SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #647 (14), Friday, February 23, 2001
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TITLE: Baltic States Ponder Decade of Independence
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalyev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: RIGA, Latvia - It was a rainy and misty November day in 1967 when 20-year-old Yuris Putrinsh accompanied his mother to a Riga cemetery to lay flowers on the graves of Putrinsh's father and sister. A promising fourth-year physics student at Riga University, Putrinsh's life had little to do with politics, a little over two decades after Stalin had annexed his tiny Baltic state.
"I wanted to be a scientist," said Putrinsh as he reminisced over a cup of coffee at Riga's City Council Building. "I was at the top of my class, there were a lot of offers to participate in different international conferences."
As he and his mother passed though the cemetery, past the memorial of Karlis Ulmanis, Latvia's prime minister from 1934 to 1940, who was deposed by Stalin, the naive young student saw something that enraged him, and his reaction to it propelled him for the first time into the labyrinth of dissent against the Soviet power that ruled his country.
"There were candles around the memorial, put there by people for All Souls Day, and I noticed there were people wearing black leather jackets blowing out the candles and taking them away," said Putrinsh.
"I was outraged. I approached them and asked, 'Why are you doing this?'"
Never had it occurred to him that the leather-clad thugs were agents of the local KGB, who summarily roughed him up and took him to the police station. The only identification Putrinsh had with him at the time was his university student's card. In a matter of days, he was expelled.
"My career was stolen," he said. So he took the one option left to him: spreading anti-Soviet literature printed in St. Petersburg through the streets of Riga. It wasn't until 10 years ago - March 3, 1991 - that the freedom of his country was returned, when 75 percent of those Latvians who voted chose to break with Moscow. Similar votes in Lithuania in 1990 and Estonia in 1991 ended 52 years of what many Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians still refer to as "the occupation."
Since then, the tiny nations - whose combined population of a little more than 4 million is less than that of St. Petersburg's - have flourished both economically and socially in comparison to their giant, deposed ruler.
Economic restructuring in the Baltics has made their entrance - especially for Estonia - into the European Union almost a fait accompli by 2005.
They also enjoy the broad support of the United States as contenders for NATO in the alliance's next round of inductions from Eastern Europe.
But these advances, plus the fate of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians who have suffered bureaucratic humiliation and other bitterness at the hands of the their new Baltic masters, have incensed Moscow for the past decade.
EAST VERSUS WEST
For better or for worse, the East-West tug-of-war is something that has been familiar to the Baltics since 1939 and the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentropp pact signed under Stalin and Hitler, which put the Baltics under the Soviet "sphere of influence." Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had already been part of Russia up until 1918, when they gained independence at the end of WWI. But the Soviet Union annexed the three states again in 1940. Within a year of their arrival, the Soviets had exiled or executed almost the entire political and intellectual elite of the Baltics, from the presidents all the way to beat-walking police, said Uldis Strelis, a retired deputy prosecutor in Latvia who survived Stalin's Gulag.
The Nazi invaders who came in 1941, as Hitler marched north from Poland, were greeted by many in the Baltics as heroes.
"That is why when the German army marched in, many people met them with flowers," said Strelis as he showed state archive pictures of smiling German soldiers being greeted with garlands and bouquets.
"People hoped they were liberators, but that turned out not to be the case."
During its occupation of the Baltics, Nazi Germany executed 70,000 Jews and gypsies in Latvia and 200,000 Jews in Lithuania. They also executed 5,000 ethnic Estonians, 18,000 ethnic Latvians and 50,000 ethnic Lithuanians.
In 1944, the Baltics were "liberated" by a vengeful Red Army and a campaign of executions and deportations of alleged Nazi collaborators began. Freight trains with box-cars of human cargo steamed eastward to Siberian work camps and collective farms. Two thirds of those deported were women and children. According to documents from the Latvian Socialist Republic KGB, 256,000 Baltic nationals were exiled between 1940 and 1954. Of the men, many were sent to filtration camps for suspected anti-Soviet activity during the war. They were then executed in the muffled Baltic forests and dumped in mass graves.
These were the same forests that provided the cover for the rugged resistance fighters - the "forest brethern" - who waged a guerilla-style campaign against the Soviet occupation well into the 50s.
THE KGB'S RETURN
The array of crimes that could land you in jail or the grave were truly staggering. They were also documented by Indulis Zalite's Center on the Research of Crimes of Totalitarianism in Riga.
"I'm afraid I can't give you any bright examples of our work at that time," he demurred in an interview. "The only thing I can say is just that everyone did his own job."
Pointing to an array of KGB files kept on people who allegedly conducted anti-Soviet activity in Latvia, Zalite singles out report No. 062056, dated May 9, 1979.
"Kugas., A.Y. came to his work place at a factory at 7 a.m. drunk. He took down the flag of Latvian SSR from the stand, went to his work place, covered himself with the flag like a blanket and fell asleep.
On May 9 he was detained for interrogation, where he said that on May 8 he was at a party and drank a lot of alcohol there. Kugas, A.Y. admitted his guilt and repented [his anti-Soviet activity]," the report read. Kugas was then released shortly after the interrogation - but his report was kept on file.
"I remember the case of a woman who was detained once because somebody indicated in a KGB report that her daughter had been seen wearing a knitted hat bearing the national colors of Latvia - red and white," said Zalite.
It was obviously a banal coincidence, Zalite explained. "But in the end the woman was forced to repent her anti-Soviet activities as well," he said.
According to Zalite's files, more than 26,000 KGB agents and 60,000 informers were active in Latvia between 1950 and 1991.
"It looks like every second adult worked for KGB here if we compare the number of agents to that of the Latvian population," Zalite said. The figures, however, fluctuated from time to time, he said, so it is hard to pin down how many agents or informers were working during any given year.
One thing that is certain, however, is that Kugas - the man who slept under the flag - and the woman who knitted her daughter a red and white hat got off easy.
STRELIS' TRAVELS
"The truth is bitter and unpleasant. This was insulting [for the country], all this ugliness, which was committed by Soviets during just one year," said Strelis of the Soviet re-occupation of 1944. But things got even worse for his family 5 years later.
"In 1949 people were taken to the freight cars right from their homes, children were taken right from schools, as happened to me one day," he said. "They did not even give me time to get my things. All I was allowed to take were the clothes I was wearing."
Strelis, who was 11 years old at the time, was guilty of nothing more than being Latvian. Over the next three weeks, as the train traveled to the Western Siberian city of Omsk, he and his mother learned the meaning of the word "horror," he said.
"The guards humiliated us constantly," he said. "For example, there were no toilets in the freight carriages. So sometimes, for a bathroom stop, the guards would lead us out of the train and make the men face the women in order to defecate," he said.
"Only at the last minute would they put bags over our heads so we could have some privacy."
When the train arrived in Omsk, it was met by thugs from the local collective farms who came looking for able-bodied slave labor. Strelis was taken. "It was a slave market," he said.
His home for the next five years was a dirt dugout. In 1954, a year after Stalin's death, Strelis escaped back to Latvia and, within a few years, was studying at Riga University's Law School. He became a deputy prosecutor for the State in 1991, when the country gained its freedom.
Despite his achievements, though, he asked rhetorically, "Do you think it is possible to forget all this?"
LANGUAGES & NATIONS
The occupation by the Soviet Union before and after, and by Nazi Germany during the war led to a decline in the native population of Latvia from which it has yet to recover. According to state statistics, Latvia's population in 1940 was 77 percent Latvian. By 1989, that figure had shrunk to 55 percent. Estonia witnessed similar dynamics, where the native-speaking Russian population grew from 6 percent in 1934 to nearly 30 percent in 1997.
This was one reason that the Baltic states introduced strict language comprehension laws after 1991, which abolished Russian as a state language and stipulated that all people wishing to become citizens or work in government or businesses, must meet high standards of proficiency in the language of their Baltic country.
Given the demographic decline of the national peoples, observers in the Baltics say this was necessary to save Baltic culture.
"The language law is necessary to defend our culture, which could otherwise die," said Valery Kalabugin, member of The Estonian Institute for Human Rights.
"The Russification was the worst in Latvia," Strelis agreed. "Without these laws, we could have disappeared as a nation."
But the language requirement has left 150,000 people in Estonia and 300,000 in Latvia without citizenship, Agence France-Presse recently reported, and many ethnic Russians think Moscow has turned its back on them.
"Russia's law on the protection of its compatriots has only a declarative character and we've felt no real help from Russia," Tatyana Zhanok, a leading member of Latvia's ethnic Russian community, told AFP.
Indeed, the compatriot law is stretched thin, with Moscow setting aside a mere 90 million rubles ($3.2 million) in 2001 to help approximately 25 million Russians living abroad after the break-up of the Soviet Union, balancing out to about 13 cents per person.
FINDING COMMON WORDS
President Vladimir Putin raised the issue in sharp tones during a Feb. 10 meeting with Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga.
"We are prepared to resolve all problems, no matter how acute they appear," said Putin in remarks reported by Interfax. "We ask only that the same rules be applied in relation to Latvia's Russian-speaking population as are applied to ethnic minorities in Europe. That would be good enough both for us and our compatriots in the Baltic states."
Vike-Freiberga commented that "those [Russian speakers] who stayed in independent Latvia are not to blame."
"Mr. Putin showed an understanding of Latvia's aspirations, our desire to reinstate our language and preserve our culture," she added. "We both felt mutual understanding."
But with a Moscow visa requirement that was hastily imposed on Russians living in the Baltics over the New Year's holidays, many Russians don't share Vike-Freiberga's sentiment.
In response to Moscow, Riga's Russian-language daily Respublika wrote that "Russia has thus reclassified more than half a million of its former compatriots as official foreigners."
WAR CRIMES
More bedeviling to Moscow perhaps than language requirements are the occasional trials of Soviet war criminals held in the Baltics. One of the most active prosecutors of such cases has been none other than Urlis Strelis.
Many of those the prosecutors track down, like 70-year-old former Red Army Officer Vasily Kononov - whose case has enraged the Russian media and provoked attacks by nationalist groups in St. Petersburg on the Latvian consulate - are elderly. To Strelis, age is no factor. "Why should the fact that you are old make any difference," said Strelis. "When you were young you killed and that is why you should be jailed."
Strelis is equally even-handed about nationality. In 1995, he prosecuted Alfons Noviks, a Latvian who had approved 41,544 deportation documents. Other Latvians charged with war crimes or on genocide charges nclude Karlis Ozuls, Trofim Yakushyonok, Yanis Kirshteins, Konrads Kaleins and Russian citizens Yevgeny Savenkov, Nikolai Larionov, Ilya Moshenkin and Vasily Kiranov.
According to Dzintra Shubrovska, a spokesperson at the Latvian Prosecutor's Office, the tally of Latvians tried for war crimes is something the Russian media misses.
During his visit with Vike-Freiberga, Putin raised the issue of Kononov's case, as well as the cases of other ex-Soviet officers, Mikhail Fartbukh and Yevgeny Savenko.
Vike-Freiberga, however, commented that a war crime conviction is something independent of nationality.
"Those people were prosecuted not because they served one side or the other," she said. "If they were found guilty, punishment should follow."
FUTURE RELATIONS
Perhaps the biggest sticking point between Russia and its Baltic neighbors is the Baltics' courtship of NATO. So sticky is the topic that Putin and Vike-Freiberga avoided it entirely during their Feb. 10 meeting.
But on Wednesday, NATO Secretary General George Robertson, on a visit to Moscow, tried to assuage Russian fears with a geographical argument.
"Why should it be any more of a problem for NATO to have members that are close to Russia when there is already a NATO member, Norway, which is an immediate neighbor of Russia and has been for the last 50 years?" he said on Ekho Moskvy Radio.
Indeed, Robertson drew attention to Putin's own statements about a Russian bid for NATO membership. "I don't see how anyone would have objections to Baltic integration," he said.
For now though, most analysts say that the Baltics are just learning to trust their neighbor to the east, and that no big political gains should be expected between Moscow and its former satellites.
"I don't see any political perspectives at the moment, mainly because Russia doesn't have an adequate answer on the Baltic states' integration into EU and NATO. In this area we should expect a period of stagnation," said Andrei Ryabov, a political analyst with the Moscow-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Instead, Ryabov said economic relations - which fell off after the 1998 Russian economic crash - would be the focus. Russia has an interest in gaining access to Baltic ports for transporting goods to Europe.
Russian business, too, is on an upswing in Latvia, according to Oleg Baranov, head of the Macroeconomics Department of the Latvian government, who says that half of deposits held by Latvian banks belong to non-residents, mostly Russians.
This is not to say that all the Baltic States have developed economically at the same rate - Estonia, because of its proximity to Scandinavia, leads the pack by far. The final decision on its induction into the European Union will come next year.
In fact, Latvia has struggled the most of the three since the Soviet strangle-hold was severed, said Patrinsh, the Latvian dissident physicist. This, he said, was because Estonia's Tartu and Lithuania's Kaunas - both university towns - fostered an intelligentsia of their own while their capitals were besieged. Riga did not have that luxury.
As for the continuing problem of integration of ethnic Russians in the three states, perhaps the best that can be expected is a new bicultural generation. As one Russian diplomat, interviewed by AFP put it, "They've all had nine years to decide where to live."
TITLE: Putins' Old Pal Prints New Take on 'Truth'
AUTHOR: By Robin Munro
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Lyudmila Putin once called President Vladimir Putin a vampire, while he in turn has suggested that anyone who could put up with her for three weeks was heroic and deserved a monument.
These and other observations about the president's family's private life are detailed in a new book, titled "Fragile Friendships" and penned by a German friend who became acquainted with the Putins in 1995.
The book was released in Hamburg on Thursday.
"Unfortunately, he is a vampire," Irene Pietsch, the wife of a Hamburg banker, quotes Russia's first lady as joking in her book, excerpts of which were published in advance by the German magazine Der Speigel.
Pietsch also writes that Lyudmila Putin has a fondness for astrology that did not rest well with her husband, who shushed her when she started talking about zodiac signs.
Pietsch said Lyudmila Putin thought highly of truthfulness, but was reprimanded by her husband: "Who cares about your truths."
Then Vladimir Putin told Pietsch that she would deserve a monument if she could bear to spend three weeks with Lyudmila.
Lyudmila Putin complained that her husband broke a promise to stay away from the world of spying when he agreed to head the Federal Security Service in July 1998, according to Der Speigel.
"It's terrible," Lyudmila complained in a telephone call that turned out to be the last contact the two women ever had with each other. "We won't be allowed to contact each other again."
"This awful isolation. No more traveling wherever we want to go; no longer able to say whatever we want. I had only just begun to live," she said.
The book is written in German and published by Molden Verlag in Vienna.
A spokeswoman for the publisher, who declined to be named, said Thursday that 4,000 copies had been printed and they cost $26.50 each.
Molden has no plans to publish the book into English or Russian at the moment, but if there is enough interest it would probably be translated, the spokeswoman said by telephone from Vienna.
The two women met in 1995 when Vladimir Putin was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg and his family was visiting Hamburg, which has a sister-city relationship with Russia's northern capital.
The future president's family had all learned German while he was a KGB agent stationed in the East German city of Dresden in the 1980s.
In 1996, the Putins visited Hamburg again, even though Putin had lost his job after mentor Anatoly Sobchak was defeated as St. Petersburg mayor.
Pietsch quotes Lyudmila Putin as describing her husband as just the right man for her - he didn't drink and he didn't beat her.
However, she fretted about him spending too much time with his friends in the evenings - social gatherings at which she had to serve drinks, gherkins and fish, Pietsch writes.
Lyudmila also complained about German men rousing their wives early every morning to prepare their husbands' breakfasts because her Volodya started making similar demands after visiting Germany.
When Putin started working as deputy to then-Kremlin property manager Pavel Borodin, the women indulged in an intense correspondence by fax from Putin's Kremlin office.
In 1997, Pietsch and her husband visited the Putins for a week. They stayed at a government dacha in Ark han gelskoye, where Lyudmila cooked soups and Vladimir Putin, wearing a pullover, exuded charm.
Pietsch describes his blue-green eyes as "two hungry, lurking predators" that he used as weapons. On that particular visit, Putin declared himself in favor of a Russian version of Germany's social democracy, she said.
Lyudmila told her later that her husband "always goes to Finland when he has something important to say. He doesn't think there is anywhere in Russia where you can speak without being overheard."
She also talked of how when she was a flight attendant she had made sandwiches that she sold at a huge profit until the pilot, who was not getting any of the proceeds, stopped her.
Lyudmila traveled to Hamburg in 1997 for four days and spent most of her time shopping. Pietsch said Lyudmila was angry that her husband, apparently aware of the uproar over credit cards allegedly issued to the Yeltsin family, had not given her a credit card.
"I will never be like Raisa Gorbachev," Pietsch quotes Lyudmila as saying.
The women spoke often, talking about sex and God and how to behave in their respective countries. Lyudmila asked whether she should tip shop assistants and whether it was all right to take your own food to a bar.
As for customs in Russia, Lyudmila advised: "You must always listen between the words, and read between the lines."
TITLE: Kursk Relatives Make a Plea for Facts and Justice
AUTHOR: By Yevgenia Borisova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Half a year after the Kursk submarine tragedy left 118 seamen buried at the bottom of the Barents Sea, relatives of the victims still don't know the truth about the disaster and are petitioning the Prosecutor General's Office to find out.
"I am feeling enormous moral damage in the form of physical and moral suffering," said Nadezhda Neust ro yeva, mother of Alexander Neust royev, a 21-year-old electrician who went down with the Kursk. "I ask you to consider me a victim and a plaintiff in the criminal case launched into the sinking of the Kursk," she said in her complaint.
Neustroyeva's complaint is just one of at least 15 that have been filed by surviving family members to date, human rights group Pravo Materi, or Mother's Rights, told reporters Thursday.
Pravo Materi legal advisor Anastasiya Bakarasova said that if the families are successful, they will win access to as yet unreleased documents compiled during the course of the official criminal investigation.
"After that," Bakarasova said, "the families will be able to open [their own] court case against specific officials who are guilty in the tragedy and for the satisfaction of the damage done to them."
Nadezhda Tylik, whose son Sergei was among the Kursk dead, said she, too, petitioned the Prosecutor General's Office.
Tylik made headlines around the world when a television camera caught an unidentified woman surreptitiously jabbing a syringe of tranquilizers into her as she was shouting at Admiral Vla di mir Kuroyedov during a post-tragedy press conference.
Just after the stealth injection, Tylik said, her husband claimed it was he who had asked the woman to tranquilizer her because she was prone to excessive emotions. But, she said, several months later he confessed that this was a lie.
"He said it was a lie to save my nerves. In fact, he did not ask for any help," Tyulik said. "The injection was done to shut my mouth. Immediately after it I just lost the ability to speak and was carried out."
Tylik said that she is prepared to do anything to uncover the truth about the sinking of the Kursk. "They told us lies the whole time, and even now we are unable to get any information," she said.
Tylik also criticized President Vla di mir Putin because he "did not answer direct questions" at his meeting with the families in Vidyayevo in August.
"Maybe he did not know what to say. But we did not receive concrete answers to concrete questions," she said.
Most of the male relatives of the perished crewmembers are professional Navy officers, Tylik said (including her husband Nikolai, a submarine officer with 20 years experience), and believe that the cause of the tragedy was an explosion of two experimental torpedoes, one of which was leaking.
"My son said six days before the tragedy that the Kursk had 'death onboard,' but he didn't explain what he meant," she said.
"I am sure that the commanders of the Northern Fleet knew that the torpedoes were not in order. Those who are guilty must be punished.
TITLE: President Boosted by Duma's Budget Support
AUTHOR: By Darya Korsunskaya
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW - The government won a parliamentary battle over budget amendments Thursday, easing fears of a foreign debt default and striking a blow against Communist opponents.
After a heated debate, which ended with Communists storming out in protest against government privatization plans, the remaining deputies voted overwhelmingly for proposals to direct more funds toward debt servicing.
"The main task was to prevent the country falling into technical default," Alexander Kotenkov, the president's representative in the Duma, told reporters after the vote.
The measures still need clearance from the Federation Council and Putin's signature, but their approval by the Duma marks a victory for the president in his first real battle with the chamber since taking power in December 1999.
The Communists, who failed in an effort to get the debate on budget amendments struck from the day's agenda, are now likely to be even more determined to push for a vote of no confidence in Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov's government.
The only consolation for the Communists and their left-wing allies was the Duma's rejection of a government proposal to lift a ban on major privatizations imposed last year pending a new law on state sell-offs.
The government hoped to raise 15 billion rubles ($524.3 million) from privatizations, as part of efforts to cover a budget shortfall of about 183 billion rubles to meet foreign debt obligations.
But Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin refused to admit the privatization plan was dead.
"We had to make a decision today, giving ground on the privatization question. We will introduce [privatization proposals] separately," Kudrin told reporters after the vote.
Kotenkov said the government would probably return to the privatization question in March: "Now the task is completed, though not quite 100 percent."
Kudrin said that even without the privatization revenue, the amendments would allow the government to pay the Paris Club of creditor nations $620 million owed by the end of February, as well as meet social needs Communists say are being neglected.
"As a whole the law allows us to guarantee social spending and preserve the reputation of the country as a solvent borrower," Kudrin said.
Under the compromise proposals approved by the Duma, the first 41 billion rubles in extra revenues will go toward paying interest on foreign debt. For sums greater than this, the split will be 50-50 between debt and other spending.
Kudrin said conservative estimates foresaw extra revenues garnering about 108 billion rubles, mostly generated by higher-than-expected oil and gas revenues.
TITLE: Rozhdestvensky Returns to Court
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalyev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The trial of Dmitry Rozhdestvensky, former head of the Russkoye Video television and advertising company who was charged in 1998 with embezzlement, got underway in a city court Thursday with the reading of a five-hour indictment.
The Rozhdestvensky case echoes charges brought against Media-MOST mogul Vladimir Gusinsky - now under house arrest in Spain and awaiting possible extradition - that he embezzled $10 million when purchasing a controlling stake in Russkoye Video in 1997.
But while Russkoye Video figures in the case against Gusinsky - which many of his supporters have labeled as government pressure against the free media - Gusinsky's name did not appear in the indictment presented by the Prosecutor General against Rozh dest vensky in the Petrogradsky District Court.
Rozhdestvensky was in arrested and jailed in 1998 on suspicion of embezzling 142,500 Finnish marks, a state-owned Lada automobile and $56,000, all of which investigators say were received by the defendant as payment for advertising run on Russkoye Video programming in 1997.
Investigators also say Rozhdestvensky then illegally invested the proceeds in the construction of a luxurious summer home for himself and family.
Rozhdestvensky contends the home was constructed legally for company employees and guests. He was jailed in 1998, pending trial, but was released late last year due to health reasons.
He says the case is political in nature and linked to Gusinsky and Boris Berezovksy, who also had an interest in acquiring the station and who has for months been in self-imposed exile after receiving a summons from the Prosecutor General's Office.
Accompanied by his mother in court, Rozhdestvensky listened to Judge Natalya Baganskaya read the indictment prepared by investigators.
"The defendant used the property of Russkoye Video [when it was a] state company to enrich himself," read the case's central point.
Investigators contend that Russkoye Video ran commercials from Finnish customers that were up to 10 minutes in length, while short-shrifting Russian clients with one-minute spots.
Investigators also say that the state-owned Lada in question was given to Russkoye Video by Tavria, a local car dealer, in lieu of cash payment. It was then registered to Russkoye Video executive director, Alexander Sekretarev, who investigators allege would drive the car to work and parked it some distance from the firm's offices to avoid suspicion.
The current charges are somewhat less severe than those that led to Rozhdestvensky's arrest three years ago. At that time, a Federal Audit Chamber investigation asserted that tax misdeeds during the ruble's 1998 plummet netted Rozhdestvensky $1.7 million. That case was dropped, however, for lack of evidence.
Nonetheless, City Prosecutor's Office spokesperson Gennady Ryabov was in upbeat mood in a telephone interview after the hearings.
"[Investigators] have dug out a lot [of evidence against Rozhdestvensky]," he said on Thursday.
"It is likely that ultimately the court will convict Rozhdestvensky and give him a suspended sentence of five to eight years in prison," he said. He said he expected the case to last two months.
"Listening to [the evidence] investigators found on me, I have the impression they think it is crime in and of itself to run a business in Russia," said Rozhdestvensky in a telephone interview Thursday, referring to the charges of embezzlement connected to the Lada and the Finnish advertising time.
The most difficult matter in the case, however, may be proving that renovations done to the summer cottage in Siverskaya- which police investigators allege belonged to Rozhdestvensky alone - were a business expense for an employee resort.
The cottage is listed as such in company documents, but investigators say that the cottage was used exclusively by Rozhdestvensky's family and that former Russkoye Video employees have given testimony that they have never seen the place.
But Rozhdestvensky said: "If they interrogated the employees the way they interrogated me, I'm not really so surprised they testified they haven't ever been there."
"The place was packed with visitors all the time. It was used as representative headquarters and sometimes people stayed there for weeks - to write a story for a film, for instance," he said.
Ruslan Linkov, local Democratic Russia party leader and a close ally of Rozhdestvensky, said the case would likely collapse as soon as the court looks deeper into how Russkoye Video was formed in the beginning of the 1990s.
