SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #653 (20), Friday, March 16, 2001
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TITLE: Measures Against Foot-and-Mouth Announced
AUTHOR: By Robin Munro
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia has announced steps to gird itself against the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease spreading through Europe, as some agriculture experts said the country is better prepared to deal with the disease than its Western neighbors.
 Moscow banned meat imports from eight regions of northwestern France on Wednesday, Interfax reported. It had already banned meat from Britain, and warned that it could halt all European meat imports if the outbreak spreads, according to the Associated Press.
 It was unclear how the ban would affect Russia's meat market.
 The nation receives one-third of the 6 million or so tons of meat it consumes annually from abroad, according to Viktor Yatskin, head of the trade and information committee of the Russian Meat Union.
 The local meat industry would need at least two years of significant investment to compensate for imports from European Union countries in the event of an all-out ban, Yatskin said in a telephone interview Thursday.
 However, Yatskin said meat exporters outside Europe - such as Australia and Brazil - could easily make up the difference. 
 One agriculture expert said this week that Russia is in much better shape than Europe to fight off foot-and-mouth, and that the European outbreak had been predictable.
 Valery Zakharov, deputy director of a the All-Russia Research Institute of Animal Protection in Vladimir, forecast in his doctoral dissertation in 1999 that a foot-and-mouth epidemic would strike 89 areas of Britain, the Noviye Izvestia daily reported Wednesday.
 Zakharov based his prediction on information that Western Europe had abolished annual inoculations of cattle, sheep and goats in 1991 due to the high cost, the report said.
 No EU officials were available Thursday to comment on Zakharov's claims, but David Byrne, the EU's commissioner for health and consumer affairs, said Wednesday that annual vaccinations were not necessary to control foot-and-mouth.
 Vaccination should only be resorted to as a preventative measure in order to prevent the further spread of the disease pending certain eradication measures, he said in a statement.
 Zakharov was quoted as saying that inoculations in Russia cover about 18 percent of cattle and 19.5 percent of sheep and goats, with special focus this year on the North Caucasus and the Rostov, Volgograd, Stavropol, Krasnodar, Vladimir and Moscow regions. 
 Zakharov said Russia has been vigilant about vaccination because it has long faced the threat of foot-and-mouth from the east, rather than the west.
 Domestic animals in Siberia's Buryatia and Chita regions, which border Mongolia and China, have been inoculated.
 In Chita, authorities are concerned that about 10,000 antelopes have crossed the border from Mongolia, where cases of foot-and-mouth have been reported in six regions. Three thousand of the antelopes have been killed inside the Russian border, Interfax reported Thursday.
 Cases of foot-and-mouth near Russia's borders have also been reported in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, but no cases have been registered in Russia this year. The nation's last reported cases were in the Primorye region in April 2000, and were immediately eradicated, Interfax reported.

TITLE: Unknown Assailant Shoots Editor of Russian Playboy
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - The editor of the Russian version of Playboy magazine, Maxim Maslakov, was shot and wounded Wednesday night by an unknown attacker in the parking lot in front of the magazine's offices in northern Moscow.
 Maslakov was shot in the lower back at short range as he and two other Playboy employees were approaching his black Mercedes in a dark parking lot on Vyborgskaya Ulitsa at about 9 p.m.
 The medics said he was shot with buckshot and no vital organs were damaged. Maslakov was taken to Hospital No. 15 and was expected to remain there for at least a few days. He has been Playboy's editor for a year and a half.
 The motive for the attack and the identity of the gunman were not immediately known. Police who arrived shortly after the attack found at least one shell near the car.
 According to one of the witnesses, Playboy department editor Artyom Lipatov, the assailant said nothing before firing and he aimed below the waist. He is believed to have fled in a car waiting nearby.
 The Russian version of Playboy is published by Independent Media, the parent company of The St. Petersburg Times. In addition to Playboy, Independent Media publishes a range of Russian versions of glossy magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Men's Health and Good Housekeeping, and its own magazines. The Vedomosti daily is published in cooperation with The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.
 Maslakov is the second employee of Independent Media to be attacked this year. A Vedomosti deputy editor, Vladislav Maximov, was stabbed and seriously injured outside the Dynamo metro station on Jan. 24. He remains hospitalized. The motive for the attack was not clear.

TITLE: Chernomyrdin To Join Start of Polar Expedition
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Former Russian prime minister and Duma deputy, Viktor Chernomyrdin flew to Murmansk Thursday from where he will take part in the first leg of an international round-the-world snowmobile trip that will cover the Great Northern Route expedition, Strana.ru news Web site reported. 
 The expedition begins March 16 from the Kola Peninsula in the north of Russia, starting in the city of Zapolyarny, the chairperson of the expedition's international organizing committee said, according to the news service.
 The first leg of the expedition will be covered by snowmobiles.
 Chernomyrdin, together with the leader of the expedition, well-known Polar explorer Sergei Solovyov will be in the main group that will travel to the Russian-Norwegian border. Here the expedition will switch to dog sleds. Chernomyrdin will leave the expedition and return to Mos cow, Strana.ru reported, quoting him as saying he regrets he will have to leave the expedition at that early juncture. 
 The rest of the group will travel by dog sleds along the Arctic Circle through the northern territories of Russia, the United States, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Finland, said the news service.
 The second group - a technical support group - will travel following the first on snowmobiles. The group includes a painter, a photographer, a journalist and a video-cameraman, Strana.ru reported.
 This project is the continuation of the first expedition by the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya in 1982-83 when Solovyov and his team covered more than 10,000 kilometers by dog sled, said the agency.

TITLE: Kaliningrad Becoming Metals-Theft Capital
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalyev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The night of Feb. 1 began as any other working night for Gennady and Izotas Shidaskas, who earned their money boosting non-ferrous metals that they later resold. 
 This night, however, the brothers had planned a bigger haul than usual that involved cutting electric wires from a high voltage power line near their village in Kaliningrad.
 The evening ended with a jolt for Izotas and death for his brother Gennady, who was electrocuted by his high-voltage query. 
 "I saw smoke coming out of his gloves, and then he collapsed on the ground," Izotas said, according to police reports. Gennady survived the initial shock, but died later that day at a local hospital. 
 Kaliningrad - an enclave of Russian territory wedged between the Baltic States and the ocean - has been plagued by a myriad of difficulties since the break up of the Soviet Union: drugs, AIDS, poverty, and allegations of the presence of nuclear weapons. 
 But more recently, Kaliningrad is being dismantled practically screw by screw by illicit dealers in non-ferrous metals. Indeed, metal theft is a problem that affects all of Russia. But the problem has become especially acute in Kalinigrad. 
 Everything from power lines, to cars, to air defense radar systems are fair game for the thieves, who turn a tidy profit selling them on the high-tech black market. The metals can also be sold at redemption centers, which in turn pass them into the shadow economy. 
 Metal is being stolen by the tons and costing local industry tens of thousands of dollars, according to local officials, who have shut down local redemption centers in order to get a handle on the problem. Since Kaliningrad's 12 redemption centers have been shut down last month under a strict new licensing law passed last year, authorities have confiscated 10,000 tons of what they say are stolen non-ferrous metals. 
 The Kaliningrad Regional Railway reported losses of electrical cable last year totaling $16,700. The metal is then sold to middlemen, who officials say inflate the original buying price as much as ten times. But putting an official figure on the losses and criminal gains is tricky. 
 "It's quite often not even money they get for the wires, but just a bottle of vodka," said Vladimir Bagalin, a lawmaker in the Kaliningrad Oblast Duma.
 But even for such wages, the thieves are becoming more brazen. In late February, a cache of expensive military equipment containing non-ferrous metal was heisted from the radar system at one of Russia's air defense installations near the village of Nivenskoe in the Bagrationovsky district. 
 Artur Khashkhozhev, the acting prosecutor for the military base, said that all of the equipment was recovered and that the radar system was not damaged because of the theft.
 And last year a segment of railway track was stolen which would have caused a severe accident had rail workers not discovered the missing segment, Victor Budovsky, head of Kaliningrad Railways, wrote in a report to the Ka liningrad Oblast Duma. 
 "Illegal actions of this kind created a real threat to train operations and to the lives of hundreds of people," Budovsky wrote.
 Worst of all, perhaps, was the theft in Krasnoznamyonky District of 3,200 meters of electric wires, which left 670 people without electricity, many of them farmers raising livestock. 
 "The situation is worst, of course, in regions that are close to the border, because all this metal goes for export," said Peter Shelishch in a telephone interview. Shelishch is co-author of a federal bill that would ban the export of non-ferrous metals from Russia until 2005. 
 The bill was passed into law in November, but then vetoed by President Vladimir Putin, who said the law contradicted federal business.
 Shelishch was under no illusions that such a law could stop all theft but he is convinced strict licensing laws would change the situation. 
 Kaliningrad law, specifically a licensing law banning illegal collectors, has shut down 30 illegal redemption points over the past year. 
 Even so, Bagalin said the situation appeared "catastrophic." 
 "This year the police are more active than before. Each day we detain two or three people who steal," said Vyacheslav Bagutsky, spokesperson for the Kaliningrad Oblast Police.

