SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #650 (17), Tuesday, March 6, 2001
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TITLE: Duma Report: Adamov Corrupt
AUTHOR: By Andrei Zolotov Jr.
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The Nuclear Power Ministry on Monday denied corruption allegations leveled against the head of the agency, Yevgeny Adamov, by the State Duma's anti-corruption commission.
 The report - a copy of which was obtained by The St. Petersburg Times on Monday from the Duma, where it was distributed among deputies Friday - said that Adamov illegally continued to engage in business activities after becoming minister in March 1998, and used his post to appoint business associates to key positions.
 "Let the Prosecutor General's Office and the Audit Chamber sort it out," Nuclear Power Ministry spokesman Yury Bespalko said Monday in response to the report, which recommended that law enforcement agencies open a formal investigation into the charges against Adamov. 
 "They have been here many times and did not find anything wrong. ... As soon as Adamov was appointed minister, he immediately put all his securities in trust, and has not been involved in business any more. He is not an idiot and he knows that a state official is not allowed to engage in business activities," Bespalko said in a telephone interview.
 The 20-odd page report, which was commissioned by the Duma, offers detailed proof of allegations printed earlier by the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, many of which Adamov has denied.
 The report cited a speech made by Adamov to the Duma in which he said he had not engaged in business since his appointment as minister in March 1998.
 "There have been no deposits to my personal [bank] account since I've been minister," the report quoted him as saying.
 But the entire report is devoted to debunking Adamov's statement.
 According to the report, Adamov, who from 1986 to 1999 headed NIKIET, a secret energy technologies institute that was the key developer of Chernobyl-type nuclear reactors, violated many security regulations and created "various commercial organizations in Moscow and abroad and continues to be actively involved in entrepreneurial activities."
 The anti-corruption commission does not have the right to prosecute, but its report concluded that the Prosecutor General's Office and the FSB should launch a formal probe into Adamov's activities. Copies of the report were to be sent to President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov.
 It is not clear from the document whether the companies founded by Ada mov were directly involved in the nuclear sector. But, according to the report, the companies' Russian offices were set up at security-sensitive nuclear research facilities, and Adamov's NIKIET institute became home to several companies, some of which list Adamov's wife Olga Pin chuk as a co-founder.
 The report also said that until 1998 Adamov served as president of a U.S.-based consulting, management and investment company he founded in 1994 called Omeka, Ltd. and registered in Monroeville, Pennsylvania. His wife became the company's representative in Russia and Omeka's local office was registered at Adamov's home address, the report said. In 1998, around the time he was appointed nuclear minister, Ada mov resigned as president of Omeka in favor of his U.S. partner Mark Kaushansky.
 However, according to the report, at the end of 1999, the company's $5 million in assets were controlled by Adamov ($3.15 million), his wife ($1.5 million) and Kaushansky ($410,000).
 The report, which says Adamov has admitted having a U.S. social security card, went on to say that when Adamov applied for a Diner's Club card in 1996, he stated his total annual income at over $120,000.
 It also said Omeka provided Ada mov's NIKIET with $34,000 worth of flooring supplies and continues to provide the institute with computer equipment to the tune of $50,000 a year.
 According to the report, Omeka owns stock in a "housing services" company in Pennsylvania and a medical services center in Michigan, along with investments in Russia and Ukraine.
 The report says the company bought a $200,000 house for Adamov in Pittsburgh. The date of the transaction was not clear from the report. 
 But it said that both Omeka and Adamov's other U.S.-based company, Energy Pool Inc., transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars for Adamov and other Nuclear Ministry officials through the Logic Realty real estate company registered at the address of his NIKIET institute. The report identified Ada mov's wife as an Energy Pool shareholder. 
 In 1996, when Adamov headed NIKIET, it signed a contract with Iran's nuclear agency to conduct an expert assessment of plans for a nuclear facility in Iran. The contract, the report said, violated regulations governing such contacts and, in December 2000, the Prosecutor General's Office opened an investigation into the "illegal export" of technologies related to weapons of mass destruction and military equipment.
 "The fact that Adamov engaged in commercial activity while he was director of NIKIET and nuclear power minister has been fully proven," the report said.
 It also listed a number of cases when Adamov appointed people with no experience in the nuclear industry to key positions in the ministry and state companies controlled by the ministry. Some of these officials were also listed as shareholders of private companies formed by Adamov before he became minister.
 As minister, Adamov initially saw to it that the ministry's international deals - reported to total about $2 billion in exports annually - were channeled through the ministry-affiliated bank Konversbank. Then, according to the report, he ordered bank officials to sell the bank's controlling stake to MDM-Bank, an institution associated with Kremlin insiders Alexander Mamut and Roman Abramovich. Thereby, the report said, MDM got control over some highly lucrative deals.
 Yury Shchekochikhin, a Duma deputy who is on the anti-corruption commission and a reporter with the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, said Monday that the commission's investigation had nothing to do with political maneuvers targeting the Nuclear Power Ministry. 
 "It was a Novaya Gazeta project," Shchekochikhin said. "Deputies requested an investigation after they read a Novaya Gazeta article, and it is not connected with any political struggle."
 Shchekochikhin said the investigation had been on the agenda of the previous Duma's anti-corruption commission, of which he was also a member. Last year, the probe got the backing of Nikolai Kovalyov, the Fatherland faction deputy and former head of the Federal Security Service, who now heads the commission.
 The Nuclear Power Ministry's Bespalko denied speculation by Greenpeace that the commission's report led to the postponement of the Duma's second reading of a controversial bill allowing the import of spent nuclear fuel to Russia. He said the vote has been rescheduled for late March and the ministry remained confident that the Duma will pass the bill. Bespalko said, however, that the anti-corruption commission's report may complicate the bill's passage.
 
 Staff Writer Ana Uzelac contributed to this report.

TITLE: 'City's Biggest' Crime Gang Trial Resumes
AUTHOR: By Masha Kaminskaya
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: In what is being labeled the first big case on organized crime in St. Petersburg to have reached the courtroom, the City Criminal Court has resumed the trial of the so-called Akulovskaya gang, which allegedly operated in the city between 1992 and 1997.
 Charges of organizing a crime gang, reportedly led by 40-year-old Alexander Anisimov, also known as Akula, or the Shark, that have been brought against him and 17 others concern eight counts of extortion, kidnapping and armed robbery that have been brought collectively, as well as several individual charges.
 "It is too soon to say when and how the process will end," said Judge Yelena Volkova last Thursday, a day after the trial, which began last summer, was resumed.
 The trial was interrupted soon after commencing when two of the defendants pleaded mental instability, and a court-ordered psychiatric examination was scheduled. The two defendants are being kept in a hospital ward for the mentally ill. 
 Eight defendants, including Anisimov, are in custody, while eight more were released during the course of the investigation into the charges on a guarantee that they would not leave the city.
 The accused were arrested in mid-1997 by the St. Petersburg Anti-Organized Crime Division, or RUBOP, after a three-year investigation. According to RUBOP spokesperson Natalya Kalinina, during searches of the apartments of the accused detectives found several pistols and shotguns, an Agram-2000 long-barreled submachine gun, electric stun batons, gun silencers, cartridges and $100,000 of "illegally obtained property." 
 However, no charges of illegal possession of weapons have been brought. Indeed, Judge Volkova said that most of the original 56 charge counts were not being considered by the court. She did not explain why.
 According to Kalinina, Anisimov - a native of the town of Priozersk in the Leningrad Oblast, with previous convictions including disorderly conduct and grievous bodily harm - has already been in remand for a year awaiting trial.
 Anisimov himself took the stand on Wednesday. While admitting to having a criminal past and going under the nickname of the Shark, he denied any criminal activity since last being released from jail in 1991, and said he was innocent of the current charges.
 Thursday's and Monday's hearings concentrated on other defendants.
 Acccording to City Prosecutor's Office spokesperson Gennady Ryabov, the Akulovskaya group allegedly operated as the protection for several city firms, and "collected tribute" from city markets and companies in the Leningrad Oblast.
 Citing anonymous sources, Interfax news agency said that "before this trial, similar cases have almost always fallen to pieces even during investigations, and mafia bosses went free."
 "I agree this is the first and biggest trial of organized crime [in St. Petersburg]," said Andrei Gankevich, one of the 17 lawyers working for one of the defendants. "But it's also a difficult one. All defendants except one refuse to testify."
 Judge Volkova said that the vague definition of what constitutes organizing and running a criminal group in Russia's Criminal Code meant that convictions were hard to obtain.
 "It is too soon to say if the case is airtight, for the charge - organizing a criminal group - is one of the most difficult to prove ... even if it is clear to us."

TITLE: 80-Year Bandit Headhunt Ends
AUTHOR: By Molly Graves
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: In the days before television, a face that everyone could imagine but no one could describe held St. Petersburg in the grip of terror. 
 Now, nearly 80 years after the head went missing, it still looks a fright - floating in a dim jar of murky greenish formaldehyde. 
 The head is all that remains of Leonid Pantelkin, also known as Lyonka Panteleyev and by his mob nickname "Lyonka the Lucky," who was one of the most feared gangsters in 1920's Petrograd, as St. Petersburg was then called. Before he was killed in a police ambush, Panteleyev was charged with 11 murders - though historical legend says he could have been responsible for as many as 89 deaths. 
 He is harmless now, but his visage, visible through the dust and liquid, was, in 1923, the stuff of Al Capone-style myth. 
 According to recent local media reports, the jar containing Panteleyev's head was rediscovered last week in the storage shelves of the Criminology and Criminal Proceedings Department, a division of the law faculty at St. Petersburg State University. 
 However, Vadim Petrov, senior professor of forensic medicine and criminology at the university, claims the head was never lost. It was just sitting in a cabinet like many of the other forensic anatomical specimens lining macabre shelves, some of which were assembled during a time when scientists thought they could predict criminal behavior by studying the physical traits of deceased convicts. 
 Meanwhile, two historians from the St. Petersburg Military History Museum, Tatyana Konstantinova and museum director Igor Mikhailov, claim the discovery of the lucky Panteleyev head as theirs. As they describe it, Petrov was totally unaware of the head's presence in his collection until a museum inquiry revealed the gory find. 
 The discovery of the whereabouts of Panteleyev's head set off a minor media firestorm as reporters probed the notorious criminal's past. However, sorting fact from fiction is a difficult task where Panteleyev is concerned, Konstantinova explained. 
 Panteleyev's rap sheet stretches back to 1922, when newspapers like Krasnaya Gazeta reported on his first forays into the criminal underworld, said Konstantinova. 
 "Eventually a legendary story and personality was created that had nothing to do with [Panteleyev's] real-life character," Konstantinova said. 
 "For instance, he was charged with 11 murders that were proven, but some say he may be responsible for up to 78 more. No one knows the real truth," Kon stantinova said. 
 What is known, said Konstantinova, is that Panteleyev worked briefly in a printing house in a small provincial town before joining the army. Upon his return home, he joined the Cheka - forerunner to the KGB - and it was there, says Konstantinov, that his taste for crime began. 
 With his Cheka documentation, he entered homes on the pretext of a search - and left laden with valuables. His misdeeds were eventually discovered by his regional bosses, and he was dismissed. 
 Panteleyev then set out for Petrograd with his Cheka identification, where he continued his cycle of thefts from rich city residents. 
 "This initially earned him the reputation as a sort of local Robin Hood, who stole from the rich but didn't bother the poor," said Konstantinova. 
 Before long, his thefts began to include murder, and the heroic image changed to terror, said Leonid Kesselman, political analyst at the Russian Academy of Sciences, in an interview Thursday. 
 In the absence of a developed media, gossip filled the holes in "Lyonka the Lucky's" dark peregrinations. Even crimes Panteleyev did not commit were ascribed to him in the popular imagination. 
 Panteleyev was eventually shot and killed on Feb. 13, 1923, by an 18-year-old police rookie during a stake-out set up as part of a city-wide sweep of 20 criminal gangs, according to Krasnaya Gazeta. Neither his age nor town of origin were apparently known. All that mattered to the frightened city was that the murderer was dead. 
 But doubting local citizens wanted proof of his death. His body was laid in state at the Alexandrovskaya Hospital, where crowds flocked to view the corpse. 
 Shortly after Panteleyev was removed to the city morgue, his head was removed for scientific purposes, said Konstantinova. This gave birth to its own rumor mill, and many papers reported that Panteleyev's head had been thrown into the Neva river, said Kesselman, while still others said that it was lashed to a post over Nevsky as proof of his death.
 The head-spinning story remained dormant until the tabloid Petersburg Ekspress began an investigation into the head's whereabouts some five years ago. The periodical's investigation piqued the interest of the Military Museum, which began its own headhunt. 
 As it turned out, the head had been turned over by the morgue in 1923 to a group of crime experts for study, including Vadim Petrov - the law faculty criminologist's father.
 After years of rough handling, the head is a bit the worse for wear. 
 "Once [somebody] knocked the jar [containing Panteleyev's head] off the shelf, and it fell and broke," said Konstantinova. "The head rolled around on the floor - right over to a woman's feet and scared the daylights out of her!" 
 What will happen to the famous head now that it has been discovered is anyone's guess. 
 "It has been sitting there at the university and there it will remain for another 100 years," said Konstantinova.
 For his part, Pavlov - carrying on his father's tradition - seems content to keep the mysteries alive. 
 "We have several more interesting items in need of preparation and analysis," said Petrov. And as for the head, he added, "I won't speak of the future - that I cannot predict."

TITLE: City Schools Offering Variety on a Budget
AUTHOR: By Masha Kaminskaya and Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Editor's note: This is the second in an occasional series on education in St. Petersburg.
 During the demonstrations organized by teachers, professors and students last week, out on the streets to protest against government plans they say would mean paid university education, there was a familiar complaint being voiced almost as an afterthought: teachers' salaries.
 But for Russia's state-run schools, which face an acute and daily struggle for funds, just because the problem is an old one doesn't mean that it's any less serious.
 "We are constantly papering over the cracks," says Alexander Lysenkov, director of school No. 320 in the city's Central district.
 "We get by in almost all areas, but we can't do anything about teachers' salaries. If [salaries] remain this small, in five years we may already find we have no teachers at all."
 In January, teachers were given a 20 percent raise by the federal government, while the city administration has also in the past increased salaries significantly.
 If one examines how that translates into real money, a teacher's average monthly paycheck amounts to between 1,200 and 1,700 rubles ($42 to $60 at current exchange rates) - a fair distance from the supposed parity with the average wage - as set out by law - of 5,000 rubles for workers in the industrial sector, and on a par with St. Petersburg's minimum subsistence level of 1,500 rubles, as stipulated by the City Employment Committee's figure for January.
 
 SHOWING INITIATIVE
 </strong>&quot;It is true that there is little money in the country,&quot; says Tamara Alexandrova, head of the Central District's education committee. &quot;But our district is very lucky - the Legislative Assembly deputies and various municipal bodies understand that education is a priority, and they do a lot to help.&quot;
 Schools, like hospitals, are the most obvious recipients of cash from Legislative Assembly deputies' personal funds. City lawmakers are given around $900,000 a year to dispense as they see fit, and while the system has come in for criticism as open to abuse, schools often benefit from these discretionary funds, as Lysenkov acknowledges.
 In addition, many local schools have taken to earning their own money wherever possible - holding extra classes, renting out school premises, and asking parents and businesses for their support. As Alexandrova put it, today's school director must be an administrator, lawyer and economist in one.
 Such activities need not be sophisticated. Yelena Talapova, a Russian language and literature teacher, says that twice a year, school No. 371 gets children to collect paper for recycling. &quot;We earn about 3,000 rubles ($103) each time by doing this,&quot; Talapova said. &quot;If you manage this money well, it can go toward renovations or new purchases.&quot;
 School No. 320 offers extra chemistry and biology lessons for students who wish to prepare themselves for medical degrees, with eight hours of each subject costing 250 rubles ($8.60) a month. Some schools also suggest to parents that they pay extra to have security guards present on campus, or that they cough up a few rubles to pay for cleaning staff.
 Theoretically, textbooks are still free at most schools, but many suffer from chronic shortages, and those books they have wore out long ago.
 Nina Limonova, whose daughter is in the eighth grade, said: &quot;There are never enough textbooks for everyone, because the library at my daughter's school is so poor,&quot; she says. &quot;We buy the necessary books ourselves, but at the end of the [academic] year, the librarian still asks me if the school can keep them.&quot;
 Enterprise on the part of school directors, however, has its drawbacks.
 &quot;Independence in managing finances means responsibility, too,&quot; says Natalya Yevdokimova, head of the Legislative Assembly's social committee. &quot;Some directors are [opposed to or afraid of] being made responsible for every financial decision, every investment they make.&quot;
 But, Yevdokimova added, federal legislation makes it impossible for schools to have complete independence when it comes to allocating money they earned themselves. The law states that schools must obtain permission from the state before spending any money, including what they earned themselves.
 &quot;Everything in a state school - from the building to a piece of chalk to the money they can potentially earn - belongs to the state,&quot; said Yevdokimova. &quot;State schools don't even have their own bank accounts, and have to deal with sub-accounts held at district education committees.&quot;
 &quot;There are some creative and enthusiastic school teachers, but a lot more directors come to me and say: 'Life is hard enough, why do we need the extra headache [of raising cash]?' Yes, this is a passive [attitude], but you can't blame them - having done a good job, they aren't free to spend the money.&quot;
 
 GOING PRIVATE
 Parents who have enough money can choose to send their children to private schools, but not everyone agrees that this is a better option.
 &quot;There is no doubt [that we provide a better education than a public school],&quot; says Irina Olendzskaya, director of the Diplomat private school. &quot;The difference is not in the additional courses we offer, but [in the general approach] to the same subjects.&quot;
 According to Olendzskaya, there are only eight to 10 students in a class at Diplomat, as opposed to 30 or more in a state school. The school also has plans to admit around 10 students a year free of charge on a competitive basis.
 Olendzskaya would not reveal any details of her school's financial situation, but said that Diplomat, which has been running for eight years, charges between $250 to $300 a month per student. She added that Diplomat decided not to accept state support, although it is entitled to this because it has received the necessary accreditation to issue secondary-education certificates. 
 Irina Prokopchuk, whose son is in the sixth grade, said that his private education meant &quot;fewer people in class, less stress and more attention to every individual student.&quot;
 However, she added that she did not consider the standard of teaching to be necessarily higher because, she said, some teachers who work for private schools are moonlighting to supplement their state incomes. 
 &quot;In any school, there are some subjects that are taught poorly. Parents should determine their priorities, and go for them. But to think that everything is ideal in a private school would be very wrong,&quot; she said. &quot;An expensive school does not guarantee a better education.&quot;
 
 AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE
 Ironically, as state schools fight to stay above water, educational options have never been more varied, according to the Central district's Alexandrova.
 &quot;Diversity is probably the most noticeable trait of the contemporary school,&quot; Alexandrova says, adding that a child in the Central District has 70 state schools and 14 private schools to choose from. Disabled children can go to one of four specialist schools. Apart from the standard curriculum, there are extra subjects on offer, some of which are even financed by the city administration, which pays the teaching staff. Sixty percent of the district's schools have foreign languages, history of art and other lessons as extras.
 But as the nationwide protests showed, while the spirit is willing, the salaries are weak. According to Lysenkov, around 30 percent of St. Petersburg's teachers are near or at retirement age, while the next generation is reluctant to work in state schools when private education has more money.
 If the trend continues, Lysenkov's &quot;no more teachers&quot; warning may come true.

