsk last week, Putin complained that newcomers to Russia always want to live either in the Black Sea sun or in the capital.

"In general everyone goes to Sochi or to Moscow," he said. "But we need people here in Siberia."

Building new settlements out there will require private cash, according to Podgorbunsky.

But companies active in Siberia and capable of providing the sort of large-scale investment that would be needed were skeptical. Putin's remarks aside, managers of such companies generally said they felt there were plenty of people already in Siberia.

"Our labor needs are not such that new people need to be brought in," said Alexander Vasilenko, press secretary with LUKoil, a major employer throughout the region.

Vasilenko said LUKoil has enough workers living in its own oil-supported company towns, such as Kalagim and Langepas, to develop its oil business. He suggested a work force of sorts might need to be brought in for developing the more remote Timan-Pechora region.

But he also said the problem was less the number of willing workers than of trained workers, and argued that the emphasis should be more on training existing populations than on importing new ones.

Those specific projects aside, however, some demographers said a bold new immigration-friendly policy could indeed improve Russia's demographic slide.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Presidents Immune

MOSCOW (AP) - The State Duma gave initial approval Wednesday to a bill offering former presidents immunity from criminal prosecution for actions during their tenure, despite objections that the measure is unconstitutional. The bill also says former presidents' offices cannot be searched and their documents cannot be perused.

The government-proposed bill parallels the main provisions of a decree signed by President Vladimir Putin shortly after Boris Yeltsin's resignation.

"No reasonable politician would try to get immunity guarantees if he doesn't intend to break the law," said Communist Anatoly Lukyanov, chief of the Du ma's committee for state legal affairs.



Anthem in Question

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Kremlin source said Tuesday that Putin wanted parliament to re-establish the Soviet tune as the national song, with new words by Sergei Mikhalkov, the children's poet who wrote the original text nearly 60 years ago.

The source said the Kremlin would send a bill to the State Duma next week proposing to keep intact the music composed by Alexander Alexandrov in 1943, accompanied by new verses by 87-year-old Mikhalkov.



Far East Gets Heat

VLADIVOSTOK, Far East (Reuters) - Moscow on Tuesday relented in a war of words with regional bosses in the freezing far eastern Primorye region and rushed money to provide heat to thousands of people shivering in sub-zero temperatures.

While accusations flew, people in small towns and villages in the region bundled themselves up in clothes at home and slept under layers of blankets as frozen water and sewage pipes burst around them.

RIA news agency quoted a spokes man for Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin as saying the ministry was opening two credit lines to Primorye worth a total of some $6 million and sending an additional $10 million in urgent financing.


U.S. Prof Wins Prize

MOSCOW (SPT) - An American anthropologist who has spent more than a decade assembling research critical of U.S. foreign aid to Russia and Eastern Europe has won a $200,000 academic prize for her work.

Janine Wedel, a professor with the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, was on Thursday to be awarded the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order for 2001.

Wedel's work was chosen from among 51 nominations and represents groundbreaking research and writing on how the U.S. government, via the U.S. Agency for International Development, used aid money in the early and mid-1990s to support the programs and careers of Anatoly Chubais and his allies.



Aeroflot Emergency

MOSCOW (AP) - An Aeroflot passenger jet flying from Vietnam to Moscow made a safe emergency landing in Novosibirsk on Tuesday when a panel light indicated the nose gear had failed.

The Airbus-310 touched down at the Tolmachevo airport outside of Novosibirsk, Itar-Tass said. None of the passengers was injured during the landing.

The report did not say whether the nose gear was fully in place when the plane landed. Most of the passengers on the flight from Ho Chi Minh City boarded another flight to Moscow, while the remaining passengers were to be flown to Moscow later in the day, Itar-Tass said.

TITLE: Putin Backs Statehood for Palestine
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin has sent President Yasser Arafat a message reasserting Russian support for a separate Palestinian state and a peaceful resolution to the conflict in the Middle East, the Kremlin said on Wednesday.


Putin's message comes a week after he met Arafat in Moscow and brokered a three-way telephone call between Arafat, the Kremlin and embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

"[Russia] has consistently backed and backs the fair resolution of the Palestinian problem, the fulfillment of the Palestinian people's rights including the right to self-determination and the creation of their own state," a Kremlin statement quoted Putin's note as saying.

The message was sent ahead of Wednesday's anniversary of the 1947 UN decision to divide Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The Kremlin called it the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.

The letter also called for "an end to bloodshed, the normalization of the situation and the resumption on this basis of a discussion process in the region."

Putin has sought in recent weeks to raise Russia's profile as a co-sponsor of the Middle East peace talks, after Moscow was left out of a key meeting in Egypt last month.

Analysts have said Arafat backs increased Russian involvement to counterbalance Washington's pre-eminence as the major mediator in the region.

TITLE: State Prosecutors Seeking 20-Year Prison Sentence for Pope
AUTHOR: By Angela Charlton
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Edmond Pope should serve 20 years in prison and pay a staggering $250 million in damages for harming Russia's military by obtaining classified torpedo designs, a prosecutor insisted Wednesday at the American businessman's espionage trial. 


Even though Pope's key accuser recanted testimony and despite the defendant's deteriorating health, prosecutor Yury Volgin urged the maximum sentence during closing arguments of the six-week closed-door trial, the defense lawyer said. 

Pope, of State College, Pennsylvania, insists he is innocent, but his defense team says they are losing hope for an acquittal. His supporters say the Shkval torpedo blueprints at the center of the case had already been sold abroad and published in open sources. 

"[Pope] is ready for whatever comes. But he's looking at this all skeptically and pessimistically," defense lawyer Pavel Astakhov said. He and Pope, who has spent the last seven months in a Moscow jail, were to deliver closing arguments Friday. 

Volgin maintains that Pope caused irreparable harm to Russia's shrinking defense industry by acquiring plans for the torpedo, Astakhov said. Volgin refused to speak to reporters Wednesday. 

The Russian navy last week tried to file a civil suit against Pope, claiming development and production of the Shkval torpedo cost more than $250 million and that Pope had hurt Russia's military security. The judge in the espionage trial, Nina Barkina, rejected that lawsuit. 

But Volgin, the prosecutor, apparently used the navy's figure as his assessment of the damage caused by Pope. 

Astakhov called the prosecutors' closing statement illegal because they did not explain how they arrived at the damages. He was hoping for the case to be sent back for more investigation. 

"They said proof of Pope's espionage activities came during the trial. For example, they said, Pope asked questions of an espionage character about fire-extinguishing devices. They said that proved that Pope is an experienced intelligence agent," Astakhov said. 

Volgin also said prosecutors would soon "make a special decision" regarding Russian scientists who had dealings with Pope while he was seeking plans for the torpedo, according to Astakhov. He did not elaborate. 

The U.S. government and Pope's supporters maintain Russian authorities have failed to prove that Pope did anything wrong. 

One of Pope's key accusers has recanted a statement that implicated him in espionage. When Pope was seeking the torpedo plans, an experts' group concluded that the materials weren't secret - but after his arrest, a state commission ruled the plans were in fact classified. 

Washington has urged Russia to release Pope, partly because he is in poor health. Pope has suffered from bone cancer, which was in remission when he came to Moscow but which his family fears may have returned. 

Pope, 54, is a retired U.S. Navy officer and founder of CERF Technologies International, a company specializing in studying foreign maritime equipment.

TITLE: Tax Police Blessed With Patron Saint
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia's Orthodox Church has named the apostle Matthew patron saint of the country's feared tax police, the Segodnya newspaper reported on Thursday.


Russian tax police - known for storming buildings in black ski masks to conduct an audit - have had something of a public relations problem, as did the widely despised Roman tax collectors, or "publicans," of biblical times.

St. Matthew himself was a publican, before giving up the profession to follow Jesus. In Matthew's book of the Bible, Jesus frequently lumps tax collectors along with prostitutes as being allowed to enter heaven if they accept God.

Segodnya quoted tax police spokesman Yury Tretyakov as saying the agency had won the support of the Church in part by helping to renovate a cathedral located in part on the territory of its headquarters.

"It is not just a fashion statement, and we are not planning to make our heavenly protection into a cult," Segodnya quoted him as saying.

"It simply means that tax police will have another holiday, Nov. 29, St. Matthew's day."

TITLE: Oil Firms Evade $9Bln in Taxes
AUTHOR: By Elizabeth LeBras and Natalya Neimysheva
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - A report prepared for the government by tax authorities suggests that oil companies are using complicated yet legal schemes to deny federal coffers about $25 in tax revenue per ton of oil - or roughly a staggering $9 billion annually. 


Nine billion dollars is about a quarter of the entire 2001 federal budget. 

It's also about twice the sum the Finance Ministry has been casting about for since it became clear that neither the International Monetary Fund nor those holding Soviet-era sovereign debt was likely to cut Russia a break next year. 

The joint report by the Tax Ministry and the Federal Tax Police Service - first reported Tuesday by the Vedomosti newspaper - found that on average, oil companies are underpaying their taxes by about 700 rubles ($25.13) per ton. 

The argument focuses on "corporate pricing" or "transfer pricing" - the practice of the oil extraction unit of a company selling the oil it gets from the ground to other arms of the company, including perhaps those offshore, at artificially low prices. 

"Oil companies sell oil internally at $55-$75/ton, compared with the domestic market price of $160/ton and the export price of $210/ton," wrote Aton brokerage's Steven Dashevsky in a recent report. 

Such arrangements steeply lower the taxes to be paid. 

All agree that transfer pricing goes on. But the conclusion that it is happening to the tune of $25 per ton of oil is much more aggressive than the estimations of other oil watchers. 

The Troika Dialog brokerage, for example, has suggested that transfer pricing allowed oil companies to lower their average oil tax-per-ton burden by about $9 in 1999 and about $11 this year, while the Independent Fuel and Energy Institute has estimated it has saved the companies $11.30 in 1999 and $14.60 in 2000. 

Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin last week talked of transfer pricing as a tax evasion scheme and promised to report to the president, while a source in the Tax Ministry said that Tax Minister Gennady Bukayev had been instructed by the Kremlin to draw up a draft decree outlawing the practice. 

That follows Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Khristenko's insistence earlier this month that oil companies bid for the right to ship their oil out of Russia through the national pipeline mono poly, Transneft. 

Hitting the oil companies up for tax revenue does have a particular logic to it: Oil and gas are the big dollar-earners for Russia, and in the early and mid-1990s the industry moved from state to private hands via a privatization process that has become synonymous with corrupt dealings. 

But the oil companies are politically powerful, and they argue against hefty new taxes with a logic of their own: They argue the government should think more long-term than try to patch holes in the 2001 budget, and instead should let the windfall of sky-high world oil prices be reinvested in developing new fields and improving existing ones. 

Oil companies are already using more of that cash to invest in their business than it may at first seem, according to a joint study by three think tanks: the Independent Fuel and Energy Institute, the Institute of Macroeconomic Research and the Institute of Investment Problems. 

That study found that oil companies' investment is about 30 percent more than what is broadly announced and documented. 

Both publicly and privately, oil companies are lobbying furiously to head off the new taxes. On Tuesday, representatives of many major oil players were not prepared to comment either on the Vedomosti report about the tax authorities $25-per-ton evasion claim, or on the broader transfer-pricing struggles. 

A spokesperson for oil major Sidanko, for example, said the company's leadership was in the midst of negotiations with the government on the matter, and so obviously could not comment. A representative of Tyumen Oil Co., or TNK, would only note that "it is quite a delicate issue." 

Representatives of other companies, including Sibneft, LUKoil and Yukos, simply declined comment. And even the Finance Ministry itself was not prepared Tuesday to comment on Vedomosti's report, promising to say something about it Wednesday. 

Not all oil companies reduce their taxes by $25 a ton, according to the tax authorities' report; that was just the average. The report found large differences among companies, with Sibneft, for example, paying about 49 rubles ($1.76) per ton of oil to the budget last year, while Sidanko paid about 173 rubles ($6.02). 

Oil players in turn questioned the methodology of the report behind the 700-ruble evasion conclusion. They noted, for example, that different oil companies also got better or worse prices for their oil sales per ton - depending on how much oil was sold abroad and how much at home, for depressed prices. 

They also even challenged some of the math. The Russian-Belarussian oil company Slavneft, for example, said that by its count the company paid about 189 rubles ($6.55) in tax per ton of oil - while the tax authorities report credited Slavneft as paying just 76 rubles a ton.

Slavneft argued the report did not include all arms of its company, including some that are loss-making. 

"No one can say what the domestic price is for a ton of oil," said Dmitry Penevalov, a vice president of Slavneft, in an interview Tuesday. "[Our earnings] depend on how much oil is supplied to the export markets. Sometimes we aren't paid [when we supply state agencies]. We can cover our losses with corporate pricing." 

Andrei Shtork, a fellow vice president at Slavneft, added other factors that influence how much an oil company earns per ton - and so, how much it pays in taxes. 

"[The amount earned per ton] depends on ecological and physical conditions. It depends on the distance from the pipes and the number of orders made for the company's oil," Shtork said. 

Like Penevalov and other oil players, Shtork defended transfer pricing because the transactions all occur inside "the same team" - Slavneft. 

His colleague Penevalov said that by keeping more profits back from the tax man, Slavneft could invest in its older and less efficient Saratov refinery, while other oil players could sink the money back into the economy in the form of new gas stations in Moscow and other profitable ventures.

TITLE: Development Rights in City Center Up for Sale
AUTHOR: By Yevgenia Borisova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The rights to develop four plots of land near Nevsky Prospect will be sold by the City Property Fund by tender early next year, with the city hoping to raise up to $4 million, according to officials.


The sales are part of the World Bank-financed $30 million project for the reconstruction of St. Petersburg's historical city center. Funding began in 1997, its main targets being the creation of models for the development of areas in the center, including finding ways to attract investment for reconstruction.

A decree allowing the sales to go ahead, has been prepared and is waiting to be signed by Gov. Vla dimir Yakovlev, said Yury Shche gol kov, the head of the real estate department of the Fund for St. Petersburg Investment Construction Projects - the agency that was set up by City Hall to run projects funded by the World Bank.

The tender is scheduled for the end of January or the beginning of February.

Money made on the sales will go toward paying off the loan. If the project proves successful, the city will be eligible for a bigger loan from the bank - from $150 million to $300 million, said the fund's general director Alexei Vasiliev in an interview on Tuesday.

The four plots are located along an as-yet-unnamed street about 100 meters from Nevsky, in the city's 130th quarter. Mayakovskaya Ul., Ul. Zhukovskogo and Ul. Vos sta niya are the other streets flanking the area.

Preparation of the plots involved pulling down some of the dilapidated buildings, clearing away and replacing old water pipes, telephone lines and gas mains, and installing two new boilers for central heating and hot water supplies, Vasiliev said.

The four plots are sized 1,131, 1,297, 1,891 and 2,271 square meters. Starting prices have been set at $320,000, $465,000, $375,000 and $735,000 respectively. Fund officials say, however, that the selling figures are likely to increase substantially, and maybe even double.

"We have had several offers already from potential buyers offering double the [asking] price," Shche gol kov said, adding that his department had received at least 10 offers from local and Moscow-based companies and "even private individuals."

While he would not disclose the identity of the interested parties, he said that all were Russian.

According to regulations, investors who offer to pay double the starting price for a piece of St. Petersburg property - prices are fixed by the city - should receive that property without any tender. Shche gol kov said, however, that the World Bank had insisted all rights to develop lots be sold by tender.

Two of the plots are to be developed as apartment buildings, with the other two being potential sites for the development of hotels, office buildings, department stores, service centers or restaurants. Each building must have its own basement parking.

"After buildings are constructed, they will automatically become the property of the developers," Shche golkov said. He also said that the land could be leased on a 49-year term, or bought "according to normative prices."

"These prices are peanuts, really," he added.

World Bank officials were unavailable for comment this week.

"Even if we sold the rights to develop the plots at the starting price, we would cover about 80 percent of all costs of improving the infrastructure in the entire 130th quarter," said Vasiliev. "This is already a very good result. But the sale price will apparently be greater than that, and we might actually [recoup] 100 percent of our costs."

The project also includes the development of the area near the State Academic Cappella, from the Moika Embankment to Bolshaya Konyushennaya Ul., as well as the reconstruction of gas mains, power lines and lighting along Nevsky Prospect. To date, 57 percent of the loan has been spent, Va siliev said. 

Vasiliev said that the city's improvement of the area's infrastructure had attracted others to investment possibilities. He said that four other apartment buildings in the area had been bought up by investors, who were now relocating insolvent tenants to new apartments in order to build elite residences.

The poor condition of many buildings in the city center is in sharp contrast to the shiny facade of Nevsky Prospect, even though they are merely meters away from St. Petersburg's main thoroughfare and shop windows. 

One building bought by an investor is located at 104 Nevsky Prospect, where residents still talk of the time one of the tenants crashed through the rotting floor of his bathroom - together with the toilet he was sitting on.

Valery Shevchenko, a 35-year-old resident of the building - a typical system of connected residential blocks that were built in the 19th century, and which have never had hot water - said he was not sorry to go.

"I want to get out," Shevchenko said. "Our neighbor was offered an apartment on Moskovsky Prospect, and I won't mind leaving my communal apartment room."

TITLE: Illarionov: Growth Statistics Flatter To Deceive
AUTHOR: By Elizabeth LeBras
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The vital statistics of the nation's economy are "the most impressive indicators of Russia's development for the past three centuries," but at the same time this year has been one of missed opportunities, Andrei Illarionov, economic adviser to President Vladimir Putin, said at a news conference Wednesday.


Illarionov forecast the year will end with 7 percent gross domestic product growth and 10 percent growth of industrial output. He predicted investment will be up 20 percent for the year, exports up more than 40 percent and wages up 23 percent.

The economist, who is one of the Central Bank's harshest critics, said the bank's hard-currency and gold reserves will have more than doubled to $30 billion over the year.

However, the tone of most of Illarionov's address was negative. He said that the economic growth achieved in 2000 "is not sustainable."

The growth was mainly owing to external factors such as high world prices for energy exports rather than the government's effective management of the economy, he said.

Illarionov referred to the positive economic indicators as "unmerited success" and said that Russia had earned more than $16 billion solely from changes in world prices rather than from any really effective economic policies.

He said still greater economic growth could have been reached.

"The government could not cope with the tasks of managing the economy," Illarionov said.

He blamed the so-called Dutch disease for a fall off in growth in the third and fourth quarters of this year after being very high in the first half of the year.

Dutch disease refers to the tendency of large influxes of income from the export of energy resources to raise the exchange rate of a nation's currency and also to damage competitiveness in the non-export sector of the economy.

He also blamed Dutch disease for increasing inflation. He predicted the rate for this year will total 21 percent, which is significantly more than the 12 percent to 14 percent inflation that the federal government projected back in May.

On the subject of foreign debts, Illarionov said that if Russia does not pay off its foreign debts inflation will continue to grow and economic growth will falter.

"We should pay the debt not only because responsible countries pay their debts but because under the current conditions, it is the most effective method of sterilizing the mass of surplus rubles that cause inflation and slow down economic growth," Illarionov said.

TITLE: Vodka Distillery Faces Further Disputes
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - Just when the dust seemed to have settled after months of management disputes at Moscow's Kristall vodka distillery, the legality of a new management team has been contested in court.


A group of Moscow bailiffs came to the distillery Tuesday afternoon demanding access for former general director Alexander Romanov who was relieved from his position Nov. 9 by a board of directors and replaced by Sergei Lukashuk, Kristall's chief engineer.

The bailiffs presented a St. Petersburg court judgement based on a minority shareholder suit that demanded the annulment of decisions made by the board of directors. 

Lukashuk was confirmed in his position at an extraordinary shareholder meeting in Pskov on Monday, when a new board of directors was elected and Kristall's charter was changed.

Romanov, who was appointed general director in May and backed by the Moscow City government, did not appear at the distillery Tuesday and was not available for comment.

Fifty-one percent of Kristall's state-owned shares were transferred this month from the Moscow city government to Rosspirtprom, a newly registered holding company created to accumulate all state-owned shares in alcohol-producing enterprises.

Natalya Salangina, deputy director of Rosspirtprom and a Kristall board member, said the new management was astonished by the turn of events and that the shareholder who lodged the suit was not on the shareholder list.

TITLE: Conference Discusses Electronic Terrorism
AUTHOR: By Andrey Musatov
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: While the legendary inventiveness of Russia's hackers has made frequent headlines in recent years, the small number of experts discussing technological security in the city last week said that the chances of disruption or danger to public services was slim.


At the two-day conference, entitled Electronic Terrorism in Telecommunications and held at St. Petersburg's Military University of Communications (VUS), participants warned that Russian companies were not rigorous enough over electronic security.

According to research carried out by a private firm called the Technical Security Bureau, Russian firms spend only about 1 percent of their budgets on electronic security - compared to 25 percent in the United States and Western Europe.

"Russian companies are spending money on training security guards, but it's time to create professional security services that will provide a wide range of protection, including the protection of information," said Viktor Sabynin, former deputy head of the radio electronic department at VUS, and now the general director of the Technical Security Bureau.

According to Sabynin, the conference was meant to discuss and forecast the prospect of hackers breaking into automated operation systems.

"Computer technology has grown to occupy a central place in our lives," Sabynin said Friday. "Today, more companies and facilities use internal networks, including banks, telecommunications companies and - even more importantly - automated programs that run things like subway systems and atomic power stations."

But officials at the Leningrad Atomic Power Station (LAES) and the St. Petersburg Metro said in interviews after the conference that neither object was at risk from hackers - mostly because the technology in both cases was too antiquated to be broken into.

"In theory hackers can do anything," said Anatoly Shatalov, head of the Metro's computer center, in a telephone interview on Wednesday. "However, no part of the St. Petersburg subway system has a connection to the Internet." 

"Hackers could probably break into the automatic computer system which operates the passenger gates at the entrance to the metro," Shatalov said. "But only if hackers themselves wire a connection to the system. As for the regulation of trains, this system is too old to have anything to worry about from computers and hackers. It's too early for us to care about electronic terrorism."

Sergei Averyanov, chief press officer at LAES, had a similar view. .

"Our operating system's obsolescence is, in this case, a good thing," Averyanov said in telephone interview on Wednesday. "And none of our systems is hooked up to the Internet, so a break-in is practically impossible."

Nonetheless, stories of successful hackers have led experts to urge caution.

At the end of October this year, for example, computer experts at Microsoft became aware of an attempt to steal the source codes for Microsoft Windows and Office software products - with the information being funneled to an e-mail address in St. Petersburg.