TITLE: Orphanage Staff Balks at HIV Cases
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Six staff members of St. Petersburg's Young Children's Orphanage No. 10 have quit, and 12 more have tendered their resignations, over a city Health Committee decision to send the facility up to 20 HIV-positive children. 
 The children - aged 1 month to 1 year - were all abandoned at various hospitals throughout the city, mostly by drug-addicted parents, health officials said. They will be joining the 50 children already at orphanage No. 10 - a decision which has not been popular with much of the hospital's 55-person staff, which will soon shrink to 37.
 Epidemiologists at the Central District Health Administration say that facilities for the HIV-infected children should be entirely separate from the rest of the orphanage's residents. 
 "The staff doesn't want to work with those kids, they are afraid," said Ivan Kun, head of the health department of St. Petersburg's Central District, where the orphanage is located.
 Alla Gamayeva, head doctor at the orphanage, said that "the sanitary norms require that such kids should have isolated rooms with separate entrances, individual washing machines, bathrooms, toilets, and examination rooms so they don't interfere with other babies." 
 "You know, little children are unpredictable by nature. They can bite each other or a nurse, injure themselves when playing, and pass the disease on to a healthy kid or a nurse."
 Lyudmila Korovyanova, a night nurse for babies, said she has no prejudice against the new HIV-positive patients at Young Children's Orphanage No. 10, but confessed that she is psychologically not prepared to work with them and will probably resign if more of her colleagues do. 
 Anatoly Simakhovsky, head of the motherhood and childhood protection department of the Health Committee, said that they will bring the children to the orphanage anyway.
 "When people are doctors, they should do their duty," he said.
 Indeed, it is not even fully established that all of those children born to HIV-positive mothers will have the virus. In fact, these babies stand only a 40 percent chance of contracting the virus, according to Doctors Without Borders. This is not a fact that can be discerned at birth, however - the child must wait a year and a half to be tested. 
 Alla Davydova, an AIDS prevention specialist from the St. Petersburg AIDS Center, agreed, saying the fear of the children's home staff was baseless. As has been established by medical research throughout the world - which was reiterated by Davydova - there are only three known ways to contract the HIV virus: blood contact, such as through transfusions or needle sharing during drug use; unprotected sexual intercourse; and birth to an HIV-infected mother. 
 "There is almost no way such contact could take place in the orphanage, only hypothetically," she said, pointing out that the staff of her own AIDS center share none of the fears of the staff at Young Children's Orphanage No. 10. 
 Kun criticized the approach of those staff members who had resigned or planned to as "unacceptable." 
 "However, that's their choice, and we have to understand that for many people it's hard to change the whole style of their work," he said. 
 Nonetheless, even those staff members who plan on staying are concerned by the threadbare budget augmentations the orphanage has been given to accept its new guests. Anatoly Kagan, head of the City Health Committee, issued an order to allocate 200 thousand rubles for repairs and expansions to the orphanage. But head doctor Gamayeva said it's not enough for such big changes. 
 She complained that the building was not ready to take in such a huge influx of residents in its current state. 
 "We would do our duty if we were sure we would receive the essential financing and could be sure there would be measures for protecting us and our orphanage children who are just like our own for us," said Marina Borisenko, speech therapist.
 Meanwhile, Kun agreed that the situation was far from ideal.
 "Of course, those kids should have either a separate building or a big separate department in some orphanage," he said. But he added that most immediately the HIV-infected children needed shelter. 
 Nonetheless, the staff at Young Children's Orphanage No. 10 is afraid that prejudices against those with HIV could affect the adoptability of all the children in the home - many parents, staff members fear, may lose interest in adopting a healthy baby simply because it has been in an orphanage with HIV-infected children. 
 Staff members too, have been shunned by friends. Tatyana Kiryanova, another speech therapist from the orphanage, said her friends are slowly drawing away from her. 
 "The first thing they ask me when they call is if we have already received the new children," she said.

TITLE: Hijackers Grab Vnukovo Flight
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: RIYADH - A Russian airliner carrying 174 people was hijacked by men claiming to be Chechens after takeoff from Istanbul on Thursday and forced to fly to Saudi Arabia's holy city of Medina.
 A Saudi official said the hijackers had released women and children and he was confident the drama would end soon.
 "More than 20 women and children have been released. They are now in our care," Ali al-Khalaf, director of Saudi Civil Aviation told Reuters by telephone.
 "We have a team negotiating with the group and dealing with them within the appropriate rules. The crisis is on its way to resolution, God willing," he said.
 The state-run Saudi Press Agency reported that shortly after a number of women and children were released, another 15 passengers also escaped through the rear entrance of the plane. The plane, a Tupolev 154 owned by Vnukovo Airlines and originally bound for Moscow, was hijacked on Thursday afternoon shortly after takeoff from Istanbul.
 The airline said that the plane was carrying 162 passengers, 98 of Russian nationality, including 12 crew members. The Russian Foreign Ministry said that there were 59 Turks on board. The nationalities of others on board were not made available
 Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is currently on a skiing holiday in the Siberian region of Russia, ordered the creation of a special crisis team of top officials to deal with the hijacking, the Kremlin said.
 Original Turkish reports spoke of two hijackers, but the head of the Russian crisis team said that he believed that there were actually four hijackers. Vladimir Pronichev also told Russia's RTR television that it was Moscow that had negotiated the release of the women and children and of a flight attendant who had been stabbed by the hijackers. Earlier, Saudi television showed the plane parked at a remote area of the airport with its lights flashing. The footage did not, however, show any security presence around the aircraft.
 Turkish Transport Minister Enis Oksuz told NTV television that the hijackers had introduced themselves as Chechens. According to Vnukovo Airlines, they demanded that Russia's military campaign in Chechnya be stopped immediately.
 "We still do not have any information about the nationality of the hijackers, whether they were Chechens or of some other nationality, but we are guiding ourselves by the fact that one of the demands of the hijackers is an end to the war in Chechnya," said chief executive Alexander Klimov.
 Sergei Yastrzhembsky, Russian Pre si dent Vladimir Putin's chief spokes man for the military campaign in rebel Chechnya, said the hijackers had no access to the pilots, who battened down their door.
 Russia's NTV television reported that the Saudis had managed to hand a walkie-talkie to the hijackers who were demanding water. They also wanted floodlights to be directed at the plane. A pro-Chechen press agency, which claims that it is the outlet for statements by separatist forces in Chechnya, contradicted the reports of both the Russian and Saudi press by claiming that the rebels fighting Russian rule were not linked to the hijack.
 "The official structures of Chechnya do not have any links to this incident," said a statement issued by Chechen-Press in the Georgian capital Tbilisi. "Hostage-taking and blackmail are not our way of fighting."
 
 <i>- AP, Reuters </i>

TITLE: Kasyanov Survives Vote As Unity Changes Tack
AUTHOR: By Ron Popeski
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW - A Communist no-confidence vote in Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov's government failed by a wide margin in the State Duma on Wednesday. 
 Kasyanov, in office since last May, did not turn up at the session, where many deputies refused to back the Communist motion but still criticized his government. President Vladimir Putin was on a brief skiing break in Siberia. 
 Only 127 members voted in favor, far short of the 226 votes needed to pass in the 450-seat assembly. Seventy-six voted against and five abstained. Large numbers of depu ties made good on their promises not to cast ballots. 
 The outcome had been expected as only the Communists and their Agrarian party allies had pledged support. The pro-Kremlin Unity party, which had earlier suggested it would back the no-confidence vote as a tactical move to improve its standing in the Duma, was among those refusing to vote. 
 The motion was the first time since Putin came to power 14 months ago that the Communists, the Duma's largest group, had openly opposed Kremlin policies. 
 Kasyanov later said he did not attend because he believed the motion did not represent opinion in the Duma. He noted &quot;big differences&quot; in talks with Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov. 
 &quot;We did not view today's debate as an invitation by the entire Duma to engage in dialogue on essential issues, but rather a challenge issued by a single group,&quot; he told NTV television. &quot;All the complaints about the government aired during the session are well known.&quot; 
 Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin described the lopsided failure of the motion as &quot;a worthy response for a government that is working hard and resolving the most difficult of tasks.&quot; 
 Zyuganov had earlier told the Duma that ministers had solved none of Russia's problems left by ex-President Boris Yeltsin's eight years in office. Kasyanov, he said, promoted the same policies that had pitched Russia into a 1998 financial crisis. 
 &quot;This government is pursuing a ruinous policy for the country. It is not making the slightest attempt to dig its way out of this deep rut,&quot; he told the chamber. 
 Other groups steered clear of backing the Communists. 
 Boris Nemtsov of the Union of Right Forces, or SPS. The party said the government was a &quot;ship standing still&quot; failing to provide heat and electricity to vast regions. Sergei Ivanenko of the liberal Yabloko party spoke of &quot;colossal instability&quot; in the Kremlin. 
 Putin has had little trouble in securing the Duma's approval for most of his proposals, including a deficit-free budget and laws to centralize authority and trim regional leaders' powers. 
 Unity had caused a furor in the lead-up to the vote by suggesting that if the government lost the motion and Putin then dissolved parliament, it could win more seats at the Communists' expense.

TITLE: Kursk Foundation Linking Aid to Radioactive Cleanup
AUTHOR: By Robin Munro
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin will have the opportunity at an informal European Union-Russia summit next week in Stockholm to resolve a deadlock in plans to raise the Kursk submarine, said the head of the international Kursk Foundation on Wednesday.
 The fundraising group - comprising the EU countries, Norway, Japan, Canada and the United States - has agreed to pay half of the estimated $70 million salvage but only if Russia agrees to a cleanup of radioactive sites on land and sea around Arkhangelsk and Murmansk. The Russian government has said nothing publicly about the foundation's demand.
 A statement from Putin expressing support for linking the project of raising the Kursk to the cleanup could break the deadlock, the foundation's Rio Praaning said by telephone from Brussels.
 &quot;I am sure that will be enough for the EU - enough for the world - to understand what is going on and they will be appreciative of it,&quot; he said.
 &quot;If we had such a program in place it could be possible to consider assistance to raising the Kursk,&quot; said Silvia Kofler, press officer for the European Commission's delegation in Russia.
 Privately, Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov and the navy have told the foundation that they support linking funding for the Kursk salvage to acceptance of the MNEPR program, Praaning said. Kommersant, however, reported Tuesday that Moscow opposes the program because it does not want Western specialists to gain access to military information in the course of the cleanup. 
 The Kursk, which sank in the Barents Sea on Aug. 12, killing all 118 on board, has two nuclear reactors and military weapons on board. The government has promised to raise the submarine this year.
 Klebanov said Monday that the salvage operation would be conducted in August or September. But Praaning said that this would be too late and preparations should begin this week. There is no barge suitable for transporting the Kursk to port and one must be prepared well before any attempts are made to raise the submarine, he said.
 Interfax quoted Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin as saying Wednesday on Ekho Moskvy radio that 500 million rubles ($17.4 million) and $30 million of federal funds will be made available. Extra funds will be found if Western nations do not contribute, the report said.
 However, the Duma later said if Russia has to bear the full cost of raising the sub, it would be the government's fault, Interfax reported. Deputies voted almost unanimously to send a request to the government to urgently resolve the financial issues of the salvage, Interfax reported. 
 Igor Kudrik, a researcher at the Norwegian environmental group Bellona, said that Russian politicians have been reluctant to mention MNEPR because it had been under discussion for so long with no visible results. &quot;It's a kind of embarrassment,&quot; Kudrik said by telephone from Oslo.