TITLE: Gorbachev Celebrates Birthday
AUTHOR: By Ron Popeski
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russian and foreign dignitaries paid tribute on Friday to former the Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, marking his 70th birthday with flair in a country where most people still dismiss the legacy of his reforms.
 Current Russian President Vla dimir Putin and even his predecessor Boris Yeltsin - Gorbachev's bitter rival even after the 1991 collapse of communism - led the congratulations for the man whose perestroika reforms overturned Soviet society.
 Gorbachev journeyed in the morning to the Novodevichy Ce metery, burial site for many illustrious Russians, to visit the grave of his wife Raisa, whose 1999 death weighed heavily on him. 
 Interviewed at length on television and in newspapers, Gorbachev acknowledged that the changes undertaken when he came to power in 1985 had transformed a hidebound society.
 &quot;I think the main achievement was bringing the country out of a totalitarian state to freedom and democracy, recognition of different forms of ownership, that people could choose and run their own affairs,&quot; he told ORT television. &quot;That there was no longer one road to be taken, but several options.&quot;
 He also repeated praise for Putin's first year in office. &quot;Even with errors and shortcomings, he has done quite a bit,&quot; he told ORT. 
 Putin, on a visit to Vietnam, said Gorbachev was linked to an &quot;era in which transformations were launched which altered the political map of the world.&quot; 
 Yeltsin wished Gorbachev health and success. He said Gorbachev had enabled Russia to &quot;rid itself of total control, learn the truth about its history and both reason and choose.&quot;
 A long list of Western statesman in and out of office praised Gor bachev's actions in ending the Cold War and facing down hardliners to end the Communist monopoly on power. 
 Admiration in the West during the glasnost years was offset by indignation among Russians who ridiculed his attempts to tackle alcoholism, and blamed him for mass poverty as Yeltsin's reforms got under way.
 &quot;The difficulty can be summed up in a single question,&quot; wrote Vitaly Tretyakov, editor of Ne za vi si maya Gazeta. &quot;Why, Mik hail Ser geye vich, were you unable to defeat Yeltsin, on the one hand, and the coup plotters on the other?&quot;

TITLE: Firm Hopes To Profit From Nuclear Metals
AUTHOR: By Charles Digges
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Environmentalists and officials are protesting over a factory that will rework radioactive metals - currently in waste storage at the Leningrad Atomic Energy Station, or LAES - for eventual use in all manner of consumer products, from refrigerators to utensils.
 The firm, called EKOMET-S - located in the militarily closed city of Sosnovy Bor, 60 kilometers to St. Petersburg's west - says that by smelting many of the radioactive metals stored in LAES' overflowing waste-storage facilities, it can lower radioactivity in the waste so it is safe for commercial use. 
 If and when the factory gets the expected go-ahead, observers fear that metal formerly residing in nuclear reactors could turn up in products as disparate as cell phones and spoons. 
 Local environmentalists accuse EKOMET-S of flaunting environmental safety laws by delaying the presentation of environmental impact reports.
 By law, these plans should have been submitted to an expert committee selected by officials from Gosatomnadzor, or GAN, Russia's nuclear regulatory body, when the blueprints for the factory were still on the drawing board back in 1994. 
 But the plans did not reach the committee until December 2000, well after the factory had been built, according to Natalya Malevannaya of the Sosnovy Bor administration's department of environmental safety.
 She expects the plant to receive its license from GAN by the end of the month. 
 But because the factory is dragging its feet filing safety reports environmentalists say the safety of EKOMET-S' proposed product is highly suspect. 
 &quot;The company has followed none of the norms governing the building of a nuclear installation,&quot; Sergei Kharitonov, an activist with Greenworld Sosnovy Bor and a former waste engineer at LAES, said in an interview. 
 &quot;It has been subject to no regulation at all.&quot; 
 Because of this, it is nearly certain that much of the metal produced by EKOMET-S for general consumption will contain dangerously high traces of radioactivity, Kharitonov said.
 Malevannaya agreed. &quot;Re-smelting highly radioactive metals for commercial consumption could turn out to be extremely dangerous to thousands of people,&quot; she said in a telephone interview Monday. 
 According to its Web site, EKOMET-S plans to smelt 5,000 tons of radioactive metal a year. The supposedly radioactively inert metals will then be sold in Russia and abroad. 
 If the pilot program at LAES is successful, the company plans to build more facilities throughout Russia with the aim of producing as much as 150,000 tons of cleansed metal a year.
 Exactly who owns EKOMET-S is a mystery. None of those interviewed for this article knew, and company representatives refused comment.
 Malevannaya said that EKOMET-S has been operating on a small and unofficial basis - cleansing valuable metals such as platinum, silver and gold from discarded reactor control consoles - since 1992.
 But whether the steel, aluminum and other metals removed from the actual reactors during renovation will be safe for use in consumer products is unclear.
 In 1996, the &quot;unofficial&quot; EKOMET-S had to stop operations for several days because of an alpha decay during smelting - an accident that carries a high risk of causing cancer in those exposed.
 It is also unknown if items produced by EKOMET-S will carry any information as to their origin.
 Oleg Bodrov of Greenworld also said there was no indication from EKOMET-S or GAN as to how many becquerels -a measure of radioactive decay - would be considered safe in metals produced. Acceptable levels are generally considered be in the low hundreds. 
 Neither the firm nor GAN's St. Petersburg offices, which are handling the licensing procedure, have commented. EKOMET-S spokesperson Vladimir Buntushkin has refused comment until a press conference for hand-picked media scheduled for Tuesday.
 Gosatomnadzor officials have also refused repeated requests for comment, and some observers - including Malevannaya and Kharitonov - have suggested that the regulatory body may be cajoled into licensing EKOMET-S by the Nuclear Power Ministry, or Minatom.
 Last month, the ministry put a bill before the Duma that would hand over all of GAN's licensing and safety-control authority to Minatom, which would make a number of Nuclear Minister Yevgeny Adamov's pet projects - like the import of nuclear waste from other countries - considerably easier.
 Ironically, the smelting of radioactively contaminated metals has been in successful use in Britain for over a decade, where more that &quot;thousands of tons&quot; of cleaned-up radioactive metals are annually sold on the open market, said David Cartwright, a decommissioning expert with British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. in London. 
 But Cartwright cautioned that strict controls are in place and only certain metals can be rehabilitated to safe levels. Others must be buried. 
 &quot;Our metals literally have to be less radioactive than a Brazil nut,&quot; said Cartwright. &quot;Metals from the reactor core - things that have been bombarded by neutrons - are unsuitable.&quot;

TITLE: Lawmakers' Funds Are Frozen by City Hall
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalyev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: In a surprise audit by City Hall, Legislative Assembly lawmakers saw their reserve funds frozen on the order of Gov. Vla dimir Yakovlev, who ordered city district authorities to stop doling out the cash effective February 20. 
 Since the decision was taken at a closed City Hall meeting, most of the lawmakers didn't find out about the spending freeze until voters from their district called to complain. 
 City Hall tried to smooth ruffled feathers by saying the block on the reserve funds was &quot;temporary.&quot; 
 &quot;There is budget money involved and City Hall, as the executive power structure, has the right to check how it is being spent,&quot; said Svetlana Ivanova, a spokesperson for the governor, in a telephone interview on Wednesday.
 The most recent flap over the reserve fund - which is a discretionary fund allocated to each deputy for extra-budgetary projects in his or her district - began in November, when City Hall announced it was cutting back on the deputies' funds. 
 Lawmakers, however, managed to secure 22 million rubles (about $766,000) before the budget's final reading. 
 The freeze incensed lawmakers like Sergei Nikeshin, head of the Legislative Assembly budget committee, who blamed Duma Deputy and Yakovlev ally Oksana Dmitriyeva as being the devil in City Hall's ear. 
 &quot;[The freeze] was done according to her suggestion, because she works as Yakovlev's adviser,&quot; said Nikeshin in an interview Wednesday.
 Dmitriyeva Thursday denied working as a Yakovlev adviser, but said that her position on the Duma Committee to form budget processes means she is responsible for observing budget practices. 
 She added that &quot;many of the violations of budget law were made by lawmakers when they distributed their money.&quot;
 Since its inception in 1996 by ex-mayor Anatoly Sobchak, the reserve fund has been a bargaining chip between the legislators and City Hall. Sobchak conceived of the idea to sway legislators to change the date of the governors' election - the title that replaced mayor - to an earlier date, which Sobchak thought would be to his advantage. 
 Lawmakers bought the idea, moved the election date back and received $1 million a piece for projects in their districts as a budgetary gift for backing the mayor. Sobchak lost, but Yakovlev, following his predecessor's example, has used the reserve fund to leverage, among other things, election dates. 
 But the fund has also become a source of suspicious dealings and many lawmakers have been caught spending their city cash on projects involving their close friends rather than their districts.
 Whatever bite is being taken out of the reserve fund cannot match the plight of 63-year-old Nina Sansayeva, who was the beneficiary of a dental program that lawmaker Oleg Sergeyev was running in district No. 50. With his account frozen, however, he cannot pay the dentists. 
 Sansayeva, who was due to receive a set of three false teeth from Sergeyev's reserve fund in March, will now have to wait indefinitely. And she's not the only one. 
 &quot;There are about 40 people in my district left without teeth,&quot; said Sergeyev in an interview on Wednesday.
 But Sansayeva was more upbeat. 
 &quot;I almost don't have any teeth at all, so there is no big difference really,&quot; she said in a telephone interview Thursday.

TITLE: Unity Offers Support for No-Confidence Vote
AUTHOR: By Darya Korsunskaya
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW - The top pro-Kremlin party gave its backing on Monday to a no-confidence vote in the government appointed by President Vla dimir Putin.
 But it said its aim was to force early elections and win more seats in the State Duma for the Kremlin.
 The manoeuvre by the Unity Party, seemingly going against Putin's government, followed months of speculation over Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov's cabinet, with many media predicting Putin would soon reshuffle the cabinet.
 The Communist Party, the largest faction in the Duma despite losing ground in the last election in 1999, had already called for a no-confidence vote, accusing the government of pushing the country to &quot;mass famine.&quot;
 But the support of Unity, the second-largest party, added to the intrigue.
 &quot;We believe that if there is a vote of no-confidence in the government, the president will not dismiss the government but will dissolve the Duma and call early elections,&quot; said Unity's Duma faction leader, Frants Klintsevich.
 &quot;I want to say straight away that we are not allying ourselves with the Communists. We do not believe that the government is bad. We are going for a dissolution of the Duma,&quot; he told a news conference.
 &quot;We believe the government is working well, but the State Duma is working badly. Destructive processes have taken place recently in the Duma,&quot; he said.
 Klintsevich reiterated party statements that Unity would adopt a final position on Tuesday.
 He predicted Unity would make big gains in any early election given Putin's overwhelming popularity. Recent opinion surveys put the president's rating at between 60 and 70 percent. 
 Communist Party leader Gennady Zyu ganov told Interfax news agency, &quot;We are not afraid of early elections. We have plenty of experience, a strong team of like-minded people and a clear program to take the country out of crisis.&quot;
 To pass, a no-confidence motion requires a minimum of 226 votes in the 450-seat Duma. Putin, who has stood behind Kasyanov, can ignore the initial vote. But if the Duma approves the measure again by a similar majority, he is obliged either to sack the government or call elections. Unity, along with the Communists and their allies, has enough seats to secure the necessary votes. The Kremlin has said it would call an early election rather than sack the government.
 The decision-making Duma Council is to rule on Tuesday when parliament will consider the no-confidence motion.
 A good performance in the 1999 election by Unity, a pro-Kremlin party cobbled together just two months before the vote, was attributed to the backing of Putin, then prime minister and leading a popular war in breakaway Chechnya.
 Putin went on to win the March 2000 presidential election, emboldened by Unity's good showing a few months previously.
 The Duma has generally approved Putin's legislative initiatives since he came to power. The Communists had also fallen in behind his initiatives before proposing the no-confidence motion two weeks ago.
 Other parties appeared unhappy at the idea of new elections.
 Gennady Raikov of the People's Deputy group, loosely aligned to the Kremlin, suggested the move was &quot;an attempt to blow up the situation.&quot; Irina Khakamada of the liberal Union of Right-Wing Forces, said ousting the government would give Putin &quot;a free hand.&quot;

TITLE: Newfound Status Fortifies Salvation Army
AUTHOR: By Andrei Zolotov Jr.
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The Russian branch of the Salvation Army has been granted the status of a &quot;centralized&quot; nationwide religious group.
 The church hopes this will improve its chances for resolving its legal problems in Moscow, where a local court refused to reregister the group last year on the grounds that it poses a &quot;national security threat.&quot; 
 Captain Adam Morales, who is responsible for financial and legal affairs of the church's operations in Russia and other former Soviet republics, said Friday that on Feb. 20 the Salvation Army was registered as a &quot;centralized&quot; religious organization by the federal Justice Ministry.
 &quot;It means that we are not in a critical situation any more,&quot; Morales said in a telephone interview. 
 &quot;But the Moscow court decision is still outstanding and in force. If we don't overturn it, it will be a black stain on our reputation and can cause us problems in the future.&quot;
 A 1997 law, which was criticized by many religious freedom advocates in Russia and abroad, stipulated that religious organizations operating in Russia had to reregister by Dec. 31, 2000. All groups that failed to meet the deadline may face &quot;liquidation&quot; proceedings later this year, which would mean they would lose their status as legal entities and, consequently, their right to own or rent property, carry out services in public places, distribute literature and invite pastors from abroad.
 Under the law, churches registered as &quot;centralized&quot; can provide their regional branches with special certificates, which can facilitate the process of registering locally. 
 Branches with such certificates do not have to prove that they have been operating in the area for at least 15 years, as required by the 1997 law. 
 Late last year, Moscow's municipal justice department refused to reregister the Salvation Army's Moscow branch. 
 When the church took the case to court, it lost on grounds that it was a &quot;militarized&quot; organization and, as such, poses a &quot;threat&quot; to Russia's security. The Salvation Army appealed the ruling, but with less than a month left before the Dec. 31 deadline, it did not have time to complete its legal battle with Moscow city authorities.
 The court decision, as well as the reaction it triggered from Western organizations, became an embarrassment for government agencies dealing with religious organizations, and they had promised to expedite federal registration.
 Meanwhile, Morales said, the group's undetermined legal status in Moscow has led to difficulties with its operations in the city. Two of the church's landlords have terminated lease agreements, and a city social welfare office has pulled out of a joint program for delivering food to lonely senior citizens.
 &quot;It was hard to find new office space,&quot; he said. &quot;People turned us down saying we were not registered and should go away.&quot;
 The Salvation Army, a Protestant denomination founded in London in 1865, is established in more than 80 countries and preaches the gospel in 112 languages. The movement is organized on a military pattern and includes the basic principles common to most Protestant evangelical denominations. Services are conducted in an informal atmosphere to put new converts at ease and include singing, personal testimony and free prayer. 
 In Russia, the Salvation Army operates in 14 cities and is registered in five of them - St. Petersburg, Vyborg, Petrozavodsk, Volgograd and Rostov-on-Don.
 No date for a new court hearing in Moscow has been set, Morales said. But he hopes the federal registration will help. 
 &quot;Now [if the city denies the church registration] it would look like the right hand does not know what the left is doing.&quot;
 It remains extremely important for the group to overturn the municipal court's decision, he added. 
 &quot;Otherwise we will be court-proven to be a security threat.&quot;

TITLE: Discovery of Bodies in Grozny Raises New Atrocity Questions
AUTHOR: By Ana Uzelac
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A total of 48 bodies have been found scattered through an abandoned village of summer homes on the outskirts of Grozny, said the chief prosecutor for the pro-Moscow Chechen administration.
 But whether there are more bodies and who the dead were remained in dispute.
 The prosecutor, Vsevolod Chernov, in announcing the completion of the investigation Friday, said virtually all of the dead were believed to be rebels because most were men of combat age and they had gunshot wounds and bandages. He hinted that some may have been foreign mercenaries because they were wearing foreign-made camouflage and Turkish underwear.
 The Associated Press, however, quoted an unnamed official in the same pro-Moscow administration as saying there may up to 70 bodies and they include women and children.
 The human rights group Memorial said the bodies revealed a new atrocity committed by federal troops in Chechnya. In an interview with The Washington Post, Memorial executive director Tatyana Kasatkina said of the 23 bodies she personally saw, all were killed execution-style: shot in the head, with their hands tied behind their backs. She said at least five of the bodies have been identified as those of civilians.
 The bodies were first discovered two weeks ago in Zdorovye, which has been misidentified as Dachny because of its summer homes. The village is located about a kilometer from the main military base in Chechnya, Khankala.
 The general who conducted the battle for Grozny a year ago - former commander of the Western military group and current Ulyanovsk Governor Vla dimir Shamanov - played down the findings at a news conference in neighboring Dagestan on Friday.
 &quot;I could point to several [such sites] where corpses were brought by the thousands and buried with bulldozers,&quot; he said, according to the Kommersant newspaper. &quot;But nobody is speaking about them for some reason.&quot;
 Several Russian and international human rights organizations have accused federal troops of executing prisoners. 
 The Council of Europe's human rights commissioner, Alvaro Gil-Robles, returned Saturday from his most recent trip to Chechnya and urged Russian authorities to investigate the many reports of murders and beatings of civilians by federal troops.
 Also Friday, Chernov said the team of investigators who flew to southern Chechnya last week to look into accusations made by reporter Anna Po lit kov skaya, found no evidence that a paratroop unit was holding Chechen men captive for ransom.
 Politkovskaya, a respected war correspondent for Novaya Gazeta, accused the paratroop unit stationed in the village of Khatuni in the Vedeno region of kidnapping local Chechen men and keeping them in deep pits until their relatives paid the ransom. Polit kov skaya said she made her last trip to Chechnya in February to investigate the villagers' complaints and personally saw the pits.
 &quot;We haven't found anything like the things that the journalist was talking about,&quot; Interfax quoted Chernov as saying. He said the only pits they found were waste pits and dug-in shelters.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Mole Exposes Tunnel 
 

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's Foreign Ministry summoned the U.S. charg&eacute; d'affaires on Monday to demand an explanation for reports that intelligence services had dug a tunnel under the Soviet embassy in Washington during the 1980s.
 Russia's demand for clarification of weekend U.S. press reports of the tunnel, said to have been built at the height of the Cold War, added to a growing list of irritants in spy scandals jolting relations between Washington and Moscow.
 A ministry statement said the charg&eacute; d'affaires had been asked to "explain the position of the U.S. State Department."
 A U.S. embassy official said charg&eacute; d'affaires George Krol had gone to the ministry for "a clarification of the tunnel story. A discussion took place to address that question." 
 He gave no further details.
 The U.S. reports said the plan to dig the tunnel to monitor communications in the Washington embassy had been betrayed by FBI agent Robert Hanssen, arrested last month on charges of spying for the Soviet Union and Russia.
 U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, interviewed on CBS television, said he could not say whether the U.S. intelligence services had dug such a tunnel.
 
 
Iraqi Embasssy Grows
 

MOSCOW (SPT) - Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has ordered an increase in personnel at his country's diplomatic missions in Russia and Belarus in a move Western officials fear will help Russia and Iraq negotiate arms deals, according to a report in Britain's Telegraph.
 The daily reported earlier this month that Moscow's Iraqi Embassy will have a new intelligence unit headed by Brigadier Saadi Mohammed Subhi. 
 A Russian Foreign Ministry official said he had heard about the report, but "had no information" about any expansion of the Iraqi Embassy. Unnamed Western officials interviewed by the Telegraph believe Subhi's appointment could signal new arms deals between Baghdad and Moscow. 
 "Usually, they appoint lower-ranking military intelligence officials. The fact that he comes from air defense is proof that negotiations with Moscow are at an advanced stage," one official told the Telegraph.
 
 
New Corruption Probe
 

MOSCOW (AP) - The Prosecutor General's Office may again appeal to the United States for help in investigating a case of suspected corruption involving prominent figures - including Boris Nemtsov and Anatoly Chubais - a spokesperson was quoted as saying.
 The office had asked the United States for help in the case in February 1999, "but unfortunately the American side still has not answered its Russian colleagues," a spokesperson said Friday, according to Interfax. 
 The prosecutor's office hopes that U.S. investigators will be able to help provide information about the transfer in 1994 of $2 million to the Bank of New York from the Russian commercial bank Nizhegorodets, the report said. 
 
 
Yeltsin's Pneumonia 
 

MOSCOW (AP) - A top Kremlin doctor revealed that former President Boris Yeltsin, who was hospitalized more than a month ago with the flu, had fallen ill with pneumonia but has recovered. 
 Sergei Mironov, the director of the Russian presidential administration's medical center, said Friday that Yeltsin had a tough time overcoming the flu, which landed him in the hospital on Jan. 30, the eve of his 70th birthday. 
 The illness was complicated by a form of pneumonia, and Yeltsin was treated with antibiotics, Mironov said. He said that Yeltsin's condition was "fully satisfactory, the inflammation of the lungs has been cured in full," Interfax reported. 



TITLE: Chubais Pushes On With UES Restructure
AUTHOR: By Alla Startseva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Caught in the crosshairs of verbal snipers from both the left and the right, Anatoly Chubais is once again exactly where he wants to be: at the center of Russia's most daunting project.
 Chubais, who has been accused of everything from creating the oligarchy to precipitating the country's 1998 financial meltdown, is under intense pressure to reform the world's largest power grid.
 Having been hired, fired and reappointed numerous times from various government posts in the last decade, Chubais' future as CEO of Unified Energy Systems depends on how he handles the Herculean task of restructuring the electricity monopoly - considered the government's top priority for 2001.
 As the architect of the loans-for-shares privatization debacle in the mid-1990s, he has been the target of a staunch opposition group composed of both politicians and investors from communists to capitalists.
 Minority shareholders have already demanded his ouster for what they see as his plan to strip the company of assets by selling off its most prized pieces at below-market prices to a chosen few.
 And Chubais' handling of UES in the last 2 1/2 years has been blasted by, among others, top presidential economic adviser Andrei Illarianov and Deputy Energy Minister Viktor Kud rya vy, who last month accused Chubais of holding his job illegally and urged his ouster.
 But through it all Chubais has remained cool, calm and collected.
 On Thursday evening, Chubais led potential investors - heads of European diplomatic missions and representatives of leading Western energy companies - on a tour of UES's main control room after pitching his reform plan and touting the results he's already achieved.
 Chubais told the group, which included the head of the European Commission's mission to Russia, Richard Wright, and representatives of Ericsson, Gas de France, Electricite de France, ABB, Siemens and Total, among others, that the government would approve a plan to restructure UES on May 16.
 By that time he said he would have a list ready of investment projects that will add capacity to the grid, including upgrading stations and building new ones because &quot;capacity is being withdrawn five times faster than it is being added.&quot;
 The entire restructuring plan will cost somewhere between $40 billion and $70 billion, he said, adding that the federal budget could finance no more than 5 percent, with the rest coming from private investors and raising tariffs.
 The EC's Wright threw his full weight behind the Chubais plan, which calls for, among other things, liberalizing prices and spinning off UES's 73 generating plants and the national transmission grid into separate companies, with the government retaining control of the grid.
 &quot;The energy system restructure proposals of Anatoly Chubais that have been announced at today's meeting should create the conditions to attract investments,&quot; Wright said.
 Seppo Remmes, head of Russian operations for Finnish energy giant Fortum and the chairman of the European Business Club, which organized the meeting, called the UES restructuring an &quot;absolute necessity&quot; for the economy as a whole to develop.
 Chubais dismissed his critics and touted his achievements during his tenure at UES, the most important of which, he said, was eradicating barter deals from the company's accounts.
 He also said that since the beginning of this year UES's capitalization increased from $2.5 billion to $4 billion, and that annual sales are expected to reach $10 billion this year.
 &quot;In 1998, the financial situation of UES was monstrous,&quot; he said. &quot;More than 80 percent of transactions were barter, wages were 8 months overdue, strikes and starvation plagued dozens of power plants and 12 plants were in bankruptcy proceedings.
 &quot;We had to completely change the marketing strategy of the company, we had to disconnect those who did not pay, we had to watch hundreds of demonstrations all over the country with people demanding that Chubais be hanged and a number of Chubais-like mannequins being set aflame.&quot;