"Russkoye Video was fully guaranteed by Rozhdestvensky's own property when it was set up, said Linkov in a telephone interview. "The charges make it look as if Rozhdestvensky stole from himself."
In the earlier 1998 court case involving charges against Rozhdestvensky, prosecutors tried to make him give evidence against prominent St. Petersburg businessman Mikhail Mirilashvili, Rozhdestvensky told The St. Petersburg Times last month.
Mirilashvili was arrested on kidnapping charges at the end of January. While the cases against the three are separate, Mirilashvili, Gusinsky and Rozhdestvensky are known to have been business associates. In addition, Gusinsky is president of the Russian Jewish Congress, while Mirilashvili is its vice president.
TITLE: U.S. Consulate Rent Case Nixed
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The St. Petersburg City Arbitration Court Wednesday threw out a case lodged by an arm of the City Property Committee, or KUGI, against the U.S. Consulate in an effort to raise the U.S. Diplomatic Mission's rent of $6 per year.
The court - citing the consulate's diplomatic immunity - said the case was out of its jurisdiction and that it would have to be forwarded to Foreign Ministry and U.S. diplomatic authorities in Moscow for further talks, which are scheduled for March, consular officials said.
The $6 dollar yearly rent covers both the U.S. Consulate compound on Furshtatskaya Ul. and the residence of the American Consul General at 4 Grodnesnsky Pereulok.
The case was lodged six months ago by Inpredservice - a private wing of KUGI that provides landlord services to St. Petersburg's diplomatic missions - in an effort to raise the U.S. Consulate's current rock-bottom rent, which was negotiated in 1984 to last until 2009, said Inpredservice general director Boris Morozov in a telephone interview Wednesday.
But roller-coaster currency fluctuations since that time have rendered the rent ridiculously low and Morozov says that his organization is losing almost $35,000 a year in rent and services to the U.S. Diplomatic Mission.
"We cover all the communal and repair expenses for the two buildings, and it is all out of our own expenses," said Morozov.
Daniil Petrov, deputy legal advisor of the KUGI legal department, confirmed that the city was indeed incurring a loss and had to therefore make up the difference from the St. Petersburg city budget.
US consulate officials contacted by telephone - and who all requested anonymity - said they were not authorized to comment on the situation and would await the outcome of March discussions between the Foreign Ministry and the U.S. State Department.
The Canadian and the British consulates, who were also contacted for comment, would not reveal their rent figures, citing commercial secrecy.
But Morozov said that other consulates in town are not enjoying the same extreme rent breaks that the U.S. Consulate is.
On the other side of the Atlantic, in New York City, Nikolai Antonov, assistant to Russian Consul General Pavel Prokofyev, said that their consulate is owned outright by the Russian Foreign Ministry.
However, the Russian government pays $3,500 a month for two bedroom apartments for its diplomatic personnel.
TITLE: Upper House Presented With Revised Prison Bill
AUTHOR: By Ana Uzelac
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - After being approved Wednesday by the State Duma, a bill aimed at easing prison overcrowding and reducing the time suspects can be held before being brought to trial is once again headed for the Federation Council. This time, it seems set to pass.
The legislation was first approved by the Duma in December, but was unexpectedly rejected by the upper house Jan. 31 after the prosecutor general intervened.
A new version was passed Wed nes day by the Duma. Some of the bill's provisions were changed by a parliamentary conciliatory commission to meet the prosecutor general's objections, but its authors say the essence of the legislation is unchanged and prison populations should see a sharp decline.
Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov scuttled the bill the first time around by sending senators a letter warning about its "danger to society." He objected to a provision that would have shortened the time a suspect can be held in pretrial detention from 18 months to 12 months.
In the compromise version, a suspect can be held for up to 18 months only if he is suspected of a grave crime, said Alexander Urmanov, an aid to Pavel Krasheninnikov, chairman of the Duma's legislation committee and one of the project's authors. In all other cases, the maximum period remains a year, he added.
The original version limited the amount of time a suspect can be held during trial to six months. After Usti nov objected, the bill was changed to allow for three more months, but only with court approval, Urmanov said.
Troshin, spokesman for the Prosecutor General's Office, said the revised bill addressed Ustinov's main grievances. "I don't think there will be any letters this time," he said.
The Prosecutor's Office won more concessions when lawmakers agreed to delay implementing the new measures. The limit on pretrial detention will come into effect only Jan. 1 and the limit on detention during trial will come into effect three months after it is published in the official government paper, Rossiis kaya Gazeta.
The prosecutor general complained that the original legislation would immediately have set free as many as 350 people accused of murder, rape and banditry. "Overall we're satisfied with the results, since the changes don't affect the essence of the law," Urma nov said.
Even with the compromises, the prison population should fall by 250,000 within the next 1 1/2 years, he said. Russia's jails hold about 990,000 prisoners, who live in appalling conditions in overcrowded cells.
For now, the conciliatory commission gave up on another part of the legislation: changing paragraph 158 of the Criminal Code, which provides for punishing some types of theft with up to six years in prison. The severity of the punishment means the crimes are classified "grave," making it easier to jail suspects for longer periods.
This and other paragraphs should be changed to "prevent a situation when someone who steals two bags of potatoes goes to jail and gets involved with the criminal world," Interfax quoted Krasheninnikov as saying.
TITLE: Analysts: Cold War Is Over, but Spying Remains Priority
AUTHOR: By Jim Heintz
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - The Cold War may be over and Russia may have overhauled the Soviet-era KGB, but Moscow has shown no inclination to rein in its foreign intelligence activities.
The fall of European communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union may have initially led to hopes for an end to the cloak-and-dagger era, but Russia remains suspicious about an array of security issues centered on the United States.
"Espionage didn't fall with the [Berlin] Wall," said security expert Frank Cilluffo of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
From U.S. proposals for a new missile defense system, to Russia's great technological gap, to NATO's proposed thrust to the East, spies have plenty of work assessing the West's next moves.
The United States, likewise, maintains its interest in keeping tabs on the military, political and economic activities of other nations.
"Russia still has the capacity to destroy the United States in 30 minutes, so that focuses the attention, even though the prospects of that are minimal in the near term," said Loch Johnson, a professor of political science at the University of Georgia, who worked on intelligence issues for the Clinton White House and congressional intelligence committees.
Foreign intelligence activities never seem to have flagged under former president Boris Yeltsin, and some analysts have predicted they would increase under his successor Vladimir Putin, a 15-year KGB veteran. Yeltsin split the KGB into several smaller agencies, but the security apparatus appears to have remained mighty.
Russia's intense interest in learning the secrets of the wealthy and technically sophisticated West were underlined on Tuesday by the announcement in Washington that a veteral FBI agent had been arrested on charges of spying for Russia.
The arrest of Robert Philip Hanssen on Sunday in Virginia was the latest in an unusually heavy flurry of espionage cases over the past year and a half.
Hanssen has been charged with providing American secrets to Moscow for 15 years - both during and after the Cold War.
The announcement came just hours after Sweden reported the arrest of a spying suspect, whom a newspaper reported was working for Russia.
It also came at a time when Russia was under particular pressure from the West on issues that prompt worry and anger in the Kremlin.
Since President George Bush took office last month, Washington has mounted a full-court press against Russia's objections to a proposed national missile defense system. Moscow says the system would wreck the delicate strategic balance created by the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
Meanwhile, Russia is increasingly nervous and prickly about the prospect of NATO taking in the small former Soviet Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson was in Moscow on Tuesday for talks with top officials.
Russia, once proud of how it sped from the serf age to the space age in less than a century, now appears to feel vulnerable because it is behind the technological wave. Hanssen reportedly was passing along unspecified information about U.S. electronic surveillance techniques.
Cilluffo speculated that could be information about bugging techniques or about long-range signals intelligence.
Western technological sophistication has made many other countries besides Russia nervous, particularly over the Echelon surveillance network, allegedly run by the U.S. National Security Agency, which reportedly intercepts telephone calls, fax transmissions and private e-mails.
Moscow, meanwhile, says foreign intelligence agents have stepped up their work in Russia. Following the conviction last year of American Edmond Pope on charges of trying to buy plans for a sophisticated torpedo system, Federal Security Service head Nikolai Patrushev wrote that one of the main goals of the expanded activity "is to determine the true plans of the new state authorities in Russia." Pope, who denied he was a spy, was pardoned by Putin and released. "Espionage has always been a tool in every nation's tool kit," said Cilluffo, the security expert.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Don't Dump Mir!
MOSCOW (AP) - On the 15th anniversary of the Mir space station, a group of scientists and hard-line politicians protested Tuesday against the spacecraft's planned dumping next month.
About 100 protesters stood outside the headquarters of the Russian Aviation and Space Agency, chanting slogans and stamping their feet to stay warm in the freezing temperatures.
Protesters slammed the government's decision last year to bring down Mir in a controlled descent, which has been tentatively scheduled for mid-March.
According to current plans, the Mir will be directed to a stretch of the South Pacific between Australia and Chile in mid-March. The exact date will depend on solar activity.
No Confidence Motion
MOSCOW (SPT) - In the first show of opposition toward President Vla dimir Putin, the Communists in the State Duma announced Tuesday they would seek a no-confidence vote in his government over its economic course.
Communist leader Gennady Zyu ga nov announced Tuesday that his faction has started gathering the 90 lawmakers' signatures required for putting forward a no-confidence motion. The faction has 127 of the Du ma's 450 seats.
War Reporter Detained
MOSCOW (SPT) - Novaya Ga ze ta correspondent, Anna Polit kov skaya, was detained this week in southern Chechnya after she approached an army checkpoint to interview soldiers.
Her detention, first reported Wed nes day by her colleagues, was confirmed later in the day by the Kremlin and military officials. The Kremlin spokes man on Chechnya, Sergei Yastr zhembsky, said she was held at the army unit in Khatuni, a village near Vedeno. He said Politkovskaya had broken the rules by traveling in Chechnya without registering her whereabouts with the military, though she does have accreditation.
Pardons From Putin
MOSCOW(Reuters) - Vladimir Putin is dispatching more presidential pardons than his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, a Russian official said on Thursday.
Anatoly Pristavkin, head of the presidential pardons commission, told a news conference Putin had satisfied 12,800 pardon requests last year, 1,000 more than Yeltsin in 1999.
Among those pardoned by Putin was former U.S. intelligence officer Edmond Pope, convicted by a Russian court of spying.
Pristavkin did not explain whether the reason for the increased number of pardons was Putin's more lenient approach to crime or that he was simply processing more requests than an ailing Yeltsin in the last year of his presidency.
Fleeing Trawler Sunk
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian border guards, alerted by a U.S. reconnaissance plane, shot at and sank a Russian trawler suspected of poaching on Thursday after a day-long chase in the Northern Pacific, a border guard spokesman said.
The spokesman said a border guard ship had taken aboard all 28 crew members from the trawler, which had refused orders to stop for its papers to be checked.
He said a coast guard aircraft had fired at the trawler during the pursuit near the island of Shiashkotan, in the northern part of the Kurile chain, nearly 1,000 km north of Japan.
TITLE: Oligarchs Trying Out Role as Philanthropes
AUTHOR: By Anna Raff
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The chandelier hanging from the ceiling of the President's Hall in the Russian Academy of Sciences Headquarters illuminated the calm demeanors of three of the country's wealthiest men.
At the head table sat Chukotka Governor and Sibneft magnate Roman Abramovich, Siberian Aluminum chief Oleg Deripaska and MDM-Bank chairman Alexander Mamut. To their right was academy president Yury Osipov.
The occasion: The three oligarchs decided Wednesday to take a step toward modeling themselves after America's turn-of-the-century monopolists-philanthropists.
The three multimillionaires - who have often been reviled in the Russian media for their growing fortunes - announced to a crowd of several hundred scientists and guests the founding of the Fund to Support National Science.
Fund organizer Mamut then helped hand out its first annual cash awards totaling $1 million to 220 leading scientists.
"The idea was to become Russia's version of George Soros' fund," said Maxim Kagan, a physicist who met Mamut when they were both eighth graders.
Financier Soros hands out millions of dollars in grants to Russia each year.
Work on the new fund began in November, when the idea came up in one of Kagan and Mamut's many conversations, the physicist said. Mamut then convinced Abramovich and Deripaska to come on board.
During the ceremony, Abra mo vich - with his trademark shy grin - and Deripaska - with his shoulders slumped forward - listened to poignant speeches by Russia's greatest academics. The scientists lamented the brain drain, imploring the younger generation of scientists to stay home, and lavished praise on their benefactors.
"These are courageous people, don't you agree?" said Boris Zakharchenya, department head at the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute. "It's difficult to do real business in this country. I remember seeing Roman Arkadiavich [Abramovich] on television and thinking, 'Wouldn't it be great to give a little trickle of that oil to science?' And then he gave it!"
At the reception afterward, some of the recipients weren't quite as ecstatic about their awards, which ranged from $1,000 to $10,000.
"It's difficult, taking money from crooks," said one scientist who did not want to be identified. "Why do you think I'm standing here drinking? But then there are ways to justify it to yourself. If they stole from Russia, they were really stealing from me and my children, so it's really my money anyway that they're giving back to me."
TITLE: Robertson Ends Moscow Talks
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: BRUSSELS, Belgium - The Russian plan for anti-missile defense presented to NATO Secretary General George Robertson in Moscow this week is a broad concept that does not mention any specific anti-missile system, an alliance official said on Thursday.
"It's very broad-brush ... not overly detailed ... there is no specific mention of a system," he told reporters at a background briefing. "We would need to see a lot more before we could describe it as a detailed plan."
That did not imply criticism, the official stressed. The Russians had shown willingness to engage the United States and its European allies on the controversy over American plans to build a strategic missile shield of space interceptors.
Robertson welcomed the proposal as evidence that Russia shares Western concerns about threats posed by the proliferation of missile technology, but he remained noncommittal Wednesday before leaving Moscow.
"After careful study of this Russian proposal, we can sit down and discuss where our interests meet and how we can take this project forward."
Russian experts were expected to visit NATO to explain in more detail what Moscow had in mind precisely as a lower-cost, mobile, European system for countering the threat of ballistic missile attack. No date had been set, he said.
The encouraging point was that everyone was now discussing the same problem - missile proliferation and the potential threat it posed - whereas Moscow previously cast strong doubt on whether there was any such risk.
The Russian proposal was presented to NATO Secretary General George Robertson on Tuesday by Russian Defense Minister Marshal Igor Sergeyev.
It was widely assumed to be based on using existing theater-range weapons that can destroy ballistic missiles in their so-called "boost phase" - shortly after launch - rather than in space as the proposed American shield would do.
The target at that stage is slower, bigger and cannot scatter decoys. The United States says a missile's trajectory in the short-lived boost phase is actually very hard to track, and such a system might need 10 years to develop.
The killer missile would also have to placed within range. Former U.S. secretary of defense William Cohen said last June, when the Russians first suggested their alternative, that if a boost-phase interceptor was what they had in mind it would be "completely insufficient."
Recent reports speculate that the system could be built around Russia's advanced S-400 air defense missile, which Moscow says can far out-perform the U.S. Patriot system.
The NATO official, however, said it might be something else. "There are indications, implicit not explicit, that it would not be a boost-phase system ... but that it would be within the ABM treaty," he said.
The treaty only permits anti-missile systems capable of destroying ballistic missiles with a limited range of 3,500 kilometers, which would not protect the continental United States from a missile fired by, for example, North Korea.
North Korea, complaining about U.S. behavior, on Thursday threatened to end a moratorium on missile development.
The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty prohibited the United States and the then-Soviet Union from developing extensive anti-missile shields, so that each would remain vulnerable to the other's nuclear arsenal in a "balance of terror."
The new U.S. administration says that Cold War strategy is obsolete and it is asking Moscow to amend the treaty to permit the new defenses against renegade states or so-called terrorists.
Russia says the treaty remains the cornerstone of disarmament and should stay. Its proposal of an alternative that would meet this criterion has been met with a blend of puzzlement, curiosity and skepticism in the West.
Many Western commentators believe Moscow's main aim is political - to divide Europe from the United States on an issue that some fear could ignite a new arms race.
But governments generally have welcomed the fact that the Russians now agree there is a problem to be addressed and are disposed to discuss it.
The Russian plan, described in a dossier handed to Robertson, looks at ways of dealing with the threat in three broad steps: an international method of determining where missile threats exist, a diplomatic method of trying to remove them, and a hardware defense if that doesn't work.
- Reuters, AP
TITLE: Case Reopened on Pope Case Witness
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) has reopened a high- treason investigation into the professor at the center of last year's spying case against U.S. businessman Edmond Pope, Interfax news agency said on Thursday.
It said Anatoly Babkin, of Moscow's prestigious Bauman technical university, was called in for questioning more than two months after President Vla dimir Putin pardoned Pope who had been sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment for spying. An FSB spokesman declined to comment on the case, which concerns Babkin's arrest with Pope in a Moscow hotel room in April 2000 while allegedly discussing documents relating to the propulsion and fuel systems of Russia's high-speed Shkval torpedo. Pope's lawyers insisted the FSB's case was based on Babkin's testimony, and during the American's trial repeatedly asked a Moscow court why Babkin had not faced any charges for selling Pope what prosecutors insisted were state secrets.
The FSB dropped its initial investigation into Babkin because of his ill health, and he later withdrew a statement accusing Pope of espionage, saying it had been made under FSB duress. Putin pardoned Pope in mid-December and he returned to the United States to see his terminally ill father and receive treatment for a rare form of bone cancer.
The case strained Russian-U.S. relations with former president Bill Clinton, who asked Putin to expedite Pope's release. Putin's pardon eased ties with new U.S. President George W. Bush, but the arrest this week of Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Robert Philip Hanssen on suspicion of spying for Moscow has highlighted lingering East-West security tensions.
TITLE: EBRD Commits Itself to Small Business
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - "When I started my business I borrowed some money and left my dog as collateral..."
Strange as it might sound to some, such a declaration has actually been uttered by a few of the people who took 46,000 loans from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development over the past six years, the EBRD said Monday.
The bank's Russia Small Business Fund has lent $520 million to small businesses, with the tiniest loans ringing in at a mere $30, the EBRD said. With the vast majority of the loans amounting to just a few thousand dollars, the EBRD has accepted as collateral dogs, TV sets and old refrigerators - the only valuables that some clients have to offer.
"Everybody has something that they value or treasure. It can be a television set, a refrigerator or a wedding ring, or a pedigree dog, so we would take those as collateral," said Elizabeth Wallace, director of EBRD's small business department.
The EBRD is ready to accept many more dogs and refrigerators over the next three years as it moves to expand its lending.
EBRD president Jean Lemierre told a news conference that this year the bank hopes to disburse $645 million - a level last seen in 1997. Small businesses will account for $250 million of that amount.
"It is most crucial to finance the real economy ... this is why the EBRD never left Russia and is planning to increase the volume of its investment," Lemierre said.
Lending is expected to reach $1 billion a year by 2003, he said.
The EBRD, which was set up to assist the nations of the former Soviet Union in their transition to free market economies, has also sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into bigger projects like oil and trucks over the past decade. But it is the small businesses that the bank sees as the backbone of its operations.
Small businesses account for about 25 percent of Russia's gross domestic product, or $50 billion of last year's $200 billion. But that is a small amount compared with the 40 to 50 percent that small businesses in Eastern European countries contributed to their economies, said Roland Nash, an economist with Renaissance Capital brokerage.
"The fact that Russia has not managed to generate a significant increase in the number of small businesses in Russia is a major indicator of the fact that the conditions for the small businesses are still horrendous," Nash said.
The EBRD provides its loans via a network of major banks such as Sberbank and the EBRD-controlled bank KMB, or Small Business Financing. The interest rates generally follow the Central Bank's rates - 15 percent to 17 percent for loans in U.S. dollars and 25 percent for ruble loans.
Of the total funds distributed about 60 percent are lent in rubles and 40 percent in dollars. Wallace noted that before the crisis the ratio between local and foreign currency loans was reversed with 60 percent in dollars.
The average loan amounts to $11,300 and matures after three to five years.
Wallace said the EBRD has about 600 specially trained loan officers who examine the credit worthiness of clients. The bank then doles out increasingly larger loans once a borrower proves himself.
But since the EBRD does not have credit histories to turn to with new clients, the loan officers often have to look for unusual collateral - like dogs.
Wallace said the EBRD has never actually had to repossess a dog from a defaulter.
But Dirk Haboeck, the Russia Small Business Fund program coordinator, said that once he actually had to carry someone's television set out of his apartment.
"We did return the TV after a while, after the person resumed payments," Haboeck said.
TITLE: Putin Weighs In on Land Code
AUTHOR: By Yevgenia Borisova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin ordered the government Wednesday to come up with a new Land Code by May and to prepare a separate bill that would allow the regions to decide for themselves how to deal with agricultural land.
The order, which effectively scraps the current draft of the Land Code, appeared to be a bid to break the six-year deadlock in parliament over land ownership. Many lawmakers are bitterly opposed to the sale of agricultural land, which they say would be lost to greedy industrialists if fully privatized.
"The president and the State Council agreed that those drafts [under debate in parliament] are wholly outdated and they are difficult to change," Sergei Sai, head of the State Service of the Land Register, told reporters after the State Council meeting.
The State Council, an advisory body composed of the country's 89 governors, was told that the new Land Code would deal with all ownership issues of land for commercial and residential use. The separate bill on agricultural land is to provide a broad framework of regulations from which the regions could pick and choose what they wished to implement.
Putin said the new Land Code must be submitted to the State Duma by May and the draft on agricultural land had to be ready for discussion in the Cabinet in June.
The government is already piecing together the draft laws, Sai said.
"The new Land Code already has a clearly formulated principle, concept and structure" and will be discussed in the regions in April, Sai said.
"The basic point of the new draft Land Code that is being prepared by the government will be treating land as a state strategic resource," he said.
Copies of the draft were not made available Wednesday.
Agrarian lobbyist Nikolai Plotnikov, a fierce opponent of agricultural land sales who attended the meeting Wednesday, said he was left speechless by the Kremlin's new plan.
"They were talking about something that no one has ever seen in a written form," he complained.
The Duma will have to go back to the beginning in the approval process of the Land Code, he added. The 1994 code had already passed two of the required three readings.
But the government said it is confident that with the contentious agricultural issue removed, it will not take another six years to get the new Land Code pushed through the first two readings.
In fact, the governors agreed Wednesday that the code and agricultural bill must be implemented this year.
"The State Council agreed that it is necessary to take all the issues that caused problems out of the code," Sai said.
Dmitry Ayatskov, the governor of the Saratov region, said the council was evenly split on the sale and purchase of farmland. He said one-third was for sales, one-third is against and the rest are undecided.
Stavropol territory Governor Alexander Chernogorov warned the council that nothing good could come from private land ownership, Interfax reported.
He said that about 60 percent of privatized farmland in his region has been snapped up by nonfarmers.
But Rostov Governor Vladimir Chub said after the meeting that he was very pleased with the unanimity with which regional governors spoke about the necessity to develop different forms of ownership on land in different regions.
"Different regions have different kinds of climates and land - in some of them there are deserts, in others forests, mineral resources or permafrost," the governor said.
"Regions have different kinds of traditional ownership on land, too," he added. "We in the Rostov region historically have common land ownership by Cossacks, and the majority of the Rostov people think that is all right.
"But that doesn't mean people in other regions have to agree!"
TITLE: LUKoil Building Up Refinery Infrastructure
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON - Russia's top oil producer LUKoil said Tuesday it is close to making an offer for a U.S. refinery to help supply its 1,300 Getty gas stations and enlarge its foothold in the United States while simultaneously pursuing an aggressive expansion of its downstream business in Eastern Europe.
"We're holding negotiations with the seven world oil majors about our plans," a LUKoil spokesman said.
He said the producer was considering acquiring refining infrastructure in Russia, the Balkans and the United States, as well as a distribution set up in Canada.
Vadim Gluzman, head of LUKoil in the United States, said the plans included the purchase of a large refinery in the northeast of the United States, the Financial Times reported on its Web site.
LUKoil wanted a plant of at least 150,000-barrels-a-day capacity located somewhere south of Massachusetts and north of Pennsylvania, Gluzman said. "We are not under pressure timewise," he was quoted by the Web site as saying.
LUKoil is also reportedly considering the acquisition of a gasoline marketing operation that would give the company about 350 outlets in Canada, Gluzman told FT.com.
This would add to the company's 1,300-outlet filling-station network in the United States, operated under the name Getty Petroleum.
The company spokesman said oil for the planned U.S. refinery would be supplied by LUKoil's giant Timan-Pechora field in European Russia.
The company is developing a transport route from Timan-Pechora involving surface and underwater pipelines, a 15-million-ton-capacity oil terminal in Varandei on the Barents Sea and a flotilla of ice-resistant tankers, the spokesman added.
"Our enormous reserves and growing crude production are forcing us to expand our downstream operations in Europe and the United States," he said, adding that annual oil output of 70 million tons would likely rise to 100 million tons by 2005.
"We cannot afford to rely on crude exports alone, and downstream expansion is important if we are to guard against fluctuations in the world market," he added.