TITLE: Khatami Visits Site of Iran's Nuclear Buy
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW - A Russian official said Thursday that Iran will sign up for a second Russian-built nuclear reactor once the delayed first one, which has already sparked U.S. worries, has been completed.
 Russia is helping Iran build a nuclear power plant at the Gulf port of Bushehr. Iran says it is for civil use, but the United States has worried it might help the Islamic Republic, which it dubs a &quot;rogue state,&quot; develop nuclear weapons.
 &quot;In principle, he [Iranian President Mohammed Khatami] confirmed that as soon as the equipment for the first reactor leaves the factory, a contract for a second reactor will be signed,&quot; Yevgeny Sergeyev, the general director of the Izhorskiye Zavody plant, told journalists.
 Khatami, on a visit to Russia, visited the plant in St. Petersburg and met Sergeyev. The plant is making equipment for the first reactor, which it plans to deliver in the third quarter of 2001.
 Sergeyev said the first reactor had originally been scheduled for completion by the end of 2002, but had now been put back to late 2003 or early 2004. 
 Russia and Iran have been in talks before over the construction of a second reactor. 
 Dressed in traditional Muslim cleric's robes, Khatami toured the factory floor while Sergeyev explained the manufacturing process to him.
 Iran and Russia signed an $800 million deal for the first nuclear power plant's construction in the mid-1990s, but it has since been subject to delays. 
 Last week, the deputy head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, Assadollah Sabouri, was quoted on state television as criticizing Russian contractors for the hold-ups.
 Sabouri said the first unit, a 1,000 megawatt power station, was &quot;about 50 percent completed&quot; and its main equipment would be installed during the next Iranian year, which begins March 21.
 The total construction cost of one reactor is between $800 million and one billion. 
 The United States has put pressure on Russia to abandon the nuclear project as it sees Iran as one of the &quot;rogue states&quot; that it says threaten world stability. 
 It has also urged Russia to drop plans to resume supplying conventional weapons to Iran, although Russian President Vladimir Putin told Khatami earlier this week that Moscow was ready to go ahead with the arms sales.
 Tehran and Moscow insist the nuclear cooperation is of a strictly civilian nature. They say arms will be defensive and the sale does not violate Russia's international treaty obligations.
 He said the deal for manufacturing equipment for a second reactor could be signed by the end of 2002 or the start of 2003. 
 After leaving St. Petersburg, Khatami travels to Kazan in Russia's autonomous Tatarstan Republic where he will meet regional President Min ti mer Shaimiyev and visit a mosque.
 Tatarstan is one of Russia's main Muslim provinces.

TITLE: Tycoon Avoids Prosecution in Aeroflot Case
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - More than two years after it was opened, the Aeroflot fraud case will be sent to court in May, but Boris Berezovsky is not among the four people charged with defrauding the airline of hundreds of millions of dollars, an official at the Prosecutor General's Office said Wednesday by telephone.
 Berezovsky has been spared, at least temporarily, even though Deputy Prosecutor General Vladimir Kolmogorov issued an official statement in November saying his office planned to bring charges against him. 
 Prosecutors said last year they had established that about $900 million in Aeroflot funds went through two Swiss-based companies, Andava and Forus, reportedly co-founded by Berezovsky to service the airliner's hard-currency proceeds. It was unclear how many millions may have been diverted.
 The defendants are Aeroflot's former commercial director Alexander Krasnenker, former deputy director Nikolai Glush kov, former senior vice president Lydia Kryzhevskaya and Roman Sheinin, who heads the Moscow-based company FOK, which is suspected of working with Andava to defraud the national carrier. 
 All four were charged last year with organized gross fraud, but only Glushkov has been arrested and jailed. 
 The investigation was opened Jan. 18, 1999. By law, an investigation must be completed within six months unless extended, which the Aeroflot case was. 
 But when the current term expires May 18, investigator Alexander Filin has decided not to seek an extension and to send the case immediately to court, said the official at the Prosecutor General's Office, who asked not to be identified. 
 &quot;We believe that a decision should be made quickly in the case of Aeroflot. The case of those who we believe are guilty should be sent to court,&quot; Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov was quoted as saying by Monday's Nezavisimaya Gazeta, which is owned by Berezovsky.
 The prosecutor's office official said Berezovsky has not been charged in the case and he would not comment on why Kol mogorov has failed to keep his promise to do so. Neither Kolmogorov nor Filin could be reached Wednesday. 
 But Berezovsky is not off the hook. The official said a separate case could be opened against Berezovsky even after the trial begins &quot;if sufficient evidence is collected.&quot; 
 Berezovsky, once considered untouchable because of his close connections to former President Boris Yeltsin, went into self-imposed exile last year. 
 Andrei Ryabov, political analyst at the Moscow Carnegie Center, said prosecutors are unlikely to charge Berezovsky unless he resumes his criticism of the Kremlin.
 Shortly after Vladimir Putin's inauguration in May, ORT television, which was then controlled by Berezovsky, launched an offensive against the new president, accusing him of using excessive force in Chechnya and infringing upon freedom of speech. 
 The campaign, which some analysts believed was launched in an effort by Berezovsky to demonstrate his political weight and try to preserve his waning influence in the Kremlin, reached its peak when the Kursk submarine sank in August 2000 and Putin initially decided not to cut short his vacation.
 Soon enough Berezovsky saw control of ORT wrested from him and he fled Russia. He continued his anti-Putin crusade for some time from the United States, but then went silent.
 Berezovsky's silence &quot;could have been a signal of truce to the Kremlin and this signal may have been heard,&quot; Ryabov said. Should Berezovsky resume his criticism of Putin, he could find himself wanted for arrest.

TITLE: Petersburg Programmers Win World Competition
AUTHOR: By Andrey Musatov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Two teams of students from St. Petersburg won first and third prize at the Association for Computing Machinery's International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals in Vancouver, Canada, on Saturday.
 The first-place team - made up of Nikolai Durov, Oleg Yeterevsky and Andrei Lopatin, third-year students in the mathematics and mechanics department at St. Petersburg State University - also won last year in Orlando, Florida.
 More than 13,000 computer science and engineering students and faculty from more than 70 countries competed in regional preliminary contests held from last September through December. The top 70 teams earned places in the finals.
 The Commonwealth of Independent States was represented by six teams - including the St. Petersburg Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics, which won third place, and Moscow State University and Ural State University, each of which tied with 15 other teams for 14th place.
 The object, said Alexander Alexeyev, a fifth-year student and a coach of the St. Petersburg State team, was to create a program that could solve as many tasks as possible in five hours.
 &quot;In order to win, we had to create a computer program that could solve some mathematical problems and pass a few mathematical tests,&quot; Alexeyev said in a telephone interview Tuesday. &quot;Our team solved six problems and did it two hours earlier than the Virginia Tech [team], which got second place.&quot;
 According to Alexeyev, training the team was quite difficult.
 &quot;Our technical base was very poor, and we simply did not have enough computers,&quot; he said. &quot;The only computer classroom was also used by other students,&quot; he said.
 &quot;Our training program, in order to get used to the competition, included five-hour sessions spent exercising on old problems that were used in previous contests.&quot;
 According to Alexeyev, new tasks had to be created often to ensure that the students would be ready for any problems they encountered in the contest. 
 But despite the technical problems, the team was well prepared for the contest in other ways - the St. Petersburg States students were intelligent long before they entered the university, Alexeyev said. They started participating in mathematical competitions while they were still in school - and did quite well.
 &quot;A large part of their talent was due to very good basic mathematical knowledge given in school,&quot; Alexeyev said. &quot;That is one of the strongest points of Russian education. Michigan University, for instance, may have stronger technical facilities, but the smartest guys come from Russia.&quot;
 Alexeyev himself works as a programmer at a St. Petersburg firm. However, he refused to say how much he earns or discuss the professional plans of his winning team. 
 The members of the Russian teams cannot be reached for comment until Friday, when they return from abroad. The universities have paid for their trips to and from Vancouver, while the computing association paid for living expenses during the contest. 
 As for the team from St. Petersburg State, they're doing a little traveling around Europe to celebrate the victory, Alexeyev said.

TITLE: U.S. Officials Question Kokh Over Media-MOST Affair
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Gazprom-Media chief Alfred Kokh apparently has not had an easy time of it in the United States, where he has been meeting with various high-ranking officials. 
 Kokh went to Washington last week to convince the Americans that he is not acting on behalf of the Kremlin to suppress media freedom in Russia but is motivated purely by business interests in his dispute with Vladimir Gusinsky's Media-MOST holding, which owes the state-controlled gas giant millions of dollars.
 Instead, he has been forced to fight off tough questions from U.S. congressmen and security officials and to justify his actions against Media-MOST, according to a source in Gazprom-Media and a report in Kommersant on Tuesday.
 Among those who met with Kokh are Acting Assistant Secretary of State John Beyrle and Daniel Fried, National Security Council director for European and Eurasian affairs. 
 Kommersant reported that the meeting with Fried and other NSC officials late last week turned out to be the toughest for Kokh. They asked Kokh to explain why Gazprom started collecting debts from Media-MOST and not from Itera, a U.S.-registered gas producer and trader, which owes Gazprom half a billion dollars. Kokh responded that Itera was outside his area of responsibility.
 &quot;Possibly we have some insignificant differences with the Americans about the political component to this conflict,&quot; Kokh said. &quot;I would express it like this: In the State Department and NSC they don't see a political underpinning between Media-MOST and Gaz prom but between Media-MOST and the Russian prosecutor.&quot;
 Back in Moscow, the Audit Chamber, the State Duma's budgetary watchdog, which has been auditing Gazprom for the past year, also addressed Gazprom's relationship with Media-MOST and Itera.
 Auditor Mikhail Beskhmelnitsin said at a news conference Monday that the Audit Chamber was recommending Gazprom get out of the media business. Beskhmelnitsin also said the Audit Chamber will sort out the relationship between Gazprom and Itera and determine whether Itera has been used to channel Gazprom assets out of the country, the report said. The Audit Chamber's decisions have little weight even if wrongdoing is uncovered.
 Kommersant wrote Kokh was questioned in Washington about Press Minister Mikhail Lesin's role in the conflict between Gazprom and Media-MOST. 
 Last July, Lesin signed an appendix to an agreement between Gazprom and Gusinsky that promised the media mogul he would be free to leave Russia in exchange for signing away his companies. The move was widely seen as dubious both legally and morally. Lesin, who received a public slap from Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, later admitted it was a mistake.