TITLE: Energy Cos Make Jump To Western Markets
AUTHOR: By Sujata Rao
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON - Russia's giant energy firms, armed with cash stockpiles from the oil price rally, are on the march with acquisitions in mind - from the United States to Ukraine. 
 But the advance into neighboring countries may be summoning up unsettling memories in East Europe, analysts say. 
 &quot;Given the amount of money the Russians made in the past two years, they have enough money to go through with expansion,&quot; said Charles Saunders, emerging market analyst at Nomura. 
 &quot;But the Eastern Europeans are nervous ... we are seeing bald-faced moves from governments and companies to keep them out.&quot; 
 LUKoil, the largest and most aggressive of the Russian oil majors, already operates a 1300-strong filling station network in the United States, and is on the prowl for a U.S. refinery as well as retail networks in Canada and Mexico. 
 &quot;Our enormous reserves and growing crude production are forcing us to expand our downstream operations in Europe and the United States,&quot; LUKoil Europe head Ralif Safin said on a recent visit to London. &quot;We are wary of only depending heavily on crude exports.&quot; 
 The company may snap up Austrian Avanti's chain of filling stations and is looking at Yugoslavia's Novy Sad refinery after buying refineries in Bulgaria, Romania and Ukraine. 
 Suddenly the Russians seem to be everywhere. 
 Other Russian firms too are getting in on the act. Slavneft and Rosneft jointly operate a petrol station network in Bulgaria and Romania, while Nafta Moscow does the same in Finland. Tyumen Oil has two refineries and a filling station chain in Ukraine 
 Russian oil majors are finding their home market cramped. Soaring oil prices gave the sector free cash flow of $16 billion in 2000 and the figure for this year is put at $11 billion. 
 &quot;There is not a sufficient number of attractive assets left in Russia for these companies to invest in,&quot; said Dmitry Avdeyev, oil analyst at United Financial Group brokerage. 
 But the path abroad is not hurdle-free, and their expansion is making many people in Eastern Europe very uneasy. In Poland and the Czech Republic, LUKoil was shut out of refinery privatizations. In Hungary, the BorsodChem raid prompted the government to toughen corporate takeover rules. 
 Hungarian energy firm MOL and Poland's PKN Orlen have forged an alliance seen as key to ward off takeover bids by a Russian company. 
 &quot;History is working against the Russians,&quot; says Nomura's Saunders. &quot;The East Europeans are scared to the extent firms like MOL have changed their charters to force people holding over 2 percent of shares to reveal their ownership.&quot;

TITLE: PTS Moves Back Billing Plan
AUTHOR: By Simon Ostrovsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Petersburg Telephone Network (PTS) announced at a press conference Friday that its merger with St. Petersburg National and International Telephone (SPB MMT) and St. Petersburg Telegraph (SPT) has been completed. 
 The St. Petersburg merger is one of a number which fit into national telecoms holding Svyazinvest's plans to restructure Russia's telephone market.
 &quot;The merger fits into the larger framework of Svyazinvest plans to consolidate smaller regional telecoms into regional hubs, such as PTS in the northwest, said Andrei Braginsky, an analyst for Moscow-based Renaissance Capital, which has been hired as a consultant by the region's telecoms to evaluate their value.
 The local telecoms include all of those in the northwest region, with the exception of Komisvyaz, in the Komi republic, in which Svayazinvest does not have a controlling interest.
 Beside commenting on the completion of the merger, PTS General Director Sergei Soldatenkov discussed the company's progress in a number of other present initiatives.
 Soldatenkov said that the implementation of a controversial plan to introduce by-the-minute charges for local calls made on PTS's system has been moved back to the beginning of 2002. The company had originally said that the system would take effect this January.
 &quot;The delay was due to a PTS decision to implement the local-call billing as part of a bigger overhaul of the old system,&quot; said Oleg Kurinoy at PTS's Information Analysis department. &quot;It also took some time to find a supplier for the necessary equipment.&quot;
 PTS ultimately decided on Elsis, a company based in Lithuania, which will be paid $10 million to install the system. PTS will pay $1 million up front, with the balance to be paid over the next five years.
 A report by Renaissance Capital Research said that PTS also announced plans at the press conference to build new lines in 2001 that will hook up 25,000 new customers, bringing the total number of lines in operation to 1.77 million, as well as reaffirming plans to register a level 1 American Depository Receipts (ADR) by the end of the summer.

TITLE: Oil Majors Boosting Sales to EU
AUTHOR: By Igor Semenenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The European Union's plan to make Russia its major energy supplier is inching toward reality.
 In addition to being the major source of natural gas to Germany, the EU's largest economy, Russia is also gradually becoming its main source of crude oil.
 Russia's share of German crude imports should grow to 31.6 percent in 2001, up from 28.7 percent in 2000 and 26.5 percent in 1999, the Association of the German Petroleum Industry said in a new report posted on its website, www.mwv.de.
 &quot;We began to diversify our import structure after two crises [engineered by OPEC],&quot; said the association's spokes person, Birgit Layes, in a telephone interview from Hamburg, Germany.
 Germany imported 103.6 million tons of crude last year, or about 88 percent of its total consumption. This amount came more or less equally from OPEC, the North Sea (mainly Norway) and the former Soviet Union, which made up 27.6 percent, 31.4 percent and 33 percent of supplies respectively.
 Russian crude is popular in Germany because two of the country's 14 refineries are located in former East Germany and were built specifically to handle Soviet-grade crude.
 But that alone does not explain the recent spike in imports of Russian oil.
 In the 1970s, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries delivered 90 percent of the total amount of crude consumed by the Federal Republic of Germany. But OPEC's mood swings and constant pursuit of higher prices - coupled with never-ending hostilities in the Middle East - have forced Europeans, led by Germany, to rethink their attitudes lately.
 Next year, Germany is expected to import 13.8 percent less oil from OPEC, while raising Russian supplies by 33.8 million tons, or 13.4 percent, and North Sea supplies 9.2 percent, according to the AGPI.
 Last October, Russia cut a deal with the European Union to double oil and gas exports within the next 20 years.
 On Oct. 12, after OPEC countries cut their output 1.85 percent to an average of 27 million barrels per day, prices hit a 10-year high of $35.30 per barrel, while Russia gradually hiked its yearly production 5.9 percent to 323 million tons, or 2.4 billion barrels.
 Tellingly, local statistics failed to catch the increase in supplies to Germany.
 According to the State Customs Committee, deliveries of Russian crude to Germany amounted to 19.4 million tons in January-October 2000 - a marginal increase from 19.7 million tons for the whole of 1999.
 But those figures are misleading because they don't take into account Russian crude that goes through offshore middlemen.
 &quot;This is a natural development given that a large share of crude is sold via companies incorporated offshore,&quot; said Valery Nesterov, oil and gas analyst at Troika Dialog.
 Between January and September last year, Cyprus took 2.83 million tons of Russian crude, the Virgin Islands imported 3.2 million tons and Gibraltar another 506,000 tons - all apparently resold to Germany and other Western countries. Other importers include Bermuda and several offshore havens that host export arms of local oil companies, whose usual practice is to under report export proceeds.
 Estimates made last spring by the Foreign Currency Control Service, shortly before it was dissolved by President Vladimir Putin, showed that oil companies underreport their export earnings by $1 to $2 per barrel.
 Another factual discrepancy between German and Russian claims can be seen in data revealed last week by the AGPI, which directly contradict statements made by No. 2 oil major Yukos chairman Mikhail Khodorkovsky in an interview with The Financial Times.
 Khodorkovsky complained that Europe was reluctant to buy Russian crude because of political considerations.
 &quot;Europe does not want to buy our oil,&quot; Khodorkovsky said. &quot;Everyone assures us that there are no such policies, but we know that such policies exist ... they go by the name of energy independence.&quot;
 However, industry insiders said Kho dorkovsky was playing his own game, trying to win more concessions from the Russian government by making it appear that his company is doing worse than it actually is.

TITLE: Diamond Producer Has Big Plans for Northwest
AUTHOR: By John Varoli
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Alrosa (Almazy Rossii-Sakha), the world's second largest diamond producer, said Thursday its $3.2 billion, five-year development plan includes exploration for new deposits not far from St. Petersburg, opening new diamond mines in Arkangelsk, as well as opening diamond cutting and trading centers here.
 Next year Alrosa, which accounts for nearly 25 percent of world and 98 percent of Russia's diamond output, will begin exploration in the Leningrad Oblast and in the neighboring Republic of Karelia. The company has earmarked 30 million rubles for exploration.
 In Karelia, Alrosa owns 51 percent in Alrosa-Karelia, which is itself 49 percent owned by the Australian company Ashton Mining. Ashton Mining, in turn, is part of the English holding company, Rio-Tinto.
 The company said the deposits in both regions are part of the same geological formation as the large diamond deposits to the north in the Ark han gelsk Oblast discovered in 1980 and estimated to be worth $12 billion. Alrosa plans to start mining there in 2004, and annual output should be around $350 million.
 &quot;This territory is all part of the same massif, and we plan to explore it,&quot; said Vyacheslav Shtyirov, president of Alrosa, during a press conference on Thursday.
 But he cautioned that it's not certain diamonds will be found in the Le nin grad Oblast. &quot;Geology is a little bit like shamanism - sometimes you're lucky, sometimes you're not,&quot; said Shtyirov.
 Alrosa also plans to spend up to $15 million to set up a trading center in St. Petersburg, the company's third in Russia. Once operational, total sales may reach $200 million, said Shtyirov.
 Alrosa's local operations are headed by Vyacheslav Sherbakov, one of Governor Vladimir Yakovlev's former vice-governors.
 Alrosa plans to extract $1.8 billion worth of raw diamonds and sell $2.1 billion worth of raw and polished diamonds this year, and increase overall output by 26 percent by 2005. The company is primarily state-owned, with 32 percent belonging to the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), 32 percent in the hands of the Russian federal government, and 8 percent owned by the Social Guarantee Fund for Military Personnel, a government organization. The company did not specify who owns the remaining 28 percent.
 Alrosa is no longer a mere mining operation, but has started to develop processing facilities for turning rough diamonds into polished gems, and is working on a worldwide sales network. According to Shtyirov, nearly half the world's diamond sales go to the United States, and if the economy there should sag, then diamond sales in the short-term may slide. But in the long-term, over the next ten to 15 years, the company said sales should grow as Asian countries, such as China and India, develop.
 &quot;There is a direct correlation between GNP growth and diamond sales, and as the GNP of more and more countries increase, so should global diamond sales,&quot; said Shtyirov.

TITLE: Kirovsky Reinvents Itself Once More To Weather New Market
TEXT: As the rest of Russia will observe the 10-year anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union in December of this year, Kirovsky Zavod, one of the country's largest and most successful factories, is gearing up for a celebration of its own in April. <strong>Andrey Musatov </strong> and <strong>Thomas Rymer </strong>report. APRIL 4 has been chosen as the date for 200th anniversary celebrations at Kirovsky Zavod, but much of the focus at the factory is on more recent activities. The restructuring process that was spurred by the end of the Soviet system, and even further by conditions following Russia's economic crisis in the summer of 1998, has brought dividends, and the company is today looking with confidence to the future.
 Faced with the disappearance of a number of its traditional markets, including military orders and other large-scale undertakings for the Soviet government, Kirovsky remade itself, turning itself into a joint-stock company, separating into 31 subsidiaries under one umbrella, and instituting new production-monitoring procedures and product lines to become effective in a significantly changed market.
 Figures released by the company reported total sales for the group of 3.9 billion rubles (about $137 million) in 2000, 35 percent above the company's original target, while preliminary estimates of profits for last year are at 620 million rubles ($22 million).
 Kirovsky Zavod is forecasting a jump in revenues of another 40 percent this year.
 But much has had to be done at the plant to reach this point and the road has often been rocky.
 Post-Soviet blues are nothing new for Kirovsky, as it has experienced a number of lean periods along with successes during its 200 years. Change has been almost constant at the factory - the fact that it is already on its fourth name being the most obvious example.
 In a sense, the enterprise has had three lives: that before the October Revolution of 1917, the Soviet era, and the period from 1991 to the present.
 Growing Pains While Kirovsky Zavod traces its history back to 1801, the plant's story actually begins a little earlier. In 1789, during the war with Sweden, the Russian army found itself short of ammunition of all types, and was searching for ways to make up the shortfall. One method that was tried was to set up a small iron-casting foundry on the island of Kotlin, site of the Kronshtadt naval base.
 In 1801 Tsar Paul I ordered that a new site less exposed to enemy attacks be found, and this led to the establishment of the Chugoliteiny (Cast-Iron Foundry) Zavod at the present location. Responsibility for the construction and management of the plant fell to Charles Gascoigne, a Scot with extensive experience in foundry work who had originally come to Russia in 1786 to run another plant at Olonetsky.
 For a decade, the plant was involved solely in the production of munitions for the guns of the Imperial Russian Army and Navy and employed only 390 workers. It then began to broaden production to include fittings and other products for the navy, as well as ornamental grillwork for homes and materials for bridge construction in St. Petersburg.
 But in 1824, St. Petersburg was hit with the biggest flood of its history, virtually destroying the plant. The costs of rebuilding were deemed too high by the state, and the factory was put up for auction, although no buyers came forth for five years.
 Finally, a group of businessmen from the Russian Association of Miners came up with the money to buy the factory and began producing railtrack, hoping to capitalize on Russia's nascent railroad-construction industry. The group had fairly close ties to Nicholas I, which helped gain access to government orders, but it was unable to make a go of the venture and sold the facility to Richter Day and Co., an English concern.
 But the new owners had no better luck and owing to the plant's indebtedness, it was seized by the government in 1864.
 Change in Fortunes
 In 1868, the state sold the plant to Nikolai Putilov, who immediately showed a talent both for economics and engineering, and the plant was renamed Putilovsky Zavod. 
 The fortunes of the factory improved considerably owing to a combination of changes the new director made in production methods and the beginning of a period of considerable growth in Russian industry in general.
 Putilov had installed the first open-hearth furnace for the production of steel in Russia. The railway boom during this period also provided the opportunity to expand the plant's list of products, and in 1874 it also began to produce of railway cars.
 But the 1870s also brought economic crisis and, much like Kirovsky Zavod 120 years later, Putilovsky was forced to rethink its approach as the plant was pushed to the verge of bankruptcy.
 Military production turned out to be, once again, the answer. Orders for products like gun carriages, artillery and ammunition pulled the factory out of its economic straits. The plant even began building torpedo boats for the navy and, by the early 20th century, production had been expanded to include larger vessels such as cruisers and destroyers.
 When Russia's economy recovered in the mid-1890s, Putilovsky was in excellent shape to resume growth. The production of steam engines got underway, and economic growth brought the physical expansion of the factory, with buildings sprouting up at a remarkable rate.
 The leap in production meant not only new construction, but also a giant increase in the number of workers. By 1910 the factory had a work force of 30,000, the largest in Russia and one of the largest in Europe.
 St. Petersburg, or Petrograd as it was renamed after the beginning of World War I, underwent a huge jump in population during this period of industrial development. But construction of living space for newly arrived workers could not keep up, and the majority lived in cramped and squalid conditions. These provided an excellent breeding ground for disaffection, and the incidence of strikes and revolutionary activity rose steadily during the years leading up to the outbreak of war.
 The beginning of World War I brought a temporary easing of tensions, as patriotic reactions briefly replaced revolutionary ideas. But, as the war went badly for Russia, these sentiments resurfaced and, as it had been prior to the fighting, Putilovsky was at the center of the city's workers' movement.
 Both Mikhail Kalinin, who served as Soviet head of state under Stalin, and Grigory Zinoviev, one of the leaders of the revolution and future Politburo member, worked at Kirovsky during the period.
 &quot;Both the 1905 and February 1917 revolutions in Russia began with strikes at Putilovsky Zavod,&quot; Lev Lurie, a local historian. &quot;The most active part of Father Gapon's organization was made up of Putilovsky workers, and the list of the organization's demands sprang from cases involving the workers themselves.&quot;
 Father Gapon, an Orthodox priest, led a group of 150,000 protesters to Palace Square on Jan. 9, 1905, with a list of grievances they planned to present to Nicholas II. The police fired on the group, killing 200 and wounding another 800. &quot;Bloody Sunday&quot; sparked a reaction that quickened the capital's slide toward revolution.
 As the company's workers were becoming increasingly militant, its own fortunes were again taking a turn for the worse. By 1915, Russia's military was experiencing a munitions crisis, and the government reacted by placing orders with whomever would take them, often at inflated prices.
 Putilovsky was given an order worth 113 million rubles - far more than the capacity of the plant could handle. The price per shell was about six times the market rate, but much of the money never went to munitions production, as the directors used a large portion to fund other loss-making production centers. The money was wasted, and the company went bankrupt and was taken over by the state in 1916.
 In February 1917, it was again a strike at Putilovsky that touched off the revolt that ultimately toppled Nicholas. By the time of the October revolution, virtually all of Petrograd's factories were involved, with Putilov enjoying a primary role by virtue of being the biggest.
 
 Rolling with the Times
 Jump forward 75 years, and Kirovsky was again facing financial problems at a time of political upheaval, in an echo of its pre-revolution past.
 Much as Nikolai Putilov had done earlier, Kirovsky Zavod general director Pyotr Semenenko stepped up to set the situation in order.
 Semenenko had worked with the firm since 1981 in a number of different capacities, including as an engineer. &quot;He was even head of tank production here at one point,&quot; said Vladimir Rudkoyev, chief information officer at Kirovsky Zavod. &quot;The experience gave him a good knowledge of the different parts of Kirovsky's broad range of production.&quot;
 Semenenko split the company into about 60 smaller units based on production, and required each of them to survive by finding their own markets. Many did not, either folding or being swallowed up by stronger subsidiaries.
 The plant was doing well but then, like most in Russia, took a serious hit during the financial crash in August 1998. Profits had been around $3.8 million in 1997, but dropped by 55 percent to $1.7 million in 1998. They rebounded slightly in 1999 before taking off this year.
 Mikhail Mun, leading specialist for over-the-counter operations at Lenstroimaterialy Brokerage, says that this is a standard story for firms that survived.
 &quot;I more or less only know the history from the crisis, because the factory started publishing consolidated results reports covering all of its subsidiaries at that time,&quot; he said. &quot;It's a typical mid-sector company. About 11 percent of revenues last year went to profits, and total profits jumped by about 80 percent.&quot;
 &quot;They're in good shape because they have no serious debts.&quot;
 The company has gone a long way to paring down the size of the operation, reducing the size of its work force from about 22,000 in 1990 to the present level of 8,500.
 Many economic analysts see Semenenko as having played a central role in steering the firm through the crisis period.
 &quot;Semenenko is a very fortuitous mix of traditional Soviet director and market industrialist,&quot; said Lev Sovulkin, chief analyst at the Leontieff Center. &quot;Thanks to his Soviet habits, he was able to keep the plant from falling apart through the difficulties of the last 10 years.&quot;
 In an ironic echo of Soviet practices, press releases from the company tout the existence of a five-year plan covering the years 2001 to 2005.
 According to the SKRIN.ru financial site, Semenenko holds a little over 6 percent of the company's stock himself, with Petrostal, the subsidiary which accounts for about 50 percent of Kirovsky's total profits, holding the largest interest at just over 13 percent.
 Foreign minority shareholders include Germany's Dresdner Bank AG and Credit Suisse First Boston.
 While Kirovsky owns all its subsidiaries outright, no single investor has a controlling interest in the parent firm - a fact more appealing to some analysts than others.
 &quot;The lack of a controlling interest in the hands of one shareholder doesn't make any difference for its customers,&quot; said Vladimir Chuprygin, a specialist with the Petropromkomplekt Brokerage. &quot;But potential investors often prefer to see control in a company in one set of hands, to allow greater decisiveness in the usage of its assets.&quot;
 
 The Glory Years
 The revolutions of 1917, and the Civil War that followed, brought production at the plant to a virtual standstill.
 The economic hardships these produced brought a significant drop in the population of Petrograd, and it was only afterward that real attempts to stand the plant on a firm footing again could begin. By 1922, production was at 5 percent of its prewar level and the number of workers had fallen to a mere 2,000.
 In that year, Putilovsky was nationalized and renamed Krasny Putilovets (Red Putilov), in recognition of the role its workers had played in the revolution. The rebuilding process was difficult, with the resumption of railway engine production and metal products for a new hydro-electric generation station at the city of Volkhov in the Le nin grad Oblast as two of its first projects.
 Then, in 1924, it began producing tractors, turning out the &quot;Fordson-Puti lo vets,&quot; a copy of the Fordson model produced at the time in the United States.
 The plant branched out again in 1932 - again in a military direction - when it began producing T-26 tanks, beginning a tradition of tank-building that would last until 1992.
 In 1934, the plant gained the name it holds to this day, after the murder of the head of the Leningrad Communist Party Organization, Sergei Kirov. 
 The German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 ushered in another period of upheaval. The German army made rapid progress across Soviet territory, and laid siege to Leningrad. The siege, or the 900 Days, was not lifted until 1944.
 Kirovsky Zavod had already begun production of the KV-1 tank, a 47.5-ton monster that, along with the T-34, took Germany's tank crews by surprise when first encountered in 1941. While the Russian crews were often inexperienced and the vehicles often committed to battle in a haphazard manner, the German Panzer crews were spooked by the specter of their shells bouncing harmlessly off the Russian armor.
 Production of the KV-1 was vital to the Soviet defense effort and Kirovsky Zavod continued to turn the tanks out up to and even after the time when the city was surrounded.
 &quot;At one point, the front itself was only about three kilometers away from the factory,&quot; said Pavel Gerasimov, curator at the Kirovsky Zavod Museum. &quot;Often, the workers would climb into the tanks once they were finished and drive them up to the front themselves.&quot;
 As for all residents of Leningrad, conditions for Kirovsky workers were harsh during the blockade.
 One hundred and thirty nine people were killed and another 780 were wounded in German air and artillery attacks, while over 2,500 of the plant's workers fell victim to the blockade's biggest killers, starvation and disease.
 An unknown number of the 10,000 workers from the plant who volunteered to fight also perished in the hostilities.
 By late 1941, as the impossibility of maintaining production under blockade conditions became more apparent, the Soviet leadership decided to evacuate the plant and a large number of its workers to the east. Ten thousand workers and tons of equipment were transferred to the Urals region and the city of Tankograd, now Chelyabinsk.
 But with Leningrad's rail and road links cut , the process of moving people and equipment was difficult.
 &quot;Three or four trains carrying machinery did manage to get out before all of the lines were cut,&quot; Gerasimov said. &quot;The rest was taken out by barges and cargo ships across Lake Ladoga. Once the lake froze, more was removed over the Ladoga ice road.&quot;
 Production of the KV-1 was halted in early 1942, and Chelyabinsk Kirovsky Zavod was switched over to building the T-34, the main Soviet tank of the war.
 After the war, production facilities were rebuilt in Leningrad and, while tanks and other military products remained central to Kirovsky Zavod's output up to the end of the Soviet period, the plant continued to open up new product lines.
 Between the end of the war and the late 1950s it began building systems for the enrichment of uranium, including the construction of the world's first gas centrifuge for industrial purposes in 1954. The plant also began building atomic-powered turbines for the navy and for the Soviet Union's fleet of icebreakers.
 But military production and equipment for developing nuclear technology remained lesser known plant activities. Production of the T-80, the main battle tank of the late Soviet period was begun in 1976, but it's difficult even today to find people associated with Kirovsky Zavod who will talk about production levels. An estimate by a Russian analyst, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, put production at about 600 per year in the late Soviet period.
 &quot;Of course I knew that tanks were being built at the plant throughout the Soviet period,&quot; Lurie said. &quot;But the official line was that tractors were being built and there was no official information about tank production at all.&quot;
 What was more widely known during the late Soviet period was the plant's tractor production. Kirovsky opened a new production line for tractors in 1975, which allowed the plant to turn out 25, 000 units per year after that point.
 Turbines, tanks and tractors remained at the center of the factory's activities until 1992.
 