LUKoil is currently seeking a 51 percent share in Austria's Avanti, which operates a chain of 700 filling stations, and the spokesman said a decision could be made in the next two days.
In the Black Sea and Balkans regions, LUKoil said it was searching for a refining plant and sales infrastructure. It is also likely to acquire two more Russian refineries to add to its existing three plants, a company spokes man said.
TITLE: WTO Talks Are Raising Intellectual Questions
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Protection of intellectual property issues will take center stage in parliament this spring as Russia rushes to come up with its stance on conditions for entry into the World Trade Organization, the government said Tuesday.
A working group of WTO member nations will meet with Russian officials in Geneva for a fresh round of talks March 1-2, at which an agenda for the year will be drawn up, Russia's chief WTO negotiator Maxim Medvedkov told a conference of business leaders and diplomats.
Medvedkov, who is also a deputy economic development and trade minister, said the working group will then begin to hammer out the conditions for entry in May.
"The government plans to identify what its conditions are for joining WTO by the end of July," he said.
Medvedkov said the government is also pushing to introduce bills in the State Duma that will bring legislation in line with WTO requirements. Also, a special council overseeing trade and investment legislation was set up recently under the auspices of the Duma's economic policy committee.
"Work began on Feb. 1 to check all related laws for compatibility with WTO norms," Medvedkov said. "We are working on seven to eight laws and also on a separate package of laws on intellectual property."
Officials from Rospatent, the state agency in charge of intellectual property, said they have put together legislation for the Duma that would meet the WTO pact on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS.
The bills, which have been reviewed by U.S. and EU officials, will be sent to the Duma within a month, Rospatent head Alexander Korchagin said.
The cost of intellectual property violations in Russia is estimated at over $1 billion a year, a staggering sum that Russian and foreign companies alike have long been lobbying to claim.
Korchagin said Rospatent hopes lawmakers will amend five laws that include patents, trademarks and computer software in the spring, bills that would update laws passed in 1992.
A number of businessmen at the conference expressed concern that the laws may not be enforced once they are passed, saying that weak law enforcement made it pointless to file lawsuits.
"The judicial process here tends to be far outside the norms, competence and practices of legal proceedings in many other countries. ... Owners of IP often fail to utilize legal protection," said Peter Necarsulmer, president of the Coalition for Intellectual Property Rights lobbying group, which co-sponsored the conference.
"The present Criminal Code is inadequate and outdated in terms of legal provisions for intellectual property protection," added Yevgeny Arievich, a partner at Baker & McKenzie. "On the basis of current legislation, it is difficult to make law enforcement authorities do anything. A number of our clients have tried, but to no effect."
Korchagin countered that the best recourse would still be to sue violators and file complaints with the Interior Ministry.
But some participants were not easily soothed.
"What Korchagin said does not correspond to reality," said an executive of one multinational company at the meeting who asked not to be named. "You apply to the Interior Ministry, but they refuse to take up the case. The government could have done more."
TITLE: Government Honors Paris Debt in Part
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - The government on Tuesday paid part of the sum due to the Paris Club of sovereign creditors, and the prime minister threw his support behind a parliamentary bill that would authorize only enough budget funds to pay interest on the Soviet-era debt due to the group.
Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov said "temporary difficulties" were to blame for the government's payment of just $577 million of the $1.2 billion that was due to be paid to Paris Club creditors Tuesday. It was the single largest payment falling due this year.
Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Russia may pay the rest due as early as the end of this week, after parliament debates budget amendments authorizing funds for repaying the sovereign debt.
The Cabinet on Tuesday withdrew its proposed amendments to the 2001 budget, which it had submitted last week to the State Duma. The amendments called for finding an extra 108 billion rubles in this year's budget to finance payments to the Paris Club.
According to the compromise plan Kasyanov backed Tuesday, payment on loan principal would depend on surplus funds that enter the budget if the external balance of payments is favorable.
Kudrin said that the first 41 billion rubles in surplus funds would go to servicing the debt, and the rest would be divided 50-50 between debt service and boosting spending on politically popular budget items like defense, pensions and wages, Itar-Tass reported.
"We hope on Feb. 22 the Duma will adopt the draft law at one go," he said.
TITLE: Reiman Reaffirms Plans For Telecoms Investment
AUTHOR: By Andrey Musatov and Simon Ostrovsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Special events bringing together governmental and business officials as well as specialists to discuss development and problems in any business sector in Russia tend, eventually, to end with the same basic question of how to attract investment.
The international congress "Developing Telecommunications and Creating an Information Society," which was held at the Tavrichesky Palace on Wednesday and Thursday, proved no exception to the rule.
Federal Communications Minister Leonid Reiman said on Thursday that the reorganization plan for Russia's telecommunications sector, which the ministry announced in December, calls for total investments of $33 billion between now and 2010. Reiman said that the plan had yet to be approved, pending some minor adjustments.
The most significant part of the plan involves the integration of Russia's 82 local companies providing telephone service into seven larger entities, to conform with the seven recently created federal super-regions. The move is intended to allow the new, larger entities to attract funds to improve their equipment and infrastructures.
Speaking at a press conference at Tavrichesky Palace on Wednesday, Reiman said that the success of the ministry's plan depended in a large part on the development of an effective legal environment, needed in order to attract investors.
"We are not going to limit the participation of foreign investors in the communications sector," Reiman said. "About half of the total needed for modernization will have to be provided by long-term investors, while the other half will have to be found by the operators themselves."
But, while analysts said that the targeting of foreign sources for investment makes sense, some changes in attitude might be required to bring this about.
"Recently, government officials have talked about limiting the role of foreign investors in the telecommunications sector, but it's unlikely that they will turn them away," Andrey Bogdanov, senior analyst at Alfa Bank, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. "So, to attract investors the sector needs the government to make a clear decision to either forget about limiting foreign participation or to limit it as little as possible."
While telecommunications is considered a "strategic sector" under Russian regulatory rules - meaning that foreign ownership in the firms is limited to 25 percent - Andrey Braginsky, vice-president of Renaissance Capital analytical agency, says that Russia's telecommunications sector has no choice but to allow foreign investors.
"Reiman is a politician and he had to say what he did about protecting Russian communications, but there's really not anything to fear," he said. "Mobile Telecom Systems (MTS), Moscow's largest cellular service provider tops Rostelecom, the national long-distance operator, in profits."
"This is because MTS has the money and professional management from foreign companies behind it."
But the desirability of foreign investors wasn't the only topic raising questions, as the treatment of minority shareholders was also on the agenda in relation to restructuring.
Gennady Ko les nikov, deputy chairperson of the Federal Securities Commission (FKTsB), said that his organization was in the process of formulating a new Corporate Managing Code to regulate the telecommunications and other industries.
The project was initiated after, in July of last year, a minority shareholder in St. Petersburg National and International Telephone (SPB MMT) filed a suit to halt the company's merger with St. Petersburg Telephone Network (PTS) and St. Petersburg Telegraph (SPT). Sergei Moiseyev, claiming that the coefficient for the conversion of SPB MMT shares called for in the merger plan did not reflect the actual value of the stock, succeeded in having the $450 million merger for four months, before the Kuibishevsky Federal Court finally ruled against him.
Kolesnikov said the first chapter of the new code will set standards and regulations for the holding of shareholders' meetings, the calculation of the stock conversion coefficients and procedures for selling shares. He also said that the basic points of the new code were formulated in cooperation with the FKTsB's coordination council, which includes representatives from major Russian and foreign companies and institutions including LUKoil, Gazprom, the European Bank for Construction and Development (EBDR) and the World Bank.
"The new code will help to limit the number of court challenges as the procedures will be more clear," Kolesnikov said. "We plan to complete it and submit it to the government before November of this year."
"Nothing in Russia changes overnight, but this would be a positive step," Alfa's Bogdanov said. "But cases where minority shareholders protest what is a profitable deal for a company are common even for European and American businesses."
Reiman also addressed Russia's cellular communications market, saying that the government's policy on granting operating licenses was aimed at fostering competition in the market, while not creating glut of providers by issuing too many licenses.
"In any of the territories where GSM standard licenses have been issued, there's room for four GSM operators," Reiman said. "A third GSM license in St. Petersburg will definitely be issued, but only when the portion of the population using cell phones reaches 10 percent."
In reality, the Region at present has only one GSM-standard provider.
In 1998, two companies - North-West GSM and Telecom XXI - received licenses to operate in Global System for Mobile (GSM) cellular-phone service in the Northwest region. North-West GSM has become St. Petersburg's biggest cellular service provider, announcing at the end of January that it had reached the 250,000- subscriber plateau. Telekom XXI, meanwhile, has yet to begin operations in the city and, at the beginning of this year, bought and installed a switching station and 14 base stations for signal transfer, ostensibly to meet the terms set out to maintain its license.
TITLE: Mailbox
TEXT: Dear Editor,
John Dooley's piece ["Aid That Works," Feb. 20] extolling aid for legal reform is a sad example of how someone's experience leads to misguided generalizations. I can believe that Dooley has had some positive experiences participating in legal reform aid projects - so positive, apparently, that the grateful recipients of such aid have been able to pull the wool over his eyes. This I understand. What I don't understand is how The St. Petersburg Times can publish a piece - even an opinion piece - that is so full of blatant misstatements of fact. Here are some examples.
"Legal reform is occurring in Russia, although this progress gets far too little acknowledgment in the West. The court system is better funded; judges are better paid and better trained," Dooley writes.
Better trained? In the last 10 years educated people have fled the state sector, including the judiciary. Of roughly 15,000 judges working in Russia today, only 600 have advanced degrees (kandidat nauk, the rough equivalent of a master's; only one, the chairman of the Supreme Court, has a doctorate).
The majority of new judges are former court clerks who have completed a correspondence course in jurisprudence; their secretarial time is counted as "legal practice," and they get to sit on the bench as soon as they graduate.
Better paid? Judges have had two pay raises in the last 18 months or so, and both have fallen short of making up for inflation. A city court judge with an advanced degree makes less than $200 a month; others make less.
Better funded? Judges routinely violate the Constitution by not wearing robes and holding hearings in rooms that do not have a state flag or state seal. This is because the courts can't afford to buy this equipment.
"Reforms have separated the Russian courts from direct executive-branch control."
That happened seven years ago; since then the system has been backsliding - a process that has speeded up a great deal since Vladimir Putin became president. The prosecutors have regained most of the ground it lost when the right to exercise control over courts was taken away from it. What is that if not executive-branch control? If that is not enough, there is the new bailiff service, which is directly controlled by the Justice Ministry. If a decision is not to the executive branch's liking, the bailiffs can enforce it the right way. A good example is the recent arbitration court decision to arrest 19 percent of NTV stock without suspending Media-MOST's right to vote with those shares. The bailiffs who came to the company to serve the papers informed Media-MOST it would not be able to vote with the shares. Now Putin is also likely to replace lifetime judge appointments with 15-year ones. And who do you think will be reappointing the judges? Right. The executive branch.
"The challenge of U.S. assistance is to help historically weak institutions, like the courts and private lawyers, thrive and grow to a position in Russian society comparable to the one they occupy in United States. In order to do this, assistance must be focused on less glamorous issues like court administration, the use of technology to increase efficiency, alternative dispute resolution, effective judicial and lawyer training and ethics. And, yes, much of that assistance must go directly to the relevant parts of the government, not to nongovernmental organizations that can advocate reform, but not actually bring it about."
Sounds fine. There is just one problem: A loan for just these purposes was given by the World Bank in 1996, for a sum of $57 million. The term of the loan runs out this year, but the bulk of the money still hasn't been spent, though the Russian taxpayers are paying to service this loan. There can be no doubt at this point that the reason this loan failed so spectacularly was that state agencies were charged with reforming themselves. The bulky board composed of representatives of all the "relevant parts of the government" preferred to spend nothing rather than change anything. They could not even agree on a logo for the program's public-education component for nearly a year. In the end they threw out all the designers' proposals and drew up something themselves: a double-headed eagle.
Finally, the most insidious aspect of this piece is that it creates the erroneous impression that the tendency in Russia favors progress on legal reform. But the facts tell a different story. Two examples from the last few weeks' law making:
For one, in early January, Putin proposes amendments to the Code of Criminal Procedure that would bring parts of it in line with the Constitution - most notably, would finally require a court order rather than a prosecutor's decision to arrest someone. The prosecutor general pays a visit to the president, and he withdraws the legislation.
Example Two: The Head Directorate of Punishment Execution, the penitentiary authority (GUIN), proposes measures to reform itself - a miracle, a real attempt at liberalization coming from within. Among other things, it would place strict limits on the term of pre-trial detention and stop the practice of jailing juveniles for years for minor crimes, which are classified as severe because they were committed by a group. The Duma passes the bill, making it worse in the process. Then the prosecutor general raises a stink, the Kremlin signals the president's intention not to sign the bill, and the Federation Council, which had been all for it, votes it down.
Masha Gessen,
Moscow
Dear Editor,
I'm glad to see that the Russian justice system hasn't let former diplomat Andrei Knyazev slide away into bureaucratic never-never land after his drunk driving caused the death of Catherine MacLean here.
Many Canadian citizens are concerned that the difficult reforms Russia is going through may allow this man to fall through the cracks. We will be watching this case to its end.
James Kautz,
Ottawa, Canada
Dear Editor,
As a former member of the United States Navy (1986 to 1995), I would like to respond to Pavel Felgenhauer's column of Feb. 15 ["Is a Professional Army Feasible?"].
I agree with most of the points made by Mr. Felgenhauer. I am not a defense analyst, nor was I an officer. I was an enlisted man, one of the rank and file who comprise the strength of any military. Mr. Felgenhauer is right, shrinking a flawed system will not make that system suddenly work. What surprises me is that the Russian military leadership will not recognize the pernicious effects of conscription. General Sidorenko, the chief of military education, may believe that Russia already has professional soldiers, but his comments on the minimal training currently given to junior officers prove conclusively that even he does not believe what he says. Each year, the Russian military, following the practices of its Soviet predecessor, fills its ranks with young men who would rather be anywhere else than where they are. These young men are forced into a military with a noncommissioned officer corps that is unprepared and unwilling to enforce discipline. In fact, if media reports are to be believed, the noncommissioned officers use their rank to extort money and physically abuse the new recruits. The whole system of training the next generation of soldiers is the most important problem facing the Russian military today. As long as Russian enlisted men feel that they are being forced into involuntary servitude instead of willingly serving their country, President Putin's hopes of creating a truly professional military force will go for naught.
Timothy McGivney,
Wappingers Falls, New York
Dear Editor,
Thank goodness for wisdom like that in Vermont Justice John Dooley's comment on assistance to rule-of-law programs in Russia. Too often, dramatic, legally related headlines charging that Russia runs kangaroo courts are taken as some sort of crude reality. On Dooley's evidence alone, if there's a threat that rule-of-law assistance programs will be cut, no effort should be spared saving them from the shortsighted.
How else will AvtoVAZ/General Motors dealerships execute judgments on defaulting purchasers of new automotive products?
John Anderson,
Calgary, Canada
Dear Editor,
I am married to a Russian citizen who loves her family and Russia very much. Therefore, I am concerned about the prosperity and well-being of Russia and its citizens. Russia has such great possibilities for wealth. However, it seems to lack the trust of outside investors, and I believe that this is largely because of the corruption throughout its government.
I have heard stories about this problem, but I couldn't comprehend how bad the situation is until it struck close to home. My father-in-law is a good man who lives near the city of Omsk.
A short time ago, a Russian police officer was celebrating and during his festivities he consumed large amounts of alcohol. The police officer then got behind the wheel of his car with a few passengers, and, while driving drunk, struck my father-in-law's car. Some people died as a result of the police officer's irresponsibility. The Russian courts are dragging their feet and, according to my wife, they may well let the police officer off with no punishment and not give my father-in-law any compensation so he can get his car repaired.
Until now, I would have never believed a court of law would allow this to happen. I have also just found out today that two families near my father-in-law are now blackmailing him for money. They are threatening to harm my wife's family if my father-in-law doesn't pay them 3,000 rubles every month. The police know about this and, according to my wife, they will do nothing. Their family dog was already poisoned a couple of days ago.
I was thinking about investing in Russia by opening some stores around Omsk. This would make jobs for people and all of my employees would be paid in cash every week and would have health benefits as well as sick and vacation days with pay. I would have been willing to take a 10-year loss to ensure that all the employees are taken care of.
I strongly believed that the Russian people have the strength to make it through these hard times and prosper, but now I am starting to feel what all of the other potential investors are feeling. We must have confidence in the government and the legal system of a country before we can invest in it.
William Bishop,
Washington, D.C.
Dear Editor,
I have been pursuing the trail of tears in The St. Petersburg Times following Tom Masters' column in the Jan. 30 issue ('No End in Sight for Dual-Pricing System'). Having been involved in the funding of the nonprofit culture sector in the former Soviet Union, and working with the State Hermitage Museum in particular, for the past eight years, I am amazed by the majority of these comments. Several are ill-informed, sophomoric, and downright mean.
In spite of what Mr. Masters would have us believe, there is a distinct financial dichotomy between the ordinary Russian and the majority of foreign visitors to St. Petersburg. He also seems to forget that an increasing number of Russians are already, through the taxes they pay, indirectly funding these cultural institutions. Under these circumstances, providing a discount to Russians is not unreasonable. And in contradistinction to what Mr. Masters and some of his supporters would have us blindly accept, discounting is a practice that has been covertly and overtly in practice outside Russia for decades.
Most of these institutions depend to some degree upon financing from the federal budget. But until recently most of these institutions were only receiving on average 60 percent of the budgeted amount each fiscal year. Forced to identify other sources of income, many of these institutions established fund-raising departments, adapting the experiences of foreign organizations to Russian realities. However, philanthropy in Russia is problematic. Most Russians do not have the financial resources to contribute to these institutions to a degree that could have a demonstrative impact on them, although I am constantly amazed by the relative generosity of Russians.
Corporate sponsors are around, but the majority are foreign companies doing business in St. Petersburg. Their sponsorship is limited and linked to their marketing budgets and strategies, thus their preference for "glamour products" such as the Hermitage and the Mariinsky and generally at the expense of other less-known but deserving institutions. The majority of Russian companies either have limited discretionary budgets for sponsorship or fail to understand the importance and benefits of corporate citizenship.
Identifying donors outside Russia is also problematic. Many potential American and Western European donors generally look to their own cultural needs first when giving. And when they are drawn to Russia, they generally prefer to realize a tax break - something they are accustomed to especially in the United States. Setting up nonprofit foundations in these countries, which enable donors to realize the tax deduction, is time-consuming not to mention the resources required to solicit donations and monitor their use. Most countries have strict laws on how tax-free donations can be sent abroad. Foreign donors also expect financial transparency and accounting. This is not as simple as it may seem. Russian cultural organizations must maintain Russian accounting and reporting as required by the ministries of culture and finance. Foreign donors generally expect financial accounting following GAAP (general accepted accounting practice). It was for this reason that the Hermitage Museum upgraded its computerized financial accounting system to generate Russian and GAAP accounting but not without difficulty. Foreign foundations supporting Russian cultural institutions do exist, but they are few. As numerous organizations are vying for a piece of this small pie, it is often necessary to lobby these foundations - something that is best achieved face to face, which most of these organizations are not in a position to do.
When donations are received from abroad, they are often subject to tax by the Russian authorities at 20 to 35 percent. Foreign donors shy away from any of their donation being applied to customs or taxes, and cultural institutions generally are forbidden to use revenue received through the ministries of culture and finance for such an expense. Therefore receiving institutions must find extra budgetary resources to cover these tax and customs expenses.
And let us not forget that these institutions are struggling to manage on very slim budgets. Try to compare the Hermitage's annual operating budget of $11 million with the Metropolitan Museum's $117 million - obvious differences aside, these are comparable museums in size. No wonder many foreign managers describe cultural administrators in Russia as "miracle workers." Certainly many of these institutions could be better managed. They are generally the first to agree, and most have implemented some form of management change. However, many foreign observers fail to realize that the way cultural institutions are managed in the West does not always apply in Russia. There are no existing economic and management models and often changes that need to be made on the local level require changes on the national level- and these have been slow in coming.
Given the environment in which these institutions operate and their need for revenue, it is reasonable that they would raise entry fees. This makes good economic sense as long as the market can bear it. The suggestion that such rates are a deterrent to tourism is not borne by the facts. Foreign tourism in St. Petersburg is on the rise. St. Petersburg is now one of the 10 most-visited cities in the world, and there is also no evidence that these institutions or tourism have been adversely affected by the current fee scheme.
The better question is when will these institutions no longer need to offer a discount to Russian citizens and how can we encourage this. Looking at the overall picture calmly, perhaps it would be better to continue to support these institutions during the current transition period, rather than accusing them unfairly of xenophobia and crippling the tourist market - hysterical assertions that ring more of trouble making than trouble shooting.
Stuart Gibson,
St. Petersburg
Editor's note: We would like to thank all those who have written to us concerning the dual-pricing system, and to remind our readers that they are welcome to write letters on anything else that appears in the newspaper as well!
TITLE: City Lawmakers Trying To Curb Own Behavior
AUTHOR: By Barnaby Thompson
TEXT: IT'S finally happened. Lawmakers at the Legislative Assembly have become so disgusted at their own behavior that they have decided to set up a self-regulatory body, to be called "the working group on ethics."
The idea has come from Deputy Speaker Konstantin Serov, who has obviously had enough of taking charge of proceedings when the speaker is absent, and the chamber starts fooling around because teacher is away. Serov even looks a bit like a school assistant principal, aware that from time to time he has been left in charge and not entirely happy about it. The kind of man who takes report cards far too seriously.
I had initially thought that Serov was trying to clamp down on bad manners in the chamber - writing rude words on the blackboard, pinning obscene notes to each others' jackets - and indeed some of the wording of the proposal presented to the assembly this week deals with such joyous pranks. There is reference to "rude or insulting expressions ... damage to the honor and probity of deputies and other persons," and while there is no outright mention of swearing, it's fairly clear that an ill-considered expletive would fall into this category.
You couldn't argue with this. There is no one to compare with Vla dimir Zhirinovsky in the St. Petersburg parliament, but physical violence is not unknown, while fooling around for cheap laughs and underhanded delaying tactics are common.
After Wednesday's proceedings, however, Serov said he was more concerned with lawmakers having conversations with the press in which they deliberately smear the reputations of their colleagues and anybody else. Perhaps he had in mind the occasion when the lone female deputy in the assembly was mentioned in the same sentence as the word "whore" by another lawmaker. Or perhaps he is trying to guard against more subtle tactics, such as apparently off-the-cuff remarks about the terrible financial state of a certain company, on the board of which coincidentally sits a rival deputy.
Also fine, in my book. And Serov is no doubt trying to educate lawmakers to be good little children who will grow up a credit to us all.
But how is he going to punish them? Serov says that taking away speaking rights - as is the case in the State Duma - for varying amounts of time should do the trick, which presents the possibility of an entirely silent assembly while lawmakers get the hang of this ethics thing.
One envisions a hushed, business-like chamber, the quiet broken only by the sound of voting buttons being pressed - and Serov droning, "Thirty for, two against, we have passed the law, next document number 5783 ..."
His idea of bliss, in fact. Perhaps he can give them extra homework, too.
TITLE: These Are the Days of Our Lives
AUTHOR: By Russell Working
TEXT: ST. Valentine's Day, as we all know, has spread throughout the world in recent decades, stirring up dangerous passions and urban unrest.
In India, Hindu extremists rioted last week because they had determined that the holiday was a scheme to compel people to celebrate a Roman Catholic feast. In China, some authorities tried to discourage the "Day of Love," and distressed Valentine's Day revelers no doubt will soon be immolating themselves in Tiananmen Square.
In Vladivostok last week, such dangers seemed distant - at first. There were no Red Guards frisking citizens for love notes, no mobs ransacking Hallmark card displays while chanting the name of Shiva, destroyer and restorer of worlds. I started the day by scribbling "flowers" on my hand so I wouldn't forget to buy them for my girlfriend, Nonna and set off for my Russian class.
The Russian College for Foreigners is an excellent school whose teachers heroically labor to pound the language of Pushkin and Speed-Info into the oaken depths of my skull. Nevertheless, the staff rashly plunged us into what The New York Times would probably describe as the worldwide clash between the forces of globalization - those who send cards decorated with winged, naked babies and fundamentalists, who like to burn them.
As we arrived, a secretary ordered students to pin numbers to our shirts. Then we had to grab a piece of red paper cut out in the shape of a heart and write a note. "Just jot down the number of the person you want to give a Valentine to, and write a note," she said. "Then drop it in this box."
Like, write a love note? Can they compel us to do this?
Well, no, they made clear that you didn't have to urge your Valentine to sneak off for a romantic weekend at the Spassk cement works. Just write an "I like you"-type card, such as schoolchildren scrawl. But still. Writing a friendly note was one thing, but doing it on a heart-shaped card was asking for trouble.
Instead, I plucked a number from the air and wrote: "Respected No. 15. I don't know to whom I am writing, but I wish you a happy Valentine's Day. Sincerely, Rassell Uorking." Pleased with my own tact, I dropped the Valentine in the box.