TITLE: Borodin Returns to Jail After Treatment
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NEW YORK - A former Kremlin aide being held in the United States on Swiss money laundering charges has been moved back to jail from a hospital where he was treated for chest pains, his attorney said on Wednesday.
 Pavel Borodin, 54, who was arrested in New York in January at the request of Swiss prosecutors who want him extradited to Switzerland, was moved to an unidentified hospital on Monday.
 Borodin's attorney Barry Kingham said his client was moved from the hospital back to jail, where he said he was &quot;resting comfortably.&quot;
 Several requests by Borodin's lawyers to free him on bail have been rejected by a U.S. federal magistrate in Brooklyn.
 Kingham said he planned to request at a hearing on Friday that Borodin be released and guarded by a private security firm. He would also wear an electronic surveillance bracelet.
 The Russian official once headed the Kremlin's property empire, and his latest job was as secretary of a nebulous political union between Russia and Belarus.
 He has denied the Swiss charges of money laundering while in his Kremlin job and said he was ready to face Swiss prosecutors if freed.
 The Russian Foreign Ministry in Moscow, which has been pressing the United States to release Borodin, complained earlier in the week that he had been moved to the hospital in &quot;complete secrecy&quot; and neither Russian officials nor his lawyers were informed for some time.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Canada Crackdown
 

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada's Foreign Ministry said Wednesday it had badly mishandled the case of drunk Russian diplomat Andrei Knyazev, whose car struck and killed an Ottawa woman, and vowed to crack down on drunk driving by foreign envoys. 
 "I am saddened and angered by evidence that deficiencies in handling Andrei Knyazev may have contributed to the tragic accident on Jan. 27," Foreign Minister John Manley told a news conference.
 Manley said that sloppy paperwork, poor liaison between various sections of the ministry and policy shortcomings had prevented officials from realizing Knyazev was a dangerous driver who needed to be dealt with. 
 
 
Zenit Fan Dies
 

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Igor Formsky, 75, died suddenly Wednesday night while waiting in line at Petrovsky Stadium, the press service of Zenit, St. Petersburg professional soccer club reported Thursday. 
 Formsky had been waiting to buy a ticket for Zenit's first home game of the season, scheduled for Saturday. 
 Neither the Zenit nor the police press service had further information about Formsky's death. 
 
 
Tobin Nears Trial
 

MOSCOW (AP) - The investigation of American graduate student John Tobin, who was arrested on drug charges and accused of having ties to U.S. intelligence services, is in its final stage, a police official was quoted as saying Wednesday. 
 Tobin was arrested Feb. 1 in Voronezh, 475 kilometers south of Moscow, and held on suspicion of possessing 4.5 grams of marijuana. 
 Andrei Makarov, a senior investigator for the police in Voronezh, said the investigation is likely to be completed by the end of the month.
 "A few investigatory activities remain, after which the case will be sent to the court," Interfax quoted him as saying.
 
 
Mir Assurances?
 

KOROLYOV, Central Russia (AP) - With just a week to go before the scheduled dumping of the Mir space station, space officials Wednesday assured a nervous public that they will be able to control the orbiter's descent even in the case of a power outage or computer failure. 
 But, the chief of mission control acknowledged that this operation may not be as smooth as planned. 
 "We anticipate two possible problems - the batteries running low and the central computer's failure," Vla di mir Solovyov told reporters at mission control in Korolyov, in Moscow's northeastern outskirts.
 Mir's descent date is tentatively set for March 21-22.
 
 
Anthem Text Passed
 

MOSCOW (AP) - The Federation Council on Wednesday approved new words to go with the melody of the Soviet national anthem, reinstated as Russia's anthem by parliament last month. 
 The vote in the Federation Council was 141-1. The measure, approved by the State Duma last week, now goes to President Vladimir Putin, who is expected to sign it. 
 The new words delete praise for the Communist Party and Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin, instead referring to Russia as a country "protected by God." They were written by poet Sergei Mikhalkov, who also wrote the Soviet-era words. 



TITLE: Letter Targets Plan To Take Spent Fuel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - Hundreds of environmental organizations have sent a letter to President Vladimir Putin urging him to veto a bill that allows the import of spent nuclear fuel into the country if it is passed by lawmakers.
 &quot;We haven't received any answer to our letter so far, but it is probably too early anyway,&quot; said Alexei Yablokov, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and an environmental adviser to former president Boris Yeltsin.
 &quot;We asked the president to veto the bill if the [State] Duma passes these amendments in two readings in one go March 22,&quot; Yablokov said, expressing the fear of many environmentalists that the Duma will rush the bill, which was approved in first reading earlier this year, through the final two hearings.
 If the legislation is then passed by the Federation Council and signed into law by Putin, it will open the door to a $20 billion project by the Nuclear Power Ministry to import 20,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel from 14 countries for reprocessing or storage.

TITLE: Demonstrators' Own Blood Backs Kiev Protest
AUTHOR: By Michael Steen
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: KIEV, Ukraine - Protesters deposited a glassful of blood outside Ukraine's Interior Ministry on Wednesday, accusing President Leonid Kuchma of having blood on his hands following the murder of reporter Georgy Gongadze. 
 A dozen of the demonstrators helped fill the glass with their own blood, which the leader of the protest then placed outside the ministry's main entrance. Police, who last week fought a pitched battle with participants in an earlier rally before arresting dozens of them, looked on but made no move. 
 The symbolic protest came during a 1,000-strong march through the capital, the latest in a two-month-old campaign to press for Kuchma's resignation. They allege that the ministry acted on Kuchma's orders to &quot;get rid&quot; of the reporter. 
 Kuchma and his top officials deny involvement in the death of Gongadze, whose headless and mutilated corpse was found in a shallow grave outside Kiev last November. The 31-year-old reporter had accused the president of large-scale corruption. 
 Police were out in force as demonstrators - a loose coalition including nationalists and socialists - chanted &quot;Kuchma out!&quot; and demanded the release of students detained in a protest that turned violent in the city last week. 
 &quot;I want to urge you to be disciplined today,&quot; Yury Lutsenko, a leader of the Ukraine Without Kuchma movement, told the crowd, which marched from parliament to the prosecutor general's office and on to the Interior Ministry and presidential administration. 
 &quot;I ask you not to give in to emotions or provocations,&quot; Lutsenko added.
 Protesters shouted, &quot;Shame! Shame!&quot; at busloads of riot police that have been stationed in the city center for days. They laid wreaths &quot;to Kuch ma's political death&quot; outside his office. 
 The president, on holiday in the Crimean peninsula on the Black Sea, retains a tight grip on power, and is adept at exploiting a divided opposition. 
 Last Friday's protest was the first to turn violent and was also the largest, with up to 10,000 taking part. About 50 people remain in detention after battling riot police outside Kuchma's administration building. 
 Rallies have been generally confined to the capital, though on Tuesday 4,000 students surged through the cobbled streets of Lviv.

TITLE: Floating Nuke Plant Drawing Opposition
AUTHOR: By Yevgenia Borisova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Nuclear Power Minister Yevgeny Adamov said a floating nuclear power plant will be built in the northwestern town of Severodvinsk - a move that was immediately branded by environmentalists Wednesday as a breach of federal laws and a danger for locals.
 Adamov said Tuesday that the plant will generate 70 megawatts of power and 50 gigacalories of heat and supply electricity to Severodvinsk and the Northern Machine-Building Plant, the city's biggest power consumer and Russia's largest submarine builder.
 Nuclear Power Ministry spokesperson Yury Bespalko said Wednesday that the plant will cost $109.7 million.
 Although he did not say who would finance the project, another ministry source said the investment will be provided by the ministry itself.
 The Severodvinsk plant will be built under the same blueprints that had been drawn up in 1998 for another floating nuclear power plant in the Far East, the source said. 
 That project, for a station in Pevek, Chukotka, was frozen amid financial problems in the region. It had passed the stage of feasibility studies and parts have even been ordered from the Izhorskiye Plant in St. Petersburg. 
 The Pevek plans, which were prepared by the Nizhny Novgorod-based OKB Mashinostroyeniye factory, will be modified for the Severodvinsk location, the Nuclear Power Ministry source said.
 Feasibility studies for the Severodvinsk plant are scheduled to be completed by the end of 2001.
 Environmentalists, who have long campaigned against the Far East project as a violation of the law, said Ada mov's announcement came as a shock. 
 &quot;Nothing has changed since then in that law,&quot; said Ivan Blokov, spokesman for the Moscow office of Greenpeace. &quot;It still stipulates that 'the location, drafting and construction of nuclear power plants is prohibited - in the vicinity of bodies of water of federal significance.'&quot;
 The Severodvinsk plant is to float on the Severnaya Dvina River near the White Sea in the Arkhangelsk region, east of Murmansk and Scandinavia.
 &quot;Undoubtedly, the White Sea and Severnaya Dvina are bodies of water of federal significance,&quot; Blokov said.
 Alexei Yablokov, environmental adviser to former President Boris Yeltsin, added: &quot;In choosing between the two evils, the Pevek station in Chukotka would have been a better evil because it would have caused less damage [if a disaster occurred]. Here, it is too close to the center of Russia and to the Scandinavian countries.&quot; 
 Thomas Nilsen, spokesman for the Bellona environmental organization, said he is worried about the local residents most of all.
 &quot;I was in Severodvinsk a few years ago,&quot; he said. &quot;The block of flats [is] just a few hundred meters away from the place where the plant will be built. It is very dangerous - in the case of even a minor accident that would release radioactive steam from the plant, no one would be able to warn people, or to manage to evacuate them.&quot;
 A ministry source close to the $270 million Pevek project said construction was put on hold purely for economic reasons: The region appeared to be unable to pay for the electricity that the plant was supposed to generate. 
 The impoverishment of the region was not clear in 1995 when the project was initiated, said the source.