 Parting of Ways
 The end of the Soviet Union and the economic problems experienced by the Russian government after 1991 had serious repercussions for Kirovsky's business. Russia's military was forced to slash budgets and, along with this, its procurement levels. For a company with so much production targeted for the military, the news was bad.
 &quot;The two major military products were turbines for the Soviet navy, and T-80 tanks for the army,&quot; Rudkoyev said. &quot;But 1992 brought an end to state orders, so we really had to look for new ways to apply the technology we had.
 &quot;We repair the occasional tank damaged in Chechnya, but state orders for new military equipment stand at zero and we really don't see much chance of state military orders in the future.
 The company has found a number of ways to apply the technology advantage they already possessed. One of the best examples is the case of Kirov Energomash, one of its subsidiaries, which found a new market for Kirovsky's turbine technology in the petroleum and gas sector.
 &quot;We used the technology we had from navy production to start making gas turbines,&quot; Rudkoyev added. &quot;Using the tank technology, we increased our line of products to embrace such different spheres as road construction, excavation work, transporting timber, and a wide range of agricultural activities.
 In 1997, Kirovsky signed a $600-million deal with Gazprom, the national natural gas monopoly, to build turbines to pump gas through pipelines.
 And Vladimir Logonov, marketing director at Kirov Energomash, says that the turbine deal was only the beginning.
 &quot;We're also working with Gazprom on creating gas supply systems for automobiles, to get car engines working on natural gas, along with developing new technology to be used in their drilling stations.
 At present, Gazprom orders represent about 50 percent of Energomash production.
 Along with its own subsidiaries, the Kirovsky Zavod holding has become a landlord to other businesses.
 The plant bought its own 190-hectare grounds in 1997, and now is home to more than 300 other firms.
 &quot;But this is still a problem, as there is still a lot of space on the grounds that remains unused,&quot; Rudkoyev said. &quot;The search for further tenants for this space is one of the main objectives in our present planning.&quot;
 Potential for further growth at Kirovsky Zavod therefore remains, but for the next couple of months, most of the attention there will be devoted to the factory's storied past, including a science and technology conference entitled, &quot;Kirovsky Zavod in the 21st Century,&quot; and a number of events focusing on the 200 years of the plant.
 And there will even be a small reminder of the days of military production, as a representative from Ros vooru zheniye - the government agency which oversees arms sales - is scheduled to make an official visit to the plant on April 3.
 But Rudkoyev said that it would be a mistake to read anything into this.
 &quot;This is more the result of our old relationship than anything else.&quot;

TITLE: Foreign Ownership Laws Still Not Clear
AUTHOR: By James Hitch, Maxim Kalinin, and Elena Mochalova
TEXT: THE question of land ownership has been one of the most debated issues in Russia during the past 10 years. Presidential Decree No. 301 of March 25, 1992, established the procedure for acquiring land. According to this decree, individuals and legal entities, which acquired state enterprises through privatization, were entitled to apply to purchase the land sites on which the privatized enterprises were located. Presidential Decree No. 631 of June 14, 1992, stipulated that buyers of land, which state-owned enterprises used to occupy, can include legal entities and individuals, including foreign ones.
 In spite of the clear language of decrees 301 and 631, a number of uncertainties regarding land ownership remain, due to the questions about the validity of these decrees. These questions stem from the fact that decree 631 was issued under certain extraordinary powers, which were temporarily granted to President Boris Yeltsin and which allowed his decrees to contradict the existing law. When decrees 301 and 631 were issued, they contradicted the language in the Russian Federation Land Code, which, in 1992, forbade the foreign ownership of land. They also contradicted the language in the former Russian Constitution, which placed all land in Russia under state ownership.
 Thereafter, Presidential Decree No. 2287, of Dec. 24, 1993, deleted the provision of the Land Code, which forbade the foreign ownership of land. This edict, which was issued after the adoption of the new Russian Constitution in December 1993, eliminated numerous provisions of the Land Code on the basis that they were unconstitutional. Whether all of this was done properly is still open to question. However, if one accepts the power of the President to issue decrees 301, 631, and 2287, then the legal basis, which establishes the right of the foreign ownership of land, is reasonably clear.
 Presidential Decree No. 1767 of Oct. 27, 1993, established the procedure for the direct purchase of land. It did not contemplate the ownership of land by foreign individuals or legal entities, but it allowed for the ownership of land by Russian legal entities with foreign investment. Decree 1767 also raised uncertainties similar to those discussed above in relation to decrees 301 and 631, since it also contradicted provisions of the Land Code and the former Russian Constituupon issuance. 
 Finally, Presidential Decree No. 1535 &quot;On the General Directions of the Privatization Program after July 1, 1994&quot; of July 22, 1994, further declares that all of the companies, which own real estate objects, e.g., buildings and structures, may privatize the land plots on which such real estate objects are located.
 Thus, the ownership of land by foreign legal entities is possible, based on decrees 301 and 631, but only through the privatization process. Neither foreign private individuals nor foreign legal entities can purchase land outright pursuant to decree 1767, since this is simply not provided for in the decree.
 While the Russian federal lawmakers are still discussing a new Land Code, regional land laws have been adopted in a number of Russian regions. Until the new Land Code is adopted, however, there are potential legal constitutional challenges to any local land laws, particularly any which permit the ownership of land by foreign legal entities. Furthermore, if the long-awaited new Land Code will provide that foreign entities may not purchase land, then the title to land owned by foreign legal entities, which will have purchased that land pursuant to local land laws prior to the time of the enactment of the new Land Code, may be subject to question. 
 
 James T. Hitch is Managing Partner, Maxim Kalinin Senior Associate and Elena Mochalova a Paralegal, at Baker & McKenzie's St. Petersburg Office.

TITLE: 'Black' PR: A True Enemy of the Press
TEXT: IT is no secret that most people have little trust in newspapers. The received wisdom is that journalists are in somebody's pocket, which is galling for those sections of the press who are only paid by their employers. I often wonder why it is considered improper to ask a banker, &quot;You're stealing your clients money, aren't you?&quot; but that saying, &quot;We know you need a little extra to publish this&quot; is acceptable. The latest developments on the PR market will make my profession the target of even more suspicion.
 The Moscow office of the St. Petersburg-founded PR firm Promaco says it has suffered from unequal competition from other companies who use &quot;black&quot; PR - paid articles. As a succession of clients left for rival firms, Promaco decided to unmask such unethical methods by sending out a press release on the opening of a non-existent store to a number of papers.
 Most of the recipients - 13 out of 21 - published the release without giving any indication of its advertising nature, and accepted money for doing so. Then Promaco revealed the trick, and said they would be willing to pay a fine if the Antimonopoly Ministry would take action against the 13 organs for violations of the Law on Mass Media.
 What did this do for Promaco? Well, it gave it a lot of publicity. The story made the front-pages of national newspapers - especially those who ignored the false item. But while this looks like good PR for Promaco, the company has in fact made itself a whole load of new enemies in its own industry by revealing their questionable methods, and has not endeared itself to 13 Russian newspapers. Even the ones who didn't swallow the bait are unhappy about the fact that they were also being tested.
 Now, I would not be writing this had our newspaper published Promaco's press release. The fact that we are an honest outfit - although I assume there are also honest journalists working at the papers who fell for the ruse - means that we cannot ever allow ourselves to publish a press release in the editorial section.
 Nonetheless, I'm angry at Promaco, too, for compromising the press in its entirety. 
 Last week, I received several phone calls with proposals to &quot;place&quot; information. It takes altogether too much time and energy to explain our rules to people who usually have a myriad of marketing managers pressuring them, and to direct them instead to the advertising department. We also received a frankly insulting press release that promised to pay for articles at advertising rates. When its authors subsequently visited us, they were very disappointed that we were not going to send someone to a press conference extolling the virtues of their product, or publish their material.
 It's not Promaco who ruined the press. But Promaco has helped strengthen the corrupt-newspaper image. This is a pity.

TITLE: Motorola Fills Its Coffers With Sell-offs
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: SCHAUMBURG, Illinois - Motorola Inc., the world's No. 2 mobile phone maker, on Monday said it has received more than $1 billion cash from the sale of investments in five cellular operating companies.
 The company said that since Jan. 1 it had received cash payments for the sale of its investments in cellular operations in Brazil, Egypt, Israel, Jordan and Pakistan. In addition, Motorola has agreements to sell similar investments in Hong Kong and Mexico that could provide up to $2 billion in cash or stock by the third quarter.
 The Schaumburg, Illinois-based wireless communications giant said it plans to sell its investments in other wireless operating companies. However, it has not announced any agreements concerning those investments, ranging from 22 percent to 35 percent, in operators located in Argentina, Azerbaijan, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Lithuania and Uruguay.
 Motorola began investing in cellular operating companies in 1985, partly in order to spur the development of wireless communications outside the United States. It began divesting these companies last October because conflicts arose from network infrastructure customers competing with the cellular operating companies in which Motorola had investments.
 Motorola said it intends to use the net proceeds from the sales for general corporate purposes.

TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: Ford's Spanish Fiesta
 

LONDON (AP) - Ford Motor Co. said Monday it will manufacture the next generation of its Fiesta passenger car in Valencia, Spain, at the same Ford factory where Japan's Mazda Motor Corp. announced it will begin producing cars in 2003.
 Ford will use the plant to build Fiestas on "an overflow basis" for orders that can't be filled at its factory in Cologne, Germany. It expects the first Fiestas to roll off the assembly line in Valencia early next year, said Niel Golightly, a spokesperson for Ford's European operations.
 Ford currently builds Fiestas in Cologne and at its factory in Dagenham, East London. Ford is in the process of phasing out vehicle production at Dagenham as part of its effort to cut its European plant capacity and associated costs.
 
 
Amazon Shares Jump
 

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The shares of No. 1 Internet retailer Amazon.com Inc. surged more than 23 percent on Monday after a report published in Britain's Sunday Times Newspaper said the struggling company was in talks with Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, to form some kind of strategic e-commerce deal.
 Amazon's shares, which have lost about 83 percent of their value over the past year, were up 23.75 percent, or about $2.38, trading at $12.38 on the Nasdaq stock market by mid-morning. Wal-Mart shares were up less than a percent, trading at $49.20 on the New York Stock Exchange.
 Amazon's stock has a 52-week range of $9.56 to $75.25.
 
 
Hertz Offer Completed
 

DEARBORN, Michigan (Reuters) - Ford Motor Co., putting itself squarely in the driver's seat as the world's largest rental car company, said on Monday it had completed its tender offer for the remaining publicly held shares of Hertz Corp.
 Ford said in a statement that it received and accepted about 19.4 million of the 20.3 million Class A Hertz common shares it did not already own in the $35.50 per share tender, which expired March 2. Remaining Hertz shares will be acquired in a merger at the same price in about a week.
 
 
Bulgaria Yanks License
 

SOFIA, Bulgaria (AP) - Bulgaria's government on Monday stripped the national air carrier Balkan Airlines of its aviation license, just three weeks after the airline had suspended all its flights.
 The Zeevi Holdings Group, the Israeli majority owner of Balkan Airlines, had ordered the company on Feb. 14 to suspend all flights as a result of a dispute with the government over the airline's assets.
 "This had to be done when the company suspended flights on Feb. 14, but the measure was delayed to reroute Balkan passengers who had already booked flights to other airlines," the state BTA news agency quoted Deputy Transport Minister Apik Garabedyan as saying. 



TITLE: Daewoo Labor Strife Continues
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SEOUL, South Korea - A nationwide labor group vowed Monday to block the planned reopening this week of Daewoo Motor Co.'s main plant unless the ailing carmaker reinstates laid-off workers.
 Daewoo Motor ordered its main plaint to be temporarily closed until Tuesday after laying off 1,751 workers in mid-February. The layoffs were carried out to make the troubled car firm more salable to potential takeover candidate General Motors Corp.
 Daewoo said the temporary shutdown was to reduce a burgeoning inventory of unsold cars but the union charged that it was timed to block protests by laid-off workers at the automaker's main plant in Bupyong, about 25 kilometers west of Seoul.
 &quot;The main plant will not operate normally unless the layoffs are retracted,&quot; said Sohn Nak-koo, a spokesperson for the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, an umbrella labor group.
 Since February's layoffs, thousands of members of the confederation and laid-off Daewoo workers have staged violent protests almost daily in Seoul and Bupyong.
 Despite the threatened protests by the umbrella labor group, Daewoo said it will reopen its main plant on Wednesday as scheduled.
 While Daewoo's main plant with a capacity of 500,000 cars was closed, its two other plants in the southern provincial areas, which have a combined capacity of 500,000 vehicles, operated normally.
 Daewoo Motor has been surviving under court receivership since it filed for bankruptcy in November with estimated debts of at least $10 billion.
 Daewoo Motor's finances worsened in the past year due to a sharp drop in sales from 945,000 vehicles in 1999 to 830,000 in 2000. Sales in January were just 38,700 vehicles, down sharply from 80,600 during the same month a year ago.
 In return for emergency loans from creditor banks, Daewoo Motor promised to shed about 5,500 of its 16,000 workers, or 34 percent. About 3,700 workers resigned voluntarily.
 The government has encouraged businesses to become leaner to make them more effective and help restore investors' confidence in the economy. The 1997-98 Asian financial crisis resulted in the collapse of Daewoo Motor and many other businesses that had recklessly expanded on borrowed money.
 Daewoo's creditors and management expected the layoffs to accelerate takeover negotiations with GM. The U.S. automaker began talks with Daewoo in September, but little progress has been made as GM reportedly is reluctant to proceed without layoffs.

TITLE: A Defense of Advertising: Why Ban Proposed by Duma Makes No Sense
AUTHOR: By Gareth Brown
TEXT: SOME aging wit once said that he would wake up in the morning, check the obituary column, and if his name wasn't in it, he would get out of bed.
 Working in Moscow's murky media market is something like that. You come into the office and look at the day's edition of The Moscow Times. First, glance at the ruble rate and check the price of oil - which is more or less the same thing. Then you make sure that Ostankino isn't smoking, that NTV's weathergirl isn't in prison and that the Duma hasn't banned bread - &quot;We managed perfectly well without food in Soviet times.&quot; 
 Only after this daily ritual do we turn on the phones and see if any clients want to indulge in the questionable business of selling products. After all, not for nothing did the founder of EURO RSCG, Jacques Seguela, call his autobiography &quot;Don't Tell My Mother I Work in Advertising: She Thinks I Play Piano in a Brothel.&quot;
 Tickling the ivories at a bordello and helping to sell cigarettes are very similar professions: They both provide background music to the world's oldest profession - trade.
 It is Russia's aversion to trade that is central to the problem of developing the Russian economy. No nation was ever ruined by trade, wrote Benjamin Franklin. The British and the Dutch understand this and have become richer than their population and natural resources would seem to make possible. Despite winning the 1992 election by criticizing George Bush the elder's overseas obsession, Bill Clinton encouraged external trade and helped fuel the U.S. boom of the 1990s. 
 Trade is the engine of capitalism, and advertising is the oil in the capitalist car. The car will run for a time without it, but if you don't check the oil regularly your Volga will soon grind to a halt. Advertising smoothes the process but it is not an elixir. As advertising guru Bill Bernbach said, &quot;A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it's bad.&quot;
 Advertising is a difficult profession to defend. Our critics tell us that we sell products people don't want and cannot afford. It is difficult to respond by downplaying the power of advertising without calling into question the service we sell our clients. 
 It is a common misconception that we advertise to sell products. We advertise to create or maintain profit margins. Philip Morris and friends do not want to sell more cigarettes in fomer communist countries. They want to sell more expensive cigarettes. We don't want Russians to drink vodka for a mere $5 a bottle when we can sell them Swedish vodka in a silly bottle for $20. &quot;The story of Absolut is the perfect illusion of a con trick that is modern advertising - the creation of something out of nothing,&quot; wrote The Economist just recently.
 The Scots have always understood the power of marketing. Few people are interested in a large lake but slip a fictitious monster into the waters and you have an instant tourist industry in the worst climate in Europe. Who can imagine paying $50 for a bottle of barley water? But give it a decade or more of aging and a few centuries of dubious history and you can't make enough of the stuff. Even family Tartans were a Victorian invention. You can sell a $1,000 skirt to American tourists with names like Kirk Douglas even though they were born Issur Danielovich Demsky.
 Life is more fun with advertising. We sell aspirations. Every time you light up a Malboro you can pretend you are in the Wild West even if the closest you will ever get to a cowboy is when you get your bathroom fixed. 
 But whenever Russia's experiment with pseudo-capitalism looks like it's failing to bring the riches promised, it's always simpler to shoot the messenger. Russians however have always understood the power of the message. The current exhibition at the Museum of the Contemporary History of Russia chronicles the Soviet attempt to get Russians off the bottle. The communists were happy to turn to advertising to achieve this goal. Its failure shows the profession's redundancy when faced with strong consumer demand. People, especially when their lives are as miserable as they often are in Russia, will always smoke and drink. The best way to combat this is to give them better lives. The best way to give people better lives is to encourage free trade and business. And business requires promotion and advertising.
 My apologies for the lecture, but let's summarize how the West was really won and how the West won the Cold War. We allowed people to make things. If somebody came up with a better or new way of making something we allowed them to compete. To inform people of these new products, we advertised them - originally with posters and later with newspapers, radio and, finally, television. And if a company became too successful in its field and appeared to stifle competition we broke it up. First and most famously, this happened to Standard Oil. Now Microsoft seems to be undergoing the procedure. All this activity provided work for millions of people. This wealth provided a tax base from which we could improve the environment for more wealth creation. Or, put better by Calvin Coolidge, &quot;The chief business of the American people is business.&quot; 
 A seemingly simple recipe for capitalism. And one that the Poles, Hungarians, Czechs and Estonians appear to be having few problems following. Allow people to trade freely, advertise freely and speak freely, and everyone gets richer. 
 But clearly Russia's Duma deputies would rather enrich themselves than the miserable peasants who in the words of Igor Chubais (yes, a relation) are viewed by the nomenklatura as &quot;simply an annoying, tiresome nuisance, which, moreover, for some reason has to be paid wages.&quot;
 To be fair to the deputies, they are no different from many politicians in the West. British Prime Minister Tony Blair blames tobacco advertising for teenage smoking. This theory ignores the rise in consumption in countries that have banned the promotion of cigarettes or the decline in smoking in countries that have recently begun to advertise. Banning advertising is more dramatic and less expensive than spending money on education. 
 The French blame Hollywood for the spread of the English language and ban film companies from advertising on television - despite the fact that the films are dubbed into French anyway. Perhaps the decline of French as a diplomatic language has more to do with the decline of France as a world power. If it weren't for the Yanks, we'd all be speaking - well you know the rest.
 The Scandinavians are planning to ban advertising targeted at children. Santa may be seeking alternative employment next Christmas once Swedish children instantly forget their love of toys. Never mind. He can always console himself with a silly bottle of Swedish vodka once the Russians finally give up drinking the stuff.
 
 Gareth Brown is managing director of Initiative Media in Moscow. He contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.