The conference was not without a certain level of secrecy - television cameras were barred, and the names of representatives from the Interior Ministry and the military were left off the list given to journalists - but some methods of protecting electronic information were discussed.

Among these was a computer program designed by Sergei Bushuyev, a specialist at VUS, which could "read" the actions of a computer user - such as typing style, use of the mouse, and favorite programs - and record their individual style as a kind of password.

"I propose [creating] an information 'image' of the computer user, which includes their specific psychological or physical attributes [when before] the computer's interface," Bushuyev told the conference. 

"Theoretically, the recognition ability of this program could become [as accurate] as matching up finger prints," he said. "The software is only in the development stage, but I am hoping to demonstrate a test model at the end of May."

TITLE: Russia Catches Up on Internet Tax Law
AUTHOR: By Anna Raff
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - In the middle of a Mos cow winter, Sergei Shiyan dreams of Dubai.


Shiyan yearns not for the yearlong summer, beaches and palm trees. Instead, he is impressed by Dubai Internet City in the United Arab Emirates, an electronic- and media-free zone where there are no taxes levied on corporate profits and income.

"There are no taxes at all, not on the people, not on the company," he said.

Russia is a long way from being the next Dubai Internet City, but this doesn't mean that e-commerce is being taxed unfairly, said Shiyan, a representative of Sweden-based CMA Small Systems, a systems integrator for the finance industry. Tax laws pertaining to the Internet have only cropped up in the past five years, and the whys and hows of taxing e-commerce are still being sorted out even in the most Internet-savvy countries.

"Am I suffering from this ambiguity?" he said. "Absolutely not. I'm making money off of it." 

While CMA Small Systems is taking advantage of the short-term benefits that a lag in legislation can provide, their Russian office isn't exactly reaping the same benefits as are 180 high-tech firms already registered at Dubai Internet City (www.dubaiinternetcity.com).

Much will depend on the approach that the government still has to formulate. The current ad-hoc approach taken by tax inspectors is now considered to be relatively neutral.

"There will be no e-business here if taxation isn't convenient," Shiyan said. "Government officials have to be careful that their taxation plans don't aid in the brain drain."

In tax circles, the phenomenon of e-commerce has been compared to a crisis of physics, where what is taxed can't always be seen and the concept of "place" loses all traditional meaning.

Even the lines between "goods" and "services" have become blurred. Downloaded software has long tugged that line, and the European Commission has proposed defining it as a "service." This applies to electronic books, music, movies and distance learning. 

This has serious ramifications for the publishing industry in the United Kingdom, said Paul Tobin, senior manager for PricewaterhouseCoopers. Physical books have a value-added tax, or VAT, of zero, while the electronic versions are hit with a 17.5-percent VAT.

The U.S. Treasury Department issued a comment on the issue in 1996, which stated that foreign businesses will be taxed if they are doing business that is "effectively connected" with economic activity in the United States.

This is a very broad explanation of what is taxable, said Steve Henderson, a partner with Deloitte & Touche CIS. In Canada and the United States, two countries with a common legal system, the courts will end up deciding the nuances of how Internet activities will be taxed.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has laid out some basic concepts on taxation of e-commerce. Russia, however, is not an OECD member, so its norms don't have to apply here.

For one, according to the OECD, the existence of a server on a country's territory isn't enough to warrant being subjected to that country's tax laws. It all depends on what the server's functions are.

Even within the OECD, this clause evokes controversy, said Yulia Maximovskaya, a senior manager with Arthur Andersen. But most experts agree that if the site is used just to collect customer information, it shouldn't be taxed. If the site coordinates orders and payment, there is a more solid basis for taxation.

TITLE: Gazprom Cuts Supply to Yugoslavia
AUTHOR: By Gordana Kukic
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BELGRADE, Yugoslavia - Russian Gazprom has recently reduced its gas supply to Yugoslavia by about a third, an industry source in Belgrade said Wednesday. 


"On Nov. 20 Gazprom cut its daily deliveries to 3 million cubic meters from a previous 4.17 million cubic meters, which covers only half of the country's daily needs," an official of state oil and gas monopoly Naftna Industrija Srbije said.

The official said it was not clear why Gazprom had cut back but suggested the Russians may have been alarmed by the fact that many gas customers in Yugoslavia were not paying their bills. 

The country receives 125,000 cubic meters per hour from Russia and 75,000 to 78,000 cubic meters per hour from domestic production that only partly covers household heating systems and small industries, said the official, who asked not to be named.

"Once the temperature falls to minus 5 degrees Celsius, our needs for natural gas will rise to up to 600,000 cubic meters per hour," the official added.

Yugoslavia's President Vojislav Kostunica secured renewal of Russian gas imports, suspended in June over Belgrade's $350 million debt to Gazprom, during a meeting with President Vladimir Putin in Moscow a month ago.

Acting on a Russian government order, Gazprom promised to supply 4.2 million cubic meters a day to Yugoslavia until the end of 2000. 

The NIS official said Gazprom representatives were expected to come to Belgrade early next week to discuss the resumption of gas imports at the previous level as well as delivery of extra quantities, for those industries that can afford to pay. "This has removed Gazprom's threat to again halt its deliveries to us," the official added. 

The official blamed artificially low prices, which had not covered even half the costs, and non payments of bills by gas customers for the current financial difficulties. Only 60 percent of consumed gas was regularly paid for.

TITLE: LUKoil ADR Program for 2001 Announced
AUTHOR: By Alexander Tutushkin and Yelizaveta Osetinskaya
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW - The State Property Fund said this week that its biggest project for 2001 will be to sell 6 percent of No. 1 oil major LUKoil through American Depositary Receipts, the first year in nearly a decade a controlling stake in a major state enterprise won't be auctioned off.


State Property Fund officials said Tuesday they hope to raise $800 million through the sale.

The government, which has a stake of about 15 percent in LUKoil, had planned to sell the shares on the U.S. stock market this year, but the project was postponed. Publicly, both state and oil company officials have balked at revealing details of the project, saying that releasing information in advance of the sale would violate U.S. trading laws and damage the transaction.

On Tuesday, however, the head of the Property Fund, Vladimir Malin, announced that about 50 million LUKoil shares would be floated on the New York Stock Exchange - a little over 6 percent of the company. He even named the proposed price of the shares - $16 each.

"So far, the government is not thinking about selling major stakes in Slavneft and Rosneft because we consider the flotation of LUKoil shares to be the major transaction of 2001," said a highly placed fund official, who asked that his name be withheld.

The official said that under current Russian law, international flotations of state-owned companies are not allowed. To skirt the law, therefore, the fund will not sell the shares directly, but through a specially created structure - the Project Privatization Company, or KPP, the official said. The fund will be the founder of the company and transfer the 50 million LUKoil shares to it as principal funds. KKP will then deposit these shares with the Bank of New York, on the back of which third-level ADRs will be issued, said the official.

The ADRs will be placed on the NYSE by investment banks Morgan Stanley and CSFB. Revenue from the sale of the ADRs will then be transferred to KPP, which will then transfer it to the Russian budget.

LUKoil plans to issue its 1998, 1999 and first-half 2000 financials to generally accepted accounting principles within the next two months, which are necessary to get a listing on the NYSE.

To launch the scheme, the official said, the State Property Fund needs a presidential decree, a government resolution and official government approval of the company's charter. The official suggested that these three documents could be ready before the end of the year, after which three to four months would be needed to prepare the flotation itself.

The project has already been given the go-ahead by all interested ministries with the exception of one - the Finance Ministry, which is unhappy with the project's estimated cost of up to 10 percent of the flotation itself, the official said.

"The [Finance] Ministry's objection was not that the [cost of the project] shouldn't be paid, but rather to ask who was going to pay for it," Deputy Finance Minister Bella Zlatkis said Tuesday.

Although the fund's target of $16 per share might seem high compared with the current price of $10.75, LUKoil shares could well reach that level by the time of the flotation, said Alfa Bank oil analyst Konstantin Reznikov. If the oil market drops, he said, the government will postpone the deal until it recovers.

TITLE: Experts at Conference Claim Municipal Services in 'Crisis'
AUTHOR: By Alla Startseva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The country's municipally owned businesses, property and housing are in critical condition and need dramatic reorganization, said participants of a German government-sponsored conference on the issue, which ended Wednesday.


More than 130 representatives from the private and public sectors of Germany and Russia attended the Moscow region conference, one of 27 projects in the German government's $11.8 million Transform initiative to assist Russia's transition to capitalism.

One of the main reasons city-run services across the country are falling apart is the lack of participation by private firms, delegates from both countries said.

Russia faces many of the same problems as Germany, which is still struggling to integrate fully the once-communist East Germany into its economy.

Diter Ohnesorge, former mayor of the East German city of Noishtadt-Wainshtrasse, recommended his city's system for running basic services such as water, sewage and garbage. City-owned enterprises provide the services, but the commercial part is run privately, he said.

"It took 30 to 40 years in Germany to adapt municipal structures to the modern world," said Heinz-Herman Runde, director of a municipal company in the German city of Nojss. "Municipal organizations must work on economic, not social principles," he said.

Claus Kiliman, a professor and ex-mayor of Rostok, said that "public-private partnerships are the future of municipal economies in Russia."

There are, however, success stories of Russian cities making great progress at keeping the life-support systems of society functioning - profitably.

"After this conference I understand that in Russia there are many very progressive ideas that could be accepted in Germany," said Claus Brummer, an adviser to the German Embassy and coordinator of Transform.

Alexei Mikhalin, deputy head of the administration for the Moscow Oblast town of Dzerzhinsky, said his town decided six years ago to turn over its housing-insurance system to a private company. While average payments were comparable with those in Moscow at the time, Dzerzhinsky citizens now pay only about a quarter of what those in Moscow pay, he said.

A former Smolensk official, Valery Khrapov, said that city has set up a better alternative to using state-owned Sberbank to collect bill payments. Smolensk's Unified Cash Center accepts payments for all gas, water, heat and electricity bills and is more efficient and "comfortable" than Sberbank, he said.

TITLE: Property Ministry Pushes New Law on Privatization
AUTHOR: By Ana Uzelac
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - With President Vla di mir Putin's administration still trying to define its policy on managing state assets, the Property Ministry is busy trying to put its house in order - pushing for a new privatization law and consolidating its grip on regional property committees.


The bill, drafted by the ministry, will be made public after it is submitted to the State Duma sometime within the next month, but the ministry has disclosed some parts of its proposal.

The bill stipulates that all state companies must be divided into two groups - those with fixed assets worth more than 5 million statutory minimal wages (around $15 million) and those that are worth less, a ministry official who asked not to be named said in a telephone interview Wednesday.

The first group of companies could be privatized via auctions or by issuing derivative securities on Western exchanges, the official said.

The smaller companies could be sold through auctions or in six other ways: tenders; selling shares on stock exchanges; public offerings; transferring state property to the charter capital of private companies; management in trust with the option of property eventually being transferred to the managers; and, for the least attractive companies, selling to the first bidder in "noncompetitive tenders."

Deputy Property Minister Alexander Braverman has said the ministry's main goal is to ensure transparency, but too little is known about the bill to say whether it will help make privatizations less susceptible to insider deals and under-the-table arrangements.

But instances of corruption are not always directly dependent on privatization methods, said Alexander Radygin, an expert with the Institute for Economy in Transition.

"As long as there is no judicial practice of punishing corruption in Russia, certain risks remain even when selling [assets] via auction," he told the Vedomosti business daily.

"There are too many inherent failings in the existing privatization law," said Roland Nash, an analyst with Renaissance Capital.

Currently, privatization allows a company's management to maximize its own benefits, while regarding the value of a company's shares as secondary, he said.

Nash said another big problem was that potentially effective managers often have their hands tied and cannot downsize or make "rational investments."

Largely, this problem stems from non-monetary conditions with which investors are sometimes saddled as part of privatization deals. The ministry official said that most of the privatization methods applicable to the smaller companies, as defined in the bill, include non-monetary conditions - such as obligations not to change a company's line of production for a certain period of time.

"One problem [with the bill] is it still allows for non-monetary conditions," Christopher Granville, a strategist with the United Financial Group brokerage, said in a telephone interview Wednesday. "And any non-monetary condition gives scope for potential abuse."

The ministry official said his agency aims to privatize stakes in around 10,000 companies in the next two years, adding that, since the start of privatization, the government has sold off some 102,000 state companies.

The official refused to comment on rumors that one salient procedural change proposed in the bill is to sideline the State Duma, which has summarily rejected the government's annual privatization programs.

In addition to the privatization bill, the ministry has announced plans to tighten its grip on property sales in the provinces by reviewing the work of regional property commissions, or KUGI, with which it works on a contract basis.

The official said as many as 25 percent of the KUGI could be stripped of their functions because the ministry is not satisfied with their work. Instead of the KUGI, the ministry plans to open 20 to 25 of its own regional property management offices by the end of 2001 and about twice as many in the next three to four years, he added.

TITLE: Import Tariffs To Be Lowered
AUTHOR: By Yevgenia Borisova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - In what is being billed as a simplification of the rules and a dropping of barriers to foreign trade, customs officials are following orders from the Cabinet to reduce import tariffs on thousands of items.


The government says the new rules - which will kick in on Jan. 1 - will make moving goods through customs cheaper and less Byzantine, bringing savings that will be passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices.

It also hopes the simplified rules will end a common practice of dickering over the exact definition of a particular import in hopes of getting it a cheaper tariff.

But officials at the State Customs Committee say they do not know what effect the changes will have on the billions of dollars in revenues their service traditionally earns for the budget - about 40 percent of the federal budget is funded by customs alone.

They also admit frankly they are changing tariffs in the absence of any clear policy on whether there are domestic industries that the state wants to protect from foreign competition.

Be that as it may, government decree No. 886, issued Monday, mandated the new tariffs and they are on the way.

As it is now, customs officers sort imports into one or the other of 11,031 categories and those categories pay one of seven sliding tariffs: zero, 5 percent, 10 percent, 15 percent, 20 percent, 25 percent or 30 percent.

That changes in about a month, when there will just be four principal tariffs: 5 percent, 10 percent, 15 percent and 20 percent. Some exceptions include foreign-made cars (now taxed at 30 percent), cigarettes and white sugar, all of which will be assessed a 25 percent tariff.

In the past, many importers have sought a cheaper rate by claiming an item in question was something else. The classic example is poultry producers, who began labeling chicken as turkey, back when the tariff on chicken was 30 percent and turkey was 15 percent.

Under the new rules, similar items are grouped under similar tariffs: chicken and turkey, flowers and herbs, furniture and furniture parts - all are now to be taxed alike.

All told, new tariffs will be coming in on about 3,500 categories of goods. An exact list is to be published shortly in the government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta, said Andrei Kudryashov, head of the customs committee's department of tariff and nontariff regulation.

Kudryashov spoke to a briefing Thursday about just some of the tariff changes, saying tariffs on foreign-made televisions would drop from 30 percent to 20 percent, while tariffs on cotton would remain at zero.

The government has talked of lower tariffs as likely to rev up the economy, please consumers and end rampant customs evasion. "We will open up the market," pledged Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin last week, introducing the lower tariffs on car imports.

Some are not so sure they want that, however.

"When we saw the tariffs offered by the government in September, we were shocked. Heads of enterprises were saying that dropping import tariffs would strangle domestic producers," Sergei Katyrin, vice president of the Russian Chamber of Commerce, said two weeks ago at a customs committee meeting.

Another critic has been former customs chief Valery Draganov, who is now head of the customs committee in the State Duma. Draganov complained to Profil magazine in late November tariffs were being tinkered with, but the industry-by-industry consequences were not being studied.

"In the last two years, many producers have started to manufacture competitive goods. We don't now need the additional pressure of cheap imports," Draganov said.

Kudryashov of customs frankly agreed customs was making such decisions in the absence of clearly defined government goals about which industries, if any, to protect from foreign competition.

"We don't know whether we need our own television industry. Do we need our own production of machine tools with digital program management? Do we need our own grain production? And how much grain do we need? Should we grow it ourselves, or import it?" Kudryashov said.

This week, Valery Kiselyov, an official who works with corporate members of the Russian Chamber of Commerce, said "some of the major disagreements" local producers have with the new tariffs had been settled "after several rounds of discussions with customs."

"But I can't comment on the concrete tariffs - no one has seen them yet!" he added.

Nor can anyone say whether the new lower tariffs will mean more or less federal budget money. "I don't think anyone could give you such figures," said Kudryashov.

TITLE: Judge Rules in Favor of Baltika Brand Copier
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW - It may have copied the Baltika name, the Baltika logos and the Baltika strategy of distinguishing flavors by numbers, but the company that makes Baltika cigarettes is not guilty of violating Baltika's trademark.


Or so ruled a Moscow arbitration court judge on Monday.

The judge ruled that local tobacco company Mega-Tabak didn't violate trademark laws by copying Baltika Brewery's "three-waves" logo and coat of arms - not to mention its name - in its Baltika line of cigarettes, because the nation's No. 1 beer maker couldn't prove that it had registered these trademarks in the "tobacco" category with Rospatent, the state patent agency.

The case began in early October, when a small tobacco factory in the Moscow region called Meta-Tabak, part of the SoyuzkontractTabak holding, produced 500 boxes of "Baltika" cigarettes. 

The word Baltika on the cigarette packs was printed in a font strongly reminiscent of the brewing company's logo. The names of the cigarettes with the digits "3" and "9" in blue and brown colors matched the color of the Baltika No. 3 and Baltika No. 9 labels.

Many lawyers at the time said Baltika had a clear case of patent infringement and had no doubt the brewery would triumph in court. 

"They were wrong," said Grigory Israelyan, vice president of SoyuzkontractTabak. 

SoyuzkontractTabak examined all the details of Baltika's trademark registration with Rospatent before deciding to produce cigarettes under the same name, Israelyan said. 

"It would be an honor for us if a brewing company decided to make beer called SoyuzkontractTabak. Personally, I would be grateful to the director of such a company," he said.

The name Baltika and the "three waves" logo are registered in the majority of product categories that Rospatent lists, with the notable exception of "tobacco," said the St. Petersburg-based beer maker's top lawyer, Alexander Sivkov. Baltika's coat of arms, however, actually is registered in the tobacco-products category.

Sivkov said that if Baltika loses its suit against Mega-Tabak, it may seek compensation for the damages caused by the use of its trademark, which is "millions of rubles."

"It shows once again that trademark legislation is far from perfect," said Konstantin Samoilov, marketing director of the Kaluga-based Transmark company, which bottles Zo lo taya Bochka, Miller and Staropramen beer, adding that several companies are currently using the Zolotaya Bochka logo on packages of potato chips and nuts. 

"The court's decision [on Baltika] proves once again that the intellectual property of manufacturers in Russia is poorly protected," he said.

TITLE: Mailbox
TEXT: Dear Editor,

Nikita Ivanov's article ["Old Legal Habits Are Dying Hard Among Today's Judges," Nov. 17] shows clear ignorance of Russian law. 


In questioning the legitimacy of the trade union at McDonald's, he refers to a registration procedure in the Russian Law on Trade Unions. As a practicing lawyer, he should have known that the procedure for registering NGOs, including trade unions, is in fact outlined in the Russian Law on Public Organizations.

The union at McDonald's established itself in accordance with the latter law, which allows founding congresses of local unions to ratify a decree from a higher union body, in this case the Moscow Municipal Committee of the Trade Union of Workers in Food Sales and Suppliers, thereby registering itself with the higher union and automatically adopting the higher union's constitution. A local registered in this manner enjoys all the rights of a legal entity.

And unions have very good reasons to register through affiliation to higher union bodies, as opposed to through the Justice Ministry. According to the Law on Trade Unions, trade union registration at the ministry entails simple notification; the ministry does not have the right to refuse registration. However, in practice, the law is often ignored.

Since the day of the founding congress, the members of the McDonald's union have been harassed in a number of ways - from hostile phone calls to their homes, to surveillance at work, to trumped up disciplinary actions. For two years, management "recognized" the union as trouble, as evidenced by the harassment of its members, but refused to recognize the legitimate demand that it negotiate with this representative body.

After having examined all the founding documents, the judge ruled that indeed this union exists, and indeed McDonald's was required by law to appeal to the union before disciplining an elected union official. Since McDonald's management refused to abide by this requirement, the disciplinary action was ruled illegal.

This court victory is extraordinary because the judge ruled in favor of this small union, confirming its existence in the court decision and upholding the rights of elected union officials. The judge followed both the letter and the intent of the law. 

The saddest and most reprehensible aspect of Ivanov's article is that he attempts to pit trade unions against other NGOs. The fact is that all representatives of civil society are victims of the lack of rule of law in Russia. The question arises: Why would Ivanov proclaim himself as a supporter of gay rights, at the expense of workers' rights? Surely anyone who practices law in Russia recognizes that we must stand united in order to reach a degree of rule of law that will recognize the rights of minorities, and the right to freedom of association.

Irene Stevenson

Representative of the 
AFL-CIO in Russia , Moscow



Dear Editor,

I am writing to support Yevgeny Druzhinin and other union members at the McDonald's factory in Moscow, who were so wrongly and unfairly mixed up by Nikita Ivanov with "communists and nationalists."


Besides all the unprofessional statements concerning Russian labor legislation, Ivanov made a point that the court ruled in favor of the worker in accordance with a so-called proletarian sense of justice. It would be interesting to know what Mr. Ivanov would say about dozens of cases which workers have won against McDonald's in many countries, including those which did not experience the "70-year-old tradition of administering justice." To cite examples, in France in 1994, 10 "McDo" managers were arrested by French authorities for infringing legislation and trade union rights. In other cases, courts ruled against McDonald's in France, Italy, Germany, and so on. 

McDonald's is a multinational corporation which is called to account all over the world by human rights activists for total violation of workers rights, by medics for unsafe food, psychiatrists for aggressive ads aimed at manipulating kids, and environmentalists for ecological damage. The only paradise for the company is Russia and other countries where most of the population still has an illusion - promoted by Ivanov - that McDonald's is an ideal and it is here to destroy totalitarian habits and teach us Western culture. Reality is more simple - it is here for profits only.

The judge, who made a fair decision according to the law, and in spite of McDonald's $2 billion image-creating campaign, is contributing to the formation of a democratic state, where the law rules, not money. Workers, who stand up for their rights against inhuman labor relations, form part of the movement for social and industrial democracy. 