After class, I dashed off so that I didn't see the distribution of the cards. But the next day, I was stopped in the hall by a professor who lives near me and sometimes shares a cab to school with me.
"Rassell!" she cried. "Thank you for the card! But did you really forget my name?"
"Well, no," I said. "I didn't know to whom it was going. I just chose No. 15 randomly."
Crestfallen, she said, "Oh."
"But I'm glad it went to somebody I know," I said, attempting to offer a crumb.
"Oh, da." She walked off. I haven't seen her since. Rumor has it she cut her throat in the faculty lounge.
On the other hand, the secretaries had saved three unsigned Valentines addressed to No. 67 (me). The first read, "You are a very interesting and effective person." Effective? Hmm. Another could be translated as: "Thank you, for that you are." The most puzzling stated, in intro-to-Russian print, "We love you."
We? True, I often disrupt school by stirring up crowds of screaming Korean and Japanese girls as I walk down the corridors. But perhaps this was just a prank by a male student. Or did somebody get the number wrong and accidentally send me a card intended for, say, the kindly babushka at the front desk?
I reported the entire fiasco to Nonna, and she just shrugged it off. That day, I gave her flowers and took her out to a nice restaurant. She, in turn, gave me a Nicolo Paganini CD and a case for all the jumbo-sized prints I make of my photos. Somehow we seemed to have reclaimed the holiday back from the powerful forces of globalization.
As for school, I fear that our language exercise will kindle all kinds of passions. Prediction: the fallout will include two knifings by jealous lovers, a pregnancy, and a student who throws himself from the roof of the dormitory. And next year they will have to hire guys in Mao tunics to frisk everybody for Valentines.
Russell Working is a freelance journalist based in Vladivostok.
TITLE: An Inside Look at the Other Side of Russia
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: THERE are two Russias. There is the official Russia, a land in which decrees are issued and international negotiations are conducted. And there is another Russia - a land in which bandits give orders to ministers and are the partners of ruling oligarchs.
Last week, Krasnoyarsk businessman Pavel Stru ganov - better known locally as Pasha Lights-and-Music - let us in on some of the workings of this other Russia.
The reason for Struganov's sudden candor is well known. At one time, he was the right-hand man to Anatoly Bykov, former chairman of the board of the Krasnoyarsk Aluminum Factory. Then they quarreled and Bykov ordered Stru ganov killed. But the killer turned them all in to the FSB.
Acting as if he were reporting to Bykov on the successful murder of Struganov, the killer carefully recorded Bykov's comments and reactions on a hidden tape recorder. As a result, Bykov was arrested and Struganov given a new lease on life.
After this triumph of justice, the Krasnoyarsk organized-crime division suddenly began expending enormous efforts to arrest Struganov. This, apparently, was too much for good old Lights-and-Music. He called a press conference at which he openly declared that the police were working for Bykov.
Here are two stories that Struganov told reporters.
Once upon a time, there was a businessman named Isayev. Isayev had a competitor and that competitor was protected by Bykov. Bykov summoned Isayev to his office and told him to hand over his business to the competitor. The brave Isayev told Bykov to stick to aluminum, and he would take care of his own business.
Soon after, an official police car pulled over Isayev, dragged him out of his car and forced him to get into another car with some of Bykov's thugs. Stru ganov even named the police officer in question, a man who now happens to be the head of Kras no yarsk's organized-crime division. "They call him Zhenya the Beautiful," Pasha Lights-and-Music added.
Another story.
According to Struganov, one of the people who was murdered on Bykov's orders was a certain Andrei Inin, a young colleague of Bykov's. Although he was young, Inin was charismatic and developed a loyal following. Bykov thought that he might one day evolve into a competitor.
So, on Bykov's orders, several young men lured Inin and one of his friends to an isolated apartment and shot them, according to Struganov. The friend died immediately, but Inin - spouting blood - managed to say, "What are you doing? You're crossing Bykov!" When the killers told him that they were acting on Bykov's orders, Inin simply said, "Then just finish me off." Having run out of bullets, the killers dragged him into the bathroom and drowned him in the tub.
According to Struganov, the killers then loaded both bodies into Inin's jeep and drove off. It was 3 a.m., and they suddenly realized that they were being followed by the police. They panicked and called Bykov. Within minutes, the police car got a message from their chief: "What are you wasting gas for? Get back to the station now!" That was all it took.
Bykov, of course, no longer controls Krasnoyarsk Aluminum. The factory is now controlled by Oleg Deripaska, who was recently accused of mafia ties in an American court. If all the accusations that are emerging in that case (involving Mikhail Zhivilo) turn out to be true, it will mean that the factory used to be controlled by mobsters and now is controlled by other mobsters.
That's what the other Russia, the second Russia, looks like from the inside.
Yulia Latynina is a journalist with ORT.
TITLE: Global eye
TEXT: Consider this scenario: The wife of the Vice President of the United States has written a novel celebrating - sensuously, intimately - the joys of lesbian love. What's more, this wanton womanizing takes place in the Old West, completely subverting the historical reality of the solid frontier family values that made America great.
What do you think would normally follow from such an unseemly offering? Certainly we could expect explosions of moral outrage from the nation's many guardians of goodness: Rush Limbaugh, William Bennett, Pat Robertson, Clarence Thomas, and of course, those God-fearing men in the White House, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, right? Surely the writer would be scourged by pundit and pulpit for contributing to the breakdown of sacred family structures and corrupting the nation's youth with her anti-male, femi-Nazi radicalism, right?
Wrong. Not when the lady in question is Lynne Cheney, wife of the aforementioned Dick. Ms. Cheney, a professional right-wing political activist and author - no cookie-baker, she - penned her saga of sagebrush Sapphism in a 1981 novel, "Sisters." (Another of her novels depicted - prophesied? - a fictional vice president dying of a heart attack during a bout of hot sex. And now her own husband is a fictional vice president! Pretty spooky.)
Since that time, of course, Cheney has put away such childish things, and now attends to the serious business of throwing red meat to the rabid right from her post in the abattoirs of the American Enterprise Institute. And her lesbianic literature draws naught but indulgent chuckles from the pious ideological elders she so assiduously serves. As for the novel, she doesn't exactly repudiate it - that might hurt sales - but she does confess to a certain Ashcroftian amnesia about it.
"I'm not going to analyze a novel I wrote a long time ago," she told the New York Times. "I don't remember the plot."
But wait a minute - isn't that the President's line?
Politically Erect
Tony Blair seems to be firming up his oft-questioned cojones in the approach to the UK general election, expected this spring. His handlers are taking every opportunity to put the prissy PM's testosteronic prowess front and center (as it were). First there was the business of joining with that other famous prep-school sissy, George "Cheerleader" Bush, in firing some manly missiles at Baghdad the other day.
But for someone nicknamed "Bambi" by his college chums, you can't be too careful. And thus it was that Downing Street forbade photographers from snapping a picture of the Prime Minister as he gazed thoughtfully at a painting of "Hercules at the Crossroads" by baroque artist Annibale Carracci. Why the blackout? Because a Blair aide "brandishing a tape measure ascertained that the prime minister's head would be in direct line with Hercules' penis," the Guardian reports.
What's more, press photographers were also prohibited from taking snaps of the PM in the vicinity of works by Caravaggio, renowned for the Cheney-like gender confusion of his subjects. "The prime minister will not be photographed in front of an androgynous youth," a government official said.
Guess that's why Peter Mandelson had to go.
Post Modern
Craven? Cowardly? Cringing? Why, it must be the Washington Post!
The bold journalistic enterprise that once brought down a corrupt president and shook the corridors of power with blistering exposes of the CIA, FBI, Congress and the military, has now been reduced to simpering and pleading with right-wing attack dogs not to be so mean about the paper's last remaining vestige of dissent.
Cartoons.
The Post ombudsman went all trembly this week when a couple of readers protested the "imbalance" evident in the drawings of the paper's renowned cartoonist, Herb Block. It seems that "Herblock," 91, three-time Pulitzer winner and scourge to power since the days of Herbert Hoover, has been - gasp! - drawing cartoons critical of the current White House occupant. What's more - and this is obviously his most heinous crime - the old geezer has only once lampooned Bill Clinton since he became a private citizen. "That's almost as indefensible as the pardon itself!" cried one wounded reader.
Post Ombudsman Michael Getler says the irate rightists "raise a fair point" in insisting that the personal opinions of the artist should reflect their own viewpoints, not his. After presenting a few yards of their scathing attacks, he finally lets Herblock get in a word: "Bush is right now, and more important. He came in offering an olive branch but he poked it in our eye, with Ashcroft. He started right by throwing some heavy stuff. These are his policies and I don't agree with him. People forget I've done some very tough cartoons about Clinton and Gore."
But fearing that even this might be strong meat for those little right-legged lambs so easily offended by cartoons and other ephemera, Getler hastens to assure them that "the paper's editorials and op-ed selections are frequently more conservative than Mr. Block's views."
You said a true word there, Brother Getler. The Post has moved so far right in the past few years it keeps knocking the Moonie-owned Washington Times out of the cozy little bed they share in the mansion of the Washington Establishment.
"Postie! Do I smell Herblock on your breath again?" "Sorry, Moonie dear, but it's old stock, it'll soon be gone. Just like that nasty little Constitution we got rid of last year." "Well, thank God for that! Come here, snugglepoo, let's curl up and go back to sleep."
On the Hoof
Which would you pick as a statue adorning the entrance to your historic city? Margaret Thatcher or a great big castrated bull?
That's the dilemma now facing the Oxford City Council. Tory Councilor Keith Mitchell wants to see the Iron Lady set in bronze outside the city's rail station. Labour councilors suggest paying homage to the renowned intellectual center's highly imaginative name by depicting, well, an ox crossing a ford.
However, long-time observers of the British political scene were of course asking the obvious question: What exactly is the difference?
TITLE: Time To Develop a New U.S. Policy on Russia
AUTHOR: By Paul Saunders
TEXT: IN preparation for the first meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov this weekend, the United States would be well served to make fundamental changes in its approach to Russia. The new U.S. administration must resist the temptation of inertia in dealing with Moscow and break decisively from the failed policies of its predecessor.
The first step is to recognize that Russia's post-Cold War transition is over. This does not mean that Russia will cease to evolve - but it does mean that the years of radical transformation have come to an end. The United States must therefore comprehensively redefine its interests and priorities with respect to Russia; policies geared toward a nation in transition are simply no longer appropriate.
Developing a hierarchy of U.S. interests is also essential. The Clinton administration effectively identified a range of U.S. interests vis-à-vis Russia, but largely failed to establish meaningful priorities. The result was a policy more or less blind to the trade-offs among competing U.S. objectives and constant pressure on Russian officials on a laundry list of issues. This had the effect of irritating Russian leaders without winning their cooperation on the issues most important to the United States.
When the Bush administration establishes priorities - such as National Missile Defense to protect Americans against a limited ballistic missile attack - it should be very determined in advancing them regardless of Russian opposition. Nevertheless - taking into account that the United States has not yet developed a workable technology for NMD and that it cannot affect Russia's nuclear force for a decade or two - there is no reason to allow the issue to provoke a crisis in relations with Moscow at this time. Once Russia accepts that NMD will be deployed eventually, the United States can likely accommodate its legitimate concerns through creative diplomacy. At the same time, the United States should be prepared to be flexible on matters of lesser priority to its interests.
In operational terms, the United States should cut back dramatically its involvement in Russian domestic politics and other internal matters. It is by now widely recognized that the Clinton administration's love affair with the so-called radical reformers in Yeltsin's various governments served primarily to discredit both parties. As a result, the United States has lost considerable moral and political standing, not to mention influence, within Russia.
Many Russian commentators eagerly anticipate less U.S. involvement in their country's internal affairs, which they see as typical of Republican presidents. Some even seem to believe that the Bush administration will essentially ignore developments in Chechnya, limits on press freedoms or other troubling actions by the Russian government. This is a serious mistake. Being less intrusive in Russian affairs does not mean being less interested or less concerned; rather, it means that the United States should work to address its concerns outside the arena of Russian domestic politics. Though this may result in less attention to many specific incidents, the consequences of a pattern of undesirable behavior could be much more severe.
The United States must also work to re-establish mutual respect in the U.S.-Russian relationship. This has two components: making clear to the Kremlin how the United States defines its interests and what steps Washington will take to advance them, and seeking to understand legitimate Russian interests and to respect them when they do not conflict with their own. More clarity about U.S. interests and priorities could help to avoid misunderstanding and limit Russian behavior of concern to the United States. At a minimum, it would ensure that Moscow understands the potential consequences of ignoring U.S. preferences. On the other hand, showing greater respect for legitimate Russian interests should to some degree address Russian resentment of some U.S. international behavior and would create a much greater "upside" for Russia in its relations with the United States. This approach would show Moscow that it could reap tangible benefits from cooperation on issues important to the United States.
Iran is undeniably one of United States' top priorities in this regard; Russian assistance to Tehran's efforts to develop nuclear weapons and long-range missiles presents a direct threat to vital U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf and beyond. Continued assistance to these Iranian programs, whether officially sanctioned or not, should be a "deal breaker" in the U.S.-Russian relationship.
The United States should be somewhat more flexible in other areas, such as Russia's southern frontier, where many Russians have been deeply concerned by perceived U.S. efforts to exclude Moscow from the region or redefine it as an U.S. sphere of influence. Russian interests in the former Soviet states of Central Asia are clearly quite significant; instability in the region could directly threaten Russian security. In the United States, the maximum result of a crisis in Central Asia would likely be (slightly) higher energy prices and a few back-page newspaper stories. The United States should maintain friendly relations with Central Asian states - and should deter Russian expansionism at their expense - but should generally acknowledge Moscow's legitimate interests in the region.
Finally, the United States must learn to treat Russia like a normal country. This means communicating clearly to Russian leaders that their country's role in the international system will depend primarily on Russian internal and external behavior, rather than its status as a former superpower. More specifically, it means that Russia will not be able to play a genuinely prominent role in international affairs without developing its economy and earning international respect for its conduct. The Clinton administration tried to give Russia such a role - for example, through pressing for largely symbolic Russian membership in the G-7 - but was unsuccessful. Today, Russia's standing has more to do with the trouble it could cause than the contributions it can make.
This is the context in which troubling internal Russian developments must be addressed. Rather than lobbying on behalf of particular Russian factions or repeating moralistic criticisms of Russian policies, the United States should simply make clear that Russia must act like a serious country if it wants to be treated as such - not only by the United States and other governments but by foreign investors as well. Serious countries do not kill thousands of their own citizens in "anti-terrorist operations," tolerate massive corruption and capital flight, refuse to honor their debts or strive to eliminate public opposition to their governments. Once this message has been delivered clearly and forcefully, governments, business people, and others should draw their own conclusions about Russian behavior and act accordingly. Moscow should then be left to make its own decisions and live with the consequences.
A sustainable, bipartisan policy based on these three principles would avoid needless misunderstandings between Washington and Moscow by helping each country to understand the other's interests and priorities. It would also extricate the United States from the swamp of Russian domestic politics, while imposing real costs on Russia for troubling internal policies. Perhaps most important, however, by acknowledging Moscow's interests, it would finally create a basis for a win-win relationship between Russia and the United States. Disagreements with Moscow are probably inevitable, but - with the right policy - conflict is not.
Paul Saunders is director of the Nixon Center. He contributed this comment, which is based on the Center's recent report "What Is To Be Undone? A Russia Policy Agenda for the New Administration," to The St. Petersburg Times.
TITLE: naval street gets naval eatery
AUTHOR: by Tom Masters
TEXT: Entering the Bremen at lunch time on a Wednesday was rather like rediscovering the Marie-Celeste. While far cleaner, it was equally as deserted, save a flock of polystyrene seagulls hanging from the ceiling. True to its name, Bremen is a nautically themed restaurant, suitably situated on Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa and decked out with the accouterment always deemed necessary for such establishments, painted in navy blue, with masts, a ship's help and portraits of famous ships.
As we entered, a lackey rang a loud bell and uniformed staff took us into the main hold, where we were greeted by an empty expanse of tables, filled only by waiting staff and muzak.
We were pleased to see, however, that the menu was extensive, with a sea-food base but plenty of choice for people who aren't too fond of the gifts of the sea too early on in the day. You can enjoy six fresh oysters on ice for 600 rubles, as well as paella and many varieties of fish - from sturgeon to river trout and salmon.
On the food side, I was tempted by what turned out to be a highly unspectacular Mozzarella salad (80 rub.), absent of the olives it promised and rather bland, while my colleague exercised his taste for the surreal and ordered "Albatross Soup," pondering as he did whether it would be bad luck to eat an albatross, given that it is bad luck to shoot one. Luckily, or unluckily, the proffered soup turned out to be a very small bowl of chicken bullion (60 rub.) with noodles, notable only in its absence of seabirds of any description.
By the end of round one we were unimpressed, especially as our Kapitan beer (30 rub.) was warm.
Things looked up as the mains arrived, though. My "Admiralty" Pike-Perch (160 rub.) served on a bed of new potatoes and spinach leaves in a white wine and herb sauce, was very tender and tasty, although lacking a certain kick. The fish itself was well cooked and fresh, however, and it made for a pleasant dish.
My companion had ordered "Porto Medallions" (200 rub.) which mollified him somewhat after his cuppa-soup starter. Very bloody and juicy, according to his wishes, they came with potatoes and a vegetable puree with bacon and were apparently delicious.
Bremen seemed to be making a comeback - even our second beers were suitably cold, after our complaint to the waitress, who somehow managed to chill the Kapitan draft instantly.
Unfortunately, the dessert menu wasn't nearly as enormous as the actual one (from which you can even order chewing gum for 20 rub. a packet) and the apple pie, which was the only tempting option, was unavailable, encouraging us to skip desert.
While service wasn't included, we were not inclined to leave a large tip, as the service was painfully slow as well as painfully polite.
Perhaps the highlight of a perfectly acceptable, but rather sterile restaurant was the rather gregarious gaderobshik, who showed us his Tom Jones-singing lobster that performed a farewell dance for us while he retrieved our coats - unfortunately his singing, flapping sea bass was out of batteries.
Bremen, 15 Bolshaya Morskaya Ul. Tel: 315-77-75. Open daily, 12 p.m. to 12 a.m. Lunch for two with alcohol, 620 rubles ($22). Credit cards accepted.
TITLE: exhibition on sobchak is strictly for fans only
AUTHOR: by Molly Graves
TEXT: Inside a tall glass case standing center-stage on a raised platform hangs a very ordinary brown-and-tan plaid sports coat - ordinary, that is, until a tiny printed label informs us that this particular jacket was worn by Anatoly Sobchak during the meetings of the first Congress of the People's Deputies in 1989, where the former mayor achieved international fame by blasting the failures of Soviet rule.
An air of reverence and remorse, at times exaggerated, pervades the Russian Political History Museum's newest exhibit, "fortune telling," dedicated to the triumphs and defeats of post-communist reformer Anatoly Sobchak.
The exhibit's opening on Tuesday, Feb. 20, marked the first anniversary of the death of the man who Alexander Shishlov, a Yabloko faction State Duma lawmaker, once said "personified the hopes and dreams of the entire country."
Born in 1937 in the Siberian city of Chita, Sobchak is widely known as St. Petersburg's first mayor and the man responsible for returning to the second city its historical name. Additionally, the widely published professor of law was an outspoken political figure during Mikhail Gorbachev's campaign of reform, who went on to aid the preparation of the 1993 Russian Constitution and as the city's mayor, helped to guide St. Petersburg through the 1991 August coup without bloodshed.
It would be hard to do justice to the many achievements of such a multi-faceted political figure, and the Political History Museum's small commemorative exhibit - which barely fills one room - similarly falls short of doing so. The exhibit, therefore, will most likely only appeal to those with a particular interest in the life of Sobchak.
However, according to Alexander Smernov, one of the two main organizers of the exhibition, response so far has been positive. Over 200 visitors were present on opening day Tuesday, including Sobchak's second wife and surviving widow Lyudmila Narusova and other close relatives.
Smernov added that despite the fact that Sobchak was a contentious political figure, suffering a fall from grace during his gubernatorial campaign in 1996, there had been no provocations or voiced disapproval concerning the exhibit.
Despite rumors, President Vladimir Putin - a former student of Sobchak's in the law department of Leningrad State University, and whose political career Sob chak later helped launch - did not make an appearance at the exhibit's opening. He did, however, attend a memorial ceremony for Sobchak held earlier in Moscow, a more extravagant affair than that of the Petersburg opening.
Besides the expected certificates of merit and numerous books and publications, there are a few more unusual - even slightly bizarre - features of the exhibit. One of these is a recreated scenario of what seems to be the dressing table of Sobchak, in preparation for his final trip. Scattered on and around the table are his open briefcase, a jacket and tie casually tossed over a chair and ready to be adorned - even his Aeroflot ticket to Kaliningrad, laid out as if not to be forgotten. The only thing missing is the clock that stopped ticking precisely at the moment of Sobchak's death - sometime on the evening of Feb. 20 in his hotel room in the Kaliningrad region. On the wall, a portrait of Lyudmila dressed in black, alongside another of Sobchak himself, looks down helplessly on the scene. More recently, red and white carnations have been added by visitors.
A separate display features yet another eerie prescient omen. This time, a Christian Dior powder compact - a gift from Paris which Sobchak gave to Lyudmila before embarking on his final fateful voyage - has been left open to reveal a cracked mirror. The accompanying caption explains how the gift was accidentally and mysteriously broken by Lyudmila on the eve of her husband's death - which is itself surrounded by a bit of mystery, as some refuse to accept it was caused by a heart attack.
Also included are various other artifacts, texts and photographs marking episodes in Sobchak's political and private life, ranging in scope from the trivial to the makings of history. Awards and medals are juxtaposed with pages of notes, ID cards and more personal family photos - such as one in which his daughter playfully makes rabbit ears behind the head of her famous father.
The exhibit will run through mid-March at the Museum of the Poltical History of Russia. Daily 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., closed Thursdays. 2/4 Ul. Kuibysheva, 233-70-52.
TITLE: new-look leningrad plays stadium
AUTHOR: by Sergey Chernov
TEXT: Once Sergei Shnurov was struggling for attention. Now, given the ever-growing success of his band Leningrad's concerts and albums - and with Leningrad preparing to play the biggest concert of its career - he is concerned with how to stay out of the mainstream.
"It's good and bad at the same time - when a thing ceases to be 'cult,'" said Shnurov. "When you are known by a narrow circle of people who are interested in a certain direction, you feel more liberated and you have different tasks. You have to develop, because the audience is more demanding, but as it reaches the masses it becomes easier, although your old audience turns away. I want to deal with it somehow, but haven't yet decided how. For example, we could change our style again."
Shnurov, who claimed that Lenin grad "had fulfilled his task" and even called himself the "ex-leader of Lenin grad" when performing with spin-off project 3D, now sees "new horizons."
"The style is definitely changing, there will probably be more 'new swing' and a somewhat different drive. There are also signs of a return to retro elements."
A darling of the press, who was nominated as "Person of the Year" by Kommersant newspaper last year, alongside established artists and politicians, Shnurov wants to avoid the devaluation caused by overexposure and keep Leningrad's status under control.
"There's real hysteria in Moscow. They call me and say, 'You'll be on the cover of Om magazine in March.' I don't like it very much. I think shortage is always better than abundance," said Shnurov. Indeed, the link "Photos for the Press" on Leningrad's official Web site leads to high-resolution photos of male genitals.
Having quit his job as a promotion director at a radio station last year, Shnurov keeps entertaining fans with PR stunts. His most recent club hit is called "www.leningrad.spb.ru," and advertises Leningrad's Web site, which in its turn is announced to be "on sale with all its content."
Tired from his many concerts, Shnu rov plans to take a short break next month. However, he will be busy starring in a film with a script by Vla di mir So ro kin from March 5. The film "4" will be directed by Ilya Khrzha nov sky, son of celebrated animator Andrei Khrzhanovsky, and features a sound track by local fusion double bass player Vladimir Volkov.
Shnurov has recently finished work on 3D's album, or Tri Debila (Three Retards), for which he used the services of Auktsyon's Leonid Fyodorov, the producer of Leningrad's debut in 1998, to decide on song order. "I listened to the songs too much, but I understood they needed to appear in the right order on the album and I knew that no one could do it better than Lyonya - it's enough to listen to Auktsyon's albums."
Called "Made in Zhopa," the 3D album will be released on Gala Records in March.
He has also prepared a collection of his poems and short stories which will be published in the spring. Called "Khui Vam 2" - "our answer to film-makers" - the book will be privately produced.
"I decided not to publish it as a 'real' book, because I understand how cool samizdat is, after all," said Shnurov. "Samizdat is a refined art form now, while books can be published by anybody. I'll do it as badly and make it look as cheap as possible."
With a recently recruited double bass player, who will make his debut this weekend, Leningrad's line-up has been expanded to 11 players. "We haven't had time to rehearse all the material with him, so we will have a small digression in the middle of the show, when we'll perform around seven songs in a slightly different style. With a double bass we even rearranged some of our old songs in a more swing style," he said.