TITLE: Why Is It Called 'Intelligence?'
AUTHOR: By Pavel Felgenhauer
TEXT: LAST week FBI agent Robert Philip Hanssen was arrested in the United States and charged with spying for the Soviet Union and Russia for the last 15 years. A spokesman for Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, Boris Labusov, told Russian State Television: &quot;We never comment on whether any specific person has or does not have relations with Russian special services.&quot; While speaking Labusov noticeably smirked and added that &quot;the greatest achievements of intelligence services become public knowledge only after an exposure.&quot;
 If Russian officials are trying to hide their alleged connection with Hanssen, they are doing a pretty lousy job of it. In fact, they seem to be quite proud of the idea that they had such an agent.
 In the '80s and '90s, the Russians apparently managed to operate two highly successful moles, one in the FBI and one in the CIA: Hanssen and Aldrich Ames. Moscow obtained quite a lot of sensitive information from Ames and, allegedly, from Hanssen as well. It's also virtually certain that Ames and Hanssen were not the only well-placed moles that Russia had in the West. Soviet intelligence was not only highly professional, but also remarkably successful. So why then did Moscow lose the Cold War?
 A retired Russian intelligence official once told me that in the late '70s, Russian military intelligence managed to acquire a package of highly secret documents revealing the true maximum production capacity of all U.S. heavy-arms-making industrial plants. It turned out that the United States could not grossly expand tank and other heavy-weapons production even if the economy were put on a war footing and that the Soviet Union had a towering advantage in this field.
 The spies who came up with this important intelligence were expecting bunches of medals, but were harshly reprimanded by their superiors instead. The documents were suppressed by the military chiefs and never reported to the Politburo.
 The Soviet military-industrial chiefs were at that time conjuring a massive Western military threat in order to frighten the Kremlin into spending more on defense. They were deliberately fabricating yarns about U.S. military might and did not need any true information about American weaknesses.
 The same thing was happening on the other side of the Cold War divide. At the end of the '80s, the CIA estimated Soviet gross domestic product as almost 60 percent of America's. The agency portrayed Moscow not only as a military superpower - which it was in many aspects - but also as a modern industrial power, which it was not. As a result of such intelligence, the sudden political, military and industrial implosion of the Soviet empire came as a total surprise to the West.
 Throughout the Cold War, both countries spent billions of dollars recruiting moles that were used to find and &quot;neutralize&quot; enemy moles, while truly important information was shoved aside as insignificant.
 In 1995, for instance, the CIA produced a report that stated that no &quot;rogue&quot; state could develop intercontinental ballistic missiles within 15 years, and that if a threat of rogue ICBMs did develop, U.S. intelligence would detect it years in advance.
 This report disturbed many Washington decision makers, so Congress formed a special commission headed by Donald Rumsfeld, who is now secretary of defense. The purpose of this commission was to conjure a rogue ICBM threat out of thin air. In 1999, the Rumsfeld commission concluded that &quot;North Korea and Iran will have an ICBM force to attack the U.S. in five years&quot; and Iraq will have an ICBM force ready to attack the U.S. in 10 years or sooner.
 Now, almost two years later, it's obvious that the Rumsfeld report is a sham and that the original CIA estimates are correct. But who cares? Rumsfeld was appointed defense secretary because he is a good apparatchik who knows that the truth is whatever the party says it is.
 For almost a year now, the Moscow elite has been anticipating, in accordance with intelligence reports, that the new Bush administration would be Russia's best friend no matter what happened here. 
 At the same time, the West is still waiting for President Vla dimir Putin to reveal himself as the true liberal that he must be at heart. 
 By now, though, both East and West must have disappointedly returned to the drawing board to think up new policies - which no doubt are based on the latest reports of their respective intelligence services.
 
 Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent, Moscow-based defense analyst.

TITLE: Polluted Pardon Process Continued by Clinton
AUTHOR: By Robert Reno
TEXT: SEVERAL reasons come to mind to suggest the Clinton pardon scandals are hysterically overblown: 
 a) Marc Rich's indictment was an overreach typical of so many of the grandstanding prosecutions to come out of Rudy Giuliani's office when he was U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. 
 b) Still-pending civil actions against Rich are sufficient to make sure he does not go unpunished. 
 c) If the clownish Rep. Dan Burton is investigating anything, you know it's going to be done in a shifty, partisan manner. 
 d) This scandal is just the final gasp of the drooling Clinton haters, a bunch of rabies victims getting in one last bite. 
 e) Clinton's impulse to pardon merely reveals a Southern Baptist's overdeveloped sense of the concept of redemption. 
 f) None of the above. 
 The correct answer, of course, is f. The real reason the scandal is exaggerated is that the pardon process became hopelessly polluted years ago when President Richard Nixon was triumphantly re-elected in 1972 in spite of having freed Jimmy Hoffa, who until 1971 was doing 13 years stuffing mattresses at Lewisburg Penitentiary. Long before Nixon gave his enemies hope of impeachment, before we learned of his multiple constitutional atrocities or before the Watergate break-in, his shameless commutation of Hoffa's sentence gave warning of crimes to come. 
 So numerous were Nixon's offenses and so extensively were they tape-recorded that they required another great offense - a blanket pardon by President Gerald Ford so broad that if subsequent tapes had revealed Nixon practiced human torture in White House basements, he might still have been home free. 
 In freeing Hoffa, who was three times rejected for parole, Nixon opened a door that emboldened subsequent presidents to politicize pardons. Hoffa wasn't just a man with a long and convincing history of suborning violence and corruption. He was the one major labor leader who could be counted on to show favor to Republican candidates. The Clinton pardons are merely the logical and squalid progression of this madness. 
 Along the way there was President Ronald Reagan's pardon of FBI agents who acted illegally and his forgiveness of the felony sins of George Steinbrenner, who'd been rejected for a pardon by Jimmy Carter.
 The stench arising from George Bush's 1992 pardon of the Iran-contra gang was as foul as any. These were public officials, sworn upholders of the constitution. They were pardoned before many of them could even go to a trial where the pardoner himself, George Bush, might have had to testify about the most embarrassing secrets of his presidency. For some of us, no presidential pardon would ever have much shock value after this.
 
 Robert Reno is a columnist for Newsday, where this comment originally appeared.

TITLE: Putin Should Follow Up On Adamov
TEXT: THE State Duma's anti-corruption commission has made some serious allegations that Nuclear Power Minister Yevgeny Adamov has been involved in activities that amount to an impermissable abuse of power.
 Among other things, the report alleges that a U.S.-based company called Omeka Ltd., which Adamov headed, annually supplies $50,000 worth of computer equipment to a secret energy technologies institute, NIKIET, that Adamov used to run. It goes on to allege that Omeka purchased a $200,000 house for Adamov in Pittsburgh.
 The report also said the General Prosecutor's Office is investigating allegations that NIKIET violated regulations governing ties with Iran, and may have been involved in unauthorized contacts related to weapons of mass destruction.
 And in December 1998, the report says, the state nuclear regulatory body Gosatomnadzor complained to then-Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov that &quot;all of the recent lay-offs and appointments in the [Nuclear Power] Ministry ... fail to ensure safe and stable operation of nuclear power plants.&quot; That is to say, Adamov appointed people without experience to key posts in his ministry.
 In short, the commission alleges corruption, cronyism, conflict of interest and breaches of national security.
 Such charges are troubling for any minister, but they merit even more serious attention when leveled against one who is talking about earning billions of dollars in revenues by importing spent nuclear fuel into a country barely capable of dealing with its own radioactive waste - and who is working hard to sideline Gosatomnadzor so that it can't monitor the plan. If Adamov is to control the flow of money earned from the imports, his record must be irreproachable. In fact, his record must be irreproachable for him to carry out any duties as nuclear power minister.
 Adamov has denied the allegations and branded them politically motivated. While this is possible, it is not the point. The point is whether or not the charges are true.
 President Vladimir Putin is to be sent a copy of the commission's report. His course of action seems clear. He should request all the evidence on which the commission bases its claims and ensure that the matter is aggressively investigated. He should personally and publicly request Adamov to cooperate fully with the inquiry.
 If the report is substantiated, then Putin must seek a new nuclear power minister. If it is not, Adamov will be vindicated.
 Until then, since the country's national security and a significant chunk of its finances - not to mention the environment - are at stake, Putin should insist that Adamov step down until the investigation is completed.

TITLE: East and West: Face to Face
AUTHOR: By Gregory Feifer
TEXT: AS the Bush administration develops a harder-line policy toward Russia - a move that threatens to substitute greater prejudice for more objective analysis - some observers have argued that Western analysts are guilty of hypocrisy stemming from Russophobia.
 Among the most prominent accusers is Anatol Lieven, who -in a recent article in the World Policy Journal - condemns Western observers for using double standards in their criticism of Russia. Lieven charges foreigners with unfairly censuring Russia while failing to acknowledge similar problems in their own countries. To rectify that situation, he says, the Soviet collapse in general and the Chechen war in particular must be seen &quot;in the context of European and North American imperialism, decolonization and neocolonialism.&quot;
 But in his appeal against Russophobia - a blanket psychological disorder afflicting such scholars as Richard Pipes and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who have in fact contributed much insight into Russian history and politics in their respective specialties - Lieven commits the cardinal mistake of failing to take his own advice.
 Comparative study of history and politics is usually valuable for outlining differences rather than similarities. Perhaps nowhere is that clearer than in the case of Russia and Western Europe. Unlike Western countries, Russia never had a Renaissance. It never experienced Enlightenment. It didn't even have feudalism in the Western sense.
 In fact, Russian political culture is genuinely unique, the product of a highly successful practice of preserving the stability of political elites through a system of closed, conspiratorial rule in which many outward institutions and policies have obscured the real goings-on. As Harvard Professor Edward Keenan argues, that system arose in medieval Muscovy, and remains essentially unchanged today. Even Soviet communism was a uniquely Russian product; the post-1930 regime mirrored the tsarist state in many telling ways. 
 Indeed, the debate over whether Russia is Western or Eastern is moot because it is neither. Rather, the Russian political system has been very good at adopting outside influences and using them to perpetuate its own traditional practices.
 If Western observers are guilty of anything, it's the opposite of Lieven's accusation. Over the last decade, many have given Russia credit for an ability to change because they've looked at Russian policy and institutions from a Western-centric perspective. While some change did seem possible during the Yeltsin years, it has been clear for some time that Russia is going back to its basics - a practice that usually ensues after a period of instability such as the Soviet breakup.
 Witness the brief furor - before it became clear that it would result in nothing - over the arrest earlier this year in New York of former Kremlin household affairs manager Pavel Borodin, accused of accepting bribes from Swiss-based construction firms. 
 The matter shot to the top of Moscow's agenda. Nationalist Liberal Democratic Party ideologue Alexei Mitrofanov claimed Pal Palych - Borodin - should be released because he holds special status. &quot;He knows the wiring in every Kremlin office,&quot; Mitrofanov said in televised comments.
 Russian prosecutors then backed away from similar claims and toward another line of argument. That case was put forth by &quot;businessman&quot; Sergei Mikhailov, who reasoned that Borodin should be released not because he's special, but because he's &quot;one of us.&quot;
 Mikhailov, known as Mikhas, is notorious as an alleged criminal gang leader, and his stated views would be laughable if they weren't so widespread. Security Council chief Sergei Ivanov put the matter as an affront to Russian chest, or honor. Such remarks are telling. For centuries, honor has been a consideration of utmost importance for Russia's political elites. Accordingly, Moscow sees Borodin's arrest not as a matter of rule of law and standard legal procedure, but as a case of honor, because, as Mikhailov said, Borodin's &quot;one of us.&quot;
 Borodin has immunity in Russia because, despite his demotion last year, he's still an honorary member of the ruling political oligarchy with knowledge of the Kremlin's secrets. A key member of Yeltsin's coterie, Borodin was also responsible for bringing President Vladimir Putin to Moscow from St. Petersburg in 1996. If such a personage can be arrested, then any official with government protection would be under threat. 
 In these myth-spinning times, it's becoming wondrous that any dissent is possible at all. That it still is was demonstrated last week when a small group of Muscovites gathered in Pushkin Square to protest the Chechen war. The meeting, the first of its kind in recent times, was not reported on the evening television news shows that night, not even on still-independent NTV. 
 Some reporters did go to a news conference announcing the event earlier in the week where a reporter for Kommersant, once the country's most respected newspaper, angrily and loudly denounced a group of human rights advocates for daring to propose immediate negotiations with Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov. Reporters for Smi.ru and Ren-TV joined in. &quot;The Chechen disease has to be exorcised,&quot; the Kommersant reporter hissed. &quot;One side had to win.&quot; It's these kinds of spreading attitudes - in this case, a deliberate antagonism toward dissenters - that sets the country apart from the West, and Lieven fails to acknowledge that.
 Talk about phobias: Mainstream politicians fan the discontent by routinely calling for the arrest of United States citizens, saying the West in general and the United States in particular are threats to Russian security.
 Of late, most of the threats and insults that fly between Moscow and Washington have originated in the former, not the latter. That doesn't mean the Bush administration should perpetuate old antagonisms by confirming Moscow's accusations and stooping to counterproductive hard-line displays such as U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's recent snubbing of the Security Council's Ivanov in Munich. Still, that doesn't answer the larger question. 
 A truly comparative view of Russian history and politics - that Lieven rightly advocates - shows that the West should do a lot more to address the Kremlin's current behavior. 
 That's not Russophobia. That's the promotion of values such as democracy that all Russian citizens deserve to enjoy.
 
 Gregory Feifer is a Moscow-based fellow at the U.S. Institute of Current World Affairs. He contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.

TITLE: Is Zhivilo Just A Victim of Circumstances?
TEXT: THE last victim of Russia's &quot;Alumi num Wars,&quot; Mikhail Zhivilo, has been arrested in Paris. He is accused of observing Russia's traditions, i.e. he attempted to take revenge against those who stole his factories from him. Or, in translation from feudal terms to legal ones, he is accused of &quot;planning the assassination of Kemerovo Governor Aman Tuleyev.&quot;
 Before 1999, the Zhivilo brothers were the most influential businessmen in the Kuzbass region of western Siberia. They controlled the Novokuznetsk Aluminum Plant and considerable coal reserves. They were such close friends with the governor that in 1997 Tuleyev handed over to them the bankrupt Kuznets Metallurgical Plant, which had already been thoroughly pillaged by its previous managers.
 In 1999, the brothers and Tuleyev quarreled. Tuleyev learned that the brothers were plotting to replace him. Instead of Tuleyev's Communists, the Zhivilo brothers had decided to back Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov's Fatherland movement. 
 Tuleyev, for his part, turned to Oleg Deripaska's Siberian Aluminum, which was connected with the Kremlin. Soon thereafter, Tuleyev received a $50 million credit from Moscow. 
 In a nutshell, Siberian Aluminum paid Tuleyev for control of several local factories not belonging to Tuleyev. And they did it with government money! 
 As soon as this arrangement was consummated, it was discovered that the Novokuznetsk Aluminum Plant had long been paying for its prodigious electricity consumption at specially reduced rates. Deripaska's lawyers, on behalf of Anatoly Chubais' Unified Energy Systems, immediately filed suit to recover $30 million, which bankrupted the company. 
 In the end, Chubais handed over this plant - which did not belong to him - to Deripaska, in exchange for money to which he had no right (since Unified Energy Systems had voluntarily granted the original discounts). But the funniest bit is that Chubais never even got the money. Because the suits were filed by Siberian Aluminum on Chubais' behalf, Deripaska's lawyers were able to divert all the judgments to Siberian Aluminum companies. 
 About this time, the forsaken Mikhail Zhivilo, it is alleged, decided to take his revenge. But since killers as a rule don't like &quot;forsaken&quot; people and since Siberian Aluminum was so closely tied to the Kremlin, it was probably inevitable that the hitmen he hired would run immediately to the FSB. 
 Around the same time, three offshore companies thought to be linked to Zhivilo filed a $2.7 billion suit against Siberian Aluminum in a U.S. court, hoping that American justice would not mind that Zhivilo was &quot;forsaken.&quot; In his petition, Zhivilo alleges that Oleg Deripaska threatened him through an infamous local mobster.
 According to Zhivilo, his heart froze when he heard the mobster's voice, although it is difficult to understand why if you credit the accusations leveled against Zhivilo in Paris. According to the charges, he didn't exactly try to send Tuleyev a singing telegram. 
 Now we are waiting for a U.S. court to decide if Deripaska threatened Zhivilo and for a French court to decide whether Zhivilo threatened Tuleyev.
 But it seems to me that this is the same as asking some Western court to condemn some wild South Pacific cannibals for headhunting. They wouldn't have any idea what they were being accused of. After all, they were just following their own national traditions.
 
 Yulia Latynina is a journalist for ORT.

TITLE: Misleading Dubbing is A Tortuous Experience
AUTHOR: By Masha Kaminskaya
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: &quot;What?!! What did he say? How the hell... Oh Christ!&quot;
 For somebody who knows a foreign language, yelling is the safest way to watch &quot;imported&quot; dubbed movies without smashing the TV to pieces. 
 If you've ever had the luck to see your best hopes of anticipation turn into worst nightmares of disappointment, I can bet my philologist's diploma you have had experiences such as watching your beloved Kevin Spacey talk like Schwarzenegger when he was learning to say &quot;I'll be back&quot; in English. Or you've heard somebody offer a buddy &quot;Ty - chelovek!&quot; (You're a man) instead of a not so obvious &quot;Yo man!&quot; If anything, such experiences make you crave for a commercial break.
 You will find that the famous &quot;For he's a jolly good fellow&quot; - addressed to an obvious monster - has become &quot;He's so handsome that nobody can refuse him,&quot; and that when Woody Harrelson awkwardly confesses that he has been drinking for the past twenty years and is asked by a reporter if he still is, the mystifying answer comes as &quot;Nyet, a ty kupilsya?&quot; (No, did you buy it?) - instead of his ever-ready &quot;No, are you buying?&quot;
 Agatha Christie would have gone nuts had she ever seen the adaptation of one of her most dramatic novels as dubbed by a ... well, sedated Russian voice, which reaches its climax of sleepiness at the very moment when a character rushes into a room, screaming: &quot;Here's your nutpie... running around with a gun, threatening to kill father!&quot; Now a shudder shakes me awake as I hear: &quot;Tam vash pirog s orekhami strelyat' sobirayetsya!&quot; (Your pie with a nut filling is about to shoot!). 
 Hmm. The audience must have concluded that for the Brits food terms are favored derogatives, and the translation was just an attempt to save the scene's national specifics.
 Well, this country's national specifics are such that a translator's job pays less than enough to buy a concise dictionary of English slang. I have first-hand experience here, and I tell you that neither my feminist stance nor aesthetic approach were the paramount reasons why I quit translating Australian porno for NTV+ a couple of years ago. 
 So you can understand how berserk I went over the following tear-jerking scene: A final episode closing up on a mother (a detective with extrasensory abilities, who tracks down serial murderers in the serial &quot;The Profile of a Killer&quot;) and her daughter, who failed to tell mommy something very important. The girl is crying and asking her mother &quot;please don't be mad at me.&quot; 
 Mommy's English voice: &quot;It's all right, honey ... I'm not mad.&quot; Russian voice: &quot;Vsyo v po ryadke, doch ka ... Ya v svoyom ume.&quot; (It's OK, I'm not insane.)
 They both drown in tears. So does the Russian audience, perhaps assuming they had missed the moment when mommy was released from the loony bin. So do I, mourning over the ruined show, the fooled audience and the poor translators who must have been too mad - in either sense - over their miserable earnings to bother whether or not their version fit the bounds of human reason.

TITLE: Moving Home: From Communal to Costly
AUTHOR: By Tom Masters
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: How does a two-room apartment just off Nevsky Prospect for $65 a month sound? What about a three-bedroom pad on the Neva for $3,000 a month? Depending on where and how you look, how quickly you need to rent and what length of time you are willing to sign a lease for, apartments in St. Petersburg come for all budgets, down to a less than $20 a month for a room in a communal apartment. Indeed, many companies can organize short-term rents in just hours, although without a doubt you pay a huge premium for the ease. There are two main ways to find a place to live: through agencies and through acquaintances - the latter of which, if an option, is often the easiest.
 
 <strong>GOING LOCAL
 </strong>Whether or not this is actually still the case, received wisdom has it that without a large number of Russian friends, your best recourse for finding a Russian-priced apartment is the weekly Iz Ruk v Ruki (From Hand to Hand) published every Wednesday. Unfortunately, what began as a newspaper for individuals has become almost entirely dominated by down-market property agencies, whose advertisements give the impression that they were placed by individuals. This can been especially frustrating as the 36-square-meter apartment on a quiet street near Gos tiny Dvor for $45 per month is always suspiciously unavailable, no matter how early on a Wednesday morning you call.
 If you are confined to the lower financial brackets and do not have a large number of Russian friends, you will have to be prepared to deal with these infuriating agencies, which essentially sell leads rather than assist an individual to find an abode. Their rather unusual system involves pre-payment on the part of the client, albeit of a relatively small sum, usually in the region of 300 to 500 rubles ($10-18). However, the price of apartment hunting can swiftly accumulate when you employ more than one agency, which unless you are not planning to relocate for a very long time, will probably be the best idea.
 As well as pre-payment, be prepared to sign an agreement &quot;for information services&quot; (soglashenie na okazanie informatsionnikh uslug), for which you will need your passport. This may seem a scam - indeed it often is, as there is no chance of a refund if an apartment is not found - but among these rather basic establishments this is the absolute norm. 
 Once the agreement is signed, you will be given the contact telephone number of the apartment you have expressed an interest in and allotted certain times to call the agency if the initial apartment doesn't work out.
 By the terms of the agreement, the agency is obliged to supply you with information (usually over the following two months) until you have found an apartment.
 Were it that simple. Two such agencies approached by The St. Petersburg Times gave out telephone numbers to the two apartments we had expressed an interest in renting. Neither one once picked up the telephone, despite being called for an entire week. Returning to the agency, instead of centrally located, cheap apartments, we were given an enormous list of apartments at the far end of metro lines, most of which, when called, had been rented already. 
 As neither agency had any further apartments on their books, they assured us they would be in touch as soon as they had some new clients in the city center. Suffice to say, we have yet to hear back from them. A third agency was so resolutely unhelpful (and consisted of an entirely empty room with nothing but a desk and telephone in it) that we did not even bother to sign up. There are a huge number of these agencies and better ones will advise you to avoid them if you have the means.
 