Kirill Buketov

International Union 
of Food and Allied Workers' Associations (IUF), Moscow



Dear Editor,

Nikita Ivanov's interesting article about the old legal habits among today's judges contains an example concerning the refusal on the part of judges in Omsk to register the lesbian and gay group Parus is a striking picture of homophobic prejudices. And this happens not in 1990, when we had a similar sort of experiences and when there was an anti-sodomy paragraph in the Criminal Code, but now, when the legal position of Russian gays and lesbians is one of the best in the world: Only rape is punished, the penalty is the same for gays, lesbians and heterosexuals and the age of consent is only 14 years old!


I hope that the mentioned publication will improve the situation when "Parus" goes to the Russian Supreme Court. [Editor's note - To quote Iva nov's article: "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."]

Prof. Alexander Kukharsky

President of the Krylya Center



Dear Editor,

The phrase "to beg the question" means to answer without actually addressing the question at hand. It does not mean the same as "to raise the question." Government leaders are begging the question of what they are going to do about heating in the Far East when they blame others for the problem. They are talking about the question without answering it.


This note is addressed specifically to the incorrect use of the phrase in Anna Shcherbakova's Market Matters comment "Raid on Bank Is Sign of City's Newer Status" in the Nov. 24 issue. This is at least the second time I have seen this phrase incorrectly used in your paper, but I do not remember in which article I have seen it. [Editor's note: Can anyone oblige?]

Elaine Lackey,

St Petersburg



Dear Editor,

I was surprised to read an editorial opinion on the so-called "subversive" messages of/from the Teletubbies ["Insidious Plot Lurks Behind Teletubbies ...," Nov. 14], while the Middle East is going up in flames and the American presidential election system is being reduced to nothing short of a world-wide laughing stock. In fact, a satirical scriptwriters' dream come true.


Stop treating the reader like a 15-year-old! Create a dedicated TV news and reviews supplement/section, like all good, professional papers do! Additionally, this would give us something a little more interesting to read.

Viktor Romain

Moscow

TITLE: COMMENT
TEXT: A UNITED NATIONS conference on how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming ended Saturday after failing to achieve any legally binding agreement on measures by which developed countries would reduce emissions. 


U.S. diplomats were roundly excoriated for failing even to consider reducing domestic greenhouse gas emissions as much as most European nations already have. Nigeria's environment minister, Sani Zan gon Daura, said the United States had caused a "plague of climate change" as harmful as the colonization of Africa. A delegate representing low-lying island nations already being flooded because of global warming fumed, "We are fighting for our livelihood and they [the U.S.] are fighting about a change in lifestyle."

However, in technical sessions that took place behind the scenes, the United States, France and Britain bridged some of their differences, agreeing on ways to enforce reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S.-European compromise eventually foundered on opposition from Germany, but it showed that future summits could build on common principles. The summit also saw a U.S. pledge to provide up to $1 billion to help island nations and other countries especially susceptible to the effects of global warming take steps like building dikes and moving populations away from low-lying seashores.

The pledge recognized the importance of adapting to global warming rather than only trying to prevent it. Even if all nations were to agree to reduce significantly their greenhouse gas emissions now, global warming would continue and nations would still have to compensate for its effects.

Legislators in Congress were right to restrain Clinton administration delegates from agreeing to the reductions the European Union wanted. Because of the full-bore growth of the economy in recent years, the United States would have had to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by 35 percent from current levels just to meet an agreement it made in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, to cut its emissions by 7 percent from their levels in 1990. However, it would be irresponsible for Congress to continue ignoring the problem.

The summit was not the "fiasco" that some environmentalists called it. As Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, put it Friday, the negotiations were "more complex than those that spawned today's international trade rules, and that process took more than 10 years. So it should come as no surprise if the approximately 180 governments attending the summit do not agree on every issue in this round."



This comment originally appeared as an editorial in the Los Angeles Times.

TITLE: What Other Papers Are Saying
AUTHOR: by Ali Nassor
TEXT: Northwestern financial heavyweights had to undergo a five-hour refresher course organized by the region's super governor this week, to learn to Think in New Ways (financially) in exchange for political favors and freedom from harassment. Meanwhile, two of the oligarchs who wrote the book on making deals with the government are still reported missing.




Talking Shop


The Northwest's governor general, Viktor Cherkesov, gathered the cream of the region's industrialists to honor them with the rare title of honest and regular taxpayers - that's why they were invited - reports Smena. This narrowed the field down a bit, to 15 enterprises out of the more than 100 candidates from 11 regions who had yearned to meet the real power in the area, says the paper.


Having passed serious scrutiny by the tax authorities and being given a clean bill of health, the heavyweights met the governor general in his temporary home, the Tavrichesky Palace.

Baltika Brewery was there as an obvious candidate for the official tete-a-tete by virtue of its leading role in quenching the thirsts of the growing number of beer lovers in Russia, says the paper.



Rich in Debt


Lenenergo is a less obvious choice for Smena, given its habit of late of causing power blackouts in hundreds of (mostly state-owned) organizations for not paying off debts to the energy supplier. 

But Peterburgsky Chas Pik seeks an answer to that conundrum by quoting Cherkesov's talking head, Yevgeny Makarov, who defended Lenenergo's participation. Makarov reportedly said that although Lenenergo itself owes a fair bit of money, its leading role as a source of energy throughout the entire Northwest should be respected.


In any case, Kommersant sees the meeting as yet another stage in the government's policy of "vertical power," although everyone came out of the talks wearing smiles for the cameras, saying that they should do it more often.



Taken the Hint


On the other hand, says Kommersant, these are people who have seen for themselves exactly what President Vladimir Putin does with businessmen who get too big for their boots. Chas Pik, however, says that "oligarch" is too strong a term for the industrialists. The paper again quotes Cherkesov's man as saying that the businessmen are merely highly respected personalities in the regions.


The papers cound not differ more, in fact: While Chas Pik hails Cherkesov's decision to create an advisory business board so that his office is in constant contact with the Northwest's entrepreneurs, Kommersant is of the opinion that it's all the beginning of a crackdown on big business.


Copy Cats


The latter news organ asks its readers to recall events in late July, when Putin met with the nation's oligarchs to promise them a paradise of commercial liberty.


A consulting board similar to the Cherkesov variety was also created in Moscow once upon a time, a fact that so impressed the capital's businessmen they began to see him as the guarantor of their activities - not realizing that this was precisely the opposite of what Putin had in mind: raids, arrests and seizures of documents galore.

Cherkesov's meeting with the entrepreneurs, says Kommersant, will soon be emulated by governors general in other regions. Watch this space.



The Trotsky Factor


Talking of those Muscovite entrepreneurs, Vlast wonders if Russia has not lost two of its all-time leading businessmen forever, now that Boris Be rezovsky and Media-MOST's Vla di mir Gusinsky have gone into what looks like self-imposed exile.


While Vlast is of two minds on the fate of the missing oligarchs, Vladimir Zhirinovsky tells the magazine that he knows what will happen.

The leader of the Liberal Democratic Party is quoted as saying that we are witnessing a rerun of the Lev Trotsky scenario, and that Berezovsky and Gusinsky will end up victims of Russia's security services while they are abroad.

TITLE: INSIDE RUSSIA
TEXT: Easy Tips for Financing a Run for Office 


RUSSIA is a continuous stream of gubernatorial elections. Against the background of what is happening in the United States, these elections show the advantages of the Russian system, in which one can usually determine the winner by the day of the voting and - often - quite a bit earlier than that.


According to campaign experts, a candidate for governor in Russia must spend, on average, about $1 per vote. Officially, of course, they are not allowed to spend this much. Although the rules vary from region to region, on average candidates are allowed to spend about 300,000 to 400,000 rubles.

It is obvious that this amount is adequate only to mount a campaign in one or two villages. Therefore, in addition to official money, there is "black money" as well. Black money consists of both "voluntary" and "involuntary" campaign contributions. Voluntary contributions are made by an entrepreneur who wants the future governor to hand someone else's property over to him. Involuntary contributions are made to prevent the future governor from giving an entrepreneur's property to someone else.

As a result, the election of a new governor is inevitably accompanied by the local redistribution of property. For instance, when Yury Tyazhlov was governor of the Moscow region, the government did its banking with Guta Bank. As soon as Boris Gromov became governor, police armed with machine guns appeared at the bank to close the accounts and transfer them to another bank. 

When Vitaly Mukha was governor in Novosibirsk, a company called Renova was empowered to manage one of the largest state enterprises in the region, the Novosibirsk Electrode Factory. As soon as Viktor Tolokonsky became governor, this authority was transferred to another company. 

In recent months, President Vladimir Putin has taken decisive measures to break these improper ties between the governors and big money. And the governors have begun to feel the heat.

Take the remarkable case of Perm. There, incumbent governor Gennady Igumnov flipped back and forth on the question of whether he would run for another term. He apparently felt that the Kremlin was dissatisfied with him when, just before the election, a criminal case was filed against his daughter. One political consultant told me that Igumnov tried for days to call Kremlin chief of staff Alexander Voloshin, but Voloshin refused to take his calls.

In the end, Igumnov called a press conference and announced that he would not seek another term. Within an hour, Voloshin called and thereafter, Igumnov announced that he would run after all. 

According to other experts with whom I have spoken, a new means of financing gubernatorial campaigns has emerged in connection with Moscow's drive to reassert control over the regions. The Kremlin administration now has a special office of regional affairs. This office, they say, will call a governor and say: "We'll support you if you hire such-and-such a PR company." The happy governor lets everyone know that he has the support of the Kremlin, and the donations start flowing into the PR company running the campaign. The PR company somehow manages to express its gratitude to the proper bureaucrats in the Kremlin. 

Putin's campaign to control the regions has lifted Russian democracy to a new level. I doubt the United States will ever be able to catch up now.


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

TITLE: EDITORIAL
TEXT: Can This Be The Road to Democracy? 


DESPITE innumerable official assurances that Russia is striving to become a democracy, it all too often seems that the country is running full speed in exactly the opposite direction. This impression was reinforced this week by a series of government actions designed to deny the Russian people the ability to express their will and participate actively in government.


Most vividly, the Central Elections Commission on Wednesday declared invalid more than 600,000 signatures of the 2.5 million gathered by environmentalists to force a referendum on importing spent nuclear fuel. This was particularly shocking because when the signatures were checked by the local elections commission in St. Petersburg, where many of them were gathered, less than 1 percent were rejected.

The result: In all likelihood, the referendum will not be held, and the Nuclear Power Ministry will be able to force through this patently unpopular measure.

At the same time, the State Duma gave preliminary approval to a Kremlin-backed measure that would enable many regional governors to seek a third term in office. The bill, which uses a technicality to slip around a 1999 law explicitly limiting governors to two terms, is intended to enable a number of pro-Kremlin governors, particularly Tatarstan President Mintimer Shaimiyev, to hang on to their posts and perks for another five years.

While protecting its friends, the Kremlin is also sparing no effort to eliminate its enemies. In October, Kursk Gov. Alexander Rutskoi was struck from the ballot on the eve of the election there. On Thursday, the newspaper Kommersant reported that Vyacheslav Kislitsyn, president of the republic of Marii-El, will be the next victim. While it is hard to be sympathetic to either Rutskoi or Kislitsyn - both administrations have featured equal measures of incompetence and corruption - we are alarmed at the Kremlin's arrogant assumption of the right to pick and choose who can run for governor.

Still more disturbing than these case-by-case violations of democratic principles are the changes that the CEC proposed this week to the laws governing political parties. If the proposals are adopted, only organizations with more than 10,000 total members and at least 100 members in at least one-half of Russia's 89 federal regions would qualify to put forward candidates. As things now stand, only the Communist Party and the pro-Kremlin Unity party would be likely to qualify. The proposals would certainly spell the end of any pretense of grassroots democratic participation.

In the headlong drive to establish central control, the Russian people are being pushed out of the political process. Seems like a strange way to build a democracy.

TITLE: Russia Must See AIDS as Issue of National Security
AUTHOR: By Kester Klomegah
TEXT: ALMOST 20 years have passed since AIDS was first identified. Since then, almost 14 million people worldwide have died from the disease. A further 33 million are believed to be living with HIV. Life expectancy in some African countries has fallen by 20 years as a result of AIDS. In Zimbabwe, for instance, life expectancy has fallen from 65 years to 43 - less than it was at the beginning of the 20th century. In South Africa, there are estimated to be 1,500 new infections daily, and in India 4 million people, almost one in 100 adults, are HIV-positive. A recent UN report on AIDS in Africa noted that the cost of treating victims, the loss of workers to the disease and subsequent restrictions on outside investment will restrict economic growth on the continent for decades ahead.


And now, it appears such a crisis is looming for Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In Russia, the growth in the number of HIV carriers has also been alarming. In 1998, there were 15,569 officially registered cases. This month, Deputy Health Minister Gennady Onishchenko reported that the number had risen to more than 70,000. However, the actual number of cases is estimated to be between 300,000 and 400,000. 

Earlier this year, the government declared AIDS an "epidemic," and in September, a United Nations representative in Moscow, Philippe Elghouayel, said that Russia now has the highest HIV infection rate in the world. If current trends continue - and without concerted action, they certainly will - Russia will begin the new century crippled by the overwhelming social and economic costs of one of the world's worst AIDS epidemics. 

The solution to Russia's AIDS crisis involves more than just money, although the amount of resources currently devoted to meeting this challenge is ludicrously inadequate. The government's anti-AIDS program which was designed more than four years ago only began receiving funding last year. This year, it received just $1.5 million, or 20 percent of the amount budgeted.

Just as important as the amount spent is the way that it is spent. The solution to the AIDS crisis lies in honestly confronting many of society's most vexing problems - drug use, prostitution, teenage sex and others. "We are living through a severe crisis of traditional values and a mistaken acceptance of a new culture that is influencing the younger generation," says Dr. Irina Savchenko, a leading AIDS researcher. "Social circumstances are extremely unstable, and economic hardships are also taking their toll. ... [Y]oung men, especially, are psychologically open to the idea of taking drugs."

The transmission of HIV in Russia is closely linked to the use of recreational drugs. Russian officials estimate that about 90 percent of HIV cases involve drug users, but that it is spreading rapidly through sexual contact. Widespread unemployment, poverty and a sudden relaxation of social and legal taboos - coupled with an influx of illegal drugs - has led to a rapid rise in the number of intravenous drug users, a rise closely shadowed by a sharp increase in the number of Russians who have contracted HIV. 

Vladimir Yegorov, the leading drug expert at the Health Ministry, estimates there are nearly 1 million drug addicts nationwide; others believe about another 5 million Russians engage in occasional drug use. In parallel with the rise in drug use, instances of HIV infection have also spread. Once concentrated in Moscow and St. Petersburg, HIV/AIDS has spread aggressively to cities like Kaliningrad, Kras no dar, Tver, Nizhny Novgorod, Irkutsk and Samara.

In the past, anti-AIDS programs have targeted women, especially prostitutes. There are estimated to be about 80,000 women engaged in prostitution in Moscow alone. However, focusing on women may be a mistaken approach. Among the general population, it is most often men who dictate whether sexual relations will take place and what kind of birth control will be used. As a result, there are more opportunities for them to contract and transmit the virus.

Russian male drug users are more likely than women to share needles, research shows. Of drug users who are already infected with HIV, 80 percent are men. Studies also show that Russian men - especially drug-takers - continue to resist the use of condoms and demonstrate a dangerously cavalier attitude toward sexually transmitted diseases. Although condoms are widely available nationally, a survey by condom manufacturers revealed that only ten percent of sexually active Russians use them regularly. Sociologists wonder whether young Russian men can change their widely held concepts of masculinity which presently lead them to act irresponsibly and to take unacceptable risks.

The authorities are aware of the extent to which injecting drugs facilitates the spread of HIV. But so far they appear unable either to reduce the number of individuals who take drugs or to limit the spread of the virus. Drug treatment programs, especially on the local level, are primitive and poorly funded. In many cases, the authorities seem more concerned with masking their local drug problems than with solving them. The government must change its attitudes toward drug-users, develop programs that encourage them to seek treatment and widely disseminate accurate information about the dangers of drug use - including the danger of HIV infection. Drug use must be handled through the medical system rather than through the judicial system.

It is not too late for Russia to head off the AIDS crisis that is now looming over the country. But doing so will require, most of all, the active leadership of the authorities at all levels. The AIDS epidemic must be treated as a national security crisis of the highest order.


Kester Klomegah is an independent researcher and writer, whose recent work on HIV/AIDS in Russia appeared in a book entitled "AIDS and Men: Taking Risks or Taking Responsibility?" He contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.

TITLE: russian museum hopes to bring malevich to the masses
AUTHOR: by Galina Stolyarova
TEXT: This artist is a legend, but a legend unexplored by the masses. 


Though Soviet censorship restrictions are long gone, and his artistry is availiable for all to see, Kazimir Malevich - one of the key figures of 20th century visual art - still remains no more and no less than the author of "Black Square" to many Russians. And it wouldn't be true to say all of them would like to know more.

It is an open secret that Russian audiences - in the majority - still tend to favor 19th century art, with contemporary trends remaining alien. Stereotypes and shortsightedness in perceiving Russian art are yet to be overcome. But this is exactly what the State Russian Museum is trying to do, with two new exhibitions focusing on Malevich and his followers.

"Before Malevich, Russia dictated the fashion in music and literature, but with this artist's genius, the country also heralded new ways in visual art," said Vla dimir Gusev, director of the State Russian Museum.

The curators of "Malevich at the Russian Museum," which opened Thurs day in the museum's Benois Wing, deliberately decided to rely entirely on the museum's own resources, as it boasts the world's greatest collection of Malevich art. Arranged chronologically, the exhibition traces Malevich's development from his early light-blue tone oil paintings visibly inspired by impressionism to futuristic pieces to his famous suprematist works.

A particular hall juxtaposes "Black Square" (1924 version) with "Black Circle" and "Black Cross," created for an exhibition in Venice during the same period. Crowning the exhibition are post-suprematist paintings, and more specifically works comprising the so-called "second peasant cycle" heralding a tense and tragic note.

"In Malevich's Circle," hosted at the Marble Palace, introduces the audiences to Russian followers of Malevich, with 600 works put together not only from the Russian Museum but also from the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and a number of private collections.

"Russia has long been a country with closed borders, and so until the mid-80's the avant-garde was not just unknown to general [Russian] audiences, it was simply forbidden," said Yevgenia Petrova, deputy director of the Russian museum.

Names [so famous in Western countries] like Mark Chagall, Vassily Kan din sky, Kazimir Malevich and other avant-garde elite didn't mean anything to the Russian public until the perestroika era.

"The Artists in Kazimir Malevich's circle remain relatively unknown to the majority of Russians," Petrova said.

Now the times are over when Moscow bureaucrats decide which exhibitions to organize and which artists to suppress, and Gusev admits he faces the difficult task of breaking stereotypes which have been inculcated both in Russia and abroad. "Museum curators, art historians and critics were deprived of power, without much chance to influence decision-making in their own field and let new, original ideas find their way to viewers."

The fate of Malevich's works is particularly dramatic as the Russian Museum, which received the lion's share of its current selection of the artist's works from his family after he died in 1935, became a virtual tomb for his paintings and drawings when Malevich was declared ideologically alien to Soviet culture. Museum officials were forced to hide avant-garde art every time they were expecting a inspection visit from the Communist Party culture bosses.

Owner of the world's largest collection of Malevich, with over 100 paintings and about 40 graphic works, the Russian Museum has reservations as to whether the collection can grow further. "A suprematist work by Malevich was sold for $19 million at a recent auction," Petrova said. "Needless to say, we can't afford a purchase of this kind."

But the museum's finances aside, viewing these two magnificent projects can hardly leave even the most nagging critic wanting any more.



"Malevich at The Russian Museum" can be seen until mid-February. "In Malevich's Circle" is open until March. See listings for details

TITLE: 'creative translators' bridge the culture gap
AUTHOR: by Natasha Shirokova
TEXT: While Russian ballet, opera and symphonic music are well known all over the world, contemporary Russian drama and cinema are still terra incognita for most foreign audiences. The St. Petersburg theater studio "Russian Drama" thus consider it one of their tasks to present the variety of theater and cinema with simultaneous English translation for foreign viewers. "The attraction of this program," says local art critic Lev Gitelman, "is that they put stress on contemporary Russian theater, cinema and music. They want to find new ways of developing it."


The authors of the project Galina Perveyeva and Tatiana Balandina are beginners, but "enthusiastic, honest and full of energy" according to Lev Gitelman, who supports the new company. Both started their entrepreneureal careers at Alexander Mamontov's international film festival "Festival of Festivals," and later started their own business.

"They don't have a cast of their own or a film crew at the moment," explains Gitelman. "Their idea is to organise this process of cultural exchange, to promote noticable theater and cinema phenomenona. There is still certain isolation in the field of theater art. As for contemporary cinema, the situation is nearly the same. Ideally in the future, there will be a cultural center, where you can watch the best shows in your native language."

The cinema part of the project is aleady in full swing, and the shows are held at Fish Fabrique on Fridays and Saturdays. The preferance is given to "art house" and experimental films. Among them are Oleg Kovalev's "Sergey Eisenstein. Mexican Fantasy," which shows Eisenstein's work in Mexico in 1940's. The director restored what was left of Eisenstein's film about Mexico and included it into his own work, making a unique documentary film. The present repertoire of the "Russian Studio" includes a selection of Alexey Balabanov's movies, from the black and white "Of Freaks and Men," to his mainstream hits "Brat" and " Brat-2."

The translation at these shows is done by "creative" interpreters and can be heard over headsets.

The theater section of "Russian Drama" also seems promising. The recent "Golden Mask" festival, including a section which presented the best Russian productions to foreign audiences with simalteneous English translation, proved that there is great interest in contemporary theater, and gathered full houses every night.

At the present time performances will be presented at the theaters where the production were originally staged, like the upcoming "Wolves and Sheeps" and "Uncle Vanya" by Mikhail Levshin at the "Komedianty" theater at 44 Ligovsky Prospect. The renowned "Priyut Komedianta" theater has also joined the project already.

The "Russian Drama" program will involve not only celebrated productions, but also the works of young actors and directors. Productions by students of director Grigory Kozlov have formed the repertoire of the newly formed state theater. With productions previously hidden away at the Academy of Theater Arts being shown at Fish Fabrique this month, the project promises to become an interesting event for both professional theater people and the general public.



For more information see the listings or call "Russian Drama" at 167-08-27.

TITLE: sound ways fest enlivens staid music scene
AUTHOR: by Giulara Sadykh-zade
TEXT: St. Petersburg, however much a musical city, is not too advanced in the sphere of contemporary music. Depressing festivals with questionable music and unreliable, second-rate composers do not improve the situation. Academicism, traditionally dominating all forms of creative expression, has left only minuscule room for experimentation.