"I keep building artificial obstacles for Leningrad's tours - one more member, with such an instrument! Such a number of musicians and instruments cuts off unnecessary and insignificant concerts - if people really want to bring us, they do, but if they want just another band, they won't bother."
The upcoming concert is set for Feb. 23, formerly day of the Soviet Army, and is called "The Red Army Is the Strongest," but Shnurov insists he is disinclined towards patriotic sentiment.
"I just thought that 'The Red Army Is the Strongest' was a very good name for the show. The army of the dead - a non-existent army, but still the strongest. There is no Red Army in reality," he said.
Leningrad will play at Yubileiny Sports Palace (Small Arena) at 7 p.m. on Fri., Feb. 23.
TITLE: spivak lends epic quality to anouilh's 'the lark'
AUTHOR: by Natasha Shirokova
TEXT: Semyon Spivak is often called the last romantic of St. Petersburg theater for his lyric and emotional performances. His new production of Jean Anouilh's "L'Alouette" ("The Lark") which premiered on Feb. 17 at the Molodyozhny Theater, has just such qualities. Paradoxically, it seems not to contradict the essence of Anouilh's "intellectual play."
"I was impressed by the idea," says Spivak, "that a person once realized his own peculiarity and follows its vocation steadily." In this performance the director continues to develop one of his favorite topics and deal with the idea of an individual confronting a hostile world.
Spivak has been the artistic director and the leader of the Molodyozhny theater for over 10 years. We can already talk of the phenomenon of "Spivak's theater," as his performances are easily recognizable by their positive atmosphere, focusing on basic problems of life and death. During the period of his work at the Molodyozhny the range of his productions has been wide.
All his productions produce a monumental impression, as the director seem to work with big strokes, not paying attention to minor details. Under his leadership the theater has acquired a cast of highly professional and gifted actors.
To stage "L'Alouette" has been Spivak's dream for a long time. "I was probably destined to stage this play," says the director, as he finds basic coincidences in his own philosophy and that of the playwright.
This play, which tells the story of Joan of Arc, concludes the series of lonely, steadfast and rebellious characters, created by the French playwright. He retells the medieval myth, making Joan a simple girl, who refuses to betray her faith, honest and brave, sacrificing her life, but not her ideals. The same thing seems to appeal to Spivak.
To play the main part the director invited Regina Shcheglova, a young graduate of the Academy of Theater Arts. Shcheglova has already played the main part in "Cries from Odessa," staged by Spivak with students playing all the parts. "She is able to cope with different material. She loves life and has a very strong personality," says the director. In this part Shcheglova manages to act all the subtleties of the heroine's complex character. When Joan leaves her parents, she is a little girl, who is afraid to be left by herself, but when she talks to the inquisitor, she is a rebel, who according to God's will has placed herself at the head of the French army.
And although this is Shcheglova's debut on stage with experienced actors, she is equal to them and definitely possesses an individuality.
Sergei Barkovsky deserves special mention for his performance as Karl the Great. A king who amuses himself playing cards and who is afraid of his slaves, he still convinces the audience that he is worthy of his divine right to the throne.
Besides the perfect cast, the work of Emil Kapelush is also noteworthy. His decoration is ascetic, but gives a convincing impression of the Middle Ages. Metal tubes hanging from the ceiling resemble a cathedral organ, a small wheel functions as a peasant's mill and a larger one bears a symbolic meaning.
In his new production, Spivak truly achieves an epic level.
TITLE: borodina opens mariinsky's sheremyetev evenings
AUTHOR: by Giulara Sadkyh-zade
TEXT: The Mariinsky Theater, fresh from hosting the International Ballet Festival, has already embarked on its "Sheremyetev Evenings" - a cycle of eight concerts in the tradition of the concert traditions laid down by Count Alexander Sheremyetev a century ago. Sheremyetev was an enlightened dilletante with excellent musical training, and created his own choir and orchestra, which in time gained extreme popularity in St. Petersburg.
The concerts were originally held in the House on Fontanka which belonged to the Sheremyetevs, and then after the audience grew in size, moved to the Dvoryanskoe sobranie. The current Sheremyetev evenings are dedicated to Count Sheremyetev, and thus in the program of the cycle there are equal doses of symphonic and choral music, and even opera in concert versions.
The Sheremyetev evenings are being held in the theater for the second time. Olga Borodina sang at the first of the concerts, and was accompanied by the Young Singer's Choir of the theater under the baton of Valery Gergiev. Borodina, who possesses a voice of rare beauty, with the rich and ample coloratura of a mezzo, does not often sing in her native theater. All the more valuable is her appearance on the stage of the Mariinsky, in the Mahler program, where she performed the five Ruckert Lieder. The bright tone of Borodina's voice, subtly reacting to the slightest changes of nuance and switches in mood in the nostalgic texts of Ruckert unexpectedly revealed in the singer the possesion of a high, truly European restrained, noble culture of singing.
In the second half the orchestra played Mahler's Fifth Symphony. The work requires many different techniques of orchestral playing and a sure posession of one's instrument. Of course, the Young Players' Orchestra has yet to sound as collected and together as the theater's "grown-up" orchestra. It has yet to find its own sound, and is a little harsh and clumsy - features which are, however, entirely forgivable in a young orchestra. The players are indeed young, with some studying in the conservatory, and some still at music school.
The orchestra coped quite well with Mahler's Fifth: The symphony sounded coherent, if somewhat constrained. There was not quite enough force and tension in the culminations, a few lapses in the solo episodes, but under Gergiev's powerful direction, the peformance held together logically and convincingly.
The management of the theater is using the Sheremyetev evenings to "break in" the orchestra, and to give it concert polish. Gianandrea Nozeda, Gergiev's first assistant, is considered to be the official director of the orchestra.
Thus the theater solves its own problems, the system having already brought the theater some palpable results. After giving two concerts, Gergiev has gone abroad to conduct again, but the Sheremyetev evenings continue. Ahead are three choral concerts with a substantial program by Nikolai Kornev, head of the Petersburg Chamber Choir. Prokofiev's 7th Symphony played by the Young Orchestra conducted by Alexander Titov. There will also be the concert version of Verdi's early opera "Nabucco," which has never been played in the theater before. The performance has been specially prepared for the 100th anniversary of Verdi's death.
TITLE: ballet fest marred by disappointing showcase
AUTHOR: by Galina Stolyarova
TEXT: The Mariinsky Theater's top-flight ballerinas spent last week performing alongside foreign male celebrities. Vladimir Malakhov, Ethan Stiefel, Carlos Acosta and Jose Manuel Carreno paid St. Petersburg a visit to attend the Mariinsky International Ballet Festival, which ran Feb. 10 through 18.
In the meantime, the company's own male talent, Farukh Ruzimatov refrained from appearing on stage at all, while Igor Zelensky did so only once to captivate viewers in Roland Petit's "A Young Man and Death." Additionally, Ulyana Lopatkina was injured shortly before the fest and couldn't recover fast enough to go on stage.
But all these were minor disappointments compared to the premiere of "The Nutcracker," intended as the culmination of the festival. Where viewers expected provocation, they found innocence.
The name of acclaimed émigré artist and sculptor Mikhail Shemyakin, as well as the secrecy surrounding the rehearsals, did much to raise curiosity and expectations to the highest degree. Even before the curtain rose, choreographer Kirill Simonov was barely mentioned. The direction, libretto, sets and costumes - all were given to Shemyakin to manage, apart from one little thing: choreography. But by glancing at Shemyakin's Hoffmanesque sketches and drawings, one could see how the artist was suggesting the moves.
Making a debut as choreographer with a show like The Nutcracker is an obvious risk. Juxtaposing cult figure Shemyakin with a young and obscure choreographer was an additional risk which didn't pay off. It was difficult for Simonov to create and invent under the pressure of Shemyakin's fame, recognition, and, of course, talent. Long before the premiere, the newspapers were describing the production with words like "scandal" and "sensation."
And what happened was that the sophistication of Shemyakin's sets hopelessly drew attention away from the choreography, which wasn't as original as it should have been. The sumptuousness of the sets overwhelmed Simonov's work.
Mariinsky Artistic Director Valery Gergiev is well aware of the problem his theater is facing: a lack of talented modern choreographers capable of working with the Mariinsky's finest troupe. Balletmaster Alexei Ratmansky, a soloist at the Danish Royal Ballet, whose one-act ballets are now part of the Mariinsky repertoire, was initially invited to do The Nutcracker. But he left after a few rehearsals, citing a hectic schedule, and the Mariinsky didn't hide the fact that Simonov was basically coming to the rescue of the production.
Mariinsky ballerinas admitted several times in interviews how eager they are to dance something tailor-made. "My generation has been deprived of its share of choreographers," complained Altynai Asylmuratova in a recent interview with The St. Petersburg Times. "But I have so much to tell and express."
But the dancers' starvation is hard to alleviate as Russia is now paying for its long isolation behind the Iron Curtain.
A brainchild of Gergiev, the festival - the first of its kind, and expected to become an annual event - pretends first and foremost "to agitate souls," as Gergiev himself put it. It is designed as an outlet for Russian audiences to see Western stars, but also to show the best of the theater's own talent.
The Mariinsky already has an annual festival - "The Stars of the White Nights," which Gergiev established in 1993 - but the choreographic element has been gradually disappearing from its program, with only two ballet evenings in last year's festival.
Was there much to touch off hearts? At times, but only at times.
"La Bayadère" on Feb. 14 was a remarkable routine with Carreno dancing solo. His technique was impeccable, smooth and refined, but the dancer was visibly bored and indifferent. Those familiar with fiery performances of the Mariinsky's Ruzimatov in the same role were left disappointed by Carreno's technically perfect yet emotionally emasculated dancing. Svetlana Zakharova (Nikiya) and Irina Zhelonkina (Gamzatti) were the only dancers breathing life into the show.
Carreno's detached attitude could well have dented the confidence of the Mariinsky audiences, as it is rare to see a foreign dancer who is indifferent to the prestige that the theater holds in the ballet world.
But if Carreno was aloof and his approach lukewarm, his compatriot Acosta was volcanic, full-hearted, and bursting with life - thriving in his role as Basil in Don Quixote on Feb. 16, soaring over the stage, his eyes sparkling.
His somewhat acrobatic approach to classical ballet may irritate a sensitive critic, but the passion he brings into his performances has won the hearts of the majority of viewers and got his audience stirred up. Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind, as an old saying has it - and Acosta was rewarded with a whirlwind ovation.
Vladimir Malakhov and Diana Vishnyova also won a deserved ovation on Feb. 15 for their breathtaking, dramatic performance of "Giselle." The two dancers - who also took the stage on Feb. 17 in a fragment from McMillan's "Manon" - make an incredibly smooth duo, leaving much to be missed as Ma lak hov goes back to the United States.
In the meantime, a brilliantly elegant and refined performance of Ethan Stiefel (American Ballet Theater) in Balanchine's "Apollo" in a Gala concert on Feb. 17 had a rather lukewarm reaction - quite in line with the Russian audiences general view of Balanchine.
The five-hour Gala concert was an eclectic mixture of Maruis Petipa, George Balanchine, Roland Petit, John Neumeier and more, performed by all the stars of the festival. Everyone was supposed to be pleased, but not everyone survived the whole event.
As it happened, some of the audience seemed to confuse ballet with the circus: the higher the jump, the louder the applause. The dancers which got the warmest welcome were thus the Cuban-born ballet celebrities.
TITLE: rock dinosaurs beat eminem for top grammy award
AUTHOR: by Dean Goodman
TEXT: LOS ANGELES - Controversial rapper Eminem, who once boasted he did not "give a damn" about the Grammys, picked up three of the music industry's most prestigious awards on Wednesday, but missed the top prize in a stunning upset.
The album of the year Grammy instead went to veteran jazz-rock duo Steely Dan for their first release in 20 years, "Two Against Nature." The result marked an apparent setback to Grammy organizers, who have tried to make the show more cutting edge in recent years, appealing to a younger audience.
Steely Dan's stunned members, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, had never received a Grammy before Wednesday's ceremonies and backstage Becker said he was "completely and utterly" surprised by the win. Becker, had expected Eminem to win, despite the furore over his violent, misogynistic and homophobic lyrics.
"Two Against Nature" sold a relatively low 1.5 million copies worldwide and represented their third album of the year nomination.
Steely Dan went home with three Grammys, as did Irish rock band U2, which scooped the coveted song and record of the year prizes.
Country singer Shelby Lynne, 32, won the best new artist prize in recognition of her acclaimed 2000 release "I Am Shelby Lynne."
But it was Eminem's night - at least until the last few minutes of the three-hour ceremony, when Steely Dan were called to the stage for the final prize.
Eminem, 28, one of the few whites to make it big in the rap genre, was batting three for three, and most industry pundits had expected he would win the album prize for "The Marshall Mathers LP," a commercially successful album that was also widely criticized for its homophobic and violent imagery.
After deciding for weeks whether to perform at an event he had disparaged on disc, he surprised observers by announcing he would perform a duet with openly gay pop singer Sir Elton John.
Their performance of "Stan," a poignant ode to a psychotic fan, was the last of the evening and they earned a standing ovation for its passionate rendition.
Eminem censored himself during the performance, replacing obscene words with more modest alternatives like "messed up" "crumby" and "shoot," but he still managed to say "bitch" a few times. John, dressed in a pink polka-dot suit, played keyboards and sang the haunting chorus.
At song's end, they hugged, raised each other's hands in the air, and Eminem appeared to hoist his middle finger to the jubilant audience.
Outside the Staples Center, where the awards were handed out, about 200 representatives from gay, women's and religious groups held a "Rally Against Hate" to protest him.
The controversy essentially overshadowed the event. Virtually every winning artist who came backsatge to talk to the media was asked for their views on Eminem.
Techno-rocker Moby accused him of being racist, anti-semitic and homophobic, but defended his right to freedom of expression.
Steely Dan's Donald Fagen, hitherto uninformed about Eminem, was impressed by his performance, calling him "a good actor." Blues singer Taj Mahal said Eminem was "very funny ... I'm serious."
Eminem did not speak to reporters. He went home with the Grammys for rap solo album, rap solo performance and rap performance by a duo or group, sharing the latter with Dr. Dre, his mentor. Dr. Dre, 36, a pioneering gangsta rapper whose real name is Andre Young, won the producer of the year award and received a standing ovation as well.
Eminem received the rap solo Grammy during the televised ceremony, when 13 of the 100 awards were handed out.
"Well, what should I say first?" the 28-year-old rapper said. "First of all I want to thank everybody who could look past the controversy and see the album for what it is and what it isn't."
He also thanked his young daughter Hailie Jade, and took the opportunity to plug his back-up rap group D-12, whose members came out on stage with him.
Eminem now has five Grammys to his credit, having won two last year for his debut album, "The Slim Shady LP."
The U2 track "Beautiful Day" won the record and song of the year Grammys, as well as the prize for rock performance by a duo or group, giving the band a clean sweep and taking its career haul to 10.
U2 vocalist Bono said he thought soulful rocker Macy Gray - who earlier won the female pop vocal Grammy - should have won record of the year for her ballad "I Try."
Asked backstage how many awards he had been hoping for, Bono said, "I was hoping for Britney Spears."
The best new artist award usually offers scope for a big upset, but Lynne's win was well received.
"Thirteen years and six albums to get here," said the Alabama native. "I stand here tonight and represent nothing but music."
Lynne also thanked her late parents for teaching her to be independent. Her father killed his wife in a domestic dispute when Lynne and her older sister, country singer Allison Moorer, were young girls.
Double winners included rock band the Foo Fighters, blues giant B.B. King, R&B singer D'Angelo, country singer Faith Hill and banjo player Bela Fleck.
The rock album Grammy went to the Foo Fighters, alternative music album to English rock band Radiohead, R&B album to D'Angelo, country album to Hill, bluegrass album to Dolly Parton and reggae album to Beenie Man.
U2 and Hill performed. Other Grammy-winning performers included Destiny's Child, Sheryl Crow and Lynne in a duet. Madonna and Moby were among the few performers who did not win a Grammy.
Several Grammy favorites racked up even more honors, including composer John Williams who has 18 and King 11, while Johnny Cash and Emmylou Harris now have 10 each.
TITLE: torres: spanish dining the mix n' match way
AUTHOR: by Chris Stephen
TEXT: There is an old trick in my home town, London, and probably elsewhere as well, for telling a good Chinese restaurant. Look not at the menu, or even at the cleanliness of the kitchens. Look instead to see how many of the customers are Chinese.
I advise the same rule of thumb for Spanish restaurants in St. Petersburg, though there are probably not that many Spaniards here anyway. Certainly if any were eating at the Torres the night we visited I must assumed they were either 1) new, 2) starving, or 3) insane.
Torres may be the official name, but Mix n' Match would be a better one for what is surely St. Petersburg's prime ersatz Spanish restaurant. It is not so much that the food is bad - some is very good - more the fact that a lot of it is not Spanish.
Mind you, it keeps you guessing. We arrived as a pair of flamenco dancers were strutting around the handsome interior. Nice one. Plus wagon wheels nailed to the ceiling, friendly waitresses in white and red dresses and pretty placemats on heavy wooden tables.
The mood lasted until we sat down. At which point off went the dancers and on came the music. Russian. Soviet-era. Clunky, in fact. It's probably difficult to thing of anything less Spanish than Soviet hits of the '70s such as that old favorite, "Belovezhskaya Pushcha." The next clue that something was, er, not quite right, came with the menu.
I could be wrong, but I think the menu-writer is having a joke. Santa Fe Salmon? Costa Del Sol Trout? Hmm. Why not Madrid Mushrooms or Barcelona Broccoli? Sorry, but cooking Spanish style means more than giving a geographical epithet to a slab of fried fish.
The cocktails meanwhile were remarkable for their meanness - our margaritas (100 rubles each) should have sat in thimbles, not glasses, and arrived iceless.
By now the music was totally out of control - a middle aged guitarist dressed in black matador gear was warbling some song in English, Neil Diamond I think, and getting all the words wrong.
And then, just as we had decided to give it the thumbs down, the restaurant played a trick on us. The first courses arrived. And they were delicious. My carpaccio (150 rubles) was a mass of chilled scrumptious slices of deer meat. My partner's Cartagena Salad (220 rubles) was tender chicken pieces, crab, avocado and salad, all smothered in a delicious dressing. The portions were enough to be a main course. Pity we didn't take the hint.
The second surprise was the wine. A good way of smoking out a bad restaurant is to order the house red. I did so, expecting it to be as bad as the music. In fact it was very good - as ruby red and velvety and full bodied as any house red anywhere.
And then there was the waitress. She was polite, cheerful, fast and clever, her Russian vowels wrapping themselves deliciously around the text of the Spanish menu. Finally, the restaurant came to life. An old war veteran in a suit dripping with medals wandered in, and two voluptuous girls sitting at the next table insisted someone take a picture of them hugging him. Food! Wine! Life! Maybe this place was not so bad after all?
Wrong. The old Torres Mix n' Match cut in once more, in the shape of the main courses. They were as bad as the first courses had been good.
One thing I do know about paella is that it should taste the way Mama used to make it. But the stuff they served me (250 rubles) tasted like the mother of all bad paellas. Cardboard rice, mussels that had clearly not seen sight of the sea for many a day, and pork bits that were impossible to distinguish from chicken bits.
But my partner fared better with her Santa Fe Salmon (295 rubles) -slices of salmon baked with bacon, plus lumps of rissotto rice and three sauces.
And Torres had one more trick up its sleeve, in the shape of the little friend who came bobbling across the brickwork to say hello. In fact, as we watched, this cockroach took one look at my paella, then turned and scampered away. It was time for us to do likewise.
Torres, 53 Nevsky Prospect. Open daily, noon to 5 a.m. All credit cards accepted. Dinner for two with alcohol, 1,445 rubles. ($54) Tel. 113-14-53.
TITLE: Chernov's choice
AUTHOR: by Sergey Chernov
TEXT: Unlike the rather boring winter, this weekend offers plenty of opportunities, even if you're not a fan of Leningrad who will play the biggest concert of its local career on Friday (profiled on page 11).
Tatu, the recent music biz creature promoted in the category "teen lesbian," will be playing what looks like their fourth concert. Having won over MTV audiences with the spectacular "Ya Soshla s Uma," the two girls, 17 and 16, started touring on Feb. 10 and have a repertoire of a few songs, including some remixes of the hit. Their official Web site at www.taty.ru reported that Tatu's rider includes a two-room suite with one two-person bed and, for some reason, buckwheat porridge.
As Tatu will play in Moscow at 3:30 p.m. the next day, their management should be taken to court for exploitation.
Entrance costs 500 rub. (199 if you get there between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m.), and a seat at a table will be from 700 to 1,500.)
Plaza Nightclub, 10 p.m. (show will start at 1 a.m. or 1:30 a.m.), Fri.
You trendy boys and girls can go to the recently opened Neo Fashion Cafe, which has picked up the British Council program of bringing UK DJs into the country.
This weekend it will be Miles Hollway, resident of Manchester's Robodisco and frequent visitor to Moscow's Propaganda, playing a four-hour set for local audiences.
Hollway started his DJ career in the early 1990s, influenced by American house music and UK DJs such as Mike Pickering and Graeme Park, both residents at the legendary Hacienda Club in Manchester.
He co-formed Salt City Orchestra and the Paper Recordings label, which produced remixes for Sneaker Pimps, The Beloved and BJ Crosby, achieving worldwide recognition.
Support comes from DJ Strong. Entrance fee starts from 165 rub.
Neo Fashion Cafe, 10 p.m.-6 a.m., Fri.
Cactus Awards, might seem a good idea if you feel nostalgia for the 1990s and the now-defunct Ten Club, located in the slums on the bank of Obvodny Kanal.
Established in 1995, the award (a real cactus) was supposed to recognize the achievements of club bands and be an alternative to corrupt pop awards.
Though long-forgotten (it called it quits in 1996), this year's reformed Cactus Awards Concert looked impressive until it was revealed that Tequilajazzz and Leningrad are not playing. Still there remains some hope for performances from Kirpichi, Pep-See, Deadushki, Dva Samaliota and MultFilmy.
Theater of Young Spectators (TYuZ) (see Gigs for location details), 7 p.m. Sat.
TITLE: culinary salvation from daisy the ecuadorian
AUTHOR: by Penny Krumm
TEXT: One of the best things about being back in Virginia over Christmas was that my sister, Tamara, was home, too. Now, I may like to cook, but Tamara is a culinary wizard. She can stroll into the kitchen, rummage around in the refrigerator, pull out a few ordinary-looking ingredients, and within minutes - SHAZAM! - she has created an exotic Thai salad. It never ceases to amaze me.
This time she had just returned from a year in Ecuador, which meant that she treated us to all manner of Latin American delicacies. Our favorite by far was the ceviche, Ecuador's national dish. Although Tamara regaled us with tales of the exotic seafood combinations offered at her local beach ceviche shack (her neighbors even prepared an octopus-and-passionfruit-juice version for her), she made the simpler shrimp ceviche for us in Virginia, and we sure weren't complaining. In fact, we persuaded Tamara to fix it for us as often as possible. It not only tastes of summer and of tropical locales, but it's fresh and healthy too.
The cilantro (that's kinza at your local market) is full of vitamins. As my friend Maura says, the only reason that the life expectancy of Russian men isn't even lower is that they eat so many fresh herbs and spring onions with their shashlik. Could be.
In any case, the recipe - as authentically taught to my sister by a nice Ecuadorian lady named Daisy - is surprisingly easy and mouthwateringly delicious. Try this at home, and if the shrimp are too expensive just add more onions and cilantro and sop up the sauce with the popcorn. Drink a few beers as you go and imagine yourself lying on a hot and sunny Ecuadorean beach next to a ceviche shack as the warm breezes waft overhead.
Good-bye, winter!
450 g medium shrimp, peeled
1 small red onion
1/4 clove garlic
1 large bunch cilantro, finely chopped
Juice of 2 large or 4 small limes
50 g (1/4 cup) vegetable oil
1 small plum tomato
8 ml (2 tsp.) salt accompaniments: freshly popped popcorn (optional: hot sauce, corn nuts)
In a medium saucepan of water, bring a small chunk of onion, the piece of garlic, halved, and a few whole strands of cilantro (mash the stems first) to a rolling boil. Add the shrimp, cover the pot and remove from heat. Finely slice the remaining onion, rinse in water, drain and place in a small bowl with salt, lime juice, chopped cilantro and vegetable oil and mix well.
Drain most but not all of the water from the shrimp, leaving perhaps 200 g (one cup). Remove the cilantro, onion and garlic from the pot and now add the onion/lime juice mixture to the shrimp in their cooking water. Grate the tomato into the pot. Stir well and serve slightly warm or at room temperature in individual bowls. Let people add popcorn (and other condiments) as they eat, so the popcorn doesn't get too soggy. Serves 2 generously or 4 modestly as an appetizer.
TITLE: unravelling the mystique of the cuban cigar
AUTHOR: by Barnaby Thompson
TEXT: It may be true that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but that doesn't mean that the path to becoming a cigar connoisseur is any easier. For sometimes a cigar is a Cohibo or a Romeo y Julietta, sometimes it's a Churchill, Robusto or Panatella, sometimes it's shaped like a cigar, or it might be shaped like something else - a Figurados type - such as a Torpedo or a Pyramid.