 <strong>THE ELITE MARKET
 </strong>People earning good salaries have the far easier option of employing a more up-market agency. These agencies will cost more (the standard fee is equivalent to one month's rent), but because this is paid only at the conclusion of a contract, you are at least guaranteed an apartment for your outlay. During the search the agencies are far more helpful and work as fast as possible, often able to meet you within hours for viewing appointments.
 They are all very used to dealing with foreigners and all agents have at least basic English. While many of these agencies are markedly expensive, there are several that will deal with a range of apartments. The very top agencies, companies such as Pulford, Nevsky Prostor, K-Keskus and the Jensen Group, tend to deal with what are termed &quot;elite&quot; apartments. Complete with &quot;eurostandard,&quot; which tends to suggest a trend towards more minimalist European design as well as modern fittings, the lowest starting prices in the center of town are about $400 per month, from where prices rise sharply and apartments often feature true luxury.
 A pricey alternative is the out-of-town Dubravy Properties, a housing estate that would probably look far less incongruous in St. Petersburg, Florida, than it does in St. Petersburg, Russia. While the price is prohibitive for non-executives ($4,790 per month), these are homes away from home for some Westerners - highly secure, clean and boasting all mod-cons, the site is designed for foreigners with children and even has a playground and shop.
 Signing the lease (dogovor) to an apartment will be overseen by the agent, and often the non-legally binding documents simply set out the terms of the rental contract for both parties. If a legally binding lease is necessary, it will need to be signed in the presence of a notary (notarius). This costs a few hundred rubles and is relatively simple.You will need to submit an officially translated copy of your passport, your Russian visa, your landlord's passport, the apartment's privatization document and the lease itself. Once a lease is signed and notarized, you may register yourself at the address with the OVIR.
 The undoubted advantage of an agent is that they take care of such paperwork and can mediate in cases of dispute between landlord (naymodatel) and tenant (nanimatel).
 Of course, if you find an apartment privately and are not well acquainted with the landlord, then safety becomes an issue, especially in cases when a un-notarized lease or - as is often the case - no lease at all exists between landlord and tenant.
 As a rule of thumb, there should be an agreement that the landlord not enter the apartment without the tenant's permission as well as agreeing in advance who pays rates charges for gas and electricity.
 Moreover, common sense is the best protection against unreliable agencies. Trust your instincts when you visit them, look to see whether they are licensed and whether they have many customers. While in the minority, those that simply want your money and have no real intentions of finding you an apartment do definitely exist.
 However you end up finding an apartment, an element of compromise is nearly always necessary. Unless your local contacts are very strong, you will find yourself either paying somewhat over the odds to find a place quickly and easily, or the process will be more drawn out, more frustrating but cheaper.

TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: Bridge Collapses
 

CASTELO DE PAIVA, Portugal (Reuters) - A Portuguese road bridge collapsed into a river on Sunday, a bus packed with day-trippers plunging into the fast-flowing water and killing about 70 people.
 Only one body has so far been recovered after the bus, believed to be carrying 67 local people on a day-trip, plummeted into the surging Douro river just outside Castelo de Paiva town about 30 km east of Portugal's second city, Oporto.
 Two cars also tumbled into the river. It was not known how many people they carried, but some residents suggested there could have been as many as nine people.
 
 
Bomb Strikes BBC
 

LONDON (AP) - A powerful bomb blamed by police on IRA dissidents went off early Sunday outside the British Broadcasting Corp.'s television center. One man was hurt.
 Britain was on high alert against new attacks following the blast, which Prime Minister Tony Blair denounced as a "cowardly act." He said it would not deter peace efforts in Northern Ireland.
 No group claimed responsibility for the bombing, but Scotland Yard blamed defectors from the Irish Republican Army, which has observed a cease-fire since 1997. 
 
 
Shooting in Kosovo
 

DEBELDE, Yugoslavia (Reuters) - Heavy firing broke out on Monday between Macedonian security forces and ethnic Albanian guerrillas occupying a village just inside Macedonia.
 U.S. soldiers deployed across the border in Kosovo in the village of Debelde - as part of the NATO-led peacekeeping force KFOR - escorted a group of journalists to a point on a hill where they were able to overlook the Macedonian village, Tanusevci.
 The reporters saw about a dozen armed men presumed to be ethnic Albanians taking positions on a rock near Tanusevci, and then saw firing begin. As the U.S. soldiers escorted them away, they heard heavy firing from both sides.
 Macedonian generals held talks overnight with members of KFOR to plan how to clear the gunmen from Tanusevci after three Macedonian soldiers were killed there on Sunday. 
 
 
Animal Disease Spreads
 

LONDON (AP) - The foot-and-mouth disease that has swept the United Kingdom was detected in France on Sunday, where some sheep imported from Britain tested positive for the highly contagious ailment.
 Belgium shut down its two largest zoos and Denmark quarantined seven farms in a bid to ward off the livestock disease.
 In Britain and Northern Ireland, 69 separate outbreaks have been reported. About 45,000 animals - sheep, cows and pigs - have been destroyed in an effort to stop the ailment from spreading.
 
 
Hajj Stampede Kills 35
 

MINA, Saudi Arabia (AP) - A stampede broke out Monday during the annual hajj pilgrimage, killing 35 Muslims during the symbolic stoning of the devil ritual, the official Saudi Press Agency reported. 
 The news agency said 23 women and 12 men were killed and an unknown number of people were injured. 
 Security and safety have been major concerns at the hajj, as nearly 2 million Muslims from all over the world completed the annual pilgrimage that is a pillar of the Islamic faith. 
 The hajj, which began this weekend, must be performed once in a lifetime by every Muslim who is able to do so. 
 
 
Israel Braces for Attacks
 

JERUSALEM (AP) - Israeli troops killed a Palestinian in an overnight shootout, and Israeli police went on high alert Monday, concentrating on preventing Palestinian militant attacks after the latest deadly bombing. 
 Prime Minister-elect Ariel Sharon stood poised to assume power this week with the pledge to restore security to Israel after more than five months of fighting with the Palestinians. 
 Sharon reached agreement with the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party on Sunday and now has enough support for a majority coalition government. He was expected to present his government to parliament this week, and would take office if the coalition wins approval. 
 Sharon's most urgent task will be dealing with the escalating violence. 
 
 
Thai PM Target?
 

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) - The blast that destroyed a jetliner just before Thailand's prime minister was due to board over the weekend was caused by a bomb that included sophisticated plastic explosives, the defense minister said Monday.
 It was still too early to be sure the bomb targeted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, the minister said.
 The blast Saturday ripped through the floor and ceiling of the Thai Airways Boeing 737-400 and left a big hole in the tarmac of Bangkok airport.
 The plane exploded into flames 35 minutes before Thaksin and 148 other passengers were due to fly from Bangkok to the northern city of Chiang Mai. One cabin crew member was killed and seven other airline staff injured. No passengers had boarded the plane when the bomb went off.
 
 
Mozambique Floods
 

BEIRA, Mozambique (Reuters) - Portuguese navy boats joined South African helicopters Sunday in ferrying food and medicine to Mozambicans stranded by slowly rising floodwaters and packed into overcrowded refugee camps.
 Many peasant farmers continued to resist transfer from their submerged mud and thatch homesteads to camps set up by Western aid agencies.
 The deluge, caused by heavy seasonal rains in southern Africa, has so far killed 52 people and displaced almost 80,000 in the central Zambezi valley.
 
 
Cocaine Bust at Sea
 

SAN DIEGO (Reuters) - The U.S. Coast Guard on Sunday said it had seized about 8.8 tons of cocaine with a street value of more than $500 million from a fishing vessel off Mexico, marking the fourth largest cocaine seizure at sea.
 Coast Guard officials found the drugs in a hidden compartment under fish and ice.
 Officials said 10 crew members were detained in the high-seas arrest made about 460 kilometers southwest of Acapulco, Mexico.
 The seizure brings the total amount of cocaine seized by the Coast Guard this year to over 26.4 tons. In 2000, the Coast Guard set a record for cocaine seizures, capturing just over 68.3 tons, officials said. 



TITLE: Japan PM Survives No-Confidence Vote
AUTHOR: By Joseph Coleman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TOKYO - Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori survived his second no-confidence vote in parliament on Monday, but pressure for him to go was unabated from opponents and even some allies worried over his dismal public support.
 The lower house of parliament voted 274-192 to defeat the no-confidence motion submitted earlier in the day by four opposition parties. Mori, whose Liberal Democrats hold a majority in the chamber, defeated a similar measure in November.
 The vote gave Mori's enfeebled government a respite, but it was expected to be brief. Speculation was rife that he could step down as soon as this week as the LDP readies for its annual party convention March 13 and searches for a successor.
 Mori showed no signs of backing down soon, saying he considered the vote a victory. 
 &quot;Doesn't that mean that the cabinet is trusted?&quot; he asked reporters. &quot;Doesn't that mean that I must continue working responsibly?&quot;
 The sharply worded debate on the motion in Parliament was further humiliation for a prime minister whose support ratings have fallen to under 10 percent.
 Since he took office in April 2000, Mori has been embroiled in several scandals, ranging from allegations of personal misconduct to comments recalling the militarism of pre-1945 Japan.
 The three-party coalition led by the LDP, in turn, criticized the opposition for paralyzing the government with political jockeying and distracting officials from pressing national issues, such as the economy.
 The political quagmire comes at a tough time for Japan. Stock prices have fallen to a 15-year low, unemployment is at a record high, and officials are worried about signs that recovery from a decade-long slowdown may have stalled.
 The LDP is worried that Mori's unpopularity could severely damage it in upper house elections coming up in July, and it is eager to find a more popular replacement. The party is in the minority in the chamber and controls it only with the cooperation of coalition partners.
 An especially poor showing by the LDP in July could strengthen an expected campaign by the opposition to push for snap elections in the more powerful lower house.
 The dearth of support for Mori in his own camp was plain on Monday. Takenori Kanzaki, leader of the New Komeito Party, a key LDP coalition partner, said a defeat of the motion did not mean support for Mori. 
 In a joint statement Monday explaining the no-confidence motion, opposition parties blamed Mori for the country's troubles, criticized him for a series of scandals that have tarnished his one-year administration, and called his leadership &quot;confused.&quot;
 Mori narrowly survived a no-confidence motion in November after members of his own party who had threatened to vote against him backed down under intense last-minute pressure.

TITLE: Voodoo the Key to Benin Vote
AUTHOR: By Ellen Knickmeyer
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: COTONOU, Benin - They're waiting for a white dove to land on someone's shoulder this weekend in the West African nation of Benin, or for the right ray of light to illuminate the right man at the right time.
 Oh, and they're also voting for president, on Sunday. 
 By coincidence, both the nation's top political post and top religious post are open at once. The death last month of 89-year-old Sossa Guedehoungue, president of the official National Community of Voodoo, compelled Benin to search for a new leader of the traditional religion at the same time it picks the head of its body politic.
 Benin gave the world both voodoo and West Africa's first democratic transfer of power, in 1991 - but Voodoo came long before.
 So don't look for chiefs of the centuries-old tradition of voodoo to give the country's decade-old bout with the ballot box a try.
 &quot;Voting is a modern notion, an imported notion,&quot; said Erick Vidjin Agnih Gbodossou, president of an International Association of Voodoo, in town from Senegal.
 &quot;In democracies, someone who has money can use it to win,&quot; Gbodossou said, speaking in a National Community of Voodoo compound and clinic in Benin's commercial capital of Cotonou, as followers spoke softly into cell phones and something out in the courtyard squealed sharply and then stopped. 
 At least 60 percent of Benin's 6.3 million people practice Voodoo. The tradition holds, in part, that life derives from the natural forces of earth, water, fire and air.
 Countless Africans shipped into slavery from this lagoon-lined strip of the south Atlantic, then called the Slave Coast, took the legacy of Voodoo with them to the Caribbean, the American South, and elsewhere.
 White outsiders, intent on supplanting Voodoo with their own religions, depicted it as something &quot;barbaric&quot; and &quot;negative,&quot; Gbodossou said - hence the zombies and pin-skewered voodoo dolls of Hollywood.
 Benin President Mathieu Kerekou, seeking re-election, devoted part of Friday's day of campaigning to a rally in the village of Ouidah, the cradle of Voodoo.
 The 68-year-old Kerekou circled the meeting ground of the fetish-strewn village in a green baseball cap and a smile, against a cacophony provided by Ouidah's young men pounding drums and shaking beer cans full of rocks.
 Kerekou initially tried to stamp out Voodoo when he ruled Benin as a Marxist dictator for 18 years during the Cold War.
 He lost the country's first presidential elections in 1991, angering him so that he placed a Voodoo curse on the office. He conceded the loss, nonetheless, and since then has been vying with top rival Nicephore Soglo for power - and the Voodoo vote.
 Soglo, a former World Bank administrator, made Jan. 10 National Voodoo Day in Benin after defeating Kerekou in the 1991 election.
 Kerekou won the office back in 1996. Sunday, it's Soglo's turn again as challenger, among 16 other contenders.
 Talk in the closing days of the current campaign had Kerekou putting a magic powder in the water system to somehow help his re-election bid.
 Some of Soglo's supporters, meanwhile, feared a repeat of 1991, when what they took to be a curse caused Soglo to fall ill after his election. &quot;We are very afraid of it happening again,&quot; said Agoli Agbo Didier, a 30-year-old teacher.
 And as voodoo plays into Benin's politics, Benin's politics play into voodoo. Benin set up the National Voodoo Bureau in the 1990s, with Guedehoungue picked as its president in a state-sanctioned process among leaders of the various Voodoo sects.
 One, Daagbo Hounon of Ouidah, boycotted the state selection. Hounon, who traces his lineage all the way back to the 15th-century voodoo chief Dodo, says the position of Benin Voodoo leader is his by birthright.
 Guedehoungue's death on Jan. 27 opened the government-approved Voodoo post.
 After assisting in the Voodoo president's Feb. 25 burial, the bureau's vice president spent the closing days of the national presidential campaign last week stumping for Kerekou.
 Timing in the other selection - National Voodoo Bureau president - is a matter of waiting for signs, said Gbodossou, the international Voodoo chief.
 The decision could be a matter of a white dove coming to one of the Voodoo leaders, for example, &quot;or a special light that shines specially on one person,&quot; he said.
 In the dirt-road village of Ouidah, meanwhile, the 78-year-old Hounon sits straight-backed in a concrete-floored temple lined with earth-toned murals of his predecessors, starting with Dodo.
 Hounon stayed out of the politicking for the nation's presidency, backing no candidate, just as he stayed out of the politicking for the national Voodoo post.
 &quot;Voodoo is not an association. It does not have rallies. It does not have a president,&quot; said young follower Dati Towadan Hounon, kneeling at the traditional Voodoo leader's feet and speaking for him.
 &quot;Voodoo is not a democracy. Voodoo is a religion.&quot;

TITLE: Pride of Grozny: The Revival of a Soccer Club
TEXT: For more than 40 years Terek, Chechnya's first professional soccer team, was the republic's pride within the Soviet league. Some of the finest players came from Grozny, an area better known for its violence than for its love of sports. But after a seven-year hiatus, during which Chechnya suffered two wars, the soccer team is back - even if they are not playing on their own turf. <strong>Kevin O'Flynn </strong>went to Kislovodsk to track the progress of the revived club.
 
 Their stadium is destroyed, their best players haven't hit the field in years and their home games will take place hundreds of kilometers away from their native republic, but Terek Grozny, the Chechen soccer team, is making a comeback.
 Seven years and two violent wars have past since Terek last played in the Russian football league. In 1994 the Chechen side left the league as political relations between the Kremlin and the breakaway republic grew increasingly tense. The situation in Grozny today may still be too unstable to welcome back their star soccer team, but the game must go on. Last week the team was accepted back into the league, and it will play its first game in the southern zone of the Russian second division in early April.
 For now, home ground for Terek will be in Cherkessk, capital of the Kabarachayevo-Cherkessia republic. There are, however, plans to play at least one game back in their old stadium: Dinamo Moscow has tentatively agreed to come down to Grozny for a friendly match on May 9, Victory Day.
 &quot;Everyone has waited for this day,&quot; said midfielder Timur Dzhabrailov after a training session at the team's camp just outside Kislovodsk in the Stavropol territory. 
 &quot;The return of sports is a priority in Chechnya,&quot; said Shamil Beno, the Moscow representative of the Chechen government, which has provided nearly $1.5 million in funding to restore Terek. &quot;Sports in the life of Chechnya is on the same level as bread and ideology.&quot;
 One of Terek's star players of the 1980s, Khaidar Alkhanov, has been the driving force behind the club's comeback in his new role as Chechen sports minister. (Alkhanov is also, rather optimistically, the tourism minister, but he dryly adds that as yet &quot;there is no tourism.&quot;)
 Since last November, Alkhanov has gathered a squad of 23 players, most of whom are either veterans of the previous Terek or who trained at the Grozny soccer school, one of the best in the Caucasus.
 Among them is Dzhabrailov, who left his previous club Angusht Nazran to join Terek. He is one of 12 Chechens in the squad. Another five players are Russians who were either born in Grozny or played for the old Terek.
 &quot;We all know each other because we went through the same school,&quot; said Dzhabrailov &quot;Many had the same trainer.&quot;
 Although many players left for teams in Russia when war began, some stayed behind and played in the Chechen championship, or for the &quot;national&quot; team of Ichkeria when another side agreed to play them. As Ichkeria was never accepted into the European soccer organization, the team only played a handful of unofficial games against the Azeri youth team, Neftchi Baku and Angusht Nazran.
 Not surprisingly, after a long hiatus from professional training and being subjected to the desperate conditions of war, many of the players are not in top condition.
 &quot;That one spent the last two years in a basement,&quot; said Alkhanov, pointing to one teammate. &quot;You lose form.&quot; 
 Soccer has long been popular in Chech nya, vying with fighting sports such as wrestling - for which a Chechen took a gold medal in the last two Olympic games - for popularity. Teams from the Caucasus are known for their flamboyant style, emphasizing spectacle and skill rather than defense. Backed by passionate local support, they had a reputation for being difficult to beat at home. 
 Before Anzhi Makhachkala, the upstart team from the Dagestan capital, stormed to fourth place in the Russian Premier League last season, and long before the neighboring republic of Ingushetia created Angusht Nazran in 1994, Terek was born in the late 1940s. By the 1990s the republic had two teams in the Russian football league, Terek and Erzu Grozny.
 But trouble for Terek began when Chechen President Dzhokar Dudayev declared independence from Russia in 1991. In the early 1990s Grozny was a very dangerous place, and other clubs began to refuse to travel there to play. By 1994 the club voluntarily disbanded, realizing it was too dangerous to play in Grozny. 
 The reborn Terek has now reclaimed many of the players who had gone to other clubs. One former player, Shakhin Deniyev, has been installed as trainer.
 &quot;It was a lost time for Chechen football and for the Chechen people,&quot; said Deniyev, an Azeri who played for Terek in 1991 and 1992 before going to play in Israel. Since returning he has been impressed by the players' hunger. Many of them are playing for the first time in years, and this is their first job in years.
 &quot;They work day and night [at the club] to feed two or three families,&quot; said Deniyev. &quot;One hundred percent commitment.&quot;
 Indeed, many of the Chechen players are the sole breadwinners for their own family and their families' families. Goalkeeper Ramzan Tsutsulayev has looked after his brother's kin since he was killed in the bombardment of Grozny in 1996.
 Luckily for the players, the team has strong financial support. Alkhanov, who was brought up in the same village as Akhmad Kadyrov, the head of the Moscow-backed Chechen government, persuaded the government to give nearly $1.5 million to fund the team; Kadyrov himself agreed to become president of the club. 
 &quot;If it was possible I'd give more,&quot; said Kadyrov in a telephone interview from Gudermes. &quot;I want to give to sports.&quot;
 The government handed over ownership of a linoleum factory and a state farm to the team. Both of the enterprises, located just outside Gudermes, are intact and profitable, Alkhanov said, adding that the team may acquire even more enterprises in order to support the renovation of Grozny's destroyed stadium. With the money it has now the team is buying a Mercedes bus for traveling. 
 Although the season has not yet opened, the players - many of whom live in Grozny - are already attracting attention among locals. While thousands of Chechens eke by without electricity, homes and employment, no one - the players say - is bitter about the money Terek has received.
 &quot;Bread and spectacle is what people need,&quot; said Alkhanov. &quot;And the best spectacle is sports. It will help people forget about war and their everyday circumstances.&quot;
 The fact that Chechen rebels violently oppose Kadyrov and the government that is backing Terek does not seem to worry the team. Alkhanov believes the rebels will differentiate between the team and the government that supports it.
 To prove his point, Alkhanov recalled one incident in Grozny during the first war. Rebel fighters stopped him when he was driving through town in his cousin's Mercedes 600. Members of criminal boss Ruslan Labazanov's gang, they were preparing to take his car when one of the fighters saw his pass from Terek. They let him go, but not before asking after the team.
 &quot;Nobody is against sports or football,&quot; said Alkhanov, who has said that none of the team members fought in either of the wars.
 Indeed, rebel leader Shamil Basayev was a major promoter of soccer in independent Chechnya - he even played for Terek Grozny in the late 1990s. At one point Basayev was even the head of the Chechen Football Association. The rebel commander organized a number of football tournaments, including a World Cup of mujaheddins to coincide with the World Cup in France. He also arranged for a match to commemorate the first anniversary of the raid on Budyonnovsk in 1996. A typical first prize was a grenade launcher. 
 &quot;An average player,&quot; said Alkhanov about Basayev. &quot;He loved to attack. He didn't like to defend.&quot;
 Basayev's playing days may be over since part of his leg has been amputated, but his interest in football remains. Last year he was quoted as saying that soccer is all he watches on television. In an interview with Azeri television, he complained that the Turkish side had lost in the European Championships because of anti-Moslem sentiment.
 Alkhanov doesn't believe Basayev or any of the rebels would be against the team's participation in the Russian league. On the contrary, Basayev, Alkhanov said, was keen on Terek joining the league after the cease-fire in 1996, as was a top official close to Maskhadov.
 &quot;'If Italy started a war, on Sunday they'd put down their guns and play football,'&quot; said Deniyev, quoting the words of AC Milan's Andriy Shevchenko of Ukraine. &quot;It's the same with this nation.&quot;
 Although the team says they expect to be treated well by other sides, they must overcome prejudice and bad feelings in the southern Russian region they now call home.
 Indeed, Alkhanov had a hard time finding a region willing to host the Chechen team. Terek's original choice was Kislovodsk, but in spite of support from the North Caucasus Federal District's presidential representative, they were barred from playing there by the mayor, Viktor Beketov. Beketov said he feared Chechen fans would commit acts of terrorism. 
 &quot;I don't think the fighters will commit terrorist acts,&quot; said Alkhanov. &quot;On the contrary, they will be grateful to the city that accepts us.&quot;
 Beketov and his deputy even tried to stop the team from training at the Olympic CSKA Center just outside Kislovodsk, but the center's director refused to evict the team he had invited to train there.
 Instead, Terek will play 100 kilometers away in Cherkessk, where there is a sizable Chechen community.
 Alkhanov says logistical problems will most likely prevent fans in Chechnya from traveling to see the games. Indeed, it is difficult enough for the players themselves to travel throughout the Russian Federation. Two years ago, Angusht, with its contingent of Che chen players, was stopped on its way to a match in the southern Russian city of Taganrog, Sport-Express reported. The eight Chechen players were taken off the bus and forbidden to go on any further. Now many of those players are back with Terek.
 Yusup Guguyev, a Chechen player, told Sport-Express last year how he was forced to leave his club, Bestau Lermontov, in 1995 after Basayev's attack on Budyonnovsk. The heads of Lermontov, which is only 150 kilometers from Budyonnovsk, told Guguyev that his presence on the team &quot;was not desirable.&quot; 
 &quot;Guguyev should have played for a team of higher class, but his nationality interfered,&quot; said Sergei Kapustin, a soccer journalist who covers southern Russia.
 So far Terek has not had any bad experiences with other teams during the pre-season games. The team itself is unbeaten after six games. Deniyev says he needs to get three or four new players before the league starts but Terek is already aiming to win the division in 2001 and get promotion to the first division.
 The morale of the team is high. This is partly influenced by the rebirth of Terek, which obviously means a lot to many of the players. Their moods are also helped by the fact that Terek is one of the better wage-payers in their zone. Although he refused to say exactly how much they pay, Alkhanov did say that 10,000 rubles ($350) a month is the average in the division. Deniyev added that Terek pays better than three-quarters of the other clubs in the division. 
 At their previous clubs some players were paid as little as 30,000 rubles a year, while others went unpaid for up to six months.
 Although not one of the favorites, Kapustin reckons they will be in the top half of the table. Next week the players will head for Sochi where they will play First and Premier League opposition in practice matches before the start of the season.
 But however the team fares this season, Terek's aim is to return home to play in Grozny.
 &quot;We all want to play in Grozny,&quot; said the team's administrator. &quot;Everyone still considers that we're playing away.&quot;

TITLE: PRICE WATCH
TEXT: The price of a haircut, in Rubles.
 