Composers' studies usually take place in the House of Composers - as part of the yearly "Zvukoviye Puti" (Sound Ways) festival of New Music, which organized many musical seminars.

At the seminars, those who are interested can familiarize themselves with the work of well-known composers, attend lectures and presentations about new music and take part in master classes.

During the evenings at the famous Monferrant residence, new acoustic effects and timbric refinements strangely contradicted the decor - marble, ornate wooden inlays - entering into an unhurried dialogue with the architecture, throwing sounds and reverberations out into even the most secluded of corners, niches and hollows.

The opening and closing concerts of the festival usually take place - presumably to ensure creativity - in the Small Hall of the Philharmonic. Thus it was again this time, with an opening presentation of an earlier- performed work by Alexander Radvilovich, followed by Alexander Popov, artistic director and organizer of the festival, who in recent years has assured himself a place among the first-rate elite of Petersburg composers. This performance was followed by that of constant guests of the "Zvukoviye Puti" Festival, Klaus-Heinrich Stamer, and the relatively young, but extraordinarily productive composer, Leonid Rezetdinov.

The concert began symbolically, with Charles Ives' "Sound Ways No. 3," which gave the festival its name.

Numerous works were performed by the solo ensemble of the Mariinsky Theater under the direction of Leonid Korchmar. This is not to say that the ensemble rose to the challenge with particular honor, although admittedly it was possible to discern all the general contours and the composer's intention. 

Radvilovich's "Pushkin" chamber symphony in five epigraphs was pleasing in its conciseness, the transparency of its textured layers and its lively mix of moods. It was somewhat drowned by the verbosity of Rezetdinov, however: his Small Instrumental Mass being a typical example of graphomania, when the congestion of notes engender absolutely no musical sense.

Three elegant bagatelles of Stamer delicately alluded to Stravinsky's neoclassicism. However, the most brilliant work of the evening turned out to be Alexander Popov's chamber symphony, dedicated to the memory of Girolamo Frescobaldi. The singer Nelly Lee gave a solo, her brilliant voice - refined in the '80s and '90s - having lost the greater part of its earlier qualities.

A day later, Popov's music was already being heard in the House of Composers, the entire session being given over to his works while the composer himself was at the piano. He successfully demonstrated outstanding virtuosity, played his fifth piano sonata, full of romantic allusions and references from Beethoven's appassionata to the revolutionary etudes of Chopin. In the same concert Postludium for Viola and Piano was performed (with a solo by Kirill Bychkov) and also the early cycle "8 Khokku," delineated in a refined pointiliste manner.

However, Popov was not the only composer to have an entire session devoted to him during the eight-day festival. This year, going down the path of integrating composers appearing in the festival, Radvilovich organized a program consisting of a series of artistic portraits: Sergei Slonimsky, Edison Denisov, Klaus-Heinrich Schtamper, Luciano Berio, Leonid Rezetdinov, Moritz Eggert and Arvo Part.

Of particular interest were the two last portraits. Moritz Eggert, the pianist, composer and winner of numerous prestigious prizes, was able to attend the festival thanks to the Goethe Institute, who gave generous support to the festival.

Eggert, an impulsive, fun-loving German with an obviously Gallic temperament, gave a piano evening at the Cappella, and it is safe to say that within the dour walls of such a traditional establishment, such a witty and untethered performance has never been seen before.

The real performance began in the second half, when Eggert began to perform his own music. Minimalism, conceptualism and active art, mixed into an unusual cocktail of pieces, noise, bangs and piano timbres, giving rise to a brand new style: "Piano a la Eggert."

The apotheosis of the performance was sixty songs, each lasting just a second, each supplied with eloquent titles, such as "Sunset," "Daybreak," "God loves the Trinity," etc. The funniest thing was that the musical outlines of the songs related to their corresponding titles with impressive accuracy, an almost literal translation of the verbal into the non-verbal. 

The festival wound up with a concert by Estonian composer Arvo Part, honoring his 65th birthday. Part has lived in Germany since 1980, where he has experimented with his own system of composition, tending toward minimalism. This exceptionally religious man (he is rumored to have a private chapel in his house) has recently been writing only religious music, chiefly based on canonical Russian Orthodox texts.

At his concert in the Philharmonic's Small Hall, his choral works from the past few years were performed by the Youth Chamber Choir, under the direction of Yulia Khutoretskaya: "The Woman with the Alabaster Box," Magnificat, seven Antiphons, two Slavonic psalms and fragments from his enormous 110-minute composition, The Repentance Canon, written entirely in D minor. Following the traditions of Orthodox Church music and its strict diatonicism and simple harmonies, with hovering pauses, antiphonic exchanges, and mirrored reflections of theme, the Canon is full of meditative harmony. 

On the whole, the Twelfth "Zvu ko vye Puti" Festival of New Music turned out to be very involving indeed. A seething panorama of St. Petersburg's composers against a wide international background has witnessed that not everything is rotten in the State of Denmark. Among the many Russian and international performers taking part in the festival, it was still possible to find a few examples of works that will surely become a part of the history of music.

TITLE: best-looking bistro in the city
AUTHOR: by Simon Patterson
TEXT: The proliferation of 24-hour bistro-style Russian food joints around town should soon be enough to put McDonald's out of business. The bistro known as "U Tyoshi na Blinakh" which opened earlier this year is a case in point: cheap, friendly and tasty, the service is no slower, and the food is certainly a lot better for you than anything that you will experience at the Golden Arches.


With a "rustic Russia" theme predominating, the place nevertheless features plastic trays on which you collect your meal, and a counter at which you order your food in true cafeteria fashion. 

The staff are dressed in "peasant-style" sackcloth costumes, but still manage to look good - in fact, they are probably some of the most attractive cafe workers you will ever see, both male and female, so if you find the interiors are not to your taste, you can simply gaze at them. They don't seem to mind.

As you might expect from the name, bliny are featured large on the menu, with a variety of fillings going for about 20 rubles each. I had two with ham and cheese, and took a beef zharkoe (63 rubles). Zharkoe is more or less just a meat and potato stew, but on cold, or worse, wet winter days there is nothing more one could want to warm up. The meat was tender and, unlike some experiences I've had with this dish in the past, did not have any unpleasant after-effects. It seems they keep their kitchen clean, unlike many other such establishments. 

My lunching companion took a selyodka pod shuboy salad comprised of herring and beetroot, a fairly safe choice, and in the solid Russian salad department there is also no faulting this place. 

You also get your salad weighed, which is fun, and pay for it by the gram (about 20 kopecks per gram) - the salad came to 30 rubles, so you'll have to work that one out. My companion also took a couple of bliny, one with "meat" and one with chicken. There are a variety of toppings for the blini, as well, from jam to sour cream, although they are perfectly delicious on their own.

Other items that have appeared recently on the menu are the stuffed peppers (a bit overpriced at 60 rubles) and the khmelnoi myod, or mead (35 rubles). We both opted for this as the beverage of choice, expecting a pleasant drink that would warm us up, but it seems the khmelnoi (alcoholic) aspect of this drink is played to the full. 

It seems to be at least as strong as the deadliest beer in the Baltika repertoire, the infamous No. 9 "strong" beer, and so we found drinking a half-liter to be quite a challenge, and certainly not conducive to achieving anything much for the rest of the day. 

So perhaps you'd be better off sticking to the mors or the kvas, authentic Russian drinks that won't knock you out. 



U Tyoshi na Blinakh, 18 Zagorodny Prospect. M: Dostoyevskaya/Vladi mir skaya. Open daily, 24 hours. No credit cards, and absolutley no need to book a table. Lunch for two with an unexpectedly large dose of alcohol, 230 rubles.

TITLE: arnie gets cloned in another total recall ripoff
AUTHOR: by Kirill Galetski
TEXT: Although cloning is not all that new a subject in films, it has never been adequately mined as a theme. The new Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle "The 6th Day," now playing at local theaters, uses cloning as a mere superficial plot device, giving a slightly novel twist to what is essentially a standard B-actioner masquerading as a topical sci-fi film. 


The film is itself a clone, echoing director Paul Verhoeven's "Total Recall" in a number of ways, from its concepts of recording memory right down to Arnie's ride in an automated taxi.

Set in the near future, with the dire prognostication "Sooner Than You Think," the film offers a look at human society comfortable with making exact genetic copies of ailing pets but living in fear at the very real possibility of cloning anything remotely human. After a failed experiment sometime in the past, fully cloning humans has been outlawed.

Schwarzenegger plays family man Adam Gibson, a helicopter pilot who returns home one day to find a man who looks exactly like him celebrating his daughter's birthday. 

He is instantly hunted by a motley gang of hired guns, most of whom look like refugees from your local alternative dance club. Prolific B-movie actor Michael Rooker plays the zealous, trench-coat wearing, square-jawed leader of the crew. 

The twist here is that every time Arnold kills one of this bunch, he (or she in one case) is cloned, memory is restored with the aid of CD-ROMs, and continues to hunt Arnold. 

Duped into signing a phony flight contract by some corporate suits, Gibson's friend Hank (Michael Rapaport) is killed. Gibson then traces various links to a sinister corporation where ostensibly donor organs are grown using cloning techniques, but where the upscale high-tech nerd Michael Drucker (Tony Godlwyn) is plotting to take over the world with the aid of clones.

Cloning is seen as a subject of controversy in a straightforward, simplistic way in the film, as liberals protest the growth of human spare parts through cloning, while the rich folk (who presumably can afford good quality health care) line up at $1,000 a head dinners to support the effort. 

A renegade scientist, Dr. Griffin Weir (Robert Duvall) tires and quits, heartbroken by the pleas of his ailing wife to quit bringing her back through cloning. She implores him to let her die a natural death. 

The latter sequence is the only point where the film slows down slightly and becomes a tad thoughtful, and actually begins to look as if it will say something halfway important about the possibility of cloning, only to lose the thought and turn back to the mayhem instead.

Director Roger Spottiswoode, whose last effort was the over-the-top James Bond film "Tomorrow Never Dies," keeps things moving at a frenetic pace, creating scenes which competently mix action with state-of-the-art special effects. The film is long on fury and visuals, but short on story and character development. 

It delivers the goods in the action department, and Arnie even gets to deliver a couple of the trademark one-liners audiences love him for, but everything else about the film is pretty wooden. 

Arnie's wife and child are cardboard, and it is hard to actually identify with him trying to save them. Spottiswoode really does not seem to be at home in the sci-fi genre, and many sequences seem somehow lackluster, despite being technically well produced. 

The film degenerates into the standard everyman-against-mad-scientist-playing-god brouhaha pretty quickly. Essentially, it is just another twin movie, and not even one that is all that great.

Many an action star has come to a point in their career when they make a twin film - Jackie Chan with "Twin Dragons," Jean-Claude Van Damme with "Double Impact." 

Here, however, the possibilities for interaction between identical twins, or in this case clones, are left unexplored. When Schwarze negger finally does meet his double, the scene is anti-climactic, and it is never shown or explained how he was able to convince his double to team up with him against the bad guys.

It can be said that Schwarzenegger is a better actor than he was fifteen years ago. His new family man image in the film mirrors his current life, but the transitions from doting daddy to bone crushing behemoth in other parts of the film are somewhat jarring and inconsistent. 

Still, here Arnie is more human, slightly more expressive and mellowed with age. He does more for the film than the film does for him.



"The 6th Day" is currently playing at the Barrikada and Crystal Palace cinemas. See listings for screening times and addresses.

TITLE: tuxedomoon: has-beens dupe 'tolerant' russian audience
AUTHOR: by Sergey Chernov
TEXT: A "magic event" was how local promoters publicized Tuxedomoon's one-off Russian show which took place in St. Petersburg last Monday.


Enjoying cult status with local trendy youths of the 1980s and early 1990s, Tuxedomoon was expected to be a sell-out show with crowds of ticketless fans storming the 400-seat Estrada Theater desperate for an exclusive glimpse of their idols.

The promoters, obviously Tuxedomoon fans themselves, claimed half of the tickets were sold the day they were issued. 

The day arrived. Lights grew dim, we heard pre-recorded noises with voices speaking in German - and they were were. 

First enter Peter Principle (ne Dachert) playing a repetitive bass riff, then Blaine L. Reininger taking his stand at keyboards and, finally, Steven Brown blowing out a soft soprano saxophone solo - the sounds slowly combines to become a Tuxedomoon early hit, "No Tears."

Based on the band's old material - Tuxedomoon has no new material, as it admitted at the press conference - the concert was a mix of the electronic and acoustic, live and prerecorded, rehearsed and improvised as was the trend of the artistically minded bands at the beginning of the 1980s.

It is a well-know fact that David Bowie's influence on the flock was crucial, but Brown's voice was sometimes indecently similar to the Thin White Duke, which was somewhat irritating. 

"I'm depressed at the lack of diversity in their approach," admitted Tequilajazzz frontman Yevgeny Fyodorov, who moved into the bar after the first 30 minutes.

After Tuxedomoon split in 1989, the band members took up residence in different parts of the world; Brown lives in Mexico City, Principle in New York and Reininger in Athens. Now in their mid to late 40's they got together to "re-establish their reputation" - starting with the Italian tour last month.

Whatever promoters claimed before the show, the small venue - chosen for the low rent and better security facilities - turned out to be one third empty, which could have been ruinous for the promoters' budget, as the band now charges $6,000 for one show, $35 per person per day for the seven-member entourage, plus minimum four-star hotel accommodation and travel costs.

With tickets being forbidingly expensive at between 550 and 800 rubles, 14 poor fans were hanging out near the doors, repeatedly asking the manager to let them in for 100 rubles each. 25 minutes into the show they were let in (two fans who did not possess the sum went for 60 and 50 rubles, respectively).

The ticket-carrying viewers inside were evidently richer as they happily swept up 43 Tuxedomoon CDs costing 480 rubles a piece, plus a number of T-shirts and scarfs. As the public left the venue, quite a few faces were beaming with joy.

But, as one viewer noted, "You will definitely like a show if you pay $20 for a ticket."

Disappointingly, Tuxedomoon seems to be the first of the once-popular 1980s "new wave" bands to follow the hastily reformed 1970s Western hard-rock bands who paved their wave to this country, notorious for a less sophisticated and more tolerant public. Though about 10 years younger, Tuxedomoon is now hardly more relevant than Manfred Mann's Earthband, which played the city a week earlier.

TITLE: moskovsky prospect gets window on cuba
AUTHOR: by Tom Masters
TEXT: Aspiring travelers without a taste for authenticity can party the night away anywhere they like without ever leaving the center of St. Petersburg. Saigon, London, Manhattan, Rio, Liverpool and even Africa are all a short metro ride away, although generally the similarities tend to be in name only.


With temperatures plunging below zero last weekend, Havana still seemed like an attractive destination, and we headed to Mos kov sky Prospect with balmy memories of Cuban beaches and rum cocktails.

Latino theme clubs often suffer from management who seem unable to distinguish styrofoam cacti from a real atmosphere, but as Havana has both, the problem is largely avoided. We were impressed to find that Havana has a surprisingly high concentration of Latinos and thumping Hispanic beats. Even the Spanish band, Israi, who kept the crowd pleased mainly with "classics" such as "La Bamba" and Santana's "Maria Maria," occasionally came up with surprisingly authentic fare.

The fact that the first bar/dance floor you pass through instantly recalls a ghastly Mexican theme restaurant is by the by - Cuban credentials seem to be high here, with the full range of Havana Club Rum and Havana cigars available, although no decent rum cocktails, to our chagrin.

We asked for a round of mojitos, but the barmaid looked at us superciliously and told us that it wasn't a Japanese bar. Enlightened, we opted for rather un-Latino Bochkarev instead, and proceeded through to the second and third dance floors, where the Latino theme strangely vanishes.

In fact, the rest of the club is far better in terms of design, although hardly distinguishable from any other trendy new club in the city. These floors are Russian pop and house all the way with an up-for-it, young crowd and a comfortable chill-out area with leather chairs and candles.

A restaurant (for some reason spread out over the more authentic Latino dance floor, so that drunken couples attempting salsa continuously flail about the bemused diners) and a pleasantly relaxed pool room complete the smart set-up.

The first dance floor is the one we spent most of our time on, and we all agreed that the place was far more friendly than its rather forbidding entrance suggests. Indeed, the doorman warned us that if we were wearing "sports clothes" we would not be admitted, although people inside seemed to be wearing Nike, Adidas and the like with impunity.

For 75 rubles entry, expect a night of friendly people and dirty tango (and free popcorn for all - we weren't complaining). And for those who can prove you have real Latino blood in their veins, you get in free on Wednesdays.




See guide for times and addresses.

TITLE: sex, drugs, shopping comes to doll theater
AUTHOR: by Galina Stolyarova
TEXT: Offering a sight that has forced theatrical critics to resort to euphemisms and look for mollifying metaphors will be the St. Petersburg Doll Theater (10 Ul. Nekrasova) theater this Saturday and Sunday.


The show the venue is going to treat us with is a touring production - Olga Subbotina's take on Mark Ravenhill's internationally famed "Shopping&Fucking," brought to the city by the Priyut Komedianta theater, with support from the British Council.

Ravenhill's 1996 piece - the first in his career as playwright- premiered the same year in London under direction of Max Stafford-Clark to win rave reviews. Since that time, Ravenhill has produced another four successful plays, while "S&F" has toured all over the planet, enjoying interpretations in places as culturally and georgaphically disparate as Norway and Brazil.

Russians couldn't resist the story juxtaposing violence, endless drug use and sex with moral rhetoric. Subbotina's powerful and sweeping production - focusing on Mark's desperate attempts to escape from a vicious circle of narcotics and love triangle with his roommates Robbie, who is hopelessly in love with Mark and Lulu who tries to manipulate Robbie - first saw the Russian stage in October 1999 in Moscow's Center for Drama and Production, and received the highest critical acclaim.

The five characters in the play live in virtual world trying to escape from the harsh realities they find themselves in. Mark hides behind dark glasses - not only from the unfriendly environment but also from himself. But the rest of the characters also suffer from dependancy, either psychological and emotional or physical. While Mark likes to pay for sex, Robbie pretends he can survive without Mark. And all the characters are battling for freedom.

Cast in the production are young Mos cow actors from the "Russian House" theater Alexei Zyev (Mark), who performed Horatio in Peter Stein's rendition of 'Hamlet," Viktoria Tolstoganova (Lulu), Artyon Smola (Robbie), Viktor Bertye (Bryan) and Andrei Kuzichev (Gary).

Subbotina's own worklist mentions nothing but her being assistant director to Peter Stein in his production of "Hamlet" - apart from participating in several theater festivals. 

Still, Subbotina's version of "Shopping&Fucking" proved so powerful it instantly made her name. The production had its first showing in St. Petersburg last December at the "Priyut Komedianta" theater.

Interepreter Alexander Rodionov made the desicion of not translating most of the wild expressions, making the fair assumption that words such as the production has in its title have already become a part of Russian youth lexicon.

While Ravenhill's piece bursts with razor-edge pain with a touch of hopelessness and despair, Subbotina offers a milder, even encouraging interpretation which still provides much comic relief. The ending, with Lulu appearing in Irina Prozorova's monologue from Anton Chekhov's "Three Sisters," brings in a more subtle note. All in all, the main characters seem to finally break out from abnormality and achieve some kind of long-lost inner harmony.



See listings for details

TITLE: hermitage opens in london to dazzle locals
AUTHOR: by Nicholas Brautlecht
TEXT: "On entering the Hermitage, the title and rank must be put off, as well as the hat and sword," wrote the Russian empress Catherine the Great in the late 18th century, setting up ten rules to be observed by visitors of Russia's greatest museum. Whoever failed to obey by her rules was not to be welcomed to the galleries again. Now, over 200 years later, Catherine's regulations are not only valid in the Hermitage's spacious galleries, but since last weekend the Tsarina's surprisingly modern ten-point code of conduct has been extended into the realms of the British Queen.


The State Hermitage Museum has lent more than 500 paintings, jewels and other artworks from its collection to the Hermitage Rooms at Somerset House in London. The inaugural exhibition is entirely devoted to Catherine the Great, who is regarded as the founder of the Hermitage Museum and whose treasures still dominate the Hermitage's collection today.

During her reign from 1762 to 1796, she picked up over 4,000 Old Masters, 16,000 antique coins and medals, 10,000 engraved gems and at least 38,000 books, including Voltaire's library. It made her one of the greatest and certainly the most extravagant art collectors of all time.

Lasting until September next year, the "Treasures of Catherine the Great" is the first show in a series of loans from the Hermitage and the display is dazzling. Gold and gem snuffboxes, silver, porcelain and portraits of herself, her lovers and legitimate and illegitimate children as well as her silver thread wig are evidence of Catherine's enormous, unbounded passion for the arts and show her to be one of the world's greatest shoppers.

Upon entering the first of the five galleries, one unexpectedly gets to glance out of a window of St. Petersburg's General Staff Building. A real- time image displays the "real" Hermitage through a camera looking across Palace Square. In the same gallery, computer screens allow visitors to explore the Hermitage Web site, on which 3,000 items from the Hermitage collection can be called up.

But not only high- tech installations make the visitors feel that they stroll along the Hermitage, also the interior of the London Rooms much resemble the splendor of its great sister. Located on the Thames, Somerset House's elegant Georgian rooms, originally designed by Sir William Chambers as the first purpose-built civil service offices, have been decorated in the Winter Palace's imperial style with door handles, chandeliers, curtain and ceilings all copied from the Hermitage. Russian craftsmen were flown in during the last five months of preparations to lay matching parquetry floors.

A formidable painting dominates the second and largest gallery. 220 years after Catherine the Great provoked furor in Britain by sweeping Nicolas Poussin's "Moses Striking the Rock" away to Russia, the large canvas is the first of a series of "visiting masterpieces" that change every three months. Catherine bought the painting along with an Old Master's collection that might have formed the basis of a British national gallery from the grandson of Britain's first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole.

The Empress' connection to Britain was furthermore strengthened through her obsession for engraved gems and cameos. She commissioned ingenious glass copies of gems from James Tassie in London. Some 40 items of the nearly 32,000 Tassies that arrived in Russia in satinwood cases, are on show at London Rooms, including a Medusa with wild snake-filled hair.

"There has been active debate on what to include in the next exhibition in ten months," says Geraldine Norman, director of the Hermitage Development Trust, a UK charity set up in 1999, providing a British Fundraising base for the State Hermitage Museum. However, in 2003, the year of St. Petersburg's 300th anniversary, the Hermitage Rooms will be devoted to the founder of the northern Russian capital, Peter the Great.