Navigating the world of cigars takes time and experience - as does smoking the things. But a good place to start is Le Club, where real-life Cuban barman Kim Tufino is always happy to give a few pointers and educate the novice.
"I can recognize a client who knows what he's talking about in a few seconds," says Tufino. "If someone just asks for a cigar, or a Romeo y Julietta cigar, I have to say, 'Which one? There are several.' But if they say, 'I'd like a Churchill, or a Robusto, and we go on from there, then I can tell that they know something."
There are hundreds of cigar types, categorized by the country and company the produced them, their length and diameter (or, more properly, ring-size), and whether a cigar has parallel sides or is a Figurados. But perhaps because he has been in Russia for seven years, Tufino has simplified the process a little by giving cigars a first name, patronymic and surname.
SMOKE THAT BABY
The surname is relatively easy, merely the name of the manufacturer, such as Cohiba, Romeo y Julietta or Aguila.
The patronymic denotes the cigar's shape and size - or it did once. Confusion can arise here because outside Cuba, manufacturers have taken the names of the various types of cigar to personalize their own brands. But if you're talking to Tufino, you're talking inside Cuba - "Cigars from all other countries come second to Cuban cigars" - where a Robusto is around five inches, a Churchill measures seven to eight, and a Giant can reach nine. Tufino says that there are 56 such categories in Cuba, so there's quite a lot to remember. But for Americans in particular, being in Russia is an excellent opportunity to ignore the U.S. embargo on Fidel Castro's country and get to grips with Cuban, rather than Dominican or Ecuadorean, cigars.
Then there's the first name, which is a brand name given by a manufacturer to any given cigar. As with the process of naming human beings, the first name can more or less repeat the patronymic, or it can be unique. For example, Corona-sized cigars are frequently given a name that is just a variation on Corona, while Cohiba's Julietta size has been named an Esplendidos.
So, your baby's full name could be Epicur No. 2 Robusto Hoyo de Monterrey, Shakespeare's Panetela Larga Romeo y Julietta, or plain old Ninfa's Ninfa Punch.
DO IT RIGHT
If this all sounds confusing, that's because it is, and to begin with it's probably safer to let an expert choose for you. However, although this might seem like an easy route out, there are still questions of etiquette one should know in order not to appear a real bumpkin.
First, cutting the end. A place like Le Club, any of the five-star hotels or one of St. Petersburg's ritzy casinos will have a proper guillotine and a pair of cigar scissors. How far up the body to cut depends on the condition of the cigar, and on how heavy your draw is. There is also the punch, which bypasses the cutting issue by making a hole in the end, and helps avoid getting specks of tobacco on the lips.
Alternatively, you can bite off the end and spit it across the room in the manner of a four-star general, but unless you can come up with a convincing explanation as to why this improves the aroma, expect to be ostracized. "Some customers insist on cutting the cigar themselves," says Dmitry Zakharchenko, manager of the Europe restaurant in the Grand Hotel Europe, "so we just hand them the guillotine. Similarly with lighting the cigar - we can present a cigar that's cut and ready to smoke, but some prefer to control the whole process."
If you think that whipping out the Zippo and striking it against your knee before torching the Panatella is going to look cool, think again. Gasoline-filled lighters are out, since the smell ruins the aroma of a cigar almost instantaneously. Long matches made "especially" for cigars are better if you let the phosphorus burn completely away, but Tufino frowns on that, too. Ideally, using a flame from thin strips of wood, generally cedar, is the way to go. If in doubt, let the person offering the cigar light it for you, so that the entire end is glowing evenly, although Tufino has had customers ask him to produce health certificates before letting him handle their cigars.
Secondly, a faux pas that one should avoid concerns inhaling: don't. "The first draw should 'wash out' the mouth, the second should be held, and after that you will get the full aroma," says Tufino. But don't let the smoke go beyond the throat - apart from anything else, Tufino has had a first-time smoker faint on him because he treated his Churchill like a Chesterfield Light. Zakharchenko recommends breathing out through the nose, the idea being to allow the smoke to settle around your stomach before rising and enveloping you with its aroma.
For pointers on how to hold a cigar, look at any photograph of Winston Churchill. In brief, the forefinger is wrapped over, the middle finger tucked under, and the cigar more firmly held than a cigarette.
WHAT TO DRINK
Next comes the decision of what best accompanies your cigar. Any aficionado worth his salt will, in fact, leave this entirely up to the customer, but Tufino's four favorites are port (from the Portuguese side of Iberia) and madeira (from the Spanish side), rum from the Caribbean, and Irish whiskey. "Not Scotch, because it has already come into contact with smoke during distillation, which makes it a more aggressive drink," Tufino says. "Some clients prefer coffee," says Zakharchenko. "In fact, very often this is the choice of the gourmet."
Finally, a gaffe that will draw the biggest sneer is stubbing a cigar out or tapping the ash off, cigarette style. There are special ashtrays for cigars that let them rest horizontally, and you should roll your ash away gently. If you feel like a break, just let the cigar go out by itself.
As with anything else that is treated as a work of art by devotees, the cigar is a target for counterfeiters. Both Tufino and Zakharchenko say that the only way around this is to find a reputable and reliable distributor, but should you be offered an expensive box of Bolivar Coronas Gigantes by somebody you don't trust, there are several clues on the box's underside, yielded by the right stamps, stickers, factory codes and the correct wording - "Hecho en Cuba, totalmente a mano," or Made in Cuba, entirely hand-rolled - not to mention how and on which sides a wooden box has been varnished.
Speaking of quality, a final word to bluffers who want to look good by demonstrating that they know how to test a cigar. When pressed, a cigar should "give" ever so slightly, but not to the point that you leave thumbprints. If properly stored in a humidor at 70 percent humidity, a cigar should feel smooth and a little moist, but not unduly so. "You should be able to press into the cigar, but if it crackles, it's too dry," says Zakharchenko. On the other hand, any sign of mould and you should hurl the thing into the trash.
And running the thing under your nose and giving a huge snort a la Hollywood is a dead giveaway - you might as well describe a vintage wine as having lots of body as you weigh it in your hand.
Last of all, take your time. You will need at least 40 minutes to smoke a small cigar (as opposed to a cigarillo), and more like 1 1/2 to two hours to finish the biggest varieties. Switch off the mobile, sit back and relax. Churchill managed to smoke hundreds of cigars and still found time to plan the D-Day landings. You can reschedule that meeting for another day.
Links: www.cigargroup.com. The FAQ and cigar database tell you everything - we mean everything - you need to know on the subject.
TITLE: value for money: $250 cognac is really worth it
AUTHOR: by Barnaby Thompson
TEXT: It is frequently said that price doesn't necessarily determine quality. People who hold this to be true are often found saying things like, "It pays to shop around," "The best things in life are free," or even "Can't buy me love." However, these are probably the same people who can't afford the $250 glass of cognac that has acquired legendary status in St. Petersburg.
The beverage in question is to be found in various city establishments, but one at the Europe restaurant in the Grand Hotel Europe is 0.4 centiliters of Louis XIII cognac. As I went to introduce myself to this fabled drink, I had expected the kind of reception Indian Jones got when he discovered the Ark of the Covenant - mystical light, choirs of angels, perhaps a few booby traps to discourage raiders. In fact, it stands in a bottle at the front of the restaurant's drinks tray, and looks fairly ordinary.
It is not. Made out of crystal, hand decorated, and with a 24-carat gold seal around the neck, the empty bottle alone costs over $200. The fact that it is unshowy is merely more proof that true class shuns ostentation.
As for the cognac itself, Dmi t ry Zakharchenko, the Europe's manager, explains that this Remy Martin product, using grapes from the Grande Champagne region, is a blend of over 150 eaux de vie, some of which are over 100 years old. "The blend depends on the quality of the distillates, which [in turn] depends on how good the harvest was in a particular year," said Zakharchenko. "The producers will decide which spirits to mix in what proportion in order to get the best cognac."
This is not a drink to down in one. Zakharchenko said that those who order it spend a good hour enjoying its remarkable aroma. If you thought that a $250 glass of cognac was a deceit, a way of ripping off New Russians and ignorant foreign businessmen whose companies will pick up the tab, think again. The price is the real price, the drink a drink of kings and queens.
But the ultimate profligacy is still to come. "Once the bottle is half-empty," said Zakharchenko, "more air can get to it, and the cognac loses its aroma." And they pour it down the sink, or perhaps use it to flambé the duck, or something. Given that you can order a bottle of this stuff on the Internet for $1,500, this can only be described as a shame.
TITLE: griboyedov enlightening the masses
AUTHOR: by Peter Kozyrev.
TEXT: "So, what exactly are those film shows at Griboyedov? Anybody been?" - was a recent posting on one of the Web conferences dedicated to city culture.
Here's an answer.
Monthly Kinokultprosvet screenings, held by Alexei Popov and Alexander Shcherbanosov, show works by local independent film artists as well as the choicest vintage Soviet documentaries, from educational reels for schoolchildren to propaganda movies for army soldiers and pregnant women.
Shows are usually based around a theme, different each month, and have been run regularly since 1998, although Popov and Shcherbanosov have been promoting independent film since its birth in Russia with the collapse of communism.
The atmosphere in the Griboyedov club is quite appropriate for such shows: Persian carpets and cushions are put out right on the dance floor for the spectators, drinks are allowed on the dance floor area during the show so you don't lose a precious second (later in the night drinks are kept strictly out). Concrete walls and the fluorescent-painted low ceiling of this former bomb shelter add to the experience.
Kinokultprosvet stands for Cultural Enlightenment by Cinema - a variation on a Soviet term kultprosvet, describing official attitude towards culture.
"In our case it is both cult cinema and cultural enlightenment. We show unknown films, science-fiction and works by recognized directors, in an attempt to open young people's eyes to the real values of film," comments Popov, himself a filmmaker.
"We also plan to produce a series of alternative films celebrating the 300th anniversary of Petersburg."
The films in question are mostly "real" cinema - i.e. no video involved, but real celluloid, with whirring antique projectors, a ray of light cutting through thick cigarette smoke and occasional interruptions for changing reels or fixing torn film.
One of the last shows, called "Country of Heroes," presented a 1990 film by Maxim Pezhemsky "Comrade Chkalov's Passage Across the North Pole" - an eccentric blasphemy/parody on a cult movie and Stalin's favorite "Va lery Chkalov," about a legendary Soviet air pilot.
The coming Wednesday's show will feature guests of honor from Mos cow's Ciné Fantom club.
The best-known alternative film club in Russia, founded by the brothers Aleinikov, pioneers of independent film, will be bringing up a collection of short film and video with them, including the brothers' absolute classic, "Tractorists," 1987.
The film created a great buzz in the late '80s, being a totally new way of depicting Soviet "happy life and labor."
The rest of the show includes "Zen Boxing" by Doulerain and "Fate" by Silvestrov, a cross between computer game Doom and the Prodigy's "Smack my bitch up" video.
The show begins at 9 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 28. Video films are shown at the bar and celluloid is screened simultaneously on the dance floor. Come early to guarantee a seat.
TITLE: battle re-enactment adds blood for authenticity
TEXT: Many are the entertainments that can be found in the environs of St. Petersburg during winter, but besides the usual pursuits of skiing and sleigh-riding comes another sport, involving real weapons and real casualties. Robin Swithinbank travels to Sestroretsk to report on a group of Tolkienisty, or Tolkien enthusiasts, who endeavour to stage a medieval battle with as much realism as possible. Photos by Alexander Belenky. It's a quiet Sunday afternoon in a small town by the name of Sestroretsk, just outside St. Petersburg, and the sun is shining. And then, in the shadows of an old house, the snowy silence is shattered as a small group of young men in Viking battle garb, with potentially lethal weapons and but scanty armor for protection, launch into full scale one-on-one combat. Welcome to the weird and quite frankly insane world of the Tolkienisty.
We have arrived in this town expecting a battle re-enactment, perhaps a mass demonstration of medieval warfare on the shores of the Gulf of Finland. What we find instead is a gathering of about 40 people, only half of whom have actually donned any form of medieval attire. What we see before us is a bi-annual meeting of "The Black Crow" and "The Northern Company" societies, small clubs that meet together in order to "re-enact and reconstruct warfare" according to one portly young man who is either the joker or the mascot of his society. To be frank, we're disappointed by what we see.
The activities begin with a clothing check. Anyone wearing or carrying anachronistic items will have to remove them. Our period is the 10th and 11th centuries; the influences therefore are Viking.
Everyone passes, whereupon the first round of competition begins, a spear-throwing contest. In order to reach the next stage each contestant must first hit a target at 15 paces three times in 10 attempts.
This proves to be a task of some considerable difficulty for our brave band of warriors, as spears fly woefully off target over and over again, some somersaulting in mid flight, others snaping or losing their tips, while some find rest in bushes or tree roots. Five men emerge from this comedy of errors and begin to prepare for the next round. The fight.
Two men in helmets and chain mail are standing opposite one another with swords aloft, wooden shields poised to defend against the on-coming attack.
The fight begins. On the left is the man with braided hair they call "Evil," on the right the burlier figure of Kirill, who is the leader of the "Black Crow" society.
These two men are attacking each other in a manner that suggests that they both want the other dead. Each man has to defend himself against the other four, one at a time for a minute each. Kirill is first up and defends himself well.
He escapes unscathed and we begin to think that maybe the event will pass without injury.
Next up is Dima, a man with fire in his eyes. His armor is almost non-existent beyond his enormous shield, no chain mail, just a fleece and a helmet that covers just his nose. Otherwise he is unprotected. Evil returns and the fight begins. A few seconds of swishing and flailing pass before both men stop fighting and Evil, however evil he may be, is heard to utter the word "sorry."
Dima stands stock still, his face pale as the snow around him. Blood begins to pour down his face and he rushes to the snow to freeze his wound. He's been caught on the cheek.
Evil's axe has left a deep gash in Dima's face, less than an inch from his right eye. He rushes off to the patching-up corner for some plasters. There are a few calls for him to go to hospital, but he refuses.
Another round of fighting continues regardless, and a couple of fighters are bludgeoned with axes, one on the leg, another in the middle of his back, another is clonked on the top of his helmet twice in succession and does well to stay on his feet, despite his hasty retreat.
Only one is injured seriously, a sword to his wrist leaves a deep incision and a red carpet wherever he treads. To our great surprise, Dima returns. He failed to defend himself against all his opponents, and so in heroic fashion he is back to fulfill his duties. This time he's facing Kirill, who although not a skillful fighter, swipes a pretty powerful sword.
Thirty seconds into the fight and Dima throws his axe at Kirill - it misses but the crowd boo nonetheless. He fights on with just his shield, his opponent piling blow upon blow against it.
The fight stops and the ensuing damage assessment reveals that Dima's axe throwing stunt was no more than a pained release of his weapon. Kirill's sword has partially severed Dima's thumb. Suddenly the dent in his face seems to be of little significance.
This time Dima consents to a hospital trip, and in the absence of any of their own transport or an on-hand medic, our photographer takes both wounded men to a clinic nearby.
Talking with the other members of the group it becomes horrifyingly clear that this sort of thing happens all the time. The strongest reaction among Dima's fellow hard men is that "it happens." Kirill, an army man when he's not hacking limbs off people, explains that their near life-threatening antics are little more than sport.
"We do this because it's sport. If we don't fight like men it becomes theater and loses its edge," he says. He goes on to say that normally they fight harder than they did today, but it's their first outing in a while and they haven't trained for some time so they had to take it easy.
We leave our new acquaintances on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, now engaged in mock battle with the real business of the day over, laughing and jostling, seemingly unaware that next time it could be they who are carted off to hospital.
Groups of Tolkienisty exist all over the country. "The Black Crow" society are off to Moscow and Vyborg in the coming months to engage in further battles. J. R. R. Tolkien, after whom this social group is named, wrote epic fantasies; Despite a lack of the magical touch or any sign of a noble quest in the midst of this group's activities, it would appear that the Tolkienisty are aptly named - they are quite clearly living in an epic fantasy.
For more information about the Tolkienisty, visit www.tolkien.ru
TITLE: berlinale film festival marked by diversity
AUTHOR: by Kirill Galetski
TEXT: The Berlin International Film Festival, also known as Berlinale, is one of the big three film festivals in Europe, along with Cannes and Venice. Held from Feb. 7 to 18, this year's festival was the 51st, and had a number of distinctive features. It is the last to be curated by Moritz de Halden, the festival director who has guided the Berlinale since 1980. De Halden's final contribution was an incredibly varied selection of some of his favorite films. The festival also featured retrospectives of the work of maverick German director Fritz Lang and actor Kirk Douglas, who received a Golden Bear for lifetime achievement.
While the direct Russian contribution to the festival was miniscule and pretty paltry for the most part, right from the start of the festival, many festival choices proved to abound in Russian themes. The opening night film, French director Jean-Jacques Annaud's "Enemy at the Gates" is an epic-scale war film about the battle of Stalingrad made in Germany and costing more than $85 million, an unprecedented budget for a European film. Jude Law portrays Vasily Zaitsev, a humble former shepherd thrust into the middle of the slaughter, who quickly becomes a star sniper. Joseph Fiennes plays the young political officer Danilov, who tries to raise morale through his reports about Zaitsev's kills, also using his exploits as a propoganda weapon against the Germans. Zaitsev is such a skillful sharpshooter that the Germans go to great lengths to stop him, bringing in their best sniper, Major Konig (Ed Harris).
In an eye-popping opening sequence, the film vividly recreates both the horror of German firepower and the merciless tactics with which the Soviets dispensed with their own retreating soldiers. While the original version of the film is in English, it wisely avoids having the actors speak with Russian accents. It will be interesting to see how the film plays, dubbed into Russian. In general, the film received very poor reviews and indeed plays better as an action film than as a drama. The performances are all fine, however, with a bit of dastardly casting in Bob Hoskins as Nikita Khrushchev, who has come to oversee the political officers. His performance is a gas, with his growling demeanor and stern references to what the "the boss," i.e. Stalin, wants.
The Russian-associated entries from North America were Renny Bartlett's "Eisenstein," a Canadian-German co-produced biopic of the famed Russian director, and a curious low-budget feature from director Bernard Rose called "IVANSXTC," a tranplantation of "The Death of Ivan Illyich," Leo Tolstoy's novella about the connundrum surrounding the death of a civil servant, to modern day Hollywood. A big-shot Hollywood agent's sex and drug filled life in the fast lane deteriorates when he finds out he has lung cancer. Despite or even because of its subject matter, the film is incredibly unflinching and poignant, with standout performances from Danny Huston and Peter Weller. Rose's previous films were the well-received "Immortal Beloved," starring Gary Oldman as Beethoven, and "Anna Karenina," with Sophie Marceau, which was filmed at Lenfilm studios in St. Petersbur
Achim Von Borries' "England!," one of the German films shown, featured St. Petersburg actor Ivan Shvedov, a graduate of the St. Petersburg Theater Arts Academy, in a lead role. A Chernobyl clean-up volunteer slowly dying of cancer seeks out a friend who moved to Berlin in order to fulfill their lifelong dream of travelling to England. The film is mostly in Russian and explores the lives of Russian immigrants to Germany. Shvedov, who starred in director Endalf Emlyn's mostly Welsh-language oddity "Leaving Lenin," which was filmed in St. Petersburg, now lives in Prague.
The Russian entry most directly related to St. Petersburg was "Love and Other Nightmares (Lyubov y Drugiye Koshmary)," filmed here in town by director Andrei Nekrasov, a Russian émigré to England. The title is a play on words which gets lost in translation since Lyubov is both a woman's name and the Russian word for love. The film itself is pretentious post-modern swill about a young woman hardened by prison time who has become a contract killer, pursued by the main character, a cynical rake who is always off camera - everything is shown from his point of view. Although technically accomplished - the film boasts excellent cinematography by Sergey Yurizdistsky and decent sound - the film is at the very least a good-looking box with nothing in it, and at most annoying drivel.
More satisfying was Kira Muratova's new film "Second Class Citizens (Vtorostepennye Lyudi)." Muratova, a hold-over from the golden age of '70s Soviet cinema, is a Russian director now living and working in Ukraine. Her current film is a refreshing and genuinely funny absurdist comedy filmed in Odessa. The story concerns a garrulous woman (Natalya Buzko) who must dispose of her husband's body after he knocks himself stone dead after a drunken binge. The film's script was written by Sergey Yevtvertkov, who has a small role as a doctor in the first third of the film. He has some of the funniest lines and is sorely missed when his character leaves and the film starts to meander, before picking up again for a bright, if low-key, finish.
In a similar vein, Jean-Jacques Beineix's new film "Mortal Transfer" is about a Freudian psychoanalyst (Jean-Hugues Anglade) who must get rid of the body of his client after he discovers her strangled on his analyst's couch. The story is replete with Murphy's Law: everything that could go wrong does. The film is a bit more difficult to appreciate than Beineix's other work such as "Diva" and "Betty Blue (37o2 Le Matin)," but is just as exquisitely crafted. Mortal Transfer is decidedly not for all tastes. St. Petersburg audiences will be able to see it at the Festival of Festivals at the end of June.
Some of the other French films at the festival exemplified a current trend of exploring working-class lives, such as that of a fairground employee in Patrice Leconte's "Félix and Lola" and a bottle plant worker in Philippe Le Guay's "Trois Huit." Leconte's film is simple yet stylish and effective, the story of a man who works the bumper cars at a carnival and becomes enamored of a mysterious young woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) who asks him to kill her obsessed former lover. The film asks how far its protagonist is prepared to go for love, and has an unexpected conclusion. Le Guay explored the phenomenon of hazing in his film, a riveting psychological drama and character study. A standout French-lanaguage historical was Gérard Corbiau's lush costume drama "The King is Dancing," about music and theater coming together during the time of Louis XIV.
The festival featured a sizable amount of Italian entries this year, led by Giuseppe Tonatore's "Malèna," an intensely romantic, expertly filmed tale of a young boy in love with the most beautiful woman in Sicily (Monica Belucci) during World War II. Malèna loses her husband in the war, and falls prey to lusty, unscrupulous men. The boy watches powerlessly as she is courted by various suitors and eventually blackmailed and disgraced, yet he is instrumental in returning her her dignity and a shadow of her former happy life.
The festival also featured European premieres of American films and U.S.-European co-productions, both in an out of competition. The most eagerly anticipated of these was Ridley Scott's "Hannibal," the sequel to "Silence of the Lambs," starring Anthony Hopkins, Julianne Moore and Gary Oldman. The other titles included Steven Sorderbergh's "Traffic," a controversial take on the war on drugs, and Lasse Halstrom's "Chocolat," about a non-conformist woman who opens a chocolate shop in a conservative French town.
The recipients of the main competition awards at the festival were somewhat unexpected. French Director Patrice Chérau's first English-language film "Intimacy" took the Golden Bear this year. This adaption of semi-autobiographical stories by writer/director Hanif Kureishi is about Jay and Claire (Mark Rylance and Kerry Fox), a couple who have a noncommittal, purely sexual relationship and the complications that ensue when Claire fails to turn up one day. Chérau has a solid reputation both in theater as well as cinema, and his most well-known achievment was "La Reine Margot," which won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1994. Petersburg audiences have the opportunity to see his similarly award-winning 1999 film "Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train," in the repertoire at the Spartak cinema.
One Silver Bear went to Wang Xiaoshuai's "Beijing Bicycle," a Chinese take on Vittorio de Sica's "Bicycle Thief," which is a more obvious choice given the festival's predilection for Asian cinema. The other Silver Bear went to Lone Schefrig's "Italian for Beginners," Denmark's fifth film made according to the Dogma manifesto, about a diverse group of people who come together in romance and friendship in an Italian class at a community center. In addition, this bright but somewhat restrained comedy was also an audience favorite.
"Italian for Beginners" and "IVANSXTC" were both filmed with the aid of high-quality digital video technology, the image quality of which is almost indistinguishable from celluloid. The film is representative of a growing trend in European film and TV production toward using digital video formats, which are more economical than 35mm, to shoot films. This new low-cost way of working is slowly but surely revolutionizing the worldwide film industry. Considering the extraordinary problems of raising money for films, in Russia, this may create a boon for local production, so maybe there will be more Russian films at next year's festival.
TITLE: taking another look at the musical russia
AUTHOR: by Lesley Chamberlain
TEXT: When Richard Taruskin's "Defining Russia Musically" first appeared in hardback in 1997, it sparked controversy and glowing reviews, both because of and despite the way it tore into big names in the musicological world. Now it seems like a landmark. It reflects the kind of revisions about cultural history that the end of communism has forced on academics in many fields and also on our everyday institutions. BBC radio, to take one example, now resounds to obscure Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov operas and other lesser-known Russian cultural artifacts, whereas before 1991 they were all but ignored. Taruskin raises important questions about how cultural and artistic judgments are made.
One of his points is that from the early 19th century Russia was always handled in the West, not necessarily consciously, as the cultural outsider trying to get in. In art music, German, Italian and French works formed the 19th-century canon. These giants were Western art music. Late developers like the Russians (or historically diminished nations like the Czechs) could only be accepted critically if they showed a particular national flavor and charm. Nationality as an aesthetic criterion thus answered the question "How different are they from us?" and came into being to help the outsider.