Women's Men's
 Salon Alexandra 150 150
 Alla's Salon 290 290
 Alyosha Hairdressing Salon 110 80
 Boris & Co 70 70
 Eva 80 75
 Iolanta 100 100
 Looch 90 90
 May Salon 320 230
 Prestige Beauty Salon 300* 250
 Style 80 80
 Salon Verol 60 60
 
 Salon Alexandra; 53 Bolshoi Pr., M. Petrogradskaya. Tel: 233-29-23
 Alla's Salon; 131 Nab. Reki Fontanki, 131, M. Sennaya Pl. Tel: 327-20-89
 Alyosha Hairdressing Salon; 20 Ul. Vosstaniya, M. Pl. Vosstaniya. Tel: 273-13-94
 Boris & Co; 75 Moskovsky Pr., M. Frunzenskaya. Tel: 316-17-95
 Eva; 92 Bolshoi Sampsoniyevsky Pr., M. Lesnaya. Tel: 244-20-70
 Iolanta; 17 Pr. Chernyshevskogo, M. Chernyshevskaya. Tel: 279-19-29
 Looch; 52 Sredny Pr., M. Vasiliostrovskaya. Tel: 323-64-33
 May Salon; 116 Nevsky Prospect, M. Pl. Vosstaniya. Tel: 279-57-37
 Prestige Beauty Salon; 25 Bolshaya Morskaya, M. Sadovaya. Tel: 314-75-21
 Style; 7 Maly Pr., M. Vasiliostrovskaya. Tel: 328-09-83
 Salon Verol; 35 Suvorovsky Pr., M. Chernyshevskaya. Tel: 275-77-72
 
 * Price quoted is for medium length hair

TITLE: Lady Luck Takes Side of European Leaders
AUTHOR: By Paul Brown
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON - Controversy reigned in matches involving the leaders in Spain and England this weekend.
 Barcelona was furious after a late winner from Brazilian Rivaldo was ruled offside in its Spanish league clash with leaders Real Madrid at the Bernabeu, which ended 2-2.
 And Manchester United survived a late Wes Brown own goal, also ruled out when the offside flag was raised at Elland Road in their English premier league match against Leeds United.
 Fabien Barthez had earlier escaped a red card after kicking out at Ian Harte, and saved the resulting penalty, helping the league leaders to a 1-1 draw.
 Borussia Dortmund reached the summit in Germany with a 6-1 win over Eintracht Frankfurt but in Italy, France and the Netherlands the leaders all remained on top.
 
 <strong>England. </strong>Leader Manchester United found its lead at the top cut to 14 points after Leeds United held them to a 1-1 draw at Elland Road on Saturday.
 Luke Chadwick put the champions in front after Fabien Barthez had saved a penalty but Mark Viduka equalized. Leeds could have snatched it at the death but Wes Brown's own goal was ruled out for offside.
 Second-placed Arsenal comprehensively beat West Ham United 3-0, while Leicester City beat League Cup winners Liverpool 2-0 to end the weekend in fifth place.
 
 <strong>Spain. </strong>Real Madrid extended its lead at the top to five points despite being held to a controversial 2-2 draw with Barcelona at the Bernabeu on Saturday.
 The visitors were incensed when a late Rivaldo winner was ruled offside. Raul scored twice for the league leaders but Rivaldo equalized both his strikes.
 Deportivo La Coruna failed to capitalize and remains second after going two goals down at Real Mallorca and managing only one in reply from Roy Makaay.
 
 <strong>Italy. </strong>Leaders AS Roma end the weekend six points clear at the top after a 3-2 win over surprise strugglers Inter Milan in Rome on Sunday. Two goals from forward Vincenzo Montella and another from defender Marcos Assuncao gave them victory against Inter, who had Bruno Cirillo sent off.
 Second-placed Juventus won 2-0 at Udinese through goals from Gianluca Zambrotta and Filippo Inzaghi.
 Chilean international Marcelo Salas scored the winner for third-placed Lazio on Saturday, who defeated Brescia 1-0.
 
 <strong>France. </strong>A Bruno Cheyrou goal put Lille three points clear at the top of the table on Saturday with a 1-0 win over Olympique Marseille.
 But Nantes wiped out this lead to go second on goal difference on Sunday with a 2-0 win over Rennes courtesy of Nestor Fabbri and Marama Vahirua, whose goals lifted their side above Sedan, held to a 2-2 draw by RC Lens.
 Lyon beat Bordeaux 2-1 to climb above their opponents into fourth place on goal difference.
 
 <strong>Germany. </strong>Former European Cup winners Borussia Dortmund climbed to the top of the Bundesliga with a resounding 6-1 victory over Eintracht Frankfurt on Friday.
 Hansa Rostsock did the double over champions Bayern Munich, who had goalkeeper Oliver Kahn sent off towards the end of its match on Saturday.
 Goals from Victor Agali, Bachirou Salou and Andrea Jakobsson gave Rostock a 3-2 win.
 Early-season pacesetter Schalke 04 was beaten 1-0 at home by Hamburg on Sunday and lie third, a point ahead of Bayer Leverkusen, who suffered a 1-0 defeat to 1860 Munich the same day.

TITLE: A Task for a Financial Virtuoso
TEXT: Arts management in Russia is not likely to earn you a fortune, and those looking for rewards for their managerial skills would be better off working in real estate. Running a state arts institution takes much more than just skill and knowledge. It takes enormous enthusiasm.
 It has been a decade since state funding of the country's arts institutions was drastically cut. Staying afloat with an annual state budget of $500,000 is the task facing Yury Schwartzkopf, director of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic. Aside from the fact that Western orchestras of the same level enjoy sums ten times as large, Schwartzkopf truly has a task for a financial virtuoso, given that a new French horn costs $10,000, while a double-bass is $20,000.
 Schwartzkopf, who was formerly executive director of the Mariinsky Theater and director of the Komissarzhevskaya Drama Theater, spoke to <strong>Galina Stolyarova </strong>about his survival strategies, and about the state's attitude to the arts under the old and new regimes.
 
 <strong>Q: </strong>The Philharmonic's state budget is absurdly small, and forces you to find other means of survival. What are your plans for the immediate and long-term future?
 <strong>A: </strong>We've already invited designers to develop a logo for the Philharmonic, so that we can start producing souvenirs. I'm also thinking of putting Philharmonic images on chocolate bars - the question is now under negotiation with local candy factories.
 Lease of the stage is another possibility. The Philharmonic organizes approximately 220 to 230 concerts a year, with only 100 of them involving our two symphony orchestras, so it is very important whom we invite.
 Every concert should be meticulously planned. We almost never perform the same program twice during a season, every concert is a unique event. In terms of filling the auditorium, our task is much more difficult than in a theater. A ballet company can produce, say, &quot;Swan Lake,&quot; which you can rely on to get full houses for years, as long as it is staged well.
 It is important to get away from stereotypes as to who can and who cannot perform on this stage. Introducing ballet evenings to our program, I believe, will only be for the better from both the financial and artistic point of view. [Mariinsky Theater soloist] Yulia Makhalina will be performing on April 22, and I am sure it will be a success.
 There would be nothing wrong in inviting talented drama actors, either. On March 27, [prominent Moscow actor and director] Sergei Yursky will be reading Yesenin, Pasternak, Mayakov sky, Brodsky, Mandelshtam and Gogol, and we hope this literary evening will set a precedent.
 In general, there is only one major criterion for a performer who wants to take this stage: They should bring on true art.
 
 <strong>Q: </strong>Last fall you let a commercial company organize a Brian Ferry concert at the Philharmonic. How do you feel about that experience?
 <strong>A: </strong>The concert showed that we need to learn how to do these things better. We aren't always completely ready for such events, even in technical terms. Things like lighting should have been prepared differently, but I don't have any regrets that the concert took place.
 On the bright side, I should say that we were able to attract new people to our venue. Ferry's concert was a chance for them to see the Philharmonic, and maybe some of them will return for a classical concert.
 Also, on Oct. 1 our musicians received a 50 percent increase in salary, and Ferry's concert made a substantial financial input to this.
 The monthly state salary of a leading soloist is 1400 rubles ($50) plus a 50 percent bonus, also from the federal government. The major problem facing the Philharmonic is how to keep our brilliant musicians on home soil.
 The Philharmonic receives about $300,000 to 400,000 a year from its sponsors, but that can't patch all the holes. Without commercial concerts, I won't be able to increase people's salaries.
 <strong>
 Q:</strong> Are you planning to reach out to audiences and potential sponsors via the Internet?
 <strong>A: </strong>Yes, certainly. We launched a Web site a few months ago which was operating during the &quot;Arts Square&quot; festival. It is currently under reconstruction but the site will open again some time next month. In addition, we are planning to broadcast some of the concertsfrom the next Arts Square festival over the Web.
 <strong>Q: </strong>Are you looking to the West for sponsorship?
 <strong>A: </strong>We are considering creating &quot;Friends of the Philharmonic,&quot; a kind of club [like those formed by the Mariinsky and the Hermitage]. We do have supporters in the West, in Baltimore, in particular, where [Philharmonic Artistic Director] Yury Temirkanov is principle guest conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, but in general I am convinced that the Philharmonic should be looking first and foremost for Russian sponsors.
 Yes, the Mariinsky theater has a very strong promotion team working with &quot;Friends of the Kirov&quot; and other organizations. But perhaps the Mariinsky's pro-Western bent is a little excessive.
 
 <strong>Q: </strong>But don't you think that it is well grounded, as Russian businessmen tend to support show-biz projects with much greater enthusiasm than they do classical music?
 <strong>A: </strong>I can't say I completely share your opinion. The trend you mentioned does indeed exist but it is not all-consuming. Respectable and transparent businesses have emerged. They have made their names and earned their reputations, and now they want to support genuine cultural values, without tainting their images by sponsoring pop-art projects of doubtful quality - these impressions have been confirmed for me from conversations with the bankers who joined our Board of Trustees.
 
 <strong>Q: </strong>A ticket to a concert at the Philharmonic for a foreigner is $25. Russians can get in for 35-70 rubles. Can you explain this policy?
 <strong>A: </strong>Reducing the prices would saddle us with losses, while increasing them wouldn't make any sense. Russians don't have money to pay more for a regular concert, and recent market research we've done shows that foreigners are unwilling to pay more.
 During special events, like, for instance, the Arts Square Festival, we don't divide foreigners and Russians, and all tickets cost the same for everyone. To invite Gidon Kremer and his &quot;Kremerata-Baltika&quot; or an orchestra of the same level costs at least $60,000. Our expenses for bringing an orchestra of La Scala's level would be $300,000 minimum, and that is without a fee. Our state budget can't afford it, but [Kremer's] celebrity status allows us to make some tickets more expensive, as well as attract more sponsors.
 But apart from such occasions, the system we use now is optimal. We can't afford stepping out at the moment.
 
 <strong>Q: </strong>You have been working in arts management for over two decades. What would you say of the benefits and disadvantages of working under different regimes?
 <strong>A: </strong>Ideology aside, under the Soviet regime, the culture and arts enjoyed much more prestige and authority. Back in those times, the salary of the Philharmonic symphony orchestra's artistic director was higher than the Culture Minister's. The state showed that is was aware of who had an international reputation in the field of arts. Now culture is neglected, and not only from a financial point of view.
 A very surprising thing is that as we approach the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg, no city official has asked if the Philharmonic would like to participate in the celebrations.
 But we do have things to offer, like for instance open air concerts at the Peter and Paul Fortress or in Arts Square. It would be a magnificent event, if only some imagination were used, but the city officials can't be bothered installing a stage and seating. The authorities tend to make use of the city's artistic objects rather than support them.
 The local administration sends all top foreign delegations to the Mariinsky Theater and never compensates the theater for the loss of revenue. And what has the city ever done for the Mariinsky? Nothing at all.
 Until the city authorities find it necessary to go to a concert or a theater performance at least once a week - not because they have to but because they want to - St. Petersburg won't be a real cultural capital. In a cultural capital, culture should be treated differently. And with much greater care.

TITLE: Why Russia Is Home to Many Unseen Freedoms
AUTHOR: By Colin Graham
TEXT: Raised eyebrows, admonishing me with their condescending disbelief, was a common enough response when I told people that I was on my way to Russia in 1998.
 I'd been interviewed and accepted for my new job in the summer, just weeks before the August ruble devaluation and onset of the crisis here.
 It quite naturally became headline news in Britain. The footage was of queues outside exchange bureaus and pensioners fulminating against the world to the TV cameras, as they stood trembling with empty shopping bags and forlorn shelves as a backdrop.
 It was with some trepidation, therefore, that I arrived at Pulkovo airport in October of that year. The panicky misinformation we'd been getting in Britain made me wary that my belongings might be filched by the hungry natives, before I'd even passed through customs.
 As far as many people in the West were concerned, Russia was now a third world country. A term more usually applied sympathetically to unfortunate countries, it was then often being employed pejoratively to denote Russia's lowly new status.
 Although there was much about my new home that was one big culture shock, not least the frantic barging during rush hour on the metro (still not quite used to that), and the fact that there were soldiers everywhere, I eventually began to wonder what all the fuss had been about and began to enjoy myself thoroughly. It was clear however that it was my income, a good deal higher than the local average, that was allowing me to do this.
 Many of my students nonetheless openly wondered - and still do, in that very direct Russian way - what the hell I was doing here. A number of them were trying to improve their English to get away from Russia, so that they could go and live in a more stable, prosperous country, and my presence dumbfounded them. The crisis on the back of all the other upheavals of the years previously had convinced them that their country had sunk irreparably, if not quite to the level of the third world, then perilously close.
 The underbelly, so maligned by those uppity Western commentators who trash Russia as third world, is nonetheless a great source of freedom. There's undoubtedly a freedom here, which by comparison exposes the often stifling legality of the Western way of life.
 Ordinary Russians, whether using their Ladas as improvised taxis or selling vodka off the bus in Helsinki, both supplement meager incomes and show a healthy disdain for the corrupt tentacles of the state and its bureaucracy.
 Ironically, given what is written in many newspapers about the undemocratic forces busy eroding the few liberties Russians possess, it is this &quot;freedom&quot; which explains much of the attraction for life here in Russia, and St. Petersburg in particular, for me and other foreigners as well.
 In this city, there is of course a strong tradition of dissent which is palpable in the very fabric of the place, even for an outsider such as myself. There's a tenacity among many intellectuals and artists here not to belittle their creativity by tethering it to the dollar sign. A noble sentiment, rare perhaps in London or New York. Education is often seen as the key to freedom and in Russia I've found a much greater breadth of knowledge of the world among my students than most of the people I taught in further education in Britain could claim.
 And it isn't all cerebral either. Petersburg's nightclubs, with their bright, unselfconscious hedonism, their open sensuality, where you can meet people who actually become your friends - practically an impossibility in Britain - rank them alongside the most democratic and decadent in Europe, as much an advertisement for the place as its museums, concert halls and historical architecture.
 There's enough to complain about living here, not least the endless winter, but even that makes the city look glorious much of the time. Despite everything - the bureaucracy, surly shop assistants and getting stopped on the street by the militsia for no reason - I'm very glad I didn't heed those raised eyebrows back in 1998, because I've fallen deeply in love with St. Petersburg.
 
 Colin Graham is British and teaches English in St. Petersburg. He submitted this column to The St. Petersburg Times. If you would like to do so, please contact masters@sptimes.ru

TITLE: WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
TEXT: Despite being officially International Women's Day, nowhere is this holiday taken more seriously than in Russia. March 8 promises the usual festivities, which include a day off work (Friday too for most people, although they make up for it by working on Sunday), giving mimosas to women (other flowers are acceptable, but the mimosa is traditional) as well as other presents and grand television pageants devoted to the country's female majority. Champagne-loving females will be glad to see that a number of city restuarants are planning free bubbly for them on March 8, including Frederico Fellini and La Cucaracha. They may be less ecstatic to know that the stars of Russian estrada are gathering for a tribute concert to be shown on RTR that night. Women seeking a thrill might want to check out the Casino Luna Club that is aiming its usually male-oriented "super erotic show" towards women March 7, 8 and 9. Most restaurants are preparing special meals, so hurry to get a reservation at your favorite.
 
On March 8, the city's ballet theaters are staging old favorites Giselle (at the Hermitage Theater, tel. 311-90-25) and Le Corsaire (at the Mussorgsky Theater, tel. 219-19-78), while Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor is being staged at the Mariinsky (tel: 114-43-44).
 Other ideas for the long weekend could include playing Quazar, an early nineties trend in the West, where groups of people divide into two teams and try to virtually shoot each other with lasers in a maze. A great way to exhaust older children and teenagers, you can try Quazar at Q-zar (47, Prospect Professora Popova, Petrogradsky Side, M. Chkalovskaya). 
 A further alternative is taking refuge in one of the city's many billiard halls. An hour on a pool table will cost from 50 to 120 rubs. in most places, sometimes varying with time of day. Time Out supposedly has one of the best tables in the city, although just one of them. There are an enormous selection of them all over the city, but some of the bigger and more central ones are:
 
. Vosmyorka: 8 Ul. Pestelya, M. Chernyshevskaya. Tel: 273-30-46
 . Leon: 34 Ul. Dekabristov. M. Sennaya Ploshchad. Tel: 114-31-84
 . Time Out: 36 Ul. Marata. M. Dostoyevskaya. Tel: 113-24-42
 . Barrikada: 15 Nevsky Prospect. M. Gostiny Dvor. Tel: 312-53-14
 . Peterburgsky: 3 Krasnoarmeyskaya Ul. M. Tech. Institute. Tel: 316-73-23.

TITLE: HISTORY'S WEEK
TEXT: March 5, 1953 - Josef Stalin dies in somewhat mysterious circumstances at his dacha in Kuntsevo.
 March 5, 1953 - Death of Sergei Prokofiev in Moscow on the very same day, unaware of the dictator's death.
 March 5, 1966 - Death of poet Anna Akhmatova at Domodedovo.
 March 5, 1613 - Coronation of the first Romanov, Mikhail, aged 16. 
 March 7, 1876 - Alexander Bell receives the patent for his invention of the telephone.
 March 8, 1921 - Decision taken to introduce the New Economic Policy. 
 March 8, 1910 - First International Women's Day instituted in Russia.
 March 9, 1797 - Work begun on St. Petersburg's Mikhailovsky Castle.
 March 9, 1919 - Triumphal arches honoring Garibaldi unveiled in both St. Petersburg and Moscow.
 March 9, 1953 - Hundreds are killed in the crush as Stalin's funeral takes place in Moscow.
 March 10, 1940 - Death of "Master and Margarita" author Mikhail Bulgakov from a heart attack in Moscow. 
 March 10, 1985 - Death of Konstantin Chernenko, Communist Party General Secretary, making way for the rise of reformer Mikhail Gorbachev.