TITLE: Powell Sets Out Russian Goals in Testimony Before Congress
AUTHOR: By Jonathan Wright
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: WASHINGTON - The United States wants friendship with Russia, but in disputes such as Russian arms sales to Iran it should take much the same &quot;realistic approach&quot; it did with the Soviet Union, Secretary of State Colin Powell told Congress on Wednesday.
 &quot;We don't wish an enemy. We want a friend. But we understand the realism of the relationship as it exists today,&quot; Powell told the Senate Budget Committee.
 &quot;In some ways, the approach to Russia ... shouldn't be terribly different than the very realistic approach we had to the old Soviet Union in the late '80s,&quot; he added.
 Powell qualified his remark, saying the relationship had changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and that Russia no longer presented the same &quot;threatening face.&quot;
 The aim of the United States, he added, should be to help strengthen democratic institutions in Russia, promote a functioning market economy and bring the country into the global trading system.
 &quot;But at the same time, we have to be clear to the Russians that if they wish to join the world to the West, which is where their future is, then certain things have to be dealt with,&quot; he said.
 As Powell testified on the State Department budget, the secretary of Russia's security council held talks at the White House with President George W. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. Powell was scheduled to see Russia's minister of foreign affairs, Sergei Ivanov, later in the day.
 While speaking with Rice, Powell brought up the Bush administration's concerns about Russian plans to sell weapons and nuclear technology to Iran, saying that it would not be in Russia's long-term interests. Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday, after talks with Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, that Russia would go ahead with sales of defensive weapons to Iran. The United States said it would object to Russian sales of advanced conventional weapons and sensitive technologies, such as those that might help Iran develop long-range missiles or weapons of mass destruction.
 Powell said the United States also wanted to see the Russian government preserve media freedoms. Washington has repeatedly rebuked Moscow for measures that could be interpreted as harassment of the independent media. Expanding on his reference to dealing with the Soviet Union, which he did in the 1980s as national security adviser to former President George Bush, Powell said:
 &quot;We told them what bothered us. We told them where we could engage on things. We tried to convince them of the power of our values and our system. They argued back.
 &quot;We should be realistic and keep encouraging them to move in the direction of solid democracy: Don't start restricting First Amendment rights ... and don't start, or continue frankly, to invest in these regimes that, at the end of the day, you will find that the investment was not worth it.&quot;
 After his talks with Rice, Ivanov told reporters they had a &quot;very frank discussion&quot; on strategic stability, nonproliferation, the situation in Kosovo and U.S. plans for a missile defense system.
 &quot;Certainly there are differences. We understand there are differences and they will have to be addressed. This is something we will have to work on in the future,&quot; he said.
 He invited Rice to visit Moscow and said the first meeting between Bush and Putin would take place in Genoa when G-8 heads of state meet in July.

TITLE: LIVIZ Extends Russia Smirnoff Deal
AUTHOR: By Andrey Musatov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: London-based United Distillers & Vintners (UDV) on Tuesday signed a 5-year deal with LIVIZ distillery to extend the production agreement with the St. Petersburg firm for Smirnoff brand vodka.
 The deal carries on an arrangement by which LIVIZ had been licensed by UDV to produce Smirnoff vodka to be sold in Russia since 1997. UDV has been selling the Smirnoff brand in Russia for 10 years.
 The Smirnoff brand was founded in Russia by Pyotr Smirnov during the second half of the 19th century, and became Tsarist Russia's largest vodka producer. But the company was nationalized in 1917 by the new Soviet government. Vledimir Smirnov, one of Pyotr's three sons, emigrated from the Soviet Union and set up production of the brand in Poland in the early 20s. He subsequently set up production facilities in Paris and New York.
 UDV is a subsidiary of Diageo, which was formed in 1997 by the merger of GrandMet and Guinness. Heublein, a Diageo holding, purchased the Smirnoff trademark in 1939. UDV also owns such famous brands as Jimmy Walker, Bacardi, Gordons and Bailey's. 
 According to Shafi Shaikh, the general manager of UDV for Russia and the Baltic states, the contract with LIVIZ was to cement UDV's strategic position in the region. At Tuesday's signing, he said that the plan is to increase the volume of Smirnoff production at LIVIZ for export to the Commonwealth of Independent States and Baltic states over the next five years.
 Representatives of both sides at the signing ceremony declined to comment on the financial specifics of the deal.
 &quot;Over the last decade, UDV has invested $43 million in Russia, with most of this going toward improving the place of our brands in the Russian market - including $800,000 spent on upgrading the equipment at Liviz,&quot; Shaikh said. &quot;The volume of our investment in the distillery in the future will depend on sales.&quot;
 According to Vladimir Sharshov, general director of LIVIZ, the distillery produced about 1.5 million liters of Smirnoff vodka in 2000, about 10 percent of LIVIZ' total production.

TITLE: Kudrin Says IMF Deal More a Matter of Image Than Need
AUTHOR: By Julie Tolkacheva
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia will not need cash from the International Monetary Fund in 2001, but still hopes that creditors will ease Moscow's debt burden in peak repayment years, Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Wednesday.
 &quot;I do not think we shall need an IMF credit this year,&quot; Kudrin told Ekho Moskvy radio station.
 &quot;We shall raise enough revenue not to get deeper into debt, not to increase the debt burden which sometimes throws us to our knees. This is good. We shall leave less debt to our children.&quot;
 Russia is enjoying a period of high international prices for its main exports, energy and metals - a great boon to state coffers.
 This allowed the Kremlin to win parliament's approval to increase extra revenues in the budget to service foreign debts, including the $40 billion Soviet-era debt to the Paris Club of creditor nations and the IMF.
 The upper chamber of parliament approved the budget amendments earlier on Wednesday.
 The government and the IMF are currently putting final touches to a one-year precautionary loan agreement, and Kudrin said Russia needed the deal only to raise its reputation in the eyes of the world business community.
 &quot;The aim of the program is not to get credits, but to strengthen trust in the country as our credit ratings in the West are not very high,&quot; he said.
 Kudrin said interest payments on foreign debts were eating up to a quarter of budget revenues with payments to increase to $18.5-19.0 billion in 2003 versus $14.5 billion this year.
 He said the government would try to carry out reforms that would allow the country to cope with the debt burden on its own, but might need help if the results of those reforms were disappointing.
 &quot;Another variant, or additional insurance is the possibility of help from governments of other countries that would allow us to postpone part of the payments in peak years. We should hope for such support, but must do everything to do without it.&quot;
 He said that if the government could ensure a level of 4 to 5 percent annual economic growth and if commodity prices were not too bad, Russia had a good chance to meet debt payments without the need for any debt restructuring.
 This year the government hopes to attain a level of 4 to 5 percent growth in gross domestic product after an encouraging 7.7 percent rise in GDP last year.

TITLE: Aluminum Tycoon Makes His Play for Irkutskenergo
AUTHOR: By Igor Semenenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Tycoon Oleg Deripaska, who controls the world's second-largest aluminum producer, now wants to control the company that powers a large chunk of that production.
 And unless the federal government does something in the next 45 days to convince the governor of Irkutsk to cooperate, that company - Irkutskenergo - may end up in the hands of a consortium led by Russian Aluminum, the core unit of which, Siberian Aluminum, is in the hands of Deripaska.
 &quot;Hypothetically, this may happen if nothing changes,&quot; said Irkutskenergo board chairman Boris Varnavsky, who is also the head of a department in the Fuel and Energy Ministry. &quot;But I believe that this should not be the case,&quot; he said in a telephone interview Wednesday.
 Irkutskenergo is a unique and valuable possession, especially for aluminum producers in Irkutsk, which is home to two massive smelters that together produce more than a third of the nation's total annual production of 3.2 million tons of primary aluminum.
 Those two smelters are owned by rival firms Siberian-Urals Aluminum Co. and Russian Aluminum, which would like to control Irkutskenergo for several reasons, most notably because electricity accounts for 33 percent of the total cost of producing aluminum in Russia. If they control the power company, they can choose the price they charge themselves.
 Irkutskenergo is also one of the few utilities in the country that generates its power hydroelectrically, which is the cheapest way. It also has tapped the eurobond market and does not belong to national power grid Unified Energy Systems, unlike nearly every other energo.
 But to control Irkutskenergo requires controlling its general director. And to control the general director requires controlling 50.1 percent of the company's shares.
 And here is where the battle is being fought.
 In a rare example of cooperation between Siberian-Urals Aluminum, and Russian Aluminum, who together own 36.4 percent of Irkutskenergo, they decided last month call an extraordinary shareholders meeting for April 28, apparently confident that by then they would secure the support of the additional 13.5 percent needed to elect their own man general director.
 Irkutsk Governor Boris Govorin is the man who holds the key. His government wields a 15.5 percent stake in the energo. And he will likely add that stake to those of the aluminum giants for a simple reason: He wants to keep his job.
 Govorin is up for re-election in July and Russian Aluminum and Siberian-Urals Aluminum are the largest employers in Irkutsk and control the main financial resources in the region.
 &quot;The takeover is very likely to happen because the governor is due for re-election,&quot; said Irkutskenergo board member Vasily Boiko. &quot;Should this happen, Irkutskenergo will end up in the hands of [Deripaska's] Siberian Aluminum for good.&quot;
 Last month's decision by the aluminum giants to call an extraordinary meeting came on the heels of a decision by the Supreme Arbitration Court over the long-running dispute between federal and regional authorities over a 40 percent stake in Irkutskenergo.
 In a controversial decision, the court ruled that the federal Property Ministry owned that stake, but that the regional authorities could &quot;use&quot; 15.5 percent of it.
 &quot;The wording of the court's decision allows such leeway in interpretation that it is not clear what exactly should be done with the 15.5 percent stake,&quot; a spokesman for the Property Ministry said earlier this week.
 But if nothing changes between now and April 28 and the governor casts the region's votes with the aluminum giants to elect a joint director, that director can run the company for as long as he wishes - even if the Property Ministry gets back the voting right to its full stake. This is because the general director of Irkutskenergo usually votes a 14.5 percent stake.
 Irkutskenergo's Corporate Pension Fund Energia owns 5 percent of its shares, American Depository Receipt holders have another 5 percent and employees own 4.5 percent.
 &quot;The general director always votes for the pension funds and ADR holders, while workers always side with the director,&quot; said Boiko. &quot;So once elected, the director will be able to vote a controlling stake.&quot;
 So the director votes a 14.5 percent stake plus 36.4 percent now in the hands of the aluminum companies, should they decide to give him the proxy votes.
 Boiko said the odds are high that Siberian-Urals and Russian Aluminum may fail to cut a deal. But even if they do, he said, Siberian Aluminum may later decide to dump its partner.
 It is not clear whether Siberian Aluminum, in its fight for Irkutskenergo, will try to win support from President Vladimir Putin, who is now vacationing in Khakassia.
 Unofficial reports said that Putin, a long-time fan of skiing, will spend most of his vacation at the Gladenkoye alpine resort, which is owned by Siberian Aluminum.
 On Wednesday, the Irkutskenergo's board approved a list of candidates for general director. The list includes current acting director Sergei Kuimov, Russian Aluminum's appointee and former Krasnoyarskenergo director Vladimir Kolmogorov and Siberian-Urals protege Sergei Yesapov, who is currently in charge of sales at Irkutskenergo.
 Russian Aluminum spokesman Alexander Ptashkin said Wednesday that &quot;working discussions&quot; will be carried out before the meeting to decide on the voting tactics.
 Siberian-Urals Aluminum refused to comment.
 Irkutskenergo's saga dates back to the early 1990s, when an agreement was signed between federal and regional authorities that gave them joint ownership of a 49 percent stake.
 But in 1993, the regional administration sold 9 percent of this stake.
 Later, the federal authorities attempted to get sole control of the remaining 40 percent.
 Last month's ruling by the Supreme Arbitration Court gave half of the original, jointly owned 49 percent stake - 24.5 percent - to the state.
 The remaining 15.5 percent - the difference between the disputed 40 percent and 24.5 percent - remained the property of the federal government, but the regional administration could use it.
 Earlier this month, an angry Property Ministry issued a press release saying that it would sue the regional registrar, which has kept the 15.5 percent on the accounts of the regional administration.
 Ministry officials think that they should have the right to vote the full 40 percent at the upcoming meeting, but they may have to take the regional authorities to court to prove their case.