At first it was an artificial exercise. The supposedly ultranational Mikhail Glinka was actually a sophisticated cosmopolitan composer of the first rank who created the "authentic" effects of "A Life for the Tsar" as deliberately, one might say, as Bizet set out to make "Carmen" "Spanish."
But by the 1860s, Russian music critics not only believed the critical myth, which had been unloaded on them, but were using it as their route to self-understanding, or self-invention. Take into account the various additional political pressures to do with nationalism in tsarist Russia, and the kind of nationality worked up to make the Soviet Union seem a wonderfully diverse, harmonious and humane place (all that folk singing that used to fill up the TV schedules), and you see that the idea of national authenticity can hardly be used too carefully these days.
Deconstruction has done its work here. Taruskin is, after all, professor of music at University of California, Berkeley. But the really interesting thing is that while deconstruction has done its work at the academic level, at the same time, and to the same effect, West and East have stopped regarding each other as the excluded "other." The world of abstract thought and the practical world do somehow exist as each other's reflection.
Taruskin offers many practical examples of his thesis. Russian 19th-century art music, while it defined itself against two Wests, the Italian and the German, in practice absorbed many of these "alien" elements. "A Life for the Tsar" could almost be Italian. The author feels that prominent 20th-century British and American experts on Russian music, from Gerald Abraham to David Brown, have simplified the "Russianness" of nationalism, patriotism and nativity because they have been influenced by the 1860s propagandists.
The reality was always different. Glinka's successor Mily Balakirev, for instance, was entirely opportunistic as to the content he attributed to his"Second Overture on Russian Themes." The piece represented freewheeling populism one day and became an endorsement of the autocracy the next.
Taruskin suggests many other revisions to the received picture of Russian music. Pyotr Tchaikovsky, always thought of as romantic, is seen as a realist and the last great composer of the 18th century, yet with the expressive power to convey the personal torment of living in a repressive (albeit pre-Soviet) Russia. Alexander Scriabin's music, often said to be free of "national" features, is meanwhilefound to be saturated in them, his Russianness following an older, German-inspired mystical tradition.
Scriabin thus never helped constitute a Russian musical avant-garde in the early 20th century, and indeed such a phenomenon never existed. Both Russian and Soviet art music have been predominantly conservative over the past 150 years. One can see a prominent aspect of this conservatism by comparing the Soviet aesthetic with the critical prescriptions for Russian music in the 1860s and again in the 1890s. Art is for everyone or it is not art. In Britain, New Labour seems to be the latest victim of believing that this is a leftist point of view. It isn't. It's petty bourgeois. First there was Russian music for the bourgeoisie - think of the ballet. Then, in Soviet times, music that catered for a petty bourgeois mass was de rigeur, aimed at the untroubled soul of the eternal easy listener.
And yet can this be all of Russia? Of course not. From Tchaikovsky to Alfred Schnittke, we hear a gloriously intense, uniquely powerful music and sense embodied in it a society transfigured by personal suffering. Music has kept track of the pain. Pre-eminently in Dmitry Shostakovich the extreme subjective experience cries out and grates against the would-be jolliness of the banal. I believe Taruskin is right in summing up the musical definition of Russian this way because I have experienced the same message myself.
Last time I was in St. Petersburg, in 1996, in the Conservatory, a row of babushkas stoutly refused to clap for music by that tonally risqué émigré, Igor Stravinsky.
Meanwhile, over at the opera house, Boris' reluctant, frightened teenage son was hurled bodily onto the throne. No one in my experience ever produced a "Boris Godunov" as brutal as that in London, but then audiences in London are not usually so ideological either.
Taruskin suggests that many Western critics have just not grasped what was being said musically about Russia in the past. His book is likely to be one of many to come that will reintroduce the real complexity of Russia to the former "West."
"Defining Russia Musically," by Richard Taruskin. 561 pages. Paperback. Princeton University Press. $24.95
TITLE: repainting the people's pastoral idyll
AUTHOR: by Oliver Ready
TEXT: Under Lenin and Stalin, the Soviet Union learned to read and write, something for which its citizens would be forever thankful. But the black magic of the written word served the leadership far better than its subjects. There was no crisis that could not be rewritten by the elite to conform to Marx and the General Line. In the reports compiled after Central Committee plena of the 1930s, where quotas of thousands of "enemies" to be eliminated were casually set, all acrimonious internal disputes would be erased before being sent out through the country.
Tale telling was endemic to the self-delusions of not only the elite but also the ordinary citizen. The master plot of the path to communism, enshrined in socialist realism and replete with obstacles and rewards, became the new fairy tale of the people, just as Stalin had become the new God. The gift of literacy thus endowed Homo Sovieticus with the grammar that would, in fact, enslave him. This helps explain the paramount historical importance of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose writings succeeded, albeit belatedly, in giving the victims of repression a different narrative. Yet this too became a straitjacket. Recently, Catherine Merridale spoke of how, in her research for her new book on death and memory in Russia, "Night of Stone" (Granta), former convicts under Stalin could only relate their own experiences according to the models of the "Gulag Archipelago."
Western accounts of Stalinism also developed their own deeply revealing narratives. The "totalitarian" school that flourished in the Cold War demonized Stalin at the expense of a balanced account of the role of society. The "revisionist" school, born in the 1970s in a new intellectual climate, attempted the opposite, trying to show how pressure "from below," such as the peasant's own sense of justice, affected - even dictated - policy from above. Both worked from inadequate source materials, and both are now being significantly rewritten. Today's historian, meanwhile, paddles in an ocean of archival material, but returns with a tale almost too complex to tell. Bureaucratic, prolix Soviet society left behind a never-ending matryoshka of narratives, each pointing to further research and distancing "final" interpretations.
Stalinism as a Way of Life would in theory be the ideal companion, an analysis of the mental processes by which policy was felt, implemented and perpetuated by the ordinary citizen. But while editors Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov claim such an analysis to be their aim, the focus of the material selected and of the accompanying commentary is often unclear.
The editors rightly choose to concentrate on the countryside. As the historian Moshe Lewin once wrote, for the Soviet leaders "the problem was the peasant tout court." Despite the urban focus of Bolshevik policy, peasants still constituted the bulk of the population under Stalin and underwent the harshest (and least mourned) disasters, from the collectivization begun in 1929 through the famines of the '30s. The documents, which also bring to light under-examined themes such as inter-ethnic conflicts and childhood experiences, are based largely on citizens' letters (classic "fictions") to the authorities and newspapers and NKVD summary reports on popular opinion. One of the most striking features is the often sophisticated political critiques and suggestions offered by the correspondents on intricate issues such as independent farming or alimony procedures. Yet the peasants' illusion that they were living in a participatory democracy was precisely that - theirs was a voice unheeded in any constructive sense.
The documents paint a predictably bleak version of the Soviet pastoral idyll: collective farm chairmen who use their authority to spread venereal disease; agronomists who need six hours to fix their faulty equipment before their daily round; a 65-year-old woman exiled for three years for stealing a rooster. The bleakness, however, needs to be contrasted with the immense enthusiasm specific to Stalinism. This is represented here, but insufficiently: We do not really get inside the mind of the provincial activist, for example, whose zeal the center often had to restrain. Nor can we fully appreciate the euphoria occasioned by the grand projects and technological advances of the time.
This is a shame, since study of the period will inevitably head toward greater understanding of the emotional excitement generated by Stalinism and permitted by an extraordinary confluence of historical processes. The West will perhaps cease to think of the 1930s simply as "the Terror" even if the tally of the dead makes it uneasy. Such unease, though, is as nothing compared to the agony of the Soviet Union's direct descendants who, as President Vladimir Putin's recent comments about the achievements of Stalinism made clear, are still floundering for a narrative that will at last do justice to the past.
"Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents," ed. Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov. 480 pages. Yale University Press. $35.
TITLE: petersburg fact-book makes ideal reference for historians
AUTHOR: by Masha Kaminskaya
TEXT: Every story has its logical end. With the science of history, however, we almost never know if this or that obscure event was eventually to blame for a well-known outcome, our assessments of facts changing as time passes.
Soviet-era history readers were more or less spared these doubts: Communist ideology was always there to dictate what took place when, where and why, and if it was right. The change occurred in the 1990s, and was particularly noticeable in the newly-written books on 20th-century Russia, the abundance and diversity of which, as most historians say, has brought about more confusion than clarity. What had seemed absolutely indisputable was now the subject of a hodge-podge of theories and guesses, with popular history books often providing a total misrepresentation of events.
"St. Petersburg: History and Culture in Tables" by Felix Lurie is a book meant for those who prefer to rely upon facts rather than other people's views to make their own judgments.
The new edition is printed in two slim volumes and presents the history of St. Petersburg from its founding by Peter the Great in 1703, and up to the turbulent year of 1917, shortly before the city lost its status as the capital of Russia.
The unusual linear format - the first volume consists of tables where the rows follow according to the year of an event and the eight columns describe different events in different spheres of the city's activity - makes this work a unique reference book. The year of 1703, for instance, begins with the foundation of the Peter and Paul Fortress in the first column - which summarizes everything that happened in the field of administration, law enforcement and legislation of the new city. The second column will tell you about the city's maintenance, industry, finances and trades of the time, while the third will describe architecture and so on.
The second volume provides a historic glossary and several indices to make it easier for you to find your way around the book. All in all, the trim annotations of events and the ample auxiliary information of the indices will help you create your own logical picture of the city's development both synchronically and throughout the first 214 years of its existence.
St. Petersburg in Tables is itself a logical conclusion to the two previous reference books by the same author: "Russian and World History in Tables" (1995 and 1997) and "Russian History and Culture in Tables" (1998) In Lurie's own words, these books "belong to the future, and there should be more like them."
However, this edition, which took Lurie four long years of work, comes as his last effort in the hard labor of the linear-approach history science. The only exception will be the re-publication of St. Petersburg in Tables in April, with the new, handier edition uniting the two volumes in one hard cover book, as well as making up for a few minor oversights and adding a lot of additional detail.
"I don't like to boast, but my book comprises more information on the history of St. Petersburg than has ever been published in one book," says Lurie. "Although it doesn't go beyond bare facts, it will give you a chance to follow a certain tendency from beginning to end, from causes to consequences."
This seems to be the primary reason why the book will have no continuation, although offers to describe St. Petersburg's more recent history have been made. History's own logic has us waiting to reach a certain distance from the events described to learn what they finally come to mean for us. But even if a century later we are still in confusion - well, books like St. Petersburg in Tables are bound to give us a clue.
St. Petersburg: History and Culture in Tables. 1703 - 1917. "Zolotoi Vek," "Diamant" 2000, is available at all major bookstores for 100 rubles ($3.40).
TITLE: neglected female artists get recognition at last
AUTHOR: by Yulia Savelyeva
TEXT: It is generally accepted that the Russian avant-garde is one of the brightest pages in the history of this country's art scene. And it is also generally accepted that the avant-garde's four brightest stars were Suprematist artist Kasimir Ma levich, Constructivism founder Vla di mir Tatlin, abstract Impressionist Was sily Kandinsky and revolutionary artist and photographer Alexander Rod chenko.
But what may be less well known is that six female artists were just as important to the avant-garde as their male counterparts. It is their story - that of Alexandra Ekster, Natalya Goncha ro va, Lyubov Popova, Olga Rozanova, Var vara Stepanova and Nadezhda Udalt sova - that the exhibit "Amazons of the Avant-Garde" wishes to tell.
Organized by the Guggenheim Museum and currently on display at the Old Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the exhibit - which has shown over the past 1 1/2 years at the Guggenheim museums in Berlin, Venice, Bilbao and New York, as well as at the Royal Academy of Art in London - aims to remind the world that the men of the Russian avant-garde were not the only participants in that movement.
But, why "Amazons?"
"Of course, these six women artists weren't warrior Amazons," said the exhibit's curator, Zelfira Tregulova. "Each of them was a feminine woman, but when it came to art, they were all Amazons [in that they were] innovators who fought to open up new horizons."
The exhibit features 75 of the six artists' works culled from 23 collections held inside the Russian Federation, and aims to "explain the phenomenon of the Russian avant-garde," Tregulova said. "Everybody knows that there were women artists, but no one can imagine the extent of the power of their art and their personalities."
Lest visitors to the exhibit mistake it for a statement on feminism, Tregulova warns: "The exhibit doesn't mean to focus on the artists' gender, rather [it means to focus] on the artistic value of their work, on the fact that these women created ... paintings that can bring viewers ... satisfaction.
"All six were strong, independent, wealthy, well educated and emancipated," Tregulova said. "The idea that there is a difference between men and women in art just didn't occur to them."
Considering their similarities, it is not surprising that all six of the artists knew each other and that their paths crossed frequently.
Each of the six began her career with art school, then trips to Germany, Italy and France. Around 1913, they returned to Russia, where they began working on their own art. Each then found herself under the professional influence of one of the male artists mentioned above.
Goncharova was the first to assert her own equality with the male artists of the day.
"Goncharova overcame the traditional image of a woman artist. She wore a man's suit and lived with artist Mik hail Larionov, although they weren't married," Tregulova said. "Gon charova was more Amazon than the other five. She was an example for them."
Of the other five, Ekster was a woman of society married to a well-known lawyer. She was a link between art in Russia and the West, who knew Cubists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque personally and even had a romantic relationship with Italian Futurist painter Ardengo Soffici. Udaltsova and Popova studied together in Paris, Rozanova created her own version of the Suprematist style, as seen in her work "Green Line" (Zelyonaya Polosa, 1917), which helped to establish her as an artist of the same caliber as the best known Suprematist, Malevich.
Interestingly, nearly every one of the women was involved in a romantic relationship with another artist: Goncharova with Larionov, Stepanova with Rodchenko, Rozanova with poet Alexei Kruchyonykh, Udaltsova with artist Alexander Drevin and Popova with artist Alexander Vesnin.
Sadly, the lives of all six women ended tragically. Rozanova died from typhoid in 1918. Popova died from scarlet fever in 1924, just days after her child died of the same ailment. Goncharova and Ekster both left the Soviet Union, but would never produce work of the kind they produced while there.
Udaltsova was consumed with the writing of appeals for the pardon of her husband, Drevin, after his arrest in the 1930s for producing art that conflicted with the Soviet doctrine of Socialist Realism, which said that all Soviet art ought to further the revolution. She didn't know that he had been shot shortly after his arrest.
Stepanova and Rodchenko, too, suffered because their art did not conform to Socialist Realism: by the 1930s, both had been shut out of the art world and had to survive on minor jobs like backdrop painting in local theaters.
"But I'm sure all six women will be remembered even 200 years after their deaths," Tregulova said.
"Amazons of the Avant-Garde" (Amazonki Avangarda) runs until March 28 at the Engineer Wing of the Old Tretyakov Gallery, located at 10/12 Lavrushinsky Pereulok, Moscow. Tel. 230-7788. Open 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., closed Monday.
TITLE: club that sets the standard puts out 2nd music compilation
AUTHOR: by Sergey Chernov
TEXT: Griboyedov, the trendy bunker club managed by ska band Dva Samaliota, is expanding its activities by producing a compilations of often fresh and exciting music - which has been heard in the club since its opening on Oct. 18, 1996.
"Griboyedov Music 2," which was released earlier this month, is a follow-up to last year's "Griboyedov Music" and features another 12 tracks ranging from club favorites Markscheider Kunst to the obscure Moscow band Grenki.
"Of the new bands [on the compilation] I like a lot Polyusa and Aty-Baty, which is an act of the MTV format - if they shoot a video and do a few more things, they'll be a well-known band," said Dva Samaliota's drummer Mikhail Sindalovsky.
He compiled the CD with his fellow group members, keyboard player Denis Med vyedev and bassist Anton Belyan kin. All three are directors of Griboyedov, which is oriented toward student, musicians and art-minded public.
To perform at the club has been the necessary condition of inclusion. "We'd been approached by many bands, who haven't played at the club - but we'd say: 'Play at Griboyedov first,'" said Sindalovsky.
However, it might not always be an easy goal to achieve, as the candidates have to pass the artistic control of Med vye dev, who decides on the club's repertoire.
"Two or three new bands emerge in the city every week," said Medvyedev, who gets dozens of demo tapes and at times has to run from the acts that he has rejected.
"They must be interesting musically, there should be an idea, there should be a positive mood, or if it's heavy or punk, it should be fun," he said.
"If it's jazz, it should have something to do with today's trends. But mostly I am directed by what I feel inside."
"But if a rejected band asks me what they should play to be booked, I tell them I am not at all interested in their approach. We are not a restaurant," said Medvyedev.
Medvyedev's favorite on "Griboyedov Music 2" is Polyusa, a pop/rock band who appears on the CD with a rap parody.
"It's prestigious for bands to play at the club, because they then write in their press releases that they have played at Griboyedov," said Sindalovsky. "Griboyedov means something to them."
Unlike the rest of the songs, one song by the 1980s pioneering ska band Stranniye Igry, whose ex-members once played an acoustic set at a club, was taken from the U.S.-released 1986 compilation "Red Wave. 4 Underground Bands From the U.S.S.R." and features scratching of ancient vinyl which adds an extra charm to the track.
Though there is probably no such thing as the "Griboyedov style," many turning points in local rock history took place at the bunker on Voronezhskaya Ulitsa, in the shadow of decrepit Dostoevskian buildings.
For instance, the birth of the now hugely popular band Leningrad grew out of the obscure art-rock outfit Ukho Van Goga (Van Gogh's Ear) in 1997. "Once they came to us and played a set of criminal songs at a party 'for friends,'" said Sindalovsky.
"Suddenly it was all the rage, and it became clear that it was their speciality - so they started to churn out these identical songs. There's a lot of bands who went on from Griboyedov."
KukaRecords, Griboyedov's label which was launched for the club's compilations last year, might expand its activities to release live concerts which take place at Griboyedov, and albums by friendly musicians, such as guitarist and singer Grigory Sologub, formerly of Stranniye Igry and Dva Samaliota, who has a number of unreleased songs of his own.
"It's done not only to promote bands but also to promote the club itself as a creative unit - to show that it isn't just another beer kiosk for making money," said Sindalovsky.
"Eaten Cook's Day," presenting KukaRecords and "Griboyedov Music 2" at Griboyedov at 9 p.m. Sun., Feb. 24.
TITLE: who does what: a low-down on cultural institutions
AUTHOR: by Giulara Sadykh-zade
TEXT: When St. Petersburg experienced its first wave of perestroika, approximately between 1989 and 1991, an array of new artistic collectives fought each other for their place in the sun. Perestroika's second wave brought in its turn both musical and theatrical festivals. By the middle of the '90s, St. Petersburg's cultural continuum saw the development of a new phenomenon: institutes representing the progressive cultural vanguard of European countries. At first their work was barely noticeable, but by means of cultural projects and educational programs, the Goethe Institute and the British Council began to attract the people's attention, and public opinion regarding such establishments took a U-turn. Indeed, it is presently impossible to imagine many cultural events happening in the city without their active participation.
Finding their role in the city's cultural life has not, however, been easy. The legal confusion as to their exact status and their fluctuating range of duties - from that of being an embassy to a publicly organized charity - have not permitted the institutes to redefine their relations with the city's own cultural authorities.
The institutes' own employers have studied the peculiarities of Petersburg's cultural scene to determine where their potential niches lie. The resulting options seem to be either bringing to St. Petersburg whatever is not here at present, or actually stimulating whatever has never been produced by the city itself before.
It soon became clear that the import of culture to St. Petersburg was a delicate and subtle undertaking. Petersburg has for so long been laden with its own aesthetic values that it has proved very hard for its inhabitants to contemplate contemporary modes of art.
Aside from the foreign cultural institutes, there is also the underground, which remains influential: The leaders of the Pushkinskaya 10 arts center and the younger generation of professional musicians are always ready to provide an injection of new art.
The unclear information available about the city's culture roused the cultural institutes of Germany, Holland, Britain and France to create their own information database on the subject, which they have used to plan their own cultural strategy. Thus, the Alliance Française preferred to concentrate its efforts on bringing modern dance to St. Petersburg, which came in abundance with AF financial support.
The Goethe Institute busied itself with promoting German music, organizing chamber and old-music concerts. The British Council meanwhile, has been concentrating on photo exhibits and the promotion of new ideas in the sphere of art technology and management.
THE GOETHE INSTITUTE
Founded in West Germany after World War II, the institute's original remit was to redress the worldwide anti-German feeling of the period. Beginning with German language lessons, the institute gradually went on to promote German art and culture as a whole.
After the latest directorial change, Wilfred Ekstein has been the institute's head in St. Petersburg. His arrival has seen the putting on of first class chamber music concerts, performed by German musicians. The institute has also been supporting the promotion of contemporary German music. Last autumn, the institute put on a opera seminar in Moscow, the theme of which was the work of the Stuttgart Opera. The most impressive of all was the St. Petersburg delegation of conductors and music critics, sent down by the local office of the institute, which enabled a lively discussion on the themes of the conference. The institute is further hoping to be able to bring a production of Wolfgang Rim's last opera "Jakob Lenz," which was performed with success at the Vienna Opera Festival last summer, to St. Petersburg in the coming season.
THE BRITISH COUNCIL
The British Council has the most developed organizational structure in Russia: 12 offices in big cities all over Russia. As the Dutch Institute did, the British Council organized a celebration of the 300th anniversary of Russo-British diplomatic relations founded under Peter the Great. This brought with it a wide-ranging cultural program.
The second step in the development of the St. Petersburg bureau was the organization of an early music festival, something that managed to bring together nearly all the city's cultural institutes. Currently, preference is being shown towards involvement in more progressive spheres of music. Support is now divided between educational programs and the fostering of new art forms on Petersburg soil. Furthermore, some British DJs have performed in St. Petersburg's nightclubs.
INSTITUT FRANçAIS
Several powerful organizations are promoting the ideals and values of French culture in St. Petersburg. The Institut Français, composed of the French Foreign Ministry, the Alliance Française - an authoritative organization, created in 1883 and operating in St. Petersburg since 1991, with the goal of publicizing French culture the world over - the French Language Center and the French University College.
Headed by Christian Faure, the Institut Français often works on a governmental level. However, in St. Petersburg it also organizes meetings with French writers and poets, cinema and theater festivals and retrospectives as well as organizing tours of dance troupes and French musicians.
At the Cappella on Feb. 25, the institute has arranged a performance of the venerable French pianist Michel Dalberto, who will perform works of Franc, Fauré and Ravel.
However, the most important musical event of the current season promises to be the performance of the famous Strasbourg Percussion, formed in 1961 and performing the works of Boulez, Penderetski, Messiaen and Varèse. The concert is planned to take place in the Hermitage before the opening of an exhibition of well-known French artist Pierre Soulages' work later that day.
TITLE: NEP exhibition brings '20s petersburg to life
AUTHOR: by Lena Ruthner
TEXT: Almost ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, St. Petersburg is still trying to come to terms with its Soviet past. A new exhibition which opened Tuesday in the Rumyantsev Mansion focuses on the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP), which lasted almost a decade from 1921 to 1929 and marked the introduction of certain capitalist elements to the Soviet economic order. The period saw a short time span of economic growth, consumerism, and an astonishing evolution of rural cultural variety.
Inspired by the opening of the Soviet archives to a wider public and changes in Soviet-period research, the organizers of the exhibition focus mainly on the everyday life of "ordinary" men and women in private and public, and the different strategies and tactics of the rural inhabitants for coping with the radical changes in the city during the 1920s.
The actual reality of the ordinary citizen is reconstructed through everyday-life sources like photography, video performances, letter exchanges, communal interiors, working tools, fashion, paintings, graphics, and posters.
Furthermore, the exhibition tries to outline the changes in atmosphere and outlook that St. Petersburg experienced shortly after the introduction of NEP and the subsequent thriving of free trade. Although political and economic changes were not reflected very much in architecture, the overall atmosphere of the city changed as small-scale stores, theaters and nightclubs appeared.
Ascending the museum's staircase, the visitor is invited to a short stroll along the Nevsky Prospect of the 1920s. Minimalist models, photographs, graphics and paintings illustrate the town's main boulevard and convey the lively atmosphere that was present in the shops, salons, and rag-fairs on the sidewalks of Nevsky Prospect. A second room shows communal life - the red corner (where people habitually displayed communist propaganda), collective kitchens and the tiny sleeping rooms of the kommunalkas - as well as the new evolving bourgeois living culture.
A third room demonstrates the evolving variety and abundance in cultural life - especially embodied in the developing medium of film and new directions in the field of interpretative art. A final room presents everyday life on the shop floor and the small workshops that were sprouting out of the ground everywhere. If visitors are not exhausted after their short time-journey through the NEP period, they can still take a look at the somewhat older exhibition of Soviet Poster Art, which is accommodated in two wonderful green colored halls on the first floor of the museum.
Despite the rise in the standard of living, an increase in freedom of speech and the evolution of cultural variety within certain stratas of society, the NEP period was also marked by poverty, ideological repression and an assault on those who were not seen as participating in the socialist crusade. Although it claims to portray the variety and paradoxes, the exhibition does not deal with the negative aspects of the period sufficiently. An atmosphere of awakening and growth absorbs the visitor, and the presence of ideological repression and general privation are in the meantime forgotten.