TITLE: Davenport Standing Tall on Women's Tour
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SCOTTSDALE, Arizona - At almost 1.80 meters tall, Meghann Shaughnessy usually stands out at WTA Tour events.
 Not when she plays Lindsay Davenport, though.
 Davenport overpowered Shaughnessy 6-2, 6-3 Sunday, winning the State Farm Women's tennis title.
 Martina Hingis and Davenport set up a match between the world's two top players by reaching the 2000 final. But it was never played because of two days of heavy rain, leaving the event without a champion.
 This time, the top-seeded Davenport endured three rain delays before her second-round match with Gala Leon Garcia. She then went three sets against Lisa Raymond and Capriati to reach the final against the eighth-seeded Shaughnessy, who got into her hometown tournament last year as a wild card.
 Davenport said the bright sun and late-winter warmth that dominated on Sunday inspired her to play her best.
 &quot;This is the kind of weather I like,&quot; she said.
 It was enough for her second straight title and 32nd on the WTA Tour. She won in Tokyo on Feb. 4, beating Shaughnessy in straight sets in their first meeting along the way, then took three weeks off.
 Shaughnessy was coming off the biggest win of her career, a semifinal upset of Seles, but never found a groove against the all-around power game of the world's second-ranked woman.
 It wasn't easy for Shaughnessy, who will rise to a career-high No. 24 ranking this week, even when she was serving. Davenport contested every point, pushing Shaughnessy to deuce in five of her nine service games.
 Davenport won $90,000 and Shaughnessy took home $48,000, nearly doubling her earnings in five previous events.
 
 <strong>Mexican Open. </strong>Gustavo Kuerten, in complete command against an overmatched opponent, beat Spanish wild card Galo Blanco 6-4, 6-2 Sunday to win the Mexican Open.
 Amanda Coetzer of South Africa had a tougher time in capturing the women's title, defeating Elena Dementieva of Russia 2-6, 6-1, 6-2.
 Kuerten, the world's No. 1 player, dominated this tournament from the outset. After landing a spectacular winner against Blanco, the Spaniard held up his hand as if to say, &quot;Go easy on me.&quot;
 Kuerten's toughest match came against fellow Brazilian Fernando Meligeni in the quarterfinals, but Meligeni developed a back cramp and retired in the third set.
 Coetzer, seeded first, recovered from a rough first set to defeat the second-seeded Dementieva in the baking sunshine.
 Coetzer seemed overwhelmed by Dementieva's shots in the first set before regrouping. Dementieva appeared to tire in the heat, screaming &quot;Nyet!&quot; as she hit long balls or missed serves.
 Service seemed almost a liability during the match - 15 services were broken and only eight weren't. Coetzer broke nine of Dementieva's services while Dementieva broke six of Coetzer's.
 Kuerten won $130,000 and Coetzer earned $27,000.
 
 <strong>Sybase Open. </strong>Whatever Greg Rusedski is doing, he should keep doing it.
 Working with an entourage of advisers and trainers with such titles as &quot;biomechanics expert,&quot; Rusedski defeated Australian Open champ Andre Agassi 6-3, 6-4 to win the Sybase Open title Sunday.
 Plagued by injury last season, Rusedski has been overhauling his game, making subtle changes to help avoid future problems.
 He began working with former Wimbledon champion Pat Cash last November, then added a panel of experts to tweak his mechanics.
 The changes are obviously working. The hard-serving British lefty has advanced to three semifinals this season, including a victory over former No. 1 Gustavo Kuerten in the Australian Open.
 Agassi was next.
 The top seed lost for the first time this season, putting his record at 11-1. He was playing in his first tournament since winning the Australian Open.
 Rusedski, the indoor tournament's eighth seed, earned his 10th career title, but his first since October 1999 in Vienna.
 
 <strong>Dubai Open. </strong>Juan Carlos Ferrero of Spain won the $1 million Dubai Open on Saturday when Marat Safin quit in the second set because of searing back pain.
 The top-seeded Russian was trailing 6-2, 3-1 against the seventh-seeded Ferrero, last year's losing finalist.
 &quot;It was very difficult to play in these circumstances as the pain is serious, like someone has put a knife in there,&quot; Safin said.
 Safin plans to go to Monaco for treatment. He said he will have his back checked at a hospital Monday.
 &quot;I'm scared about it as health is more important than money,&quot; he said.
 Safin was injured in Friday's semifinal victory over Thomas Johansson of Sweden. The tentative diagnosis was a pulled muscle in the lower left side of the back.
 Ferrero earned $167,000 for the title. Safin, trying to regain the No. 1 ranking from Gustavo Kuerten, won $88,000.

TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: Ruiz Upsets Champ
 

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) - Decided underdog John Ruiz knocked down Evander Holyfield in the 11th round and won a hard-fought unanimous decision to capture the World Boxing Association heavyweight title on Saturday night.
 Ruiz, a two-to-one underdog, dominated the final two rounds to pull out the victory in a bout that had distinctive ebbs and flows.
 The challenger won the early rounds, was pummeled by Holyfield during the middle rounds, then came on strong to earn the victory.
 Ruiz, who lost a close but unanimous decision in their first fight here on Aug. 12, won the rematch by scores of 116-110, 115-111 and 114-111 on the three judge's cards.
 
 
Gordon Claims 1st Win
 

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) - It was just like old times for Jeff Gordon.
 Gordon did not have the fastest car at the start of the race but through the work of his pit crew, he was able to win Sunday's NASCAR Winston Cup UAW-Daimler Chrysler 400.
 It was Gordon's first win of the season but looked a lot like the days when he won three Winston Cup championships in the 1990s.
 Gordon recorded his 53rd career Winston Cup victory, taking the lead 19 laps from the finish when the leader, Matt Kenseth, pitted. Gordon was able to drive to a 1.477-second victory over pole-sitter Dale Jarrett and earn an additional $1 million bonus from series sponsor R.J. Reynolds as part of the Winston "No Bull 5'' promotion.
 In addition to the $1 million bonus, Gordon collected $389,802 for the victory. He won with an average speed of 217.957 kilometers per hour.
 
 
Chargers Sign Wiley
 

SAN DIEGO (AP) - Defensive end Marcellus Wiley agreed to a $40 million, six-year deal on Sunday, just the ticket he was looking for to get him back to Southern California.
 The deal, the biggest in club history, includes a $9 million signing bonus. An unrestricted free agent, Wiley replaced Bruce Smith in the Buffalo Bills' lineup last year and responded with 10 1/2 sacks.
 Wiley is due in San Diego on Monday to take a physical and sign the deal, his agent, Brad Blank, said from Boston.
 Chargers line coach Wayne Nunnely was excited to hear the news. Wiley will play opposite Raylee Johnson, who had 10 1/2 sacks in 1999 before suffering a season-ending knee injury in an exhibition game in August.
 
 
Kenyans Take Top 3
 

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Kenyan men again dominated the Los Angeles Marathon, taking the top three places in a race where a distraction error decided the women's field.
 Three-time Houston marathon winner Stephen Ndungu won a slow 16th running of the marathon Sunday in 2 hours, 13 minutes and 13 seconds, followed by Ben Kimondiu 2 minutes later. Last year's winner, Benson Mbithi, was just 10 seconds behind Kimondiu.
 Elena Paramonova, 38, of Russia won the women's title when leader Nuta Olaru of Romania turned her head to look back and gagged on the fluid she took in the 40th kilometer of the 42.2-kilometer race.
 Olaru, 30, also finished second in last year's race.
 First-place money for runners was $35,000 cash and a Honda Accord worth another $25,000. Honda is one of the marathon's main sponsors. 
 
 
Sharks Land Selanne
 

BRISTOL, Connecticutt (LAT) -The slumping San Jose Sharks apparently have acquired right wing Teemu Selanne, the all-time leading scorer for the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim.
 ESPN is reporting that the Sharks have obtained the Finnish right wing from the Ducks for left wing Jeff Friesen, goaltender Steve Shields and a conditional draft choice.
 The Calder Trophy winner was rookie of the year in 1992-93, Selanne has 26 goals and 33 assists in 59 games this season. The 30-year-old has 479 points in 393 career games with the Ducks, including 224 goals.
 The Sharks (34-21-10) have lost the first four games of a six-game road trip to fall behind Dallas into second place in the Pacific Division.
 
 
Camacho Arrested
 

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Former boxing titleholder Hector Camacho was arrested early on Sunday and charged with drug possession, police said.
 Camacho, 38, a former WBC lightweight and WBO welterweight champion, was one of 13 people arrested at the Latin Palace club in Manhattan's East Harlem on drug charges in a late-night sweep of the club by police.
 He was charged with criminal possession of a controlled substance, police said. 
 
 
Isles Put Goring on Ice
 

UNIONDALE, New York (AP) - Butch Goring's fate as New York Islanders coach was sealed with a drubbing by the NHL's worst team.
 The Islanders took over that distinction Saturday night when Tampa Bay beat them 6-0 at home. Goring then became the seventh NHL coach to lose his job this season.
 "For those of you who were here, you witnessed a team that lost its way," said general manager Mike Milbury, whose job for next season was guaranteed last month by team owners. "I've always felt that the measure of a team is whether they are disciplined and motivated."
 Goring was replaced on an interim basis by assistant and former teammate Lorne Henning, who coached the Islanders during the 1994-95 season.
 Goring was dismissed with 17 games remaining in another lost season. He was 41-89-14-4 with New York since taking the job at the start of the 1999-00 season, when he inherited the youngest team in the league.
 
 
Blazers Get Strickland
 

PORTLAND, Oregon (AP) - Rod Strickland rejoined the Portland Trail Blazers Monday, becoming the backup point guard on a team that has the best record in the West but felt it needed another veteran to reach the NBA Finals.
 Strickland, 34, was at Monday's closed practice. Afterward, the Blazers were expected to announce that they had signed Strickland for $2.25 million, the amount they have as their mid-level salary-cap exemption.
 Strickland, who spent four productive seasons in Portland from 1992-96, was waived last Thursday by the Washington Wizards, who bought out the remaining year-plus on his contract for $2.5 million. No one claimed him off waivers, allowing any team to sign him. Because he was waived before midnight Thursday, he is eligible for the playoffs. 



TITLE: ACC Rivals Finish in Tie Atop League
AUTHOR: By David Droshack
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CHAPEL HILL, North Carolina - No. 4 North Carolina was braced for a three-point barrage from No. 2 Duke. Stopping it was another matter.
 The Blue Devils (26-4, 13-3 Atlantic Coast Conference), playing at a breakneck offensive pace without their top inside threat, made ACC history by winning or tying for their fifth straight league title with Sunday's 95-81 victory over the Tar Heels.
 Duke lost by two to the Tar Heels (23-5, 13-3) in Durham a month ago, missing 14 of 27 free throws, but remained alive for a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament with a dominating offensive show this time.
 Duke's two stars were the heroes in the Tobacco Road rematch as the Blue Devils were 14-for-38 from 3-point range without center Carlos Boozer, who watched from the bench with a broken bone in his right foot.
 Jason Williams scored 33 points and Shane Battier added 25 points, 11 rebounds and five blocks as Duke won its third straight in Chapel Hill for the first time since the early 1960s.
 ACC scoring leader Joseph Forte led the Tar Heels with 21 points.
 Williams came into the game shooting 36 percent against the Tar Heels in his career, but the point guard was money in this one, going seven-for-13 from three-point range while Battier was four-for-10.
 Duke led by two at halftime, but gradually pulled away midway through the second half. The Blue Devils went up 72-57 with 11:55 left on a layup by Mike Dunleavy, who along with the rest of his teammates looked twice as quick as the Tar Heels, who were repeatedly beaten down the floor.
 North Carolina coach Matt Doherty tried to fire his team up by getting a technical two minutes later, but his team could only pull within 10 as he was forced to bench big men Brendan Haywood and Kris Lang for much of the second half to try to match up with Duke.
 The Tar Heels were shooting for their first outright ACC regular-season title in eight seasons, but the Smith Center crowd instead exited early on Senior Day as Duke improved to 19-0 this season when scoring 90 or more points.
 The victory also gave Duke an ACC-record 124 wins over a four-year period, breaking the mark of the Duke teams from 1989-92.

TITLE: Tiger Collapses, Durant Wins 2nd Straight
AUTHOR: By Stephen Wade
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - Tiger Woods lost more than a tournament in the Dubai Desert Classic. He lost some of the fear factor, too.
 To the chagrin of thousands of fans lining the 18th fairway Sunday waiting for Woods to win, he blew it when he hit into the water hazard for a double-bogey 7. That allowed Thomas Bjorn of Denmark to get the winner's trophy with a simple par.
 &quot;The intimidation is disappearing,&quot; Bjorn said. &quot;People are now starting to realize you can't get intimidated by him. You have to beat him.
 The disappointed fans included Dubai's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the world's richest thoroughbred owner who named a promising 2-year-old colt &quot;Dubai Tiger&quot; and gave Woods about $2 million in appearance money.
 Woods has lost before. This time, he seemed to crack.
 Bjorn, Woods' playing partner for four straight days, parred the 547-yard hole for a 3-under 69 and a composite 22-under 266 - two better than Woods (72) and Padraig Harrington (69).
 Dead even after the Dane birdied the 17th from 8 feet and Woods missed his from 10 feet, the American made three mistakes on his next three shots.
 Woods pushed his tee shot amid clumps of brush and low-hanging tree branches. He escaped with an 8-iron, but the shot went long across the fairway into thick rough.
 Next, he drew on a 9-iron from 150 yards, but his touch was too soft, and the ball dropped inches short into a pond guarding the green.
 &quot;From the rough, I actually hit a pretty good shot, but I was protecting against the flier,&quot; said Woods, who rushed to a waiting plane with few comments after his round.
 His trip to the Middle East took 25 1/2 hours. The return must have seemed longer.
 Bjorn joined a short but growing list of players who've beaten Woods down the stretch. The American is still ranked as the world's best, but he's not as intimidating.
 &quot;This is the best performance of my life by far,&quot; the 30-year-old Dane said. &quot;I've won plenty of golf tournaments. I played in the Ryder Cup and came back from four down after four, but this is the performance of my life.
 Woods' last U.S. Tour victory came in September in the Canadian Open, although he's won three non-tour events since then in Hawaii, Thailand and Argentina. And he almost made it No. 4 on the 7,127-yard Majlis Course at the Emirates Golf Club.
 After 8-under 64s in the first two rounds and a 68 Saturday to keep the lead by a shot over Bjorn, Woods lost for one of the few times when he was leading entering the final round.
 The wind kicked up after three days of still desert golf. Woods bogeyed the opening hole when his putt lipped out from 4 feet. It didn't get much better.
 He was even-par 35 on the front nine after two bogeys and two birdies. He birdied two of the first four holes on the back nine to go 22 under, but missed birdie chances on 14, 15 and 17.
 Bjorn, who got himself back into contention with a 20-foot eagle putt on 10 to get within a stroke, caught Woods on 17 with an 8-foot birdie.
 
 q
 MIAMI - Joe Durant certainly qualifies as a slow starter. At age 36, his PGA success story has just begun.
 Durant closed with a 7-under-par 65 Sunday in driving winds and rain to win the Genuity Championship, becoming the first player since Tiger Woods last summer to win consecutive starts on the PGA Tour.
 More importantly, the win earned Durant $810,000, enough to lead the PGA Tour money list and qualify for the Masters.
 &quot;This is beyond anything I could have imagined, to be quite honest,&quot; said Durant, who finished 18 under and 2 strokes ahead of Canada's Mike Weir, who finished with a 71.
 Now, he has earned more money in two weeks than he won in his last four years combined.
 Durant became the first two-time winner on tour this year. Two weeks ago, he won the Bob Hope Classic with a record 36-under 324 over five days.
 His 65 was the best score of the day, seven strokes better than the course average in the final round. Durant played the first four holes at 4-under, including a 15-foot eagle on the first hole, and finally surged ahead with a brilliant 7-iron out of a fairway bunker on No. 14 to about 10 feet for birdie.
 Even then, the Masters never entered his mind.
 Now, he can book a trip to Augusta for the second time, hopefully with better results.
 In 1999, Durant was recovering from cracked ribs and shot 86 in the first round.

TITLE: F1 Accident Claims Life Of Marshal
AUTHOR: By Dennis Passa
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MELBOURNE, Australia - World champion Michael Schumacher led from start to finish Sunday to win an Australian Grand Prix marred by the death of a track marshal and injuries to seven spectators during a fifth-lap crash.
 Schumacher continued the Ferrari dominance established last year by holding off the second-place McLaren of David Coulthard by 1.7 seconds in the opening race of the Formula One season.
 The marshal, from Queensland state, was killed during a crash between Jacques Villeneuve and Ralf Schumacher. Last September at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, 33-year-old Paolo Ghislimberti, a volunteer track official, was killed when hit by flying debris after a five-car crash at the race.
 A somber Schumacher announced the death of the marshal, identified only as a man in his 50s, at his post-race news conference. Initial reports said the marshal was severely injured when hit by one of the tires that flew off Villeneuve's car, and died later in the hospital.
 Race official Peter Hansen said seven other people sustained minor injuries and were treated at a first-aid post and discharged. Hansen said the marshal's daughter was at the track.
 Schumacher's winning time was 1 hour, 38 minutes, 26.533 seconds, an average speed of 186.306 kilometers per hour.
 He got a good start on the 5.30-kilometer Albert Park road course and held a 1.33-second lead over McLaren's Mika Hakkinen after two laps.
 After Hakkinen crashed on lap 26 Schumacher's lead increased to more than 10 seconds over Ferrari teammate Rubens Barrichello in second place.
 Coulthard passed Barrichello on lap 33, but by that point, Schumacher had increased his lead to more than 15 seconds. He relinquished the lead briefly when he pitted on lap 37 ahead of Coulthard and after both had made pit stops Schumacher held an 8-second lead.
 Coulthard chipped away at Schumacher's lead late in the race but the German held on for his second consecutive win in Australia.
 In the accident, Villeneuve's BAR Honda rode up the back of the Williams of Ralf Schumacher. The impact threw Villeneuve's car into the air, hitting the top of the fence and nearly catapulting it over into spectators.
 Villeneuve's car lost all four wheels before hurtling down the concrete barrier, spewing parts of his car along the way.
 &quot;Ralf was in the center of the track and I didn't know which way he was going to go,&quot; said Villeneuve. &quot;By the time I went to the outside, it was too late.&quot;

TITLE: England Sweeps Scotland Aside
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON - England continued its stroll to a repeat Six Nations title with a convincing 43-3 victory over Scotland, while France looked uninspiring in its 30-19 victory over Italy on Saturday.
 Only Ireland, who had its game against Wales postponed because of the foot-and-mouth outbreak in Britain, looks the most likely to halt England's progress.
 The two sides meet in Dublin on March 24, assuming the disease does not disrupt the game.
 Despite the off-field ramifications, England's latest victory was its biggest over the Scots in the Calcutta Cup, improving on its 41-13 success of 1997.
 It also gave the English some consolation for their surprise defeat by the Scots at Murrayfield last year when they were denied a grand slam.
 The English, superbly led by pacey fullback Iain Balshaw and former captain Lawrence Dallaglio, dominated throughout. They continuously recycled the ball, starving the Scots of possession, shut down attacks behind the gain line and forced Scotland to kick the ball away.
 While Dallaglio's early try, created by Balshaw's attacking run, set the tone, England was unable to break down the Scottish defense until just before halftime, when Richard Hill and Dallaglio crossed within five minutes of each other to take England into a 22-3 halftime lead.
 Balshaw then scored two tries in the second half before center Will Greenwood finished off a fine length-of-the-field move that was sparked by replacement winger Jason Robinson.
 Robinson, the former Britain rugby league international, outpaced his cover defender then stepped inside one more tackle to hand off to Greenwood, who went in untouched.
 England manager Clive Woodward sung Robinson's praises after the game but then reminded the other countries of the depth of talent he now had to choose from.
 &quot;He has great balance and good awareness. He is so strong, but still has a lot to learn. There is a lot of competition for those places [on the wing], and it's a nice problem for me to have.&quot;
 Injury-racked France, ever the enigma of international rugby, looked uninspired in its match against Italy in Rome.
 For the French, there were only three good things to take from the match - they won, no one was injured, and flyhalf Christophe Lamaison became his country's highest international points scorer.
 Despite eclipsing Thierry Lacroix's 367 points by converting Sebastien Bonetti's injury-time try and finishing the game with 369 career points, Lamaison had a shocking day with the boot and missed five of his eight penalty attempts.
 The feelings of relief were evident in French coach Bernard Laporte's comments.
 &quot;We came here under stress and with injuries, but I'm now confident about taking on Wales. If we win against the Welsh then we will go to London for our final match against England without this kind of pressure.&quot;
 
 q
 Rugby Union's Six Nations championship could be carried over to next season if Britain's foot-and-mouth outbreak continues to spread.
 Saturday's game between Wales and Ireland in Cardiff has already been called off due to the livestock disease.
 At an emergency meeting in London on Friday, the Six Nations Committee rescheduled the game for April 29, three weeks after the championship was supposed to end.
 But further matches are in danger and the committee said that, while May 5-6 and May 12-13 are set aside as a contingency, it was prepared for the championship to resume next autumn - when the 2001-2002 season will be in full swing and after the British Lions' tour of Australia.
 &quot;The committee is committed to ensuring that, in due course, all matches will be played even if it necessitates postponing matches until the Autumn,&quot; committee member Alan Hosie said. &quot;The committee will keep the position under continuous review and hopes to conclude the championship by the end of the season.&quot;
 But the Wales-Ireland game was called off Tuesday because the Irish government feared that thousands of Irish fans traveling to and from the game at the Millennium stadium might come into contact with the highly contagious disease and take it home on their footwear.
 
 - AP

TITLE: RUBLE AROUND TOWN
TEXT: Monday's ruble/dollar rates in St. Petersburg:
 
Address Buy Sell
 Alfa Bank 6 Kanal Griboyedova 28.30 28.90
 BaltUneximbank Grand Hotel Europe 27.35 29.00
 Baltiisky Bank 34 Sadovaya Ulitsa 28.30 29.29
 Bank Sankt Peterburg 108 Ligovsky Prospect 28.35 28.95
 Impexbank 58 Nevsky Prospect 28.15 28.90
 MOST Bank 27 Nevsky Prospect 28.55 29.15
 Promstroi Bank 4 Mikhailovskaya Ulitsa 28.20 28.85
 PetroAeroBank 54 Nevsky Prospect 28.20 28.78
 RusRegion Bank 54 Nevsky Prospect 28.65 28.85
 Sberbank 4 Dumskaya Ulitsa 27.90 29.10 
 
 Average 28.20 28.98
 Change from last week -0.02 +0.01