TITLE: Top Oil Firms Crying Foul Over Auction
AUTHOR: By Anna Raff
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - In a show of solidarity, the nation's biggest oil companies teamed up Tuesday to blast the recent auction of the northern Gamburtsev Val oil fields to Severnaya Neft as a rigged sale.
 Top executives from LUKoil, Surgutneftegaz and Sibneft said they have filed suit in Arkhangelsk on the grounds that their firms had each offered higher bids than the winner.
 They also accused the Nenets autonomous district, which held the tender, of playing favorites.
 &quot;The winner had been decided from the beginning,&quot; said LUKoil vice president Leonid Fedun.
 Severnaya Neft, which is owned by a group of offshore companies, has invested millions of dollars into Nenets' infrastructure.
 Nenets over the weekend named Severnaya Neft as the winner of the auction to develop Gamburtsev's three oil fields, Khysareiskoye, Cherpayusskoye and Hyadeiyuskoye. Severnaya Neft made of bid of $900 million and offered a tie-breaking bonus of $7 million.
 During the tender, the bonus is taken into account if the development offers among all the contenders are comparable. The minimum amount set by the government was $5 million.
 To prove their positions, the three oil majors - with the support of Yukos and Rosneft - sent on Tuesday copies of their offers to Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref and Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin.
 &quot;As a result of these measures taken by [Natural Resources Minister Boris] Yatskevich and [Nenets Governor Vladimir] Butov, the federal budget will be $40 million short. An additional $60 million of revenue won't be transferred to the Nenets autonomous district. In short, every Nenets resident will go without $3,000,&quot; said a copy of the letter that was handed out to reporters.
 Severnaya Neft vigorously defended its win Tuesday, calling the backlash a &quot;purely emotional&quot; reaction.
 &quot;Our offer for development is substantially better,&quot; said Severnaya Neft spokesperson Yelena Prorokova. &quot;It's better because we are already there. Because we have already invested $100 million in the infrastructure of the region.
 Surgutneftegaz vice president Vyacheslav Nikiforov said his company had bid $1 billion to develop the fields over 20 years.
 &quot;Our plan included building a pipeline system that would connect to Transneft,&quot; Nikiforov said.
 Once Severnaya Neft gets hold of the license for the field, actual drilling could start in 2002 and extraction as early as 2004, Severnaya Neft general director Alexander Samusev said.
 The final documentation hasn't been signed by the regional and federal officials, thus, even though Severnaya Neft won the tender, it hasn't yet obtained the license.
 And if it doesn't get the license, the company is prepared to lodge a challenge in the courts, Samusev said.
 &quot;We have fulfilled all the conditions of the contest and can lay claim to our victory,&quot; he was quoted by Interfax as saying.
 This isn't the first time a contest for development rights in the Nenets region has turned sour. In 1997, local government officials annulled a tender in which Exxon was the winner. The was revoked because Exxon's Russian partners balked at the arrangement, saying that the global oil major had too much power.
 Dmitry Druzhin with the brokerage Prospect, was hesitant to take sides in Tuesday's dispute, saying it seemed that the losers of the tender were just showing bad sportsmanship.
 &quot;If there was indeed a violation, it is now up to the courts to decide,&quot; he said. &quot;It's a fact that Severnaya Neft is dominant in the region. What we'll see now is a battle between LUKoil and Severnaya Neft for ultimate control of the territory.&quot;
 However, Valery Nesterov, an oil and gas analyst at the Troika Dialog brokerage, said that oil industry lawsuits have a reputation of being thrown from one court to another without anything ever getting solved.
 &quot;And even if the government at some level does intervene, their actions would be a symptom of Russia's poor investment climate,&quot; Nesterov said. &quot;If this had been a fair auction, it would have meant that small business has the gumption to compete with the majors. In all likelihood, though, it wasn't a fair auction.&quot;
 He said that TotalFinaElf had agreed to join with Rosneft for the tender, but it abruptly withdrew in a sign that the French company thought its own participation was futile from the beginning.
 Pointing to the depth and breadth of the majors' experience, Nesterov added that it was unlikely that Severnaya Neft could offer anything better in terms of financing and technology.
 Severnaya Neft head Samusev said it will finance most of the project on its own. About $140 million will come from loans and the rest will be raised in profits made from oil extraction. Of the loans, Sberbank will supply $70 million and foreign investors will provide the remainder.
 Oil executives at the news conference said Tuesday that it didn't matter whose plan was better, as long as the tender was fair.
 &quot;The entire tender process should be more transparent,&quot; LUKoil's Fedun said. &quot;We want to know exactly how they won.&quot;

TITLE: Web Tender for Ring Road Held
AUTHOR: By Simon Ostrovsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: St. Petersburg's Ring Road project took another tentative step in its stop-and-go history this month when the Federal Roads Service announced a tender to choose a firm to build the eastern portion of the planned highway around the city.
 The &quot;Eastern Semicircle,&quot; a 70-kilometer stretch of road linking the Vyborg highway with the E95 route to Moscow, is just one part of an ambitious plan to build a highway system that will divert traffic away from the city center, but the project has been beset by administrative and funding difficulties. At present drivers are faced with the choice of working their way around the city on smaller roads or taking the time-consuming route through the center.
 The Federal Roads Service, a section of the Transport Ministry, posted the tender on its Web site, www.fad.ru, on March 1 to attract bids for the contract. Companies wishing to bid are required to possess the necessary licensing for the construction, provide their own equipment and commit to finishing the segment of highway on schedule. The last condition may be the most difficult to meet, as the ministry's schedule calls for work to be completed by 2003 - in time for the city's 300th anniversary.
 &quot;We're on schedule, and in my opinion we will stay that way,&quot; Yevgeny Koralyov, head of public relations for the project, said last week. &quot;It won't be known who's won the competition for another 1 1/2 months, but right now we're working on the exact layout of the road and designing maps.&quot;
 But, at a press conference on Sunday, Alexander Brakhno, vice governor of the Leningrad Oblast, said that construction was slated to begin Wednesday, according to an Interfax report. A significant portion of the motorway will pass through the oblast.
 A press release published by the Transport Ministry on Monday confirmed Wednesday as the start date.
 Even with construction beginning this week, some experts question the likelihood of the project meeting its deadline.
 &quot;I don't think there will be enough time to build a quality road by 2003, especially one that requires the construction of such a long bridge,&quot; said Juha Raty, director of Finmapinfra, a company that participated in the building of the E10 &quot;Scandinavia highway,&quot; which connects St. Petersburg and Helsinki.
 The plan for the eastern transport route includes a 1.8-kilometer-long bridge across the Neva river and Brakhno said it is likely that it will be a suspension bridge and that the bridge's support structures alone will weigh between 20 and 25 tons each.
 But difficulties are nothing new for the project.
 In 1994 the city created KAD to oversee construction of and the attraction of funding for the highway. In turn, KAD hired Spea to do a feasibility study on the project and the Italian firm came up with a plan calling for a 154- kilometer road with six to eight lanes. But in the summer of 1998 City Hall took over responsibility for the Ring Road citing KAD's lack of success in garnering foreign investment.
 The city oversaw completion of the first 22-kilometer segment of the highway to the city's north last year, but the federal government became impatient with the city's efforts and the Transport Ministry took control of the project last year.
 The cost of the eastern segment of the Ring Road has been set at 20 billion rubles (about $700 million), which will be spread over the 2001, 2002 and 2003 federal budgets.

TITLE: Audit Chamber in Attack on Railways Ministry's Tactics
AUTHOR: By Yevgenia Borisova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Audit Chamber officials told the State Duma on Tuesday that the Railways Ministry is breaking the law and sabotaging its work by refusing to hand over documents.
 With just two weeks left before an official recommendation is to be submitted to the government on how to reform the ministry, which controls one of the world's largest rail networks, it has categorically refused to open its finances to the public and the major issues of the restructuring remain unclear, the Duma heard.
 Alexander Dovgyalo, head of the chamber's transportation division, said that ministry officials stonewalled his inspection team on numerous occasions despite being accompanied by law enforcement officials.
 &quot;If [the ministry] hinders the work of the federal audit body now, what transparency can we expect once the largest parts of its business become corporate?&quot; Dovgyalo told the Duma during special hearings on reforming the ministry.
 Railways Minister Nikolai Aksyonenko, who is working on the reform proposal along with representatives of nine other ministries, reiterated his position: The profitable parts of the ministry will be absorbed by the 100 percent state-owned Russian Railways Co.
 Private operators will be allowed to compete with this company, have &quot;the same access to infrastructure,&quot; and be allowed to build their own railway lines.
 Economist Dmitry Lvov, the head of the economic department at the Russian Academy of Sciences who has closely followed the reform plan, blasted the ministry for a recent series of murky moves.
 &quot;We know there are a lot of [private] commercial structures created already - however, a lion's share of them are affiliated with the ministry and are draining assets and profits from the state,&quot; he said.
 The Railways Ministry is now a 300- billion-ruble-a-year ($10.4 billion) operation uniting 17 branches in 85 regions and employing 1.4 million people.
 Not counting oil and gas pipelines, it carries 86 percent of the country's cargo.