One reason for that may be the exclusive reliance on the source material of the museum's own archive and the Central State Archive of Photo and Film documents which, to a certain extent, still consist of material selected by the single source lens of the former Soviet state. Another reason for the exclusively positive image generated by the exhibition may be the very desire to find a historical and ideological basis on which the modern Russian nation can build.
See exhibits for details.
TITLE: Gretzky Era Gets Underway in Phoenix
AUTHOR: By Bob Baum
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PHOENIX, Arizona - No part-owner ever received such a welcome from his team.
A sellout crowd of 16,210 dressed in white turned out Wednesday night for the "Welcome Wayne" celebration in honor of Wayne Gretzky's takeover of the Phoenix Coyotes hockey operations.
"The Great One" is a partner with principal owner Steve Ellman, who last Thursday completed the $88 million purchase of the franchise, an arduous, complicated process that took nearly a year.
To celebrate the takeover, the Coyotes staged their first regular-season "white out." Fans dressing in white for home playoff games is a tradition that dates to the mid-1980s, when the team played in Winnipeg.
Every fan received a white "Welcome Wayne" t-shirt bearing a photo of Gretzky on the back.
The glowing moon that rises to the rafters of America West Arena before each game, as the Coyotes fans howl, read "99," the number Gretzky wore as the greatest hockey player of all time.
In a ceremony before the game against Columbus, Gretzky donned a Coyotes jersey bearing his name and number. He was introduced to the wildly cheering fans by Ellman, a developer who still faces major obstacles to get a new arena built for the franchise.
"Tonight officially marks the beginning of the Gretzky era in Phoenix," Ellman shouted.
Gretzky took the microphone and in his usual calm, unflappable style, thanked the fans.
"This is going to be wonderful," he said. "We look forward to a long, illustrious career here. We know you guys are among the greatest fans in the league."
It was only the second sellout of the season for the Coyotes, who expect to lose at least $20 million this year, playing in an arena that has many limited-view seats. The other sellout was when Mario Lemieux and the Pittsburgh Penguins came to town.
"I think it brings a whole new life to hockey here," said Dave Handler, a 35-year-old fan from nearby Mesa. "It seems to me everything Wayne Gretzky has done in his life he's succeeded in."
Actually, Gretzky has had some business failures, but those were outside of hockey.
He is the managing partner of the Coyotes and will oversee all hockey operations. Less than 48 hours after the new ownership took over, general manager Bobby Smith was fired and replaced by Cliff Fletcher.
Gretzky faces some tough decisions. He is negotiating with holdout goalie Nikolai Khabibulin, and probably will either trade him or the team's all-star goalie Sean Burke.
Gretzky also has had preliminary talks with Jeremy Roenick about a new contract.
With a shortage of cash, the Coyotes hardly can afford to re-sign Roenick and keep Keith Tkachuk, who makes $8.3 million this season and will require a new contract next fall.
"I hope to build a team around Keith Tkachuk," Gretzky said. "I've said that from day one."
But is that realistic? Gretzky just smiled when asked if the new ownership, which barely scraped together enough money to buy the team and still faces a battle with the Scottsdale City Council over the new arena, has enough resources to do what he wants to do.
"We'll see in time," he said.
TITLE: Leafs Wilting Over Lindros Trade Rumors
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: TORONTO - Toronto Maple Leafs coach and general manager Pat Quinn said Wednesday that the Philadelphia Flyers backed out of a trade for Eric Lindros at the last minute earlier this week.
"I called to arrange for a 3:30 trade call on Monday and that's when I was told [by the Flyers] we're not going through with it," Quinn said. "We met what they asked for, word for word. As far as I'm concerned, I'm not going to slop around anymore."
Quinn did not attempt to hide his anger at Wednesday's news conference and said he was "tired" of dealing with Philadelphia's "moving-target" trade demands for Lindros.
"I'm not very happy with how this transpired," he said. "I don't like the way the thing went down. Every time we moved to their position, it moved again. It was a moving target all along. Every time we got close, it moved."
According to reports, the Flyers were to receive two players and a first-round pick for Lindros. Among the names mentioned were left wing Sergei Berezin, centers Nik Antropov and Yanic Perreault and defensemen Danny Markov and Tomas Kaberle.
Quinn refused to discuss the players involved in the deal.
The rumors have clearly become a distraction for the Leafs, who are winless in their last six games (0-3-3-0) and have fallen into seventh place in the Eastern Conference race.
Lindros is a restricted free agent, but the Flyers retain the right to match any offer and are entitled to compensation if he leaves as a free agent. Lindros, however, has requested to be traded only to Toronto, leaving Flyers general manager Bob Clarke with little leverage.
Lindros and his family made no attempt to hide their dissatisfaction with the Flyers, claiming the team's medical staff misdiagnosed his fourth career concussion following a March 4 game at Boston.
Clarke responded by stripping Lindros of his captaincy. Clarke also has had problems with Lindros' father, Carl, who is his son's agent.
Lindros suffered another concussion during his rehabilitation and a sixth after taking a hard, but clean hit from Scott Stevens of the New Jersey Devils in Game Seven of the Eastern Conference finals on May 26.
Although Lindros has been cleared to play, he still remains a concern. He missed 27 games last season due to the concussions, post-traumatic migraine headaches, back spasms, a bruised left hand and a viral infection, yet still ranked third on the team with 59 points in 55 contests.
TITLE: Capriati Continues Winning Ways, Sampras Falls in Upset
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: OKLAHOMA CITY - Jennifer Capriati, playing for the first time since winning the Australian Open last month, beat Venezuela's Maria Vento 6-2, 6-1 at the IGA U.S. Indoor Championships Wednesday night.
Capriati, the second seed, split the first four games before winning six straight, including three at love.
"I think I played well and it's important, the first match is always important," Capriati said. "It was tougher than you might think, just because it was my first match since the Australian Open and I wasn't sure how I'd be playing."
Top-seeded Monica Seles beat Jenny Hopkins 7-6 (1), 6-3.
"You never like to get extended," Seles said. "You never like close matches, especially on a fast court. I could have lost that first set. But it is good to come through a tough match.
"Losing the first set would have been tough, the way things were going."
In other matches, 17-year-old Aniko Kapros of Hungary beat Jana Nejedly of Canada 4-6, 6-1, 7-6 (5), and American Alexandra Stevenson beat Germany's Jana Kandarr 6-1, 7-6 (7).
Kapros, ranked 336th, won two qualifying matches just to get into the main draw, where she has now won twice, improving to 18-0 in 2001.
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Top-seeded Pete Sampras lost to Chris Woodruff 7-6 (4), 6-2 Wednesday night in his first match at the Kroger St. Jude tennis tournament.
Woodruff took control early in the second set. Sampras, who won the tournament in 1996, failed to score a point until the third game of the set. Woodruff broke again in the seventh game for a 5-2 lead and served out the match.
"He was coming up with some great returns and seeing the ball great," Sampras said. "I was kind of caught off guard."
Sampras, who entered the tournament after losing in the fourth round of the Australian Open, said he felt fine but needs to play more to sharpen his game.
"Unfortunately, the year's been a little frustrating," Sampras said.
It was Woodruff's first win in four tries over Sampras.
"I was just feeling it," Woodruff said. "You get in these ideal performance states, and that's what happened.
"This win is great. It does wonders for my confidence."
No. 4 Nicolas Lapentti also lost, falling 4-6, 6-3, 7-6 (2) to Sebastien Lareau.
Third-seeded Tommy Haas beat Andy Roddick, 6-7 (5), 6-0, 6-4. Roddick, the top junior player in the world, said inexperience hurt him after he won the first set.
"I obviously went nuts and proceeded to have a brain [lapse] for the next eight games," Roddick said. "I definitely acted like an 18-year-old today, but I guarantee you, it won't happen again."
Sixth-seeded Michael Chang defeated Vincent Spadea 6-3, 6-2.
TITLE: Beijing Making Rich Promises
AUTHOR: By John Leicester
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEIJING - Beijing promised Olympic inspectors that it would spend $20 billion if the city is awarded the 2008 Games - a construction frenzy that bid officials said would rival the building of the Great Wall, state media reported.
The spending on new subways and other facilities was announced as inspectors were in the Chinese capital to assess its bid. Beijing, eager for the prestige of holding the games, had talked about spending $12 billion in 10 years to spruce up the city.
The plan to triple the size of Beijing's expressways and build dozens of sports facilities "will be one of the largest construction projects ever in China since the construction of the Great Wall," the official Xinhua News Agency quoted the bid committee as saying Wednesday, the first day of the four-day Olympic inspection.
Reporters were not immediately able to confirm the scope of the lavish plans with the bid committee. During the bid, state media have given differing figures on Beijing's spending plans. Xinhua said the $20 billion was "to facilitate its bid."
On Thursday, bid officials and the 17-member inspection team met for a second morning in the Beijing Hotel to comb through Beijing's proposal. A film set to pulsing rock music included futuristic images of Beijing sports venues.
The bid committee briefed inspectors about hotels, transport, the planned Olympic village and environmental issues.
Despite Beijing's efforts to focus attention on its enthusiasm and preparations, human-rights issues have dogged its bid, as in 1993 when Beijing lost the 2000 Summer Games to Sydney by two votes.
The wife of a jailed pro-democracy campaigner who sent a petition to the IOC calling for her husband's release was sentenced Wednesday to two years in a labor camp, a Hong Kong-based human-rights group said Thursday.
Shan Chengfeng was detained Jan. 15, two weeks after the appeal for the IOC to pressure China to release Wu Yilong and other dissidents, the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said.
She was sent to a labor camp - a sentence they can apply without trial - on charges of "disturbing social order," the group said, citing her father and police.
Students for a Free Tibet, a New York-based group opposed to China's rule over the Himalayan region, announced a campaign against Beijing's bid. It includes plans to mail 50,000 postcards to the International Olympic Committee marked: "China: committing genocide in Tibet. Say no to Beijing 2008."
Chinese officials say they oppose any efforts to link the bid to human rights. Beijing Mayor Liu Qi told Olympic inspectors Wednesday that the city's legal system was improving day by day and that "people's lives are freer and happier."
Under Beijing's massive construction plans, the city's current 200 kilomters of expressways would grow to 650 kilometers by 2008, Xinhua said. The construction will continue even if the bid fails, it said.
The 50-kilometer subway network will expand and a light railway will be built, Xinhua said. A new Olympic park would host 28 sports during the games.
Thirteen competition venues are already built, another 11 are planned or under construction and eight more will be added if Beijing wins, Xinhua said
International Olympic Committee members, who pick the 2008 host city on July 13, are expected to rely heavily on the inspection committee's findings. Anti-graft rules imposed after scandals over influence-peddling accusations against some IOC members bar current delegates from visiting bidding cities.
TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: UN, Congo Timetable
UNITED NATIONS (AP) - The Security Council and Congo's warring sides have agreed to a new timetable for the factions to begin pulling back their troops from the vast African nation and for UN observers to move in to oversee their departure.
A resolution with the new blueprint is expected to be adopted Thursday at the conclusion of a two-day meeting between the council, ministers of the six warring countries and representatives of Congo's three main rebel groups involved in the conflict.
The resolution demands that all forces start an initial 14-kilometer pullback by March 15, and to prepare a plan for their complete withdrawal from Congo by that date.
Nukes for Pakistan Subs
KARACHI, Pakistan (AP) - In what appeared to be the first indication that Pakistan was ready to deploy nuclear weapons, its navy said Thursday that it may put nuclear missiles on its submarines.
Such a move would aggravate tension with nuclear neighbor India, which also announced its intention to deploy nuclear armed submarines.
"We are also fully prepared for the deployment of nuclear missiles by [submarine]. We are equal to [Pakistan's move]," India's defense ministry spokesperson P.K. Bandopadhyay said in New Delhi.
Labor's Rift Widens
JERUSALEM (AP) - The rift in the defeated Labor Party deepened Thursday, with the centrist wing saying it was close to joining forces with hardline Prime Minister-elect Ariel Sharon and party doves trying to block such a move.
It was not clear whether Labor - temporarily leaderless after outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Barak announced earlier this week that he is retiring from politics - was headed for a split. The party's decision-making central committee was to meet Monday to vote on a possible coalition deal.
Negotiators from Labor and Sharon's Likud Party met Thursday for another round of talks. Labor negotiator Dalia Itsik, the outgoing minister of environmental protection, said the two sides were close to agreement, provided Likud raised no new conditions and that a deal could be presented to the party for approval next week.
Foot-and-Mouth Alarm
LONDON (Reuters) - An outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in England sparked alarm across the world, prompting governments to impose immediate import bans on British livestock and animal products in an effort to halt its spread.
The European Union, the United States, Canada and South Korea led the way in announcing quick crackdowns on Wednesday after Britain disclosed that the highly infectious disease had been found in a small group of pigs at an English abattoir.
Britain effectively put itself in quarantine by banning exports of live animals and products, and farmers' leaders warned that their industry faced catastrophe if the disease wasn't stamped out quickly.
Experts say it is a disease that knows no boundaries as it can be spread through the air or transmitted through urine, milk, semen and saliva. The ban on the export of all meat from pigs, sheep and cattle, as well as on milk and live animals, threatened to ruin farmers, already reeling after years of mad cow disease and other problems.
Pope Elevates Cardinals
VATICAN CITY (AP) - St. Peter's Square was awash in scarlet and gold Thursday as Pope John Paul II bestowed the simple golden ring of a cardinal on 44 new princes of the church.
A day earlier, the pontiff had given them their red hats, symbols of their willingness to die for the Roman Catholic faith.
One-by-one, the new cardinals approached the pontiff, bowing, then sinking to their knees on a plump golden cushion at the feet of his throne.
"Receive then the ring, sign of dignity, of pastoral readiness and of the most binding communion with the Chair of Peter," he said to each in Latin, slipping the ring on the third finger of the right hand of each kneeling prince.
The College of Cardinals now counts a record 184 members, with 135 of them under 80 and thus eligible to vote for the next pope.
Great Wall Even Greater
BEIJING (AP) - The Great Wall of China just got a little greater; China says it's 496 kilometers longer than previously thought. A recently discovered section stretches to the edge of Lop Nor, a desert used as a nuclear test site until China stopped testing in 1996, the official Xinhua news agency said Thursday.
Previously, the wall's westernmost end was thought to be a remote fortress at Jiayu Pass. The rediscovered earthen wall extends from Gansu province to the neighboring northwestern region of Xinjiang, according to Xinhua. It makes the Great Wall 7,152 kilometers long instead of 6,656 kilometers, Xinhua said. Nor does it likely end there: Beacon towers extend as far as Kashgar in Xinjiang's southwest, Xinhua said.
An expert said the section was built to protect merchants traveling the ancient Silk Road.
Official Slain
DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania (AP) - Unknown assailants ambushed and hacked to death a senior ruling party official on the Zanzibar island of Pemba, police said Monday.
Rashid Omar Ali, district secretary of the Chama Cha Mapinduzi party, was attacked by machete-wielding assailants after being stopped at a makeshift roadblock while riding his motorcycle late Saturday, said regional police chief Haji Abu Kificho.
Ali died on the spot, Kificho said. Police were unsure who carried out the attack.
Colombia Battle Rages
BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) - Leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitary gunmen battled Wednesday for control of a strategic corridor in northwest Colombia, leaving 29 people dead, authorities said.
The battle between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and the rightist United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, began Tuesday and raged on a day later near Santa Rita village in Antioquia province. The combat zone, 320 kilometers northwest of Bogota, is in a strategic drugs- and arms-smuggling corridor running from the Caribbean to Colombia's major interior cities.
TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: Avs Land Blake
LOS ANGELES (AP) - The Los Angeles Kings traded Rob Blake, one of the NHL's hardest-hitting and highest-scoring defensemen, to the Colorado Avalanche on Wednesday night.
The Kings, who included center Steve Reinprecht in the deal, acquired right wing Adam Deadmarsh and defenseman Aaron Miller from the Avalanche.
Colorado also gave Los Angeles a first-round draft choice in 2001, a prospect to be determined, and other future considerations.
Blake has 17 goals, 32 assists and 69 penalty minutes this season. In 662 regular-season games during his 12 years with the Kings, he had 138 goals, 291 assists and 1,051 penalty minutes.
Deadmarsh has 13 points and 13 assists this season. He has scored at least 20 goals in four of his previous six seasons.
Miller, 29, has four goals and nine assists, with 29 penalty minutes in 56 games.
More Legal Trouble
MADISON, Wisconsin (AP) - University of Wisconsin linebacker Russell Kuhns has pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of battery and disorderly conduct in an attack on a pizza delivery driver.
Kuhns, 21, was accused of pushing and slapping the driver last Oct. 15.
After entering his guilty pleas Tuesday, he was placed in a first-offender program.
If he successfully completes that program, he can come back to court and have the charges against him dismissed.
Kuhns was arguing in the hallway of an apartment building with his girlfriend when James Rhinerson, 23, a delivery man with Topper's Pizza, arrived to deliver a pizza, according to court records.
Rhinerson asked the young woman if she was all right, and Kuhns told him to mind his own business, the records said.
Rhinerson attempted to leave the area, records say, but Kuhns followed, pushed him against a wall and slapped him in the face.
The Best Get Better
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Philadelphia 76ers apparently have met the price for Dikembe Mutombo, acquiring the veteran center from the Atlanta Hawks in a blockbuster six-player deal.
ESPN is reporting that the Sixers have acquired Mutombo and forward Roshown McLeod from the Hawks for forward Toni Kukoc, centers Theo Ratliff and Nazr Mohammed and guard Pepe Sanchez.
Neither team would confirm the report.
The Sixers own the best record in the NBA (41-14) and hopes for their first league title since 1983 would improve dramatically with the addition of Mutombo, a defensive demon who will become a free agent on July 1.
TITLE: Wahid Leaves as Decapitations Spread
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: JAKARTA, Indonesia - Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid dismissed fears of an explosion of unrest as he flew out of the crisis-racked country Thursday, but bloodshed escalated into beheadings even before he boarded his plane.
More than 75 people have been slaughtered - many decapitated or burned to death - in a revival of ethnic violence in the remote Central Kalimantan province on Borneo, officials and media said.
The unrest on Borneo, once notorious for fierce headhunters, underlined the chaos racking the world's fourth most populous country under Wahid's increasingly fragile leadership.
Amid fears his enemies could seize on his absence to fuel instability, the frail Muslim cleric appealed for calm before leaving Jakarta's Halim military airport on a two-week trip to Africa and the Middle East.
"No. There will be no problems because there is Vice-President Megawati Sukarnoputri," he told reporters.
In what have become almost routine events, several hundred protesters hit the streets of Jakarta in driving rain earlier Thursday, yelling anti-Wahid slogans and criticizing him for leaving the country. There were no clashes with police.
The palace has offered little explanation for the trip, which includes a pilgrimage to the Muslim holy city of Mecca.
Indonesia's most-traveled president faces possible impeachment after being censured by parliament on Feb. 1 over two graft scandals. Wahid must formally respond to parliament within three months of that date.
His political support bleeding away, Wahid is under increasing fire over the graft scandals, his failure to kick start the economy, soothe separatist tensions and ease communal unrest that has killed thousands.
Heavily armed police roamed Sampit, 750 km northeast of Jakarta, as charred and hacked bodies were pulled from scrub and smoldering ruins.
Jauhar Pauzni, a local regency spokesperson, said 55 bodies - all with heads - have been recovered since the latest violence, a revival of long-running tension, erupted Sunday. The official Antara news agency reported another 20 headless corpses had been found.
Wahid, 60, leaves behind a huge range of such problems, some so acute that many question his chances of surviving many more months in office after just 16 months of his five-year term.
But with thousands of his supporters rampaging through east Java in protest following his censure, Wahid has made very clear the dangers his opponents face if they push too far.
Analysts say the tortuous process of impeachment, and the fear of mass violence if it is done any other way, are probably Wahid's best political protection for the moment.
TITLE: 3 Found Guilty at U.N. Tribunal
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: THE HAGUE, Netherlands - A UN war crimes tribunal convicted the first of three Bosnian Serbs on trial on charges of rape and torture, the first case of wartime sexual enslavement to come before an international court.
The tribunal convicted Dragoljub Kunarac on several counts of sexual crimes. Two other Bosnian Serbs listened and awaited their own verdicts.
The court said Kunarac became involved in a "nightmarish scheme of sexual exploitation" that was "especially repugnant."
The second defendant, Radomir Kovac, was also found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity by rape.
The tribunal went through the testimony of woman after woman who had told horrendous accounts of rape and torture in the Bosnian town of Foca, a city southeast of Sarajevo, after it was overrun in April 1992, when Muslims were herded into separate prison camps for men and women.
Kovac was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
The third defendant, Zoran Vu ko vic, was convicted of raping and torturing a 15-year-old girl - who was about the same age as his own daughter - but acquitted of most charges for lack of evidence. He was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment.
The defendants stood in silence wearing headphones as the judgment was read in somber tones by the presiding judge. They had faced a maximum life sentence.
Sixteen women who came to The Hague to confront their former tormentors told how Bosnian Serb paramilitary soldiers entered detention centers and selected women and girls as young as 12 for nightly gang-rapes and sexual torture.
Three of those soldiers, Kovac, Kunarac and Vukovic, were in the defendant's dock since the trial began March 20 at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
They stood charged with about 50 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including rape, torture, enslavement and outrages upon personal dignity. The crimes carry maximum life sentences.
The Security Council established the tribunal in 1993 to go after the alleged architects of the Bosnian war's bloody "ethnic cleansing" campaigns, including the former Bosnian Serb president, Radovan Karadzic, and his military chief, Ratko Mladic, who remain at large.
Human rights groups have estimated that tens of thousands of people, mainly Muslim woman and girls, were raped in the war.
Some witnesses sobbed, others shrieked with rage, as they recalled being assaulted by up to 10 soldiers at a time in classrooms of the high school where they were detained, or in soldiers' private apartments - so-called "rape camps."
The women attested to the long-lasting gynecological damage, in many cases causing permanent infertility.
"I remember he was very forceful. He wanted to hurt me," one witness said, referring to Kunarac. "But he could never hurt me as much as my soul was hurting me."
"I think that for the whole of my life, all my life, I will feel the pain that I felt then," said another woman, who was 15 at the time.
Although the women's identities were disguised from the public by electronic voice and image scrambling, they testified in full view of the defendants.
Women's rights groups contrast the UN tribunal's progressiveness on sex crimes to other omissions, in particular Japan's reluctance to fully recognize the suffering of women who were forced to serve as prostitutes for Japanese soldiers in World War II.
TITLE: Champions League Playoff Picture Shaping Up
AUTHOR: By Mike Collett
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON - European champion Real Madrid and Leeds United of the English Premier League became the first clubs to qualify for the quarterfinals of the Champions League on Wednesday.
Leeds' impressive 4-1 win over Anderlecht in Brussels and Real's 2-2 draw with Lazio in Rome means that neither team can finish outside the top two positions in Group D.
Leeds' win put it into the last eight of Europe's premier competition for the first time since it was beaten in the 1975 final by Bayern Munich.
In doing so it also ended Anderlecht's 20-match winning streak at home.
Bayern Munich was left on the verge of qualifying thanks to its 3-0 win at Spartak Moscow which consolidated its first place in Group C.
Bayern dominated the match in Moscow where the temperature hit minus 20 Celsius, and won easily with goals from Mehmet Scholl (17 and 75) and Paulo Sergio (67).
Arsenal's 1-1 draw in the same group with Olympique Lyon at Highbury left the chase for second spot wide open.
Arsenal, which led with a 33rd-minute Dennis Bergkamp goal until 50 seconds from the end of normal time when Denilson scored with a powerful header, has five points, Lyon has four and Spartak three.
The positions in Groups A and B, played on Tuesday, are less clear-cut with Manchester United (eight points), Valencia (six) and Sturm Graz (six) all still in contention in Group A.
Panathinaikos, with just one point from its first four matches, has been eliminated and its coach Angelos Anastasiadis resigned on Wednesday following 2-1 home defeat at the hands of Sturm Graz in Athens on Tuesday.
All four teams in Group B - Ga la ta sa ray (seven), AC Milan (six), Deportivo Coruna (six) and Paris St. Germain (two) - are still in with a chance of making the last eight from their section.
The outstanding result of the night came in Brussels where David O'Leary's young Leeds team, which has stuttered all season in the Premier League, reached the heights against Anderlecht.
Goals from Alan Smith (12 and 37) and Mark Viduka (33) wrapped the game up and although Jan Koller got one back for Anderlecht with a header 15 minutes from time, Leeds still had the last word when Ian Harte scored with an 80th-minute penalty.
Real Madrid also ensured its place in the last eight with its draw at Lazio whose dreams of lifting the European Cup for the first time must wait at least another year after being eliminated.
After three straight defeats Lazio had to beat Real to keep alive its faint hopes of surviving this stage, but although it twice led through Pavel Nedved (4) and Hernan Crespo (53), Real Madrid replied twice through Santiago Solari (32) and a rare header from Raul (73).
Oddly, Real has not won a competitive European match in Italy since 1962, but it went home happy, with the principal task of the evening accomplished.