Beside all the splendor of London's new attraction, the Hermitage Rooms represent a desperate source of hard currency for the Hermitage. Backed by private and corporate sponsorship, including Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Yukos Oil, the $2.9 million project enables the Hermitage to show off parts of its entire collection that the museum is not able to display in its 10 kilometers of galleries at home. Profits from the museum's shop and a part of the visitor admissions go directly to the Hermitage.

According to Mikhail Piotrovksy, Director of the State Hermitage Museum, the money is then spent on restoring the Hermitage buildings. Piotrovsky says that $1 million is needed annually to restore the facades of the museum alone. "One thing we have learned after the fall of communism is that the government will never give us enough money," he said.

The Hermitage could not have found a better partner than Somerset House. Beside the fact that the Hermitage has been granted the galleries rent-free, William Chamber's grandiose 18th-century building has a lot else to offer. After years of being (mis)used by the Inland Revenues Legal Department, the Family Courts Division and other governmental branches, the palace building at the Thames has been refurbished into a brilliant monument for everyone. In the summer, crowds flock to the courtyard for festivals and the palatial terrace cafe gives Hermitage Room visitors an opportunity for tea and snacks. But always remember the rules: "Eat slowly and with appetite; drink with moderation, that each may walk steadily as he goes out (Article IX)." Otherwise, Catherine won't welcome you again.



"Treasures of Catherine the Great" runs at the Hermitage Rooms in Somerset House, London until September 2001. 

Web site:. www.hermitagerooms.com

TITLE: kremlin's riches go on show in chicago
AUTHOR: by Stephen Kinzer
TEXT: An exhibition of sumptuous jewelry, gold and silver bowls, lavishly engraved icon covers and diamond-encrusted images of saints, now on display at the Field Museum in Chicago, is a testament to the skill of Russian decorative artists over the last 10 centuries. But on closer view, the show is more than that. It traces the rise and fall of a great empire and has as much to say about history as art.


The show contains 120 objects from the Moscow Kremlin Armory Palace, the repository for a huge collection of artistic treasures, souvenirs, ambassadors' gifts and elaborate trinkets accumulated by the tsars, their families and courtiers.

Artifacts in the Chicago show, which opened at the Houston Museum of Natural Science and will remain in Chicago, its last stop, through March 30, are displayed in roughly chronological order. The first two are magnificent gold ornaments from the region along the northern Black Sea coast. One is a flexible chain bracelet whose clasp depicts two serpents' heads. The other is a decorative collar that weighs over one kilogram. 

Many of the next artifacts in the show are religious, reflecting the spread of Orthodox Christianity during the tenth century. These artifacts became more elaborate and richer as time passed.

A golden reliquary shrine from the 11th century is about 15 centimeters high. Although it is a rich treasure that was obviously made with reverential care, it is impressive without being gaudy. It conveys a power and dignity that come from sheer beauty rather than ornamentation.

As Russian lands began to consolidate, their riches gave the tsars great power. These riches are reflected in two large dippers from the late 15th and early 16th centuries, each shaped from a single piece of gold. One belonged to Tsar Boris Godunov and the other was presented to Tsar Mikhail Feodorovich Romanov, founder of the ill-fated dynasty, by his mother. The first dipper is smaller, supremely tasteful and adorned only by engraving. The second is inlaid with ruby, sapphire, emerald and pearl. With the wisdom of hindsight, visitors to the show can see in it the beginning of the Romanovs' ever-growing passion not only for wealth but also for its display.

That passion becomes clearer as the show proceeds. A crown made for Tsar Ivan Alexeivich in 1682 contains several hundred diamonds above a sable trim. No fewer than 485 diamonds, some more than five carats in size, surround a portrait of Jesus on a ceremonial pendant, and, on the reverse, more than 100 diamonds and 135 rubies adorn an image of Our Lady of Vladimir.

This taste for ostentation reached positively baroque dimensions in later years. Objects in the show from the 19th and early 20th centuries include large platinum and gold pendants and brooches dripping with diamonds, emeralds and sapphires.

If the first part of the show depicts the noble beginnings of the Russian empire and the middle section its decline into blind narcissism, the final few objects show today's Russia in its search for direction.

Several of these last items are attempts to recapture imperial styles, among them diamond jewelry and a contemporary version of a Faberge egg crafted of gold and silver in 1993. Some might be categorized as kitsch. They reflect the search for stability in a disoriented country whose people have suffered incalculable hardships over the centuries but whose deeply rooted traditions, stirringly reflected in their earlier art treasures, give them hope for a future not just grand but also just.

TITLE: world arts
TEXT: bradbury dies


LONDON (Reuters) - Literary Britain paid homage on Tuesday to the late Sir Malcolm Bradbury, saying writers had lost a towering inspiration and readers a satirical master.


Bradbury died at the age of 68 after losing a fight against pneumonia.

A prolific author-academic, he will be remembered as much for nurturing new talent as producing books of his own.

It was 30 years ago that Bradbury broke ground by co-founding a creative writing course. Novelist Rose Tremain declared it was Britain's first - and "still the best." A roll call of unknowns became big names under the guiding hand of Bradbury: a "gentle giant" for whom writing was life itself.

"Like most comic novelists, I take the novel extremely seriously," Bradbury once said. "It is the best of all forms: open and personal, intelligent and inquiring. I value it for its skepticism, its irony and its play."

Bradbury's sixth novel "To The Hermitage'' was published just seven months ago, a fittingly elegiac book that reflects Bradbury's passion for ideas. But his best-known work dates back 25 years when "The History Man" provided a deliciously satirical window on the academic life that Bradbury so loved.

Another master of the campus comic novel, David Lodge, said he felt "quite an extraordinary sense of loss'' now his close friend and literary soulmate was gone. Bradbury was survived by his wife, radio dramatist Elizabeth Salt, and two sons.

Novelist Anita Brookner praised an "exceptional track record,'' while Britain's official Poet Laureate Andrew Motion said it was "utterly dismal" to lose somebody so big, so young.

"He was a man of immense charm, affability and kindness with no side to him," said Motion. "He had already given so much, yet he had so much more in him to give." 




sicilian sex show


ROME (AP) - A Sicilian television channel's satirical show featuring female strippers who kiss and fondle a male newsreader has proven so popular the station plans to broadcast an even racier version of the program. 


Despite condemnation from the clergy and alleged threats from the local mafia, station owner Sergio Petta said this week that he will go ahead with the new show next month. 

"News Pouts," with its dancing women who wear revealing lingerie and a newsreader who spoofs current events, is broadcast Friday nights by Video Golfo in Gela, a port city in southern Sicily. 

Several infuriated Roman Catholic priests have raged against the program, urging their parishioners not to tune in, Petta said. 

Petta says he is more concerned with mafia threats than what he calls "misguided lessons in morality."




pavarotti who?


PADUA, Italy (Reuters) - Luciano Pavarotti may be one of the most famous opera singers in the world but his rotund figure and perennially black beard were not enough to get him past reception in an Italian hotel. 


The tenor had booked a room in the northern town of Padua, where he was being presented with an international prize, but was turned away at the front desk because he did not have any identification. 

"I have been to some of the best hotels in the world and never has anyone shut the door in my face," said Pa va rotti, who trekked his way to another hotel. 

"Rules are the same for everyone," explained a duty manager at the Sheraton hotel. "Plenty of famous people come to stay here but even they have to have ID."




giotto's burial


ROME (AP) - Almost 700 years after Giotto's death, his remains can't rest in peace. That is, if they really are Giotto's remains. 


A scholarly war is raging over an anonymous skeleton found under Florence's Duomo Cathedral. One side says it is the man renowned as the father of European painting. The other says no. 

Despite the dispute, the city has decided to go ahead with a ceremonial burial on Jan. 8, the anniversary of Giot to's death. It had been put on hold after an American archeologist, Franklin Toker, said the bones weren't Giotto's 

"Let's not render honor to the bones of some fat butcher," he pleaded in a letter to Florence's Archbishop Silvano Piovanelli. 

Toker, a professor of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, took part in the excavations that unearthed the bones in the 1970s. He doesn't believe they are Giotto's 

On the other side of the debate are author Stefano Sieni and anthropologist Francesco Mallegni. They base their identification on an analysis of the skeleton. Reconstructing the face, they came up with a strong likeness to what may or may not be a Giotto self-portrait in a fresco. 

Sieni said "any face" might have emerged, but "Giotto's was the one that in fact did." 

Although he was famous in his lifetime, little is known about Giotto's life. Scholars think he died in Florence in 1337, probably at age 70. 

Giotto's masterpiece is a cycle of frescoes in Padua's Scrovegni Chapel, which contain a figure some scholars think is a self-portrait. Sieni's reconstruction resembles this figure. 

The problem is that no one knows for sure that it actually is a self-portrait. 

"This is just speculation, it is tourist literature," Toker said. Another scholar, Luciano Bellosi, said flatly that the figure "is not Giotto."



downey booked


LOS ANGELES (AP) - Robert Downey Jr. was back on the "Ally McBeal" TV production set with possible drug charges facing him after a weekend arrest, but resolved to keep fighting addiction, his publicist said. 


"He's concentrating on work and himself," spokesman Alan Nierob said this week. "He's a recovering addict. Recovering addicts have relapses. He's working hard at his sobriety as he has for the last 18 months." 

Downey was arrested Saturday in Palm Springs for investigation of drug possession, being under the influence of a controlled substance and committing a felony while free on bail. He is scheduled to be arraigned in a Riverside County court Dec. 27. 

An anonymous telephone caller sent police investigators to a room at the Merv Griffin's Resort Hotel and Given chy Spa where they allegedly found Downey with cocaine and methamphetamine. The 35-year-old actor, who has admitted to a continuing fight against addiction, was released on bail in August after serving a year in prison in connection with a previous drug case. 

Downey made a quick and successful comeback in Fox's "Ally McBeal," signed for the film "American Sweethearts" and agreed to play Hamlet on stage in January in a Mel Gibson-directed Los Angeles production. 

As the new love interest for "Ally McBeal" star Calista Flockhart, Downey had completed eight planned episodes and was signed to do two more after viewers and television critics agreed he was a boost to the four-year-old series. 

Fox and series producer David E. Kelley fully backed Downey's return to the series following his arrest, Nierob said.

The network was supportive - but pragmatic - in addressing the issue. 

"We certainly hope he'll be part of it [the show] and if he is that will be wonderful, and if not we have Anne Heche coming in for three episodes" as a guest star, said Gail Berman, Fox's programming chief. 

"We certainly have our wishes and prayers with him but we have a television show to produce," Berman told a telephone news conference. 

The actor, who was released on $15,000 bail Sunday, was staying at an undisclosed location, Nierob said.




turner winner 


LONDON (AP) - German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans won the Turner Prize for contemporary art this week, collecting Pound20,000 ($28,600) and Britain's best-known art prize for his diverse work. 


The 32-year-old artist, who runs a London studio, was chosen over Dutch painter Michael Raedecker, British painter Glenn Brown, and Japanese installation artist Tomoko Takahashi. 

Tillmans expressed delight and surprise at winning, and praised the Turner Prize for bringing contemporary art into the public arena. 

But he said he was frustrated by the way some artists' work was portrayed in the communications media. 

"I do not like the whole need for sensationalizing things. There is a desire to create some outrage and I think most people are not that outraged," he said. 

He said his own intention was not to shock.

TITLE: 'photo marathon' hits st. pete
AUTHOR: by Kirill Galetski
TEXT: St. Petersburg has many individual artistic photography exhibits, but one significant event which serves to unify projects and thus attract healthy interest in them is the Fall Photo Marathon.


This year's Marathon is the third such event, held at a number of city galleries. The tradition began somewhat informally and is currently curated by Andrei Chezhin and Dmitry Pilikin, two artists who are active on the St. Petersburg contemporary arts scene. Their activity inevitably revolves around the Pushkinskaya 10 Free Arts Foundation group of galleries - where most of the key Marathon exhibits are being held.

For the Marathon, Olga Yegorova and Dmitry Vilensky are presenting "Igor's Mania," their collaborative effort detailing the obsessions of a real man. While rummaging amongst forgotten junk in an old apartment, Yegorova and Vilensky, artists who both work in other media besides photography, found a collection of strange photographs which once belonged to an all-but-forgotten man named Igor Vikhorev. Little is known about Vikhorev other than the fact that he changed professions many times during his life and died of alcoholism. He was never involved in any sphere of life for any length of time, and was certainly not a regular artist or a photographer. Yet, from time to time, he did create.

While sifting through ordinary family photos, Yegorova and Vilensky found bizarre '60s-era collages of young women in symbolically powerful images, made with ordinary snapshots of girls combined with pictures from theater productions or ethnographic magazines. In the same place they also found winter wonderland shots which would not be worth mentioning if not for the fact that most of them featured Igor on all fours in the snow, with a woman riding on his back as if he were a beast of burden. The artists took these photographs and grouped one of each type into fitting juxtapositions elucidating the man's craze.

"Vikhorev was obsessed with the idea of the great power of woman," notes Yegorova, "She was to assume the place appropriate to her - the place of a queen in a magnificent garden, in which she sits on a throne which could be a slave, elephant, rickshaw, fence - anything at all, really. Igor wanted something frightening and wonderful. He wanted pain and rapture. He wanted to be a slave to such a [powerful] woman."

"What was near and dear to us about Igor Vikhorev's photographs was his striving to demonstrate his maniacal passion which had the capability to slip by the scrutiny of censorship unnoticed, and the pure potential [of his art] and its appeal to the future." commented Vilensky.

"The Marathon has had many artists doing wonderful work and without regard to any remuneration," added Vilensky, "We're very fortunate to fall into the time frame of the Marathon. We're the 52nd and latest exhibit to be added. I've been organizing photo exhibits for most of my adult life and I have to say that while the Photo Marathon had humble beginnings with almost no budget, it is surviving and gaining importance."

Another project worth viewing in the Marathon is "P.S." by Kirill Shuvalov, which is part of a larger project involving other artists called "Too Young To Die." Currently hard at work on a mosaic done in a Social Realist style for the apartment of a hip but secretive English designer, multi-media artist Shuvalov has created a powerful conceptual art project. Like "Igor's Mania," its creativity lies not in the forging of raw materials into something, but rather the recording and collation of already existing circumstances. Shuvalov visited several of the city's graveyards. Taking into account the derelict, dilapidated state of the sites, he found eerie images amongst the graves. Many Russian graves have an oval metal plate on which a memorial photograph of the deceased is printed in enamel. Over many years of neglect and systematic exposure to the elements, many of these plates have become altered in ways which render their subjects in unexpected ways. Some images which have lost their shading seem to even emit a ghostly light.

The Photo Marathon features other diverse exhibits, all of which have a certain conceptual edge which aims to show photography as not merely a medium in which to stage one's artistic vision, but as a new way of seeing and bringing to light forgotten people and unnoticed phenomena which already exist independently of the artists.



The 3rd Fall Photo Marathon opens at the Free Arts Foundation at Pushkinskaya 10 on Sat., Dec. 2. For more information regarding Marathon exhibits see Exhibits or consult the website www.artpiter.spb.ru

TITLE: at last, a movie that makes 'flashdance' look profound
AUTHOR: by Elvis Mitchell
TEXT: In "Coyote Ugly," three of the supermodel bartenders - Zoe (Tyra Banks), Rachel (Bridget Moynahan) and Cammie (Izabella Miko) - are poring over an issue of Playboy and making fun of the Playmate's favorite movie, "Saving Private Ryan." At this point, there's a cosmic shift in the universe, a rumbling that disrupts the plates of karma. Those same women leap on a bar and douse themselves with water - presumably so their leather pants can get even tighter around their slender hips - for a bunch of leering drunks. So having a movie as superficial as "Coyote Ugly" make fun of someone's shallowness is like having Ronald McDonald criticize your taste in clothes.


"Coyote Ugly" combines the showier elements of "Flashdance," a movie whose follow-your-dream simple-mindedness it seeks to duplicate, and "Cocktail," in which Tom Cruise flipped bottles of liquor for a clientele apparently uninterested in drinking. 

It looks like a big-budget version of a Miller's Genuine Draft commercial. (After extolling the fun of alcohol, the movie is lacking only the somber tagline "Drink Responsibly," which actually makes the Miller television spots morally superior.) 

Piper Perabo, a young actress with worried eyes and clean hair, is Violet, a Jersey girl who moves to New York City in hopes of realizing her dream of becoming a songwriter. The ambition to entertain is in her blood: Violet's mother was a singer and songwriter who never got to see her dream come true. As Violet trundles from record company to talent agency to drop off her demo tape and get rebuffed, EMF's "Unbelievable" cranks along on the soundtrack.

The song is probably meant to draw attention to the walls of indifference that Violet meets, but it functions more as a comment on the willful naivete of Gina Wendkos's script. It seems that Violet has never even seen MTV, where videos on this same subject turn up all the time. 

It also seems they don't have credit cards in New Jersey; when Violet goes shopping for a computer to use when she's composing, she asks if the store has a payment plan. 

"Coyote Ugly" seems to take place in 1989, since most of the songs - "Need You Tonight," "All She Wants to Do Is Dance," "I Will Survive," "One Way or Another" - are from roughly that year or before. Violet gets a job at Coyote Ugly, the East Village bar, after she watches Cammie, Rachel and Zoe show their sensitivity when they ridicule the Playmate. 

The bar, run by the tough and tart Lil (Maria Bello), encourages its female barkeeps, clad in snug halter tops, to stoke the libidos of its howling customers by flirting with them - Hooters as a mom-and-pop operation - while a tape loop repeatedly plays the same verse from the Charlie Daniels Band's "Devil Went Down to Georgia." (Maybe all that stomping is causing the jukebox to stick.) The place is a brightly colored dreamsicle for every frat boy in the metropolitan area.

The producer Jerry Bruckheimer ("Flashdance," "Top Gun," "Armageddon") and the director, David McNally, traffick in the lamest of soft core. This kind of teasing lacks even the complications of the escapades in "Where the Boys Are," which in its Jurassic era way suggested that there might be repercussions to such actions. Violet has to find the courage to follow her dream, conquer her stage fright and get the man she desires (Adam Garcia) to commit.

Will she accomplish all of those things? Those who've never seen "Flashdance" or heard its Oscar-winning title song may be surprised by this film's ending (re-shot a few weeks ago), which features an epic lip-sync.

In a brief appearance in "White Boys" as a sullen hip-hop kid in the Farm Belt, Ms. Perabo showed that she has enough going for her to survive "Coyote Ugly," but here can show only her spunk and her confident voice. John Goodman plays her worried dad; he gets his laughs and almost gives the picture a heart.

Each of the other women in the cast is given a single trait for definition. Zoe, for example, left the bar to study law - perhaps at the Donatella Versace Law School, where you have to work both torts and leather fittings into your schedule. She pops back into Coyote Ugly as a customer, and soon enough she is dragged kicking and screaming away from her books and back onto the bar.

Whatever else can be said about "Flashdance," its cutting, cinematography and use of music were brand new back in 1983. "Coyote Ugly" continues the tradition of integrity set by "Flashdance," in which a dancer doubled for the star, Jennifer Beals. 

Here the actresses have body doubles and dance doubles, and one of them even has a "fire leg double." At one point, when Violet and her bartender associates - or their body doubles - are driving the drunken patrons wild, Lou the bouncer (Del Pentecost) starts heaving troublemakers out. Lou grabs a guy with a camera, who screams, "Hey, man! I'm a reporter for The Voice." Maybe his article will show up in the director's cut on DVD.

Someone needs to warn the bartenders at the real Coyote Ugly bar that now is a good time to start shopping around for doubles and extra pairs of leather pants. They'll need them for the onslaught of customers the movie will bring in.



"Coyote Ugly" opens at the Crystal Palace next Thursday. See listings for screening times and addresses.

- NYT

TITLE: moloko becomes the staple diet of city's music fans
AUTHOR: by Molly Graves
TEXT: Living on a tight budget in St. Petersburg, one comes to appreciate the beauty of a few no-nonsense essentials - like khleb, kolbasa, and let's not forget Moloko. With entry fees ranging from 30 to 50 rubles a head, and local beers starting at 12 rubles, local underground rock club Moloko is still one of the best venues around to see live local bands up close. It boasts an arty atmosphere and a large student crowd, many who seem to be regulars, and over all remains a good place to meet and mingle - though the main focus remains on the stage.


Officially opened Nov. 29, 1996, the club got its name from the stark, blue-metal milk signs which adorn its walls - additions which were apparently randomly appropriated from a defunct Soviet-era milk shop. The back-to- basics nature of the name seems fitting, however, as does the club's location - a chain of basement-level rooms which once housed a small theater - making Moloko quite literally a part of the St. Petersburg "underground."

Known for consistently booking strong local bands (generally harder styles - rock, punk, ska, grunge, garage-metal), Moloko has helped boost the careers of several well-known groups who have played there, including Spitfire, Markscheider Kunst, Kolybel, and Tequilajazzz - who have even put out a live album recorded at the club, entitled "Tequilajazzz Moloko."

The club remains a favorite performance arena for some big-name bands who still play there on occasion, though the overwhelming crowds may cause some to end up listening from the street. However, the small size of the venue is viewed as an asset by a number of regulars; it provides a cozy, intimate atmosphere that gives the place character and the potential for even weeknight gigs to have the feel of something impressive.

Wednesday night's birthday celebration, in honor of the club's four-year anniversary, was no exception. The band menu had a bit of something for everyone, and as usual the music got harder and the head banging stronger as the night wore on. Each act only had a limited time to play so no encores were witnessed, and all groups incorporated their own personally dedicated birthday tunes and wishes to the club. The final act was followed by an all-night disco which lasted well beyond the club's normal 11 p.m. curfew.

Things started off shortly after 7 p.m. with local band Llanfair P.G., who play their own special version of Irish-inspired rock - so special, in fact, that it took me a couple of songs to figure out they were actually singing in English. 

This act was followed by the amusing solo performer Dr. Aibolit - who, with his rasta hat and red-yellow-and-green painted guitar, morphed the antics of Russian children's story character Dr. Aibolit (the English equivalent would read something like "Dr. Ouchithurts") - basically a russified Dr. Doolittle who talks to animals - into his own reggae-themed call for all those ailing to "come to Aibolit" (ya, man) in their search for a musical remedy. And I suppose the call was heard: Aibolit quoted text directly from the stories, and soon everyone in the room was chanting lines learned from childhood along with the doctor himself.