TITLE: Lenoblast Hits the Net To Foster Investment
AUTHOR: By Simon Ostrovsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Leningrad Oblast government held an Internet conference on investment Wednesday evening, giving users worldwide the opportunity to direct questions to a panel of oblast representatives and local businessmen.
 The panel included deputy governor Grigory Dvas and Chairperson of the Committee for External Economic Relations Sergei Naryshin, both from the oblast, James T. Hitch, managing partner of law firm Baker and McKenzie's St. Petersburg office, and Brian McDonald, general director of International Paper-Svetogorsk.
 The conference was hosted in real time from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. on the Leningrad Oblast's Web site (www.lenobl-invest.ru). The event was targeted at international investors, so the evening time-slot was chosen with U.S. investors in particular in mind.
 The Leningrad Oblast has been one of the most successful of Russia's regions in attracting foreign investment, with firms such as International Paper, Kraft, Philip Morris, Caterpillar and Ford, opening large-scale operations there.
 And the Internet conference provided an example of the reasons for the oblast's success.
 &quot;I think that the impression people got was one of two younger officials who weren't dancing around the questions,&quot; Baker & McKenzie's Hitch said Thursday. &quot;People didn't see Communist-era bureaucrats out of the old mold. The officials they saw were much more responsive, pro-business and entrepreneurial.&quot;
 The issues raised during the session included the oblast infrastructure, future plans for incentives to attract investment and the region's natural resources. 
 &quot;The questions varied, with some being a little technical and a few being a bit strange,&quot; Hitch said. &quot;A number of questions from abroad didn't show a great degree of familiarity with the Leningrad oblast, but they showed a greater deal of awareness than many of the basic questions about the Russian situation that you might expect.&quot;
 The conference's orientation toward Western, particularly U.S., investors was underscored by the fact that both Dvas and Naryshin opened the session with addresses in English, although most of the question-and-answer portion of the event was carried out through translation.
 For those who have been frustrated in their attempts in the past to get clear information from government representatives in Russia, the conference might also have provided a pleasant surprise. One question focused on a tax-exemption package the oblast offers to new businesses for a period up until two years after they have recouped their original investments. Naryshin fielded the question and went into significant detail explaining just what procedures the oblast intended to use in these calculations.
 In all, the oblast's Web site received over 10,000 hits during the 3-hour conference, with about 20 percent coming from Russia and the rest from abroad.
 This is the second such conference run by the oblast, as part of the run-up to a business development mission by Leningrad Oblast Governor Valery Serdyukov to Washington and Maryland in May.

TITLE: Dear Editor
TEXT: Readers write in on Russia's attitude to Turkey, levels of radiation in a Siberian river, and why liberals got it wrong over the banking system.</i>
 
 Older Stereotypes
 <i>Dear Editor,</strong></i>
 Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, several prominent Western political theorists (including Brzezinski, Huntington, and Szporluk) have &quot;offered&quot; Russia to follow the example of republican Turkey by constituting a nation-state and renouncing all ambitions on formal imperial territories. These authors, however, fail to note two crucial differences between post-Ottoman Turkey and post-Soviet Russia.
 First of all, the &quot;Turks,&quot; as such, are not an ethnic nation, but a conglomeration of 54 ethnic groups. By contrast, the Russians have been an ethnic nation since the latter half of the 19th century. To advise the Russians to take &quot;example&quot; from the Turks to form a post-imperial &quot;nation-state&quot; is absurd.
 Far more prominent, is the fact that Turkey did not give up &quot;imperial ambitions&quot; out of goodwill. Ottoman Turkey suffered a bitter military defeat in World War I, and the following revolution and the creation of the republic in 1923 were in essence the struggle of a people against its death sentence epitomized by the Treaty of S&egrave;vres.
 This is a far cry from the relatively peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Empire from &quot;within&quot; due to pressing social and economic issues. Far from dismantling its current &quot;empire,&quot; Russia will attempt to reconstitute its former empire as it overcomes its internal problems, as evidenced by the re-establishment of its influence over Belarus, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Central Asia, and its ongoing effort to subdue Ukraine and Georgia. &quot;Asking&quot; Russia to go like Turkey is not double standards, but outright naivety.
 Unfortunately, Kirill Pankratov in his letter to the editor printed on March 9 provides an altogether different answer to the arguments of Western political theorists, one based on the all-pervasive double standards against my country and my people with which I have had to become well acquainted during my years in Russia.
 Pankratov accuses Turks of not admitting the wrongs they have inflicted on other peoples - entirely missing the point that it is exactly people like him, who charge an entire people with the atrocities committed by the tyrannical Ottoman monarchy, against whom the Turks protest. Few in Russia are familiar with the names of tyrants like Abdulhamit and Enver under whom the Turks suffered no less than others.
 In contrast, Stalin and Beria, to the extent that they are associated with any people (not that they should be), are considered Georgians, not Russians. Accusing Turkey of fighting Kurdish separatists, Dr. Pankratov apparently forgets about Chechnya. His memory also fails him when it comes to Russia's threats to bomb Afghanistan and strike at the part of Georgia where it claims Chechen separatists are based. If the Ataturk cult in Turkey is &quot;nothing remotely resembling the current status of any past and present Russian leader,&quot; Pankratov may be relieved to learn that no Turkish leader since Ataturk has had the authority or the popularity of Vladimir Putin. And then, Ataturk had to die before becoming a cult figure.
 Excepting an &quot;evil alliance&quot; of the type that grows between &quot;rogue&quot; states, Russia and Turkey could both draw great benefit from a relationship of mutual understanding and respect. In order for that to happen, though, Russians will have to question the widespread notion that they are automatically right on all issues versus Turks. In the meantime, Turks are fully justified in making clear that such attitudes cannot be the foundation of a meaningful, productive relationship.
 <i>Alish Kocz,
 St. Petersburg
 River Radiation
 <i><strong>Dear Editor,
 </strong></i>The information in your article [&quot;Two Siberian Rivers Full of Radioactivity,&quot; Nov. 3, 2000] was drawn from a report entitled &quot;Radioactive Pollution in the Tom River,&quot; dated Nov. 1, 2000, and distributed by the non-governmental Government Accountability Project. The specialists of the Siberian Chemical Complex have analyzed this report and, as one might expect of information published in the periodical press, this report does not contain any information worthy of serious attention by experts in the field of environmental nuclear safety. Here are some of our reasons for reaching this conclusion:
 The measurements of the samples were carried out by the Novosibirsk State Laboratory and some American and Canadian laboratories that are not named in the report. Such anonymity means that we cannot judge their qualifications or the quality of the results presented in the report, which themselves raise doubts about the competence of these laboratories.
 For example, in regard to the measurements of phosphorus-32 and strontium-90 that are mentioned in your article, not one of the laboratories producing these results is identified in the report. The text merely reports that the American team handed the samples over to a laboratory (?) in Canada for mass-spectroscopic analysis for strontium-90 but that none was found.
 Such technical and methodological procedures in this main part of the report (the analysis of the samples) demonstrates the complete groundlessness of this research and the unwillingness of professional analytical laboratories to work with these organizations.
 Most likely it is in connection with this that the authors of the report use indirect methods to get their results concerning levels of strontium-90 in the Tom River. These methods involve using a lot of data that have no relation to the Tom River, since they were generated by a study of the Techa River in the Chelyabinsk region.
 As one would expect, the results achieved with this data exceeded all the authors' wildest expectations inasmuch as these incorrectly derived and manipulated figures indicated that strontium-90 levels in the Tom River exceed those previously established for the contamination of the Colum bia, Techa and Danube rivers.
 There is also reason to suspect the sincerity of the representatives of the NGOs in their concern for our health and environment. Despite the &quot;shocking&quot; radiation levels that they discovered and the direct - in their assessment - threat presented to the environment and local residents, the results and conclusions of this study were published after a delay of three months and then not in Russia, but in the United States. As of now, this material has not been presented to any state organs in Russia or the Tomsk region or to the municipal administration of Seversk.
 It is perhaps not out of place to mention that these American philanthropists do not need to travel to distant Siberia to carry out such studies. Available data indicate the blue-green waters of the Columbia River, which flows past the Hanford nuclear facilities, contain phosphorus-32 levels of almost 2.6 million becquerels per kilogram which cannot be compared even to the made-up figures that the report's authors attribute to the Tom River: 110,000 becquerels per kilogram.
 The work of the Siberian Chemical Complex and its impact on the environment are constantly and diligently monitored by Russia's state monitoring and control agencies, which are charged with these responsibilities. Over the last 10 years, the Complex has hosted no fewer than six commissions of various levels and statuses - from local to national - regarding matters of environmental regulation. 
 The results of our observations over many years of the level of radioactivity in the Tom River have revealed no strontium-90 contamination, even though the methods and controls that we use would detect levels even much lower than those allowed under federal sanitary norms.
 The most likely culprit of possible radioactive contamination of the local population is the consumption of fish caught in the river. According to state health statistics for 1999, the radioactive exposure of the local population based on the concentration of radiation detected in fish was not more than 12 percent of the maximum dose allowed under current norms. Preliminary results from 2000 also indicate that radiation levels are below accepted norms.
 The observation of all federal environmental legislation is the result of a strict technical policy adopted by the Siberian Chemical Complex, one priority of which is ensuring the safety of the people living near our facility.
 <i>Press Service,
 Siberian Chemical Complex,
 Seversk
 </i>
 Activists' Answer
 <i><strong>Dear Editor,</strong></i><i>
 </i>Russian non-governmental organizations invited the American public-interest organization, the Government Accountability Project (GAP), to Russia last year for co-operative environmental studies around the perimeters of four nuclear facilities to further public understanding. GAP's Nuclear Weapons Oversight Program has experience conducting such studies around American nuclear facilities.
 Last August, we found shocking levels of phosphorus-32 in the Tom River, downstream of SCC, at locations identified in our report. Our Russian-American study mostly relied on our laboratory spectrometer and on brilliant, confirming experiments by Russian co-author Sergei Pashenko of Siberian Scientists for Global Responsibility. The SCC points to the unwillingness of professional laboratories to analyze environmental samples like those we collected from the Tom River. This unwillingness is indeed a serious obstacle both in Russia and in the United States. Laboratories are operated by or under large contracts to nuclear facilities like SCC in Russia or the Energy Department in the United States, and this undermines their independence.
 We analyzed our samples and confirmed results for three months to be certain of the magnitude of pollution before publication.
 The SCC spent four months reviewing our results, rather than collecting their own samples from the locations we specified on the Tom River next to SCC. If there are more questions, let the SCC jointly sample and do replicate analyses with us. We have such agreements for joint sampling with officials of American nuclear facilities.
 The SCC's denial of radioactive problems on the Tom River mimics the response of the American nuclear agency when it has denied our test results identifying large radioactive pollution at the Hanford site along the Columbia River in Washington state.
 The SCC correctly writes that America has its own problems with massive radioactive contamination. But both countries need to end the denials, identify the problems of contamination and seek solutions. Public-interest organizations are critically important in this process of conducting independent studies that make government agencies accountable to the public.
 The SCC claims its monitoring has revealed &quot;no strontium-90 contamination&quot; in the Tom River. Yet 1999 monitoring information at the Austrian Web site www.iiasa.ac.at (&quot;Releases of Radionuclides to Surface Waters at Krasnoyarsk-26 and Tomsk-7&quot;) shows strontium-90 appears in some tabulations, while it is strangely missing from others. Why does the SCC now deny the existence of strontium-90 in the Tom River? Why is strontium-90 radioactivity missing from most but not all SCC monitoring information?
 Finally, the SCC claims we failed to notify Russian authorities of our findings. The Russian-American team held a press conference with an SCC official present in August, the day after our sampling, announcing our preliminary findings. We also sent our report to Gosatomnadzor and the International Atomic Energy Agency. A copy of that letter and our report has been posted on GAP's Web site (www.whistleblower.org) since November.
 This mindset of denial is a recipe for even worse nuclear disaster that is sure to come from the Nuclear Power Ministry proposal to import foreign radioactive waste to decrepit and contaminated Russian nuclear facilities.
 <i>Norm Buske,
 Nuclear-Weapons-Free America,
 Tom Carpenter,
 Nuclear Weapons Oversight Program,
 Government Accountability Project
 