Aibolit was followed by the act Chufella Marzufella - who seem to be riding the 70s retro-wave. They picked up the pace with lots of keyboards and a groove that got heads bobbing. Next came the less-memorable, Oen Redish - another throwback to earlier rock sounds of the 70s and early 80s.

Then Para Bellum arrived - and the fun really started. The Goth-rock group, led by the pallid, somewhat-zombified, shaggy black-haired lead singer Leonid Fomin, who lurched and waved his arms to the delight of on-lookers, seemed to wake the crowd - a great deal larger by now - out of its own stupor.

From here the energy only increased, with the arrival of group Ska fandr - led by female vocalist Anna Sto lyarova, who employed her impressive voice (she's listened to a little Bjork) and banana-shaped shaker to deftly direct the rest of the band and the crowd as well. The final act was More & Relsy - also proving to be a crowd pleaser, with stage-front dancing building into head banging crescendos.

Fortunately for those who worry about being carried off in a mosh-mob, at Moloko you can choose your seat according to comfort level and proximity to the action. In addition to the main (standing-room only) stage area, there is an adjoining room with tables and chairs where you can sit and perhaps even converse without being elbowed by the crowd, as well as an even quieter bar completely separate from the stage, where you can have a drink and forget that there are bands playing at all next door.

And if you're still hungry for more after Moloko - which has a neighbor-imposed 11 p.m. curfew - don't worry. The action continues on at other nearby clubs - such as Fish Fabrique, about a twenty-minute walk down the street, where most of the Moloko regulars and staff head after closing.



See club guide for details, and gigs for what to expect at Moloko over the next week.

TITLE: nixon biography provides indictment of u.s. politics
AUTHOR: by Chris Floyd
TEXT: The unquiet ghost of Richard Nixon still haunts the American body politic. We can see his spirit moving over the dark waters of the current political scene: the bitter divisions, the dirty tricks, the legal wrangling, the poisoned rhetoric, and, above all, the brutal, overwhelming power of money. Behind all of these - so clearly on display during the recent campaign and its unseemly aftermath - stands the jowly visage of Nixon, chief abettor of the gradual corruption of the American state over the last fifty years.


Anthony Summers captures this well in his important new book, The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon, a thorough and well-written account of the high crimes and misdemeanors that marked every stage of Nixon's torturous rise to the presidency and of the personal demons that helped bring about his downfall. He has dug up fresh information to cast new light - and new shadows - on a now-familiar story.

Nixon had his hand in nearly every ugly American pie since World War II. He was one of the earliest instigators of the McCarthyite "Red Scare," which left the rights to free speech and free association in tatters. As vice president in 1954, he was the first senior official to call for U.S. troops to be sent to Vietnam. He also secretly advocated a nuclear strike against the Vietnamese at the same time. ("You boys must be crazy, " President Eisenhower told Nixon and the generals who backed him. "We can't use those awful things against the Asians for the second time in less than ten years! My God!") As a private citizen, he struck a behind-the-scenes deal with the South Vietnamese to scuttle the peace talks in 1968 - a treasonable offence, which could have earned him a death sentence instead of the presidency. Then he prolonged the war for six more years, during which hundreds of thousands of people died, most of them civilians, and two more countries - Cambodia and Laos - were laid to waste.

Nixon's malefactions in office - break-ins, wiretaps, bribes, slush funds, tax dodging, cover-ups - are well-known, but even here Summers finds new material. For instance, it's now clear that the real reason Nixon ordered the ill-fated Watergate break-in - an otherwise incomprehensible risk during a campaign in which he was overwhelmingly favored - was to discover what the Democrats might have known about his 1968 dealings. Summers also documents for the first time the true extent of Nixon's illicit fundraising, his lifelong dependence on dubious sugar daddies and his extensive connections to organized crime.

To be sure, Nixon won his share of public support. To a nation divided by war, he promised peace, declaring he had a "secret plan" to end the war. He lied, of course, but many believed him. To a nation wracked by social unrest, he promised to "bring us together" - then proceeded to pit the "Silent Majority" of working-class whites against blacks, Jews and other minorities in the so-called "Southern Strategy" that carried him to electoral victory in two elections.

Summers also destroys the myth of Nixon's "statesmanship" in conceding the disputed 1960 election to Jack Kennedy. Nixon did indeed make a public concession, but he immediately set his aides to work in contesting the vote in dozens of states, using lawsuits, grand juries, media pressure, threats and payoffs in his furious but failed effort to overturn the result.

All in all, then, we have a devastating portrait. But what is perhaps most disheartening is that Nixon's character flaws were so clearly evident from the beginning, and yet he was still plucked from obscurity and groomed for the top, supported by some of the most respected Establishment figures - Dwight Eisenhower, Tom Dewey and top corporate bosses. All of them knew the kind of man they were dealing with, but they found Nixon useful to advance their interests. And, as Summers shows, Nixon was happy to serve, using the powers of his various offices to distort public policy for the profit of his benefactors. In his later years, they returned the favor, giving Nixon some measure of "rehabilitation" with respectful reviews of his books on international affairs, and turning him into a "wise elder statesman" on the political scene.

Summers' book reads like one of Gore Vidal's "Narratives of Empire" novels, which portray U.S. politics as a thoroughly sordid affair, with politicians as either the knowing whores or reluctant playthings of the supposedly non-existent but all-too-real ruling class. Here, this dark fictional vision is fleshed out with facts made manifest in Nixon's career. He was not, as we like to think, some kind of "aberration." For there is indeed a "secret world" in American politics, where the ruling clique of corporate and private interests largely control the state, manipulating public policy (legally and illegally) to their own ends, throwing in with the Mob, subverting the Constitution and generally making fools of us all. Nixon is in fact the very avatar of the age, the logical product of its "corrupted currents," where "'tis often seen, the wicked prize buys out the law."

Although "Arrogance of Power" is generally well-paced, the sheer scope of Nixon's career can make it heavy going, as the reader tries to untangle a thicket of obscure names and connections. There is also too much emphasis placed on Nixon's personal problems. Except when it bears directly on his public actions - as when he almost blundered into a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union during the 1974 Arab-Israeli war because he was too drunk to deal with the situation - the personal dirt, on subjects such as wife-beating and pill-popping, is irrelevant. It detracts from the larger public issues and dilutes the impact of this otherwise excellent, though sadly credible, indictment of Nixon and the system he served so well.



"The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon," by Anthony Summers. 544 pages. Viking. $29.95. Chris Floyd is a freelance writer living in Oxford.

TITLE: how foreign commentators misunderstand russia
AUTHOR: by Tom Gallagher
TEXT: The United States is proud of the freedom of its press, and justifiably so. On most any issue, the truth is out there - in print. However, when the publication of facts is drowned out by the dissemination of ideology - itself a constitutionally protected right - the value of a free press is severely diminished. Such, as Stephen F. Cohen demonstrates in Failed Crusade, is the case with Americans' understanding of contemporary Russia. Facts are readily available, but they are submerged in a sea of free-press propaganda.


Recently the European Children's Trust found that the former Soviet Union now has 40 million children living in "genuine poverty," "tuberculosis levels usually associated with the third world," and a life expectancy that has dropped to the level of India's. Major American newspapers did report all of this, but it was back page news. Meanwhile, their front pages and editorial pages continued for the most part to convey a quite different take on Russia.

The quasi-official views are decidedly more upbeat: In 1998, Vice President Al Gore could explain that "Optimism prevails universally among those who are familiar with what is going on in Russia," and the following year, political scientist Michael McFaul found that "seven years into the transition, basic arrows on all the big issues are pointing in the right direction."

For Cohen, who teaches Russian Studies at New York University, this ideological adherence to the message of the failed crusade to turn Russia into a successful capitalist society has meant that "American scholars and journalists have told us considerably less that is truly essential about Russia after communism than they did when it was part of the censorious Soviet system." Instead they have engaged in a boosterism of Boris Yeltsin that "recalls the pro-communist fellow traveling of the 1930s," albeit from an opposite point of view.

How much slack did U.S. opinion makers cut Yeltsin? Well, shortly after he shut down the Russian Parliament and ordered tanks to fire on it in 1993, an act that Cohen considers without parallel since the 1933 German Reichstag fire, President Clinton's secretary of state arrived in Moscow to praise Yeltsin's Russia as a country "being reborn as a democracy." On the other hand, ignorance rather than cynicism was the problem when The New York Times published the opinions of two American Russia "specialists" who - separately - appear to have mistaken the legislature that Yeltsin attacked for the last Soviet Parliament, elected in 1989. The parliament had, in fact, been freely elected in the Russian Republic of the Soviet Union in 1990. To this day, The New York Times reporters count "a rebellious Parliament" among Russia's biggest problems, as if a nation's highest elected body was responsible to some higher authority.

Cohen takes a distinctly harsh view of Yeltsin, and notes that no Soviet leader was ever able to appoint their successor the way that Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin. (Putin's first official act, prohibiting the prosecution of his predecessor, brings to mind not a Soviet parallel, but an American one - Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon for whatever he might be charged with after Nixon had left the White House to him.)

Above all, Cohen would have Americans confront the stark results of the vaunted "shock therapy" that American doctors of economics prescribed for their Russian patients: Total capital flight estimated in the range of $150 to $350 billion; the number living in poverty in the former Soviet Union up from 14 million in 1989 to 147 million nine years later and a life expectancy for men that fell below the age of 60. In short, "the literal de-modernization of a twentieth century country."

In the hopes of finding something that might strike a more sympathetic chord among U.S. policy makers than massive human suffering, Cohen continually hammers on the dangers inherent in the fact of the "destabilization of a fully nuclearized society." Already, in Chechnya, Russia has experienced the first civil war in a country with nuclear weapons. It lacks the funds to pay the security and maintenance personnel responsible for those weapons adequately and, in some cases, even regularly. A situation in which a nuclear arsenal was under tight control has devolved into a murky one. Yet the attention paid to it in the United States is minor, Cohen argues, compared to "the campaign against Iraq's infinitely lesser weapons of mass destruction."

He suggests that American foreign aid payments targeted at helping Russia pay the costs of maintaining an adequate nuclear security system would prove a far better and cheaper investment than building ever more complex and expensive defense and weapons systems. But, unfortunately, the recent American presidential campaign displayed a bipartisan consensus for just such systems.

What of the fate of the Russian people? Cohen feels that Russia's best missed opportunity was the 1998-99 government of Prime Minister Yev geny Primakov, which proposed measures "akin to Franklin Roosevelt's anti-Depression reforms of the 1930s." But there appears to be little prospect for American government support of that type of option either. 

On the contrary, the fact is that - emboldened in great part by the fall of the Soviet bloc - Western capital has no current interest in supporting another Franklin Delano Roosevelt anywhere in the world. Roosevelt's reforms were only accepted by moneyed interests because they feared their other options would be far worse, and they have spent much of the past twenty years trying to undo them, and much of the last ten trying to roll back the European welfare state as well.

Where it will end no one knows, but things have gotten to the point where even American Deputy Secretary of State, Strobe Talbot, acknowledges that the current state of Russian affairs has "given a bad name to democracy, reform, the free market, even liberty itself." 

As "Failed Crusade" so clearly shows, the American public has been poorly served by Russia watchers who Cohen charges with "malpractice throughout the 1990s."

Meanwhile, some Russians have continued to manage through the bleakest of situations with the aid of a dark sense of humor. As the joke goes, "We thought the Communists were lying to us about socialism and capitalism, but it turns out they were only lying to us about socialism."



"Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia," by Stephen F. Cohen. 160 pages W.W. Norton. $21.95. Tom Gallagher is a political writer based in San Francisco.

TITLE: elton john fails to give forum any atmosphere
AUTHOR: by Simon Patterson
TEXT: A just criticism recently leveled at this restaurant column was that we tend to review places within a stone's throw of our office. So for this week, it was a logical choice to review the Forum restaurant, which is less than a minute's walk away. In a basement on St. Isaac's Square, this is a venue convenient not just to workers at this office - from a tourist's point of view, it is as ideal a location as you could wish for. Thus, our expectations were high.


We found ourselves to be the only customers at 4 p.m., and checked our coats in next to a souvenir shop that appears to be part of the Forum experience. The delights of Russian culture, from matryoshki to amber jewelery, can be purchased here after your meal, or perhaps while you wait for your food: tourists take note.

The interiors are nothing remarkable, but they seem to have done a reasonable job on a shoestring budget, with an inobtrusive atmosphere reminiscent of nothing in particular. The music did nothing to make us feel at home, either: While we were treated to whatever was on the radio at the time initially, as we tucked in to our meal we found ourselves listening to the Greatest Hits of Elton John.

The menu is also difficult to pin down. We opted for the stranger-sounding items on the menu to begin with, my friend selecting the gnezdo flamingo (flamingo nest) (68 rubles) and I taking the perplexingly entitled "cowboy salad" (80 rubles).

What would a cowboy salad include besides beans, we wondered to ourselves. Indeed, the dishes looked nothing like anything we had seen before: the flamingo nest was a strange concoction of canned fish and vegetables covered with a huge quantity of fried shreds of potato. While it actually didn't taste all that bad, my friend was unable to finish it, and it really was a meal in itself, as a whole can of fish can be. My cowboy salad, on the other hand, was managable but also unusual, with peas, potatoes, cucumber and cold veal in a strange creamy and vinegary sauce. 

We saw fit to wash down these peculiar salads with some house wine, I taking the generic Georgian red and my friend the generic French white. While these were advertised as costing 120 rubles per "100 grams," the 600 grams, or four glasses, we ended up consuming between us only came to 360 rubles. Whether this was a mistake or not, you'll have to go along for yourself to find out.

Next came the soups: for me at least, my friend taking a break before the main course arrived. I had the ukha fish soup (55 rubles), which was unremarkable, though strangely sprinkled with dried dill powder, which we discovered was a common restaurant theme, covering every plate except the cowboy salad.

For mains my friend had the ryba po-monastyrski (160 rubles), sturgeon with mushrooms, which was pronounced a surprising success. I had the fried beef with eggplant (160 rubles), which was also delicious. We both found the dill powder a bit unnecessary, however, and the fish was served with some prawns which were rather superfluous, the fish being more than enough in itself.

My friend wound up with an unconvincing cappuccino, and we asked for the bill. Our waitress was just getting ready to leave, but if we were in any doubt as to whether we should leave a tip, the management decided for us, as there is a compulsory 10 percent service charge.

I would like to say this was deserved, but considering that we were the only customers and there were two waitresses standing directly across from us the whole time we ate, they could have been a bit less lethargic than they were. We were warned about the charge on the menu, unlike in some places where you don't find out until you are presented with the bill, but it didn't seem particularly justified.

Despite its excellent location, then, Forum is a bit of a missed opportunity. While the food is fine, and even excellent in parts, the restaurant still lacks any style of its own, and is best looked upon as the gastronomic equivalent of the mass-produced-for-tourists "authentic Russian" souvenirs that are sold in the same building. And what on earth was the Chef who came up with the Flamingo nest salad thinking?



Forum, 2 Pereulok Antonenko. Open daily from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. Large lunch for two with wine, including a mandatory 10 percent service charge, 1100 rubles ($40).

TITLE: looking back at origins of jazz in petersburg
AUTHOR: by Sergei Chernov
TEXT: Though not a big band leader or a spectacular saxophone soloist, Natan Leites is one of the most respected figures in the local jazz community.


A jazz activist and promoter for 40 years, Leites was instrumental in helping jazz to take root in St. Petersburg - his most famous and important achievement being the jazz club Kvadrat.

Launched in 1964, Kvadrat is the oldest surviving jazz club both in the city and in the entire country.

The unique and nationally famous jazz enterprise once was Russia's center of jazz activity, organizing some of the country's biggest jazz festivals, hundreds of concerts, lectures and jazz boats with musicians floating along the Neva and playing jazz standards. Kvadrat also published its own magazine, which was, however, soon was banned by authorities.

Leites became a jazz fan in the 1950s, when jazz was a scapegoat for both the party officials and music critics - after such pamphlets as "Music of Spiritual Poverty," which was published in 1951.

Despite the genre's political connotations at that time, Leites said it was the music that attracted him.

"I was quite a red or pink person, at least I believed in socialism," he says.

"Too many say now that they opened their eyes awfully early. It couldn't be so. The whole country was in a kind of jar, only diplomats went abroad, no-one else.

"In schools you were taught that the steam-engine was invented by some Cherepanov, that all things were done by Soviets or Russians, that we lived better than anyone, because we had no unemployment. We saw nothing."

The situation started to change during the Krushchev thaw - with masses of foreigners being allowed into the country for the Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow in 1957, the late Willis Conover's "Jazz Hour" on the Voice of America, the establishment of the first poetry and music lovers' clubs and - last but not least - checked jackets and thick-soled shoes, which first became available in 1956.

"The re-evaluation was gradual," says Leites who organized a "secret" jazz festival at the workers' club in 1964 by bribing the factory director. Unsanctioned jams with rare visiting U.S. jazz musicians followed, along with underground concerts and an unofficial meeting with Duke Ellington in 1974.

With a dozen clubs in the city now which play host to jazz, Kvadrat stands for jazz mainstream purity, with no commercial Latin outfits allowed.

An open-minded Westernizer, Leites is strict when it comes to the quality of playing, and insists that a musician who wants to play at Kvadrat must know how to use the instrument, themes and harmonies.

Leites compares the club, which now hosts mostly young musicians, to a lab which helps them to educate themselves while entertaining the public, with every concert ending in a jam.

Having changed a little too many locations - for the past decade it was based at a dilapidated culture center on Ulitsa Pravdy - Kvadrat was relaunched at the Kirov Palace of Culture on Vasilievsky Ostrov last March, and is now open twice a week on Tuesday and Thursday.



See club guide and gigs for details.

TITLE: chernov's choice
AUTHOR: by Sergey Chernov
TEXT: Headbangers of the world are uniting as the local police get ready for the Motorhead show at the Yubileiny Sports Palace on Friday. The press release stresses the number of trucks the horned ones are bringing (five) and promises an unforgettable show. Motorhead, who are currently on tour promoting the "We Are Motorhead" CD, will be followed by the no-less noisy Soulfly fronted by ex-Sepultura's Max Cavaliera. The latter is due at Lensoviet Sports Palace on Dec. 12.




As far as police go, local cops have turned their attention to DJs' apartments after raiding some clubs. In the course of what was described as an "operation to liquidate the distribution chain of synthetic drugs," three DJs were detained after the police found 40 LSD tabs and 17 ecstasy pills in the supposed safety of their homes. At least this was news published on the Web site Fontanka.ru, which - in its turn - referred to a report of the local Agency of Journalistic Investigations. At press time the report was neither confirmed nor denied, as the police spokesperson was not available for comment.




After releasing their third album, Leningrad, who packed the almost 1,500-seat Palace of Youth at the presentation concert last week, are adding more and more local shows to their program - usually at the last minute. As was announced Thursday, Leningrad will play the none-too-cheap pub Bermudsky Treugolnik (3 Manezhnaya Pl.) on Friday, while its leader Sergei Shnurov's spin-off project will be celebrating the "First Day of Winter" at Planeta Internet the very same day (we can only hope the time will be different, though Leningrad has a stand-in for Shnurov, who is still not quite adequate). Moreover, 3D will proceed with a concert at Manhattan on Saturday.




It was finally confirmed that David Thomas, the founder of the seminal Pere Ubu, which has influenced generations of musicians since 1975, will come to play the city for one show. The legendary melodeon player and vocalist will come with a project called David Thomas and the Two Pale Boys, which also includes trumpetist Andy Diagram (Diagram Brothers, James, The Honkies, The Spaceheads), who also uses radio receivers, echo machines and delays, and Keith Moline (Infidel, Mesmerist) who as Thomas' Web site says "manipulates multiple voices - dynamic calamities, delicate whispers, angular rhythms - via a midi-guitar setup."


The Sunday Times describes the band as "ceaselessly inventive," while Time Out goes on as follows: "A gloriously garrulous, diffidently divine, pumping, wheezy, melodeon-driven, contemporised avant-folk. ... Twisted and inspired, it is like everything and nothing you've ever heard, [they] are now creating a whole new kind of strange and affecting beauty."

The band, whose manifesto is called "Self-Expression Is Evil," will perform at the Estrada Theater, which is becoming a trendy venue after last week's Tuxedomoon show, on Dec. 21.

TITLE: Pakistan, England Even After Day 2
AUTHOR: By Qamar Ahmed
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: FAISALABAD, Pakistan - Saqlain Mushtaq snapped up the wickets of Michael Atherton and England captain Nasser Hussain just before the close to leave the second test intriguingly poised on Thursday.


Opener Atherton fell to a pad-bat catch for 32 and Hussain went leg before for 23 to a delivery that slow-motion television replays showed he played onto his pads.

England ended the second day on 110 for three in reply to Pakistan's first innings of 316.

The 18-year-old spinner Danish Kaneria made a breakthrough by removing Marcus Trescothick for 30 for his first test wicket.

The first hour of the day belonged to Pakistan, 243 for five overnight, as Yousuf Youhana and Moin Khan extended their sixth wicket stand to 120 before England broke through by snapping up four wickets for 12 runs.

Darren Gough started the slump by having Youhana caught off a hook by Graham Thorpe at deep square leg for 77, made in 275 minutes and containing eight fours. His partnership with captain Moin had taken 178 minutes and lifted Pakistan from 151 for five on the first day.

Four balls later Giles had Moin caught at slip by Hussain for 65 as he lunged forward and edged the turning ball. Moin hit six fours and two sixes.

Giles then dispatched Wasim Akram, who made only one before he came down the pitch, was beaten, and Alec Stewart stumped the all-rounder after an initial fumble.

England openers Atherton and Trescothick had to survive a testing new-ball burst by Akram before Kaneria struck the first blow at 49 when he beat left-hander Trescothick with a googly and Moin made a comfortable stumping.

TITLE: Living With a Stockpile of Poison in Paradise
TEXT: A TOWN of 13,500 in the Udmurt republic some 1,000 kilometers east of Moscow, Kambarka is blessed with a picturesque landscape. Here one feels light-years away from civilization in a dreamlike retreat for nature lovers.


Yet if Kambarka has made a name for itself, it is not for its natural charm. Here, tucked behind a screen of evergreens, is one of the world's largest stockpiles of World War II-generation blister agents.

Hidden behind the fence of the well-guarded military base, 6,400 tons of Lewisite - a liquid with a devastating effect on human skin - has been stored since the end of World War II. These 80 tanks of poison are due for destruction, but for now they sit untouched.

Kambarka's antiquated stockpile was outlawed in 1993 by a worldwide disarmament treaty signed by over 160 countries. The Chemical Weapons Convention - which calls upon each signatory to annihilate 1 percent of its chemical arsenal by April 2000, 20 percent by 2002 and the entire stockpile by 2009 - was ratified by Russia in 1997, but thus far not a single particle has been destroyed.

Kambarka is one of seven sites in Russia storing 40,000 tons - or nearly half the global supply - of chemical weapons. The other sites include: Kizner, also in the Udmurt republic; Gorny, in the Saratov region; the town of Pochep in the Bryansk region; the settlement of Maradykovsky in the Kirov region; Leonidovka in the Penza region; and Shchuchye in the Kurgan region.

Russia already missed the April 2000 deadline to destroy 1 percent of its arsenal. It was granted an extension by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, an international body based in The Hague, but experts predict it will not meet the next one.

"There is not much chance Russia will meet the next deadline," says Alexander Pikayev, a senior expert with the Moscow Carnegie Center. "All we can hope for is that by 2002 Russia will have scrapped the 400 tons that should have been destroyed by April 2000."

"At the pace things are going, Russia will need 60 years to destroy its stockpile," says Sergei Baranovsky, vice president of Green Cross Russia, a Swiss-based environmental organization.

Of the seven designated destruction plants, construction has begun at only two of them - in Shchuchye and Gorny. For the time being, building a destruction plant in Kambarka is on hold.



New Priorities


Originally, blister agents such as Lewisite were to be eliminated first, say experts at Moscow's central laboratory for the control of chemical weapons destruction. And since Lewisite - which accounts for 7,500 tons, or 20 percent of Russia's entire chemical arsenal - is stored chiefly in Kambarka, it made sense that this would be the starting point for destruction. Indeed, aside from a scant 1,500 tons stored in Gorny, the bulk of Russia's Lewisite supply is stored in Kambarka's large metal tanks.


Yet, four years later, everything in Kambarka is on hold while the Kremlin and Western governments are directing their funds to Gorny and Shchuchye. The destruction plants - thanks in particular to assistance from Germany and the United States - are nearing completion.

"In the beginning, Kambarka was considered to be top priority. Now, we have been pushed back to the third or fourth position. And what is happening? Not much. We are entirely dependent on the federal budget and they haven't allocated us enough money for the program," says Alexander Romanov, head of Kambarka's local administration. "Money is the main problem, if not the only one. We simply lack the funds to move forward. This is a huge financial weight for our country. To be frank, I don't see how we will make it on time."



A Costly Business


Destroying chemical weapons is a costly business - the country's single most expensive disarmament program. Initial estimates predict $6 billion to $7 billion will be required to tackle the job - a huge, if not insurmountable sum for a cash-starved government.


According to Lt. Gen. Valery Kapashin, the senior Defense Ministry official responsible for chemical weapons destruction from 1996 to 1999, the Duma was unable to appropriate more than 7 percent of the money needed to sustain the federal program.

Of these limited funds, only a small amount has been allocated to Kambarka. Between 1998 and 2000, federal funding declined each year - even as overall funding for the program increased. According to Romanov, if Kambarka was allocated nearly a third of the budgeted money in 1998, it only received a little over 1 percent of the 500 million rubles set aside for 2000.

Up to now the bulk of the money has come from Western donors. While the Russian Federation has spent around $50 million, the United States alone has committed more than $200 million to Shchuchye. Gorny, on the other hand, is heavily funded by the Germans, the Dutch and the European Union.

But the only foreign aid Kambarka has seen has come from Sweden, which funded a public information center and risk assessment study to the tune of half a million dollars. Finland, for its part, recently agreed to spend $600,000 on Lewisite destruction there. But additional funding from foreign sources has trickled down. The Netherlands, which initially pledged money to Kambarka, has decided to redirect future funding to Gorny, as have the Swedes and Finns.

"The Americans came here, had a look around and we never saw them again," says Romanov. "They were more interested in Shchuchye."

"The United States said it would only provide assistance for the destruction of nerve agents that are perceived as more dangerous [to] American national security," says Pikayev.

Now that Kambarka's plans have been put on hold, Gorny, officials say, will serve as a test case for the destruction of Lewisite.

"Gorny is not only a show case and a practical priority, but it is also a test case for blister agent destruction," says Natalya Kalinina, a government expert on chemical weapons. "Kambarka's future is pending on the [results of the] Gorny experiment."



Chemical Hostages


As for the people of Kambarka, they had to wait until the early 1990s to learn about the secret hidden in their backyard: 6,400 tons of lethal chemical agents only a few kilometers from their homes. A half-century of secrets and lies has left the population resentful and fearful.


Residents are not only worried about the consequences of an accidental leak, but about terrorist attacks - a fear inflamed by sensational media reports.

"We were told that warehouses would be the perfect targets for Chechen terrorists. An explosion would contaminate the entire region," said one resident. "It is no coincidence that the world is so eager to destroy chemical weapons. We feel like we're living in 'suspended' death."

Kambarka was, in fact, on the brink of disaster in 1996 when a fire broke out and came within 10 meters of the stockpile before it could be contained.

The discovery of the stockpiles gave rise to what Baranovsky calls "chemicophobia." Locals blamed the Lewisite for any health problem. Yet, according to Green Cross, surveys concluded there was no direct relation between diseases observed in the area and the proximity of the stockpile.

"But local people are sometimes more inclined to believe conspiracy theories and catastrophe scenarios. That's why it is important for us to work with them to restore confidence by filling the communication gap between the government and the locals," he said.

Paradoxically, the population that was so shocked by the disclosure of the stockpile was opposed to its destruction; they believed it was more dangerous to manipulate the chemicals than to keep on storing them. Cause for greater concern was the construction of the so-called destruction facilities in their neighborhood.

"When we learned about the arsenal our first reaction was to get rid of it as fast as possible. But then officials told us that transportation would be more dangerous," said one resident. "When they decided to destroy [the chemicals] here, we had to swallow it - as if we haven't had enough with 50 years of poison around the corner."

For their part, the government officials charged with the unpleasant task of disposing of the chemicals say they are being treated unfairly.

"We are constantly attacked in the press, accused of hiding some demonic plans that are harmful to the environment or the health [of the population]. But we are not hiding anything, we are open to questions," says Vyacheslav Solovyov, a Defense Ministry official involved in the destruction program. "We are genuinely willing to solve the problem as safely and as quickly as possible."

The government was not always willing to be so open, but it appears that it learned a lesson in Chapayevsk - the Volga town originally meant to serve as the central destruction point for the country's entire chemical arsenal even before Russia signed the international convention. When environmentalists heard of the plan - one that came as a bombshell to locals - they managed to rally enough local outrage and support to prevent the new plant from being built.

These days the government is a lot more careful. Representatives come to answer questions at public hearings or round-table discussions. They open public information centers and publish detailed pamphlets to answer public concerns. But there is a long way to go.

"Take a population already antagonized by 50 years of cheating and lies. Then try to explain to them it is in their best interest to tolerate a new chemical plant on their territory - this has not been an easy task," says Olga Yermakova, who works at Kambarka's public information center.



Sweetening the Pill


But in order to help the medicine go down, the government is offering socio-economic compensation - otherwise known as bribery. A large amount of federal money has already been directed to building up the local infrastructure as a means of winning over the population's neutrality, if not acceptance.


All proposals for chemical weapon destruction have been accompanied by promises of local investment, such as improved medical centers, social facilities, roads, electric power supplies, water pipelines and housing. In Kambarka, the federal funds made available for the program have been spent entirely on such improvements. In the meantime, not a kopek has been spent on chemical destruction.

It is clear the money invested in the economy has bought some local support. Kambarka residents are ready to show patience and understanding for the government program as long as federal money continues to be funneled into municipal coffers. They may not like it, but they can't afford not to be supportive.

But it seems unlikely that Kambarka will escape the construction of a plant to destroy its stockpile of Lewisite. The "test site" in Gorny will be too small to handle the 6,400 tons of Lewisite stored in Kambarka and the second plant under construction in Shchuchye will be dedicated exclusively to the destruction of nerve agents, not blister agents.

Once the destruction process in Gorny is finished - a task not likely to be completed before 2002 - government attention will shift back to Kambarka. In the meantime, they sit and wait.

"We are used to trying to make the best of a desperate situation," says Romanov. "Even if we don't like the word, we are like hostages."

TITLE: Safin and Sampras Headed for Showdown
AUTHOR: By Nesha Starcevic
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LISBON, Portugal - Two matches, two contrasting versions of Pete Sampras. Next comes the real test. 


Sampras moved back in contention for the Masters Cup title by beating Alex Corretja 7-6 (2), 7-5 on Wednesday, one day after losing badly to Lleyton Hewitt. 

Next for Sampras is Marat Safin, the 20-year-old Russian who is about to be crowned No. 1 for the year. 

Safin trounced Sampras in three sets in the U.S. Open final in early September, and Sampras decided to sit out the rest of the year until coming to Lisbon for the season-ending tournament for the top eight players in the world. 

There will be more at stake than just pure revenge or prestige when the two face each other again Friday. 

Sampras, 1-1 in the round-robin portion, needs to win the match to advance to the semifinals. Two players advance to the semifinals from each four-man group. 

The only time Sampras failed to make the last four was in his debut year in 1990. He is looking for a record sixth title in the elite event. 

Sampras, who has won a record 13 Grand Slam titles, finished No. 1 six straight seasons, until losing that distinction to Andre Agassi last year. Sampras cannot reach No. 1 this year, and that distinction will almost certainly go to Safin, winner of seven titles this year. 

Safin moved closer to clinching the No. 1 spot for the year when he beat Hewitt 6-4, 6-4. 

The only way he can lose the distinction is if he fails to win another match in this tournament and Gustavo Kuerten, his only challenger, wins the event. 

Safin will become the youngest player to finish the year ranked No. 1. He is 2-0 in the tournament and could qualify even if he loses to Sampras. Corretja is 0-2 and Hewitt is 1-1. 

"I will need luck to win Friday for sure," Safin said. "I think I can only play once like at the U.S. Open. I'll never play like that again, it's impossible. 

Sampras was a lot sharper against Corretja than in his first match. 

"I served and volleyed very well. I was just a different person, a different player," Sampras said. 



q

Andre Agassi brushed aside Russia's Yevgeny Kafelnikov 6-1, 6-4 Thursday to maintain a perfect record in the $3.7 million Masters Cup.


Agassi's victory gives him two wins from two matches in the round-robin green group. He beat Gustavo Kuerten on Tuesday. Kafelnikov beat Magnus Norman Wednesday and is 1-1.

Agassi started this clash of two Olympic gold medalists in storming fashion, sending Kafelnikov scuttling from side to side of the Atlantic Pavilion court.

The American, gold medallist in Atlanta 96, broke Sydney 2000 champion Kafelnikov in the second and sixth games before serving out the opening set 6-1 in only 21 minutes with an ace.

Kafelnikov never recovered and Agassi wrapped things up 6-4 after 66 minutes.

TITLE: Lindros Sets Sights on Becoming a Maple Leaf
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: VOORHEES, New Jersey - Eric Lindros isn't getting away from the Philadelphia Flyers just yet.


Lindros, a restricted free agent, has made it clear he will not return to the Flyers because of his contentious relationship with general manager Bob Clarke.

But the 27-year-old center can't go anywhere until the Flyers are ready to deal him. He rejected an $8.5 million qualifying offer from Philadelphia last summer.

"I think they understand it's time for change, and if they want to improve their hockey club, they can trade me," Lindros said Tuesday after an on-ice workout at York University in Toronto.

Lindros was cleared to resume playing Monday, nearly six months after his sixth concussion. He said he wants to play for the Toronto Maple Leafs, but wouldn't rule out going to another team.

"It's a great organization, a great city and being from here, it just seems to be a good fit," Lindros said.

Clarke said trading the former captain won't be easy. Toronto, Los Angeles and the New York Rangers have expressed interest, but no team has made any offers.

"Eric may want to play in Toronto, but that may not happen," Clarke said. "First of all, Toronto has to say they want him, and they have to give us compensation for him, and they have to be able to sign him.

"If someone comes along, whether it's the Rangers or somebody else and offers us more than what somebody else has offered, we'll go with the best deal for the club."

While Clarke said he hasn't spoken to any team about Lindros, Toronto general manager Pat Quinn later said he had discussions with the Flyers as recently as Saturday regarding a deal.

"Is a healthy Eric Lindros of interest to us? You bet." Quinn said. "Playing the way Eric plays, yes certainly. But under the circumstances, nobody can guarantee that sort of thing and we're not about to take all the risk in this."

Bill Watters, assistant to the Leafs president, said any deal for Lindros had to include conditions.

"The only condition that has to be is that all three stakeholders - the Philadelphia Flyers, the Lindros group, and the acquiring team - have to share the risk equally," Watters said. "If that balance is not there, then there's no deal."

Lindros hasn't played since May 26, when a check by Scott Stevens gave him his sixth concussion in slightly more than two years. It was only his second game after a 2 1/2-month absence because of postconcussion syndrome.

"I understand that he's been cleared, but we haven't had any conversations with him," Kings general manager Dave Taylor said.

Rangers general manger Glen Sather said he hasn't had any contact with Lindros or his representatives.

Lindros had 28 goals and 32 assists in 57 games last season, including four periods of the playoffs. He has made six All-Star teams and won the MVP award in 1995, but the Flyers lost in their only Stanley Cup final with him.

Lindros' relationship with Clarke reached a point last season where the two didn't speak for months.

The boiling point came after Lindros criticized the team's medical staff for failing to diagnose his second concussion of the season on March 4.

Clarke then stripped Lindros of his captaincy, and the franchise player was ostracized until he returned for Games 6 and 7 of the Eastern Conference finals against New Jersey.

TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: Yankees Sign Mussina

NEW YORK (AP) - Pitcher Mike Mussina and the New York Yankees agreed Thursday to an $88.5 million, six-year contract, The Associated Press learned.

Mussina's agent, Arn Tellem, traveled from Los Angeles and arrived in New York early Thursday, intending to complete the deal.

The sides then continued negotiations, agreeing on the final terms, a source with knowledge of the talks said on condition of anonymity.

Mussina, 32 on Dec. 8, would join a staff on the three-time defending World Series champions that already includes Roger Clemens, Orlando Hernandez and Andy Pettitte.

With a $14.75 million average annual value, the deal makes Mussina the second- or third-highest-paid pitcher in baseball, depending on how Clemens' new contract is evaluated.

Mussina also trails Kevin Brown of Los Angeles, who averages $15 million under a $105 million, seven-year contract.



'Soccer 101'

LEICESTER, England (AP) - FIFA launched a university course Wednesday aimed at producing club owners and administrators of the future.

Twenty-four students from around the world joined the secretary general of FIFA, Michel Zen-Ruffinen, at De Montfort University for the official start of a new Masters of Arts program in management, law and humanities of sport.

Students will spend their first term in Leicester studying the history, culture, sociology and ethics of sport. The second term will take place at the Business School of Bocconi University in Milan, Italy, where the students will study sports management.

The final term, focusing on law and sport, will be taught at the International Center for Sports Studies at the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland.

FIFA, soccer's governing body, is funding the program.



Hall of Famer Dies

MIDDLEBURG HEIGHTS (Reuters) - Cleveland Browns Hall of Famer Lou Groza, who excelled as an offensive tackle and kicker during a 21-year career, died Thursday night. He was 76.

Groza suffered an apparent heart attack at a country club in the Cleveland suburb of Columbia Station.

Nicknamed "The Toe," Groza spent his entire career with the Browns and scored 1,608 points. Born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, he attended Ohio State and joined the Browns in 1947, playing in four championship games in the old All-America Football Conference.

He played in nine NFL title games and was enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1974. An award presented annually to the top kicker in college football is named in Groza's honor.

Groza's jersey No. 76 is one of five uniform numbers retired by the Browns. The Browns' current headquarters are at 76 Lou Groza Boulevard.



All-British Team Nixed

LONDON (AP) - A suggestion that England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland play as a unified soccer team has been dismissed by some of the game's leading authorities.

Home Secretary Jack Straw, Bri tain's top law enforcement official, said such a team would compete under one flag as British athletes do at the Olympics.

"I personally look forward to the day when we have a British football team," Straw said Tuesday. "I think we might start winning some games."

The idea was quickly rejected by the both English and Scottish Football Associations.

The English FA said most English fans would not welcome such a move, adding the "traditional rivalry between the home nations forms an integral part of British football culture."



Soccer Player Recovers

LECCO, Italy (AP) - An Italian soccer player is out of danger after being in a coma for a week following a locker-room fight with an opponent.

Francesco Bertolotti is slowly starting to speak and respond to commands, doctors said Tuesday.

The condition of the 33-year-old midfielder has gradually improved since Sunday when he first regained consciousness and moved his eyes to acknowledge his wife standing at his bedside in a Lecco hospital.

Doctors said it was too early to say if there would be long-term brain damage.

Prosecutors in Como on Tuesday questioned Massimiliano Ferrigno, the player who is accused of punching Bertolotti after a lower-division game on Nov. 19.

Ferrigno was suspended by the Italian soccer federation pending an investigation. His team president says he will never again play for Como again. 



MacLean Suspended

MIAMI (Reuters) - Miami Heat forward Don MacLean, limited to three games this season by an injured foot, was suspended Wednesday five games without pay by the NBA for violating the steroid policy of the league and the NBA Players Association.

MacLean, 30, who was scheduled to miss at least a month after undergoing surgery on his right foot on Nov. 15, is the first NBA player to be suspended for steroid use.

Neither the Heat, the NBA nor the Players Association is permitted to disclose information regarding the testing or treatment of a player.

MacLean, the NBA's Most Improved Player for the 1993-94 season, has averaged 11.1 points and 3.8 rebounds in his career. 



Brashear Faces Charges

VANCOUVER (Reuters) - National Hockey League tough guy Donald Brashear, who was the victim of a now-infamous incident of hockey violence last year, has been charged with assault for an off-ice altercation, police said on Wednesday.

Brashear was charged for allegedly grabbing a man on Monday in the weight room of the Vancouver apartment building where he lives with his wife and baby, according to Vancouver police.

Police said the incident took place after a man told Brashear's wife to leave the room because she had her baby with her. There were no injuries, and Brashear was not arrested but charged via a summons to appear in court Jan. 2, 2000.

Brashear, 28, a forward and an "enforcer" for the NHL's Vancouver Canucks, was the victim of an on-ice stick-swinging incident last season that led to a criminal charge in Vancouver against Boston Bruins player Marty McSorley.

TITLE: New York Can't Stand the Heat
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NEW YORK - Brian Grant lifted the Miami Heat out of their worst slump in nearly five years with 24 points, nine rebounds and patient play down the stretch of a badly needed 84-81 victory over the New York Knicks Wednesday.


Grant scored Miami's last basket and drew a foul at the 3:42 mark. His second three-point play of the period gave the Heat some breathing room at 77-72 and he added two free throws to push the advantage to 81-73 with 2:26 to play.

Tim Hardaway scored 16 points and Eddie Jones added 15 for the Heat.



Charlotte 103, Toronto 79. In Charlotte, North Carolina, David Wesley scored a season-high 32 points and Baron Davis added 14 and tied a career high with 11 assists, leading the Charlotte Hornets to a 103-79 rout of the shorthanded Toronto Raptors.


Jamal Mashburn added 18 points for the Hornets, who went on a 9-0 run early in the first quarter, built a double-digit lead in the second period and easily held off any threats by the Raptors in the second half.



Detroit 97, New Jersey 76. In Auburn Hills, Michigan, Jerry Stackhouse scored six of his 31 points in an 11-1 run that bridged the third and fourth quarters as the Detroit Pistons pulled away for a 97-76 victory over the New Jersey Nets.


Stephon Marbury had 20 points and seven assists for New Jersey. 



Los Angeles Clippers 106, Golden State 83. In Los Angeles, in a battle between the worst teams in the Western Conference, Lamar Odom and the Los Angeles Clippers made the Golden State Warriors look even worse than usual.


Odom posted his fourth career triple-double with 16 points, 12 rebounds and 11 assists and rookie Quentin Richardson added 18 points and eight boards in his first career start as the Clippers embarrassed the Warriors, 106-83.



Denver 107, Minnesota 100. In Minneapolis, Nick Van Exel scored 30 points and knocked down a clutch 3-pointer down the stretch as the Nuggets used a 10-2 run to pull away for a 107-100 victory over the Minnesota Timberwolves.


Van Exel hit 11 of 20 shots, including 5 of 8 3-pointers, and handed out seven assists for Denver, which had lost five of its first six road contests.

TITLE: St. Louis' Victory Gives Toronto the Blues
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: TORONTO - In Toronto, the St. Louis Blues earned an improbable 6-5 victory over the Toronto Maple Leafs, erasing a five-goal third-period deficit before scoring 18 seconds into overtime.


Pavol Demitra assisted on the final three goals for the Blues, who entered the night having allowed a league-low 39 but surrendered an eighth of that over the opening 43 minutes.



Detroit 6, Atlanta 4. The Detroit Red Wings scored four times in a 3:57 span of the second period and overcame a hat trick by Shean Donovan in a 6-4 victory over the Atlanta Thrashers Wednesday.


Doug Brown's fifth goal of the season tied it at 3-3 and started the outburst with 7:43 left in the second.

Chris Osgood made 21 saves for Detroit.

Brendan Shanahan had three assists as the Red Wings won for the third time in four games.



Philadelphia 4, Columbus 3. In Columbus, Ohio, Mark Recchi scored two third-period goals, including the game-winner with 59 seconds left, as the Philadelphia Flyers handed the Columbus Blue Jackets their sixth straight loss, 4-3.


Philadelphia rallied from a two-goal deficit to extend its road winning streak to four games.



Colorado 4, Phoenix 3. In Denver, Martin Skoula snapped a 43-game goalless drought with 72 seconds left as the Colorado Avalanche defeated the Phoenix Coyotes, 2-1.


Skoula was credited with his first goal since Feb. 25 when his slap shot from the right point deflected off Coyotes defenseman Jyrki Lumme and got past goaltender Sean Burke for the game-winner.


Calgary 4, Dallas 3. In Dallas, Cory Stillman recorded a hat trick in the third period, scoring the eventual game-winner with 14:11 remaining, as the Calgary Flames ended an eight-game winless streak with a stunning 4-3 victory over the Dallas Stars.


The Flames were 0-6-2 in their previous eight games.

Stillman completed his second career hat trick by redirecting Marc Savard's pass from the left boards past Belfour for his ninth goal of the season.



Montreal 3, Edmonton 2. In Edmonton, Martin Rucinsky's goal with 11:42 remaining gave the Montreal Canadiens their third win in four games, a 3-2 triumph over the Edmonton Oilers in the opener of a three-game road trip.


Mike Grier scored his second goal of the game 4:33 into the third period to lift Edmonton into a 2-2 tie. But Rucinsky broke the deadlock just under four minutes later.

Jose Theodore finished with 18 saves.



Carolina 2, Florida 1. In Sunrise, Florida, Trevor Kidd made 40 saves but allowed rookie Josef Vasicek to score the tying goal late in regulation and Bates Battaglia to notch the game-winner on a breakaway 1:41 into overtime as the Carolina Hurricanes rallied for a stunning 2-1 victory over the Florida Panthers.




New Jersey 5, New York Rangers 2. In East Rutherford, New Jersey, the New Jersey Devils extended their unbeaten streak against their archrival New York Rangers to 20 games with a 5-2 victory as Jason Arnott scored twice during a four-goal third period.


New Jersey improved to 14-0-6 against its metropolitan area rival since Jan. 12, 1997 and won its 10th straight home game in the series.



Washington 4, Tampa Bay 1. In Washington, Adam Oates and Joe Murphy scored power-play goals as the Washington Capitals posted a 4-1 win over the Lightning, who welcomed back three defensemen but still were dominated.

TITLE: Ex-Girlfriend Says Carruth Confessed to Killing Adams
AUTHOR: By Paul Nowell
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CHARLOTTE, North Carolina - Rae Carruth's ex-girlfriend said the former NFL wide receiver confessed to her about plotting to kill Cherica Adams.


Candace Smith testified Wednesday that Carruth told her about arranging the drive-by shooting early the morning of Nov. 16, 1999, just after Adams was shot. But she didn't mention that disclosure in taped interviews played in court.

Smith said Carruth confessed in the Charlotte hospital where Adams was being treated.

Carruth could be sentenced to death if convicted of planning to kill Adams, who was pregnant with Carruth's child. One prosecution witness said earlier that Carruth didn't want to pay child support.

"He said, 'I can't get in trouble, can I, because I didn't actually pull the trigger?'" Smith testified under immunity from prosecution. "He said police could check his car and his clothes and not find any gunpowder."

Smith said Carruth told her that he paid others involved in the shooting over time to avoid raising suspicions and that he "saw the guys pull up and shoot into her car." He then drove away to the house of Hannibal Navies, a Carolina Panthers teammate, she said.

Under cross-examination, defense attorney David Rudolf played two taped interviews featuring Smith. She never brings up a confession by Carruth in the hospital in either of the recordings played in court.

One tape was a Jan. 10 telephone interview with a private investigator working for Carruth's defense. The second was made by a police investigator in the hospital several hours after the shooting.

In the tapes, Smith said he was praying, crying and upset in the hospital. Smith never expresses any fears for her own safety in the tape, Rudolf told reporters outside of court.

Rudolf also suggested a possible motive for Smith's testimony when he asked her how she felt when Carruth told her Adams was pregnant - Smith dated Carruth on and off since 1998.

Earlier Wednesday, a Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer testified that Carruth acted suspiciously at the hospital before any charges were filed.

Wallin said Carruth also asked if police could tell if a gun had been fired from inside his vehicle. He said Carruth wanted to know if the hospital was surrounded by police and whether the news media were outside.

"When he made the statement to me, I felt like obviously it was an admission of guilt," Wallin said.

Carruth's lawyers contend the shooting occurred as co-defendant Michael Eugene Kennedy and two other co-defendants tried to get Carruth to give them money to pay for a drug purchase.

Kennedy testified without immunity from prosecution. Kennedy and another co-defendant, Stanley Abraham, are to be tried separately on murder charges.

Co-defendant and confessed triggerman Van Brett Watkins already has pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and agreed to testify against Carruth.

TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: Helms Attacks Court

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Top Republican lawmakers led by Sen. Jesse Helms have launched a new campaign against the world's first permanent war crimes tribunal, which they say will threaten American sovereignty. 

The International Criminal Court, which supporters predict will start operating in two years, was created to deal with the world's most heinous crimes - genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. It would step in only when countries are unwilling or unable to dispense justice themselves. 

But since the treaty establishing the court was signed in Rome in July 1998, the United States has been campaigning to exempt U.S. soldiers and government officials from prosecution, so far without success. The Helms bill would require U.S. personnel to be "immunized" from the court's jurisdiction before the United States would participate in any UN peacekeeping operations. 



Tudor Placates West

BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) - Romania's far-right presidential candidate denied Wed nes day that he was an anti-Semite, assuring the West it need not worry if he wins next month's runoff elections. 

Corneliu Vadim Tudor, criticized abroad for anti-Semitic and anti-Gypsy diatribes, acknowledged he had made mistakes in past writings about Jews and Gypsies. "Auschwitz was a crime against humanity, against the people of the Bible," he said, referring to the former Nazi concentration camp. "I hate fascism and Nazism." 

Tudor's strong showing in Sunday's first-round presidential vote alarmed the West as well as Romania's neighbors. Tudor got 28 percent of the vote behind former communist Ion Iliescu, who led the 12-candidate field with 37 percent. 



Aristide Wins Vote

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (NYT) - Former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who faced virtually no opposition in a presidential election last Sunday that was boycotted by the major opposition parties, was effectively declared the winner today, the Provisional Electoral Council announced.

In figures that echoed its earlier estimates, the council said that Aristide received 91.69 percent of the ballots cast. The turnout, electoral officials said, was around 68 percent. His four opponents, unknown candidates with little popular appeal or support, each received about 2 percent. 

However, the election was neither financed nor observed by the international community, and diplomats here have cast doubt on the high voter turnout figures. Opposition parties ran no candidates and urged voters to stay home.



Japan Hangs 3

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan hanged three convicted murderers on Thursday, the eighth straight year it has carried out the death penalty, prompting protests from human rights groups which claimed the latest were done for political reasons.

The Justice Ministry confirmed the executions, but following recent practice, did not disclose the identities of those hanged.

Thursday's hanging brings the total number of executions to 39 since 1993, when Japan resumed carrying out the death penalty after refraining from doing so for nearly three-and-a-half years.

Amnesty International, which opposes the death penalty, accused the authorities of rushing to carry out the hangings before a cabinet reshuffle expected as early as next week.



New BSE Measures

BRUSSELS, Belgium (Reuters) - European officials, battling another crisis over mad cow disease, announced tough new measures Wednesday designed to rebuild public faith in beef and halt the spread of the brain-wasting disorder.

Alarmed by signs that BSE is taking hold on the continent, the European Commission urged a ban on meat-based animal feed, blamed for spreading the disease.

It also wants to test millions of cattle - all those aged over 30 months - for BSE before they can enter the food chain.

"BSE is an EU-wide problem which requires EU-wide answers. Firm action is required. We have to restore consumer confidence," EU Farm Commissioner Franz Fischler said.



Nazis Not To Blame

BERLIN (AP) - Authorities in the eastern German state of Saxony on Wednesday ruled out the possibility that a 6-year-old boy found dead in a swimming pool three years ago was a victim of neo-Nazi violence. 

Prosecutors from the state capital, Dresden, had reopened the inquiry into the death of Joseph Kantelberg-Abdulla after the boy's German mother and Iraqi father presented new witness statements that their son was beaten, drugged and drowned by a far-right gang. 

But three people arrested last week were quickly freed after prosecutors said a key witness made contradictory statements and failed to recognize two of the suspects in photographs. 

While two people remain under investigation, Saxony governor Kurt Biedenkopf's chief of staff said Wednesday there is no credible evidence that neo-Nazis were responsible for the death. 



UN, Iraq To Talk

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and Iraqi officials plan talks at the start of the new year on breaking the two-year impasse on arms inspections, the key condition for lifting sanctions, UN officials said on Wednesday.

The decision to start the dialogue was made Tuesday at a meeting between Annan and Iraq's UN ambassador, Saeed Hasan, UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said. Weapons inspectors have not been permitted to return to Baghdad since December 1998.

A high-level Iraqi delegation is expected to travel to New York in January, after the Muslim holy month of Ramadan ends, but Eckhard said the time and location were not fixed yet.



Lockerbie Suspect Held

CAMP ZEIST, Netherlands (Reuters) - Judges at the Lockerbie trial Wednesday rejected a motion to acquit one of the two Libyans accused of the 1988 Pan Am airliner bombing.

Judge Lord Sutherland referred to evidence that Al-Amin Khalifa Fahima kept explosives in his desk and knew his co-accused Abdel Basset al-Megrahi.

Fahima and Megrahi are accused of masterminding the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, killing all 259 people on board and 11 on the ground. They have denied charges of conspiracy to murder, murder and contravening the aviation security act.

TITLE: Land Returned to Victims of Apartheid
AUTHOR: By Mike Cohen
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CAPE TOWN, South Africa - More than 1,000 families came to a field on a mountainside Sunday to reclaim land that apartheid authorities had taken from them and given to whites years before. 


Among them was Fatima Benting, 86, forced to leave her home nearly 35 years ago to make way for whites. Between 1966 and 1980, she and about 66,000 other people were forcibly removed from the neighborhood known as District Six. 

Restoring the land to its former owners has been hailed as an important step toward healing apartheid wounds. 

"I feel very, very happy. ... I never thought I'd live to see it,'' Benting said at a ceremony that formally granted land ownership to former residents. "I want to die in District Six. I'm just waiting for this dream.'' 

After the apartheid government removed the people, bulldozers flattened thousands of homes and buildings, sparing only a few churches and mosques.

But plans for a whites-only area never materialized, and District Six became a scar on the city's history and reputation. 

Its former residents were dumped miles from Cape Town, in makeshift houses in an area called the Cape Flats, which quickly became - and remains - a dangerous hotbed of crime. 

Some residents say land restitution, which comes six years after apartheid ended in 1994, took too long and came too late. 

"I don't want the land back,'' former resident Yusuf Miller said. "It would never be the same.'' Instead, Miller plans to apply for the $2,200 compensation the government has offered to those who don't want to move back. 

James Daniel, 69, also said he could never return. 

"The love is gone ... they broke our hearts when they chased us out,'' Daniel said.

Others were more nostalgic, and more hopeful. 

"I get that beautiful feeling in my chest, remembering how it used to be,'' said Fuad Behardien, who plans to move back. 

Government officials acknowledge that returning the land is only a first step toward addressing the wrongs of the past. 

"I know we may never bring back what you have lost, but at least we may say the past has gone and tomorrow has come,'' Land Affairs Minister Thoko Didiza told the returning residents. 

The forced removals were emblematic of the racist regime's efforts to strip people of their humanity, President Thabo Mbeki said. He said land restitution is "the most important signal that we have broken with our terrible past.'' 

Authorities have approved 1,763 claims from former District Six residents. About 1,000 families have decided to move back and redevelop the area so far. Land claims filed by 600 former property owners are still pending.

TITLE: UN Launches Appeal for Congo
AUTHOR: By Edith Lederer
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: UNITED NATIONS - The humanitarian crisis in Congo is one of the worst in the world, with 16 million people facing human rights violations, dire financial hardship and frequent food shortages, a UN official said. 


In more than two years of civil war, the number of people suffering there has soared to around a third of the population, Carolyn McAskie, the acting UN humanitarian relief coordinator, told the Security Council on Tuesday. According to an International Rescue Committee study, up to 1.7 million people are likely to have died in eastern Congo alone. 

Hospitals, schools and churches in the city of Kisangani were destroyed in June, resulting in high civilian casualties, McAskie said. There are recurrent epidemics, a scarcity of medicines and the health-care system has collapsed. UN agencies and voluntary organizations have been forced repeatedly to suspend operations in eastern Congo. And parts of some provinces are inaccessible because of dilapidated roads and rampant insecurity. 

"In 2000, of the 16 million war-affected people less than 50 percent received humanitarian assistance, and often on a sporadic basis," McAskie said. 

The fighting in Congo began in August 1998, when rebel forces backed by Congolese President Laurent Kabila's former allies, Rwanda and Uganda, turned on him. Kabila retaliated with support from Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe. 

Over 2 million people have been internally displaced and 300,000 have taken refuge in neighboring countries since then. 

"Thus far, all diplomatic and military efforts to end what has been described as 'Africa's First World War' have not shown results," McAskie said. "The people of the Congo are becoming exhausted, no longer able to cope with the violence and impoverishment to which they are subjected on a daily basis."

To prevent an even larger humanitarian catastrophe, the UN launched an appeal Tuesday seeking $139.5 million for Congo - money which would help save lives and rebuild communities, McAskie said. 

During Tuesday's council debate, Dutch Ambassador Peter van Walsum chastised Namibia for trying to make a distinction between foreign troops "invited" into the country by Kabila to fight the rebels and those who were there to fight alongside rebels. He said such a distinction was never made in the July 1999 Lusaka cease-fire agreement, which all parties have signed but which has been repeatedly broken. 

Namibian Ambassador Martin Andjaba said he was "flabbergasted" by van Walsum's comments, saying it is an indisputable fact that some troops in the country were there at the invitation of the government and others were there illegally. 

"It is therefore incomprehensible to hear time and again you try to defend the aggressors instead of defending the victim," he said. Congo "is a victim of aggression and this is clear."

TITLE: Woods and PGA Chief Resolve Differences
AUTHOR: By Ken Peters
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: THOUSAND OAKS, California - Tiger Woods called his meeting with PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem "fence-mending."


Woods recently caused a stir by complaining that the tour was taking financial advantage of him with policies that controlled his rights, mostly in terms of marketing. He warned that his discontent could turn into a "bigger situation."

He also said the only time he heard from Finchem was when the commissioner wanted him to play in certain tournaments.

A meeting between the two earlier this week apparently defused the potential crisis between the PGA and the player whose skill and popularity has sparked quantum leaps in interest in the tour.

Describing his session with Finchem in Los Angeles, Woods said it was very positive and very upbeat.

"We exchanged ideas and there was no hostility at all. It was great. My relationship with Tim has definitely improved because of it. He was very candid, very open, and I appreciate that," Woods said Wednesday.

"We have come to a better understanding. I think we need to communicate just a little bit more face-to-face instead of, 'You talk to my people, let's do lunch,' those kinds of things."

Asked what was resolved in the talks, which went on for several hours Monday, Woods replied, "Pretty much everything."

"We need a few more sit-down meetings to hammer things out. One of the problems has been that it is hard to get our schedules clear. He's as busy as I am," Woods said.

He said there were "compromises on both sides," but was not specific.

Finchem obviously was pleased with the meeting.

"I'm delighted we're discussing the specifics of his business strategy, because a significant mission of the tour is to provide our members with a strong marketing platform," the commissioner said in a statement.

Woods believes some of the negative public reaction to his earlier comments came because people thought he was asking for a cut of the tour's TV money, which isn't the case, and isn't possible under the PGA rules, anyway.

He also said he has been surprised by the number of other players who have reacted positively to his comments.

Among Woods' concerns were implied endorsements, where PGA Tour sponsors were able to use his and other players' images in advertisements; and rights fees, in which ABC Sports had to pay the tour $400,000 to televise Woods' exhibition match against David Duval last year. When Woods set up another made-for-TV match against Sergio Garcia this year, the fee was raised to $1.5 million.

The marketing-savy Woods also wants to have some rights that would enable him to explore Internet opportunities.

"The Internet has grown substantially and there are a lot of different opportunities in which a player, as well as an organization like the tour, can do a lot for themselves via the Internet," he said. "I'm of the strong belief that I'd like to do some creative things for myself, and we're working through that."

TITLE: Peace Process Put on Hold As Israel Calls for Elections
AUTHOR: By Karin Laub
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: JERUSALEM - A senior Palestinian negotiator said Wednesday that he doubted a final peace accord with Israel could be reached before Israel's new elections, tentatively set for spring. 


But other Palestinian officials indicated that Ehud Barak appeared determined to speed up the process, saying privately that the Israeli prime minister's envoys have told them that he plans to resume talks in hopes of reaching a peace agreement before the election. 

In a goodwill gesture, Israel on Wednesday resumed the transfer of millions of dollars in tax refunds to the Palestinian Authority. The money had been stopped as one of several punitive steps by Israel during nine weeks of fighting that have left more than 280 people dead, the vast majority Palestinians. 

Barak on Tuesday yielded to pressure from the hawkish opposition to hold elections, after it became apparent that he no longer commanded backing in parliament to block the initiative. 

The elections will probably take place in the spring, though an exact date will not be set before next week. Opposition leader Ariel Sharon said he wanted to hold the vote before the Jewish Passover holiday which begins April 7, while cabinet ministers close to Barak said mid-May was a likely date. 

Barak was elected 18 months ago, on a pledge to negotiate peace agreements with the Palestinians and Syria. Some forces pushing him out of office appeared beyond his control, such as Israel's destabilizing electoral system and divisions in Israel over concessions to the Arabs. 

However, some said Barak's downfall was largely his own doing. "Barak is a tragic figure, a man of truth, of pure intentions, serious-minded, but very inexperienced," wrote commentator Nahum Barnea in the Yediot Ahronot daily. 

Barak is trailing badly in the polls, and observers said his only chance for re-election is to reach a peace agreement he can present to the voters. 

Palestinian Parliament Speaker Ah med Qureia said Wednesday he was skeptical an accord could be reached quickly. 

"I think it is very difficult to reach an agreement with [Barak] in the coming six months," Qureia said. "There are steps he should take to convince the Palestinians that he is serious about reaching an agreement. For example, he can begin implementing signed agreements." 

A number of provisions in interim accords were never carried out, such as the opening of a second land route between the West Bank and Gaza.

TITLE: Khatami Getting Ready for Battle as Iran Heads to Polls
AUTHOR: By Anwar Faruqi
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: UBAI, United Arab Emirates - With barely six months to go before a showdown at the polls, Iran's reformist and immensely popular President Mohammad Khatami has threatened to expose the illegal deeds of hardliners trying to derail him. 


Three days after he issued the challenge, Khatami's supporters say his reform movement has become even more unstoppable. But hardliners are digging in for the vote, employing increasingly desperate measures in their battle for survival. 

The mild-mannered president had watched silently as hard liners put reformists on trial in courts where the prosecutors are also the judges, banned nearly every newspaper and magazine that opposed them and jailed pro-democracy activists on ambiguous charges. 

In a speech Sunday, Khatami said he had refrained from elaborating on the illegal deeds of his opponents to "avoid tension." 

However, "at the end of my four-year term, a detailed report will be offered to the nation on all the political, economic, social and cultural arenas, including [my] efforts for implementation of the constitution," Khatami said. 

The moderate paper Iran News said Wednesday that in "a short speech of only few minutes, President Khatami took his revenge against the conservatives for all their actions in the past 3 1/2 years." 

The comments would "motivate President Khatami's supporters to provide him with extensive and overwhelming support from now until the next presidential election," the English-language paper said. 

Khatami said earlier this month that he has not decided whether to run in the May presidential elections, but close aides say he will seek re-election. 

Whatever his decision, he has promised a report on his term. Though he did not elaborate Sunday on what he would reveal, there are many matters the hardliners would rather keep secret. 

Foremost among them is the question of who was behind the 1998 slayings of five dissidents and intellectuals by people officially described as "rogue" agents of the Intelligence Ministry. 

To this day, no one has been convicted, but powerful hardliners are believed to have ordered the slayings. 

After his election in 1997, Khatami ushered in an era of freedom. Newspapers shed the self-censorship they had lived under for more than two decades and began to expose the ugly side of the Islamic Republic. 

Under Khatami, some of the more rigid restrictions on cultural and social activities were relaxed or removed. Women began to dress more freely and were allowed to sing in public and act on stage. Music concerts were revived. 

But the hard-liners, who control the judiciary, military and the broadcast networks, began to strike back - particularly after losing their majority in parliament in February's elections. They are supported by Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final word on all matters. 

On Tuesday, the judiciary ordered the newspaper Iran-e-Javan, or Iran Youth, to shut down - the 31st publication banned this year.

TITLE: Cutoff Date for U.S. Election Looms Closer
AUTHOR: By Patrick Rizzo
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: TALLAHASSEE, Florida - Al Gore's lawyers fought for a quick recount of contested votes in Florida on Thursday, but Republican lawmakers acted to outflank them, voting to call a special legislative session to help propel George W. Bush into the White House.


It was another day of bewildering political and legal maneuvering in the struggle for the presidency between Democratic Vice President Gore and Republican George W. Bush, the governor of Texas, that has raged since the disputed Nov. 7 election.

The main developments on Thursday included:

- Gore lawyer David Boies filed an emergency appeal with the Florida Supreme Court to issue an order to start counting contested ballots immediately. He said Gore effectively faced a Dec. 12 deadline to complete any recounts that might overturn Bush's 537-vote lead in Florida.

- A committee of Florida's Republican-led Legislature voted 8-5 along party lines to recommend that state lawmakers hold a special session to choose the state's 25 presidential electors, a slate virtually certain to back Bush.

- Democratic vice presidential nominee Sen. Joseph Lieberman, reacting to that move, said the Republicans in Florida were trying to thwart the will of the people. "I do think this action by Florida Legislature really threatens the credibility and legitimacy of the the ultimate choice of electors in Florida. It threatens to put us into a constitutional crisis," Lieberman said.

- A rental truck carrying nearly 463,000 ballots left Palm Beach County under police escort on Thursday en route for the state capital, Tallahassee, where a judge will hear arguments on Saturday on whether some or all of them should be recounted. A further 650,000 ballots from Miami-Dade will be transported on Friday.

- Gore submitted written briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court ahead of arguments to be heard on Friday. Lawyer Laurence Tribe accused Bush of seeking to "turn back the clock so that he can declare the game over" and urged the justices to uphold the Florida Supreme Court ruling that extended the deadline to include hand-counted votes.

- Retired Gen. Colin Powell, widely tipped to be secretary of state in a possible Bush administration, met the Texas governor at his ranch but said he had not been offered any jobs by Bush.

Bush said he was confident the legal wrangling would soon end in his favor. "One of these days all of this is going to stop and Dick Cheney and I will be the president and vice president," he said.

In the midst of all these complications, one date loomed large - the Dec. 12 cutoff for Florida and other states to select members to the Electoral College which will meet on Dec. 18 to pick the next president.

"The Florida Supreme Court has said that this is going to come to an end on Dec. 12," said Boies.

If Bush gains Florida's 25 electors, he will win 271 votes when the body meets six days later to vote for the next president - four more than Gore and enough to win the presidency.