 </i>
 Blinkered Liberals
 <i><strong>Dear Editor,
 </strong></i>Regarding John Wilhelm's letter [&quot;Not 'Neo-Liberal,' But Quasi-Administered,&quot; March 2].
 If we look to reasons behind the fateful 1998 crash - as I wrote in my 1999 book Rossiisky Krakh - three stand out. The first is obviously the Russian government's inability to balance the budget, leading to the GKO pyramid. No one would pretend that any government could survive long with the deficit level experienced in 1992.
 But what is interesting is that in 1996 and 1997, notwithstanding repeated cuts in expenditures, the budget still was not balanced. Those who know Russia's transition understand that the way these cuts were implemented destroyed the government's public legitimacy making it impossible to increase tax revenues. Budget revenues collapsed even faster than expenditures were reduced - at the cost of nearly destroying the health and educational systems. The government was issuing bonds at unsustainable interest rates and, by December 1997, the internal debt interest burden reached 55 percent of budget revenues. Clearly the writing was on the wall. The GKO system never helped the government, but greatly increased some Western bank profits, even considering the default. The whole GKO system was literally &quot;sold&quot; to the government by Western liberal experts, some of whom ended up working in the same banks that made so huge profits in this market. 
 Liberal dogmatism (&quot;You are always better-off with a completely liberalized fiscal policy.&quot;) and collusion, as so well described in Janine Wedel's book &quot;Collision and Collusion,&quot; led Russia to the August 1998 collapse.
 The lesson here is first, that you never liberalize a financial market before creating effective regulatory institutions and, second, that you never give the liberalization task to people with direct or indirect vested interest in it. Institutions were (and still are) weak because public spending is much too low, thanks to liberal advisors who put the emphasis on cuts instead of on raising more taxes.
 The second reason was the behavior of Russian banks. The forward game effectively killed most of the largest. But the real question is why the banks engaged in something more akin to gambling than effective economic activity. Economists understand that undercapitalized banks that are faced with strictly rationed liquidity inevitably engage in high-risk operations.
 The extremely restrictive monetary policy that Russia has known since 1994 has effectively induced the gambling behavior that culminated with Russian banks raising huge loans during the winter of 1997/98 to continue operating in what then still seemed to be a very attractive and safe GKO market. Easing the monetary policy even at a cost of a higher inflation - and frankly I don't see any inflation rate under 20 percent per year &quot;normal&quot; in a country facing such massive restructuring - could have encouraged banks to behave differently. Enforcing strong regulations and strengthening Central Bank control over both banks and international capital movements might also have kept banks from pursuing suicidal policies. However, even talking about such regulations was derided by liberals as a return to Soviet economics.
 The third reason for the 1998 crisis was an overvalued exchange rate. From 1995 onwards, the exchange rate was much too high and was kept so in order to reduce inflation - and, I suspect, to allow new Russians to buy imported products relatively cheaply. Economic activity was effectively constrained by such an exchange rate, leading to two important consequences. First, many enterprises became insolvent, further burdening the banking system already facing a liquidity crunch. Second, when economic activity declines, so does tax collection, making it even more difficult to balance the budget. It was interesting to see how swiftly the economy rebounded after the 1998 devaluation and to watch now as growth slows because the exchange rate is again too high. 
 It is true the liberal program was not fully implemented. But anyone who thinks any program can be implemented 100 percent is living in a fantasy world. Neoliberal economists don't bear the responsibility for everything that happened in Russia, but they must face the consequences of what they actually did - the collapse of public finance, the creation of a dangerously inept financial market and a very dogmatic monetary and exchange-rate policy.
 <i>Jacques Sapir,
 Directeur d'Etudes,
 L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales Responsable Russie-ex URSS,
 Paris, France </i>

TITLE: Forgive and Forget
TEXT:  It's a case that stinks to high heaven, an abuse of presidential privilege that brings shame on the most exalted office in the land. Just think of it: presidential pardons for terrorists, for drug dealers, for rich party donors with business ties to deadly foes of the United States, pardons involving backdoor dealing by presidential family members, pardons aimed at covering up investigations of the president himself.
 Yes, George Bush has a lot to answer for.
 But fortunately for him, and his happy-go-lucky little boy [a.k.a. the president], the same press that now thunders about the unique evil of the sleazy Clintons had almost nothing to say about the tender mercies ladled out by George I in the swirling morass of money and connections that marked his glory years.
 Take, for example, Bush's pardon of financier Armand Hammer, the industrialist whose &quot;special relationship&quot; with the Soviet Union went all the way back to Lenin. Hammer, convicted of funneling illicit contributions to Richard Nixon's campaign, saw his pardon bid turned down by Ronald Reagan. But Bush, taking office in 1989, swiftly gave Hammer his &quot;vindication&quot; - after Hammer slipped $100,000 to GOP party coffers, plus another $100,000 to Bush's inauguration fund, Salon.com reports.
 In his last days in office, Bush pardoned convicted anti-Castro terrorist Orlando Bosch, suspected mastermind of the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner which killed 76 civilians. &quot;For 30 years, Bosch has been resolute and unwavering in his advocacy of terrorist violence&quot; and &quot;repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to cause indiscriminate injury and death,&quot; prosecutors said. GOP Attorney General Dick Thornburgh called Bosch an &quot;unreformed terrorist,&quot; Online Journal reports.
 But Bosch had influential friends - among them a certain Jeb Bush, then a wealthy Florida land speculator with extensive ties to the right-wing Cuban-American National Foundation. Jeb's partners in the CANF were also big GOP donors, and so Bosch walked free - as did convicted heroin dealer Aslam Adam, a Pakistani national backed by Senator Jesse Helms, who, like Bush, was a strong supporter of Pakistan's brutal military regime.
 These acts of grace were, of course, topped by Bush's pardon of former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger, just days before he was to stand trial for his role in the Iran-Contra arms-and-drug smuggling scandal. Prosecutors were especially interested in the part played by the vice president at the time - one George W.H. Bush. But before they could get Weinberger in the dock, under oath, the disgraced defense chief was pardoned and the prosecution quashed by the sitting president - one George W.H. Bush.
 Yes, it's good to have that classy Bush &quot;integrity&quot; back in the White House again. Such a refreshing change from those vulgar, white-trash Clintons.
 
 Heart Murmurs
 Meanwhile, the American government found itself without a leader last week when Vice President/Prime Minister Dick &quot;Big Time&quot; Cheney underwent heart surgery. It was the second time since he and George W. &quot;Little Pillow&quot; Bush lost the popular vote last November that the veep's heart has gone under the knife.
 White House officials gave out the usual dissembling line that the emergency surgical procedure was &quot;routine&quot; and &quot;precautionary,&quot; but behind the scenes observers saw panic in the eyes of Placeman Bush. Cheney had been shepherding a number of policy initiatives through the pipeline, including the administration's innovative $1.96 trillion &quot;Welfare for the Wealthy&quot; income redistribution scheme, also known as the &quot;Cabinet Special Assistance Fund&quot; (the Bush team, and Bush himself, will personally reap millions from the carefully targeted tax cut). It was not immediately apparent who would actually run the government in Cheney's absence, although speculation centered on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield, Cheney's mentor from the historic days of the Ford administration.
 Cheney's bosom-heaving came only one day after he'd made the rounds of the Sunday TV spinfests, outlining the policy decisions he would later inform the president about and assuring interviewers of his robust health. (The &quot;journalists&quot; certainly put no strain on him, gently rolling the usual Nerfball questions his way while crouching in ritual abasement.) The surgery was also preceded by glowing tributes to the imperial viceroy in USA Today, the New York Times, CNN and other venues (there must have been an edict sent out from Mainstream Central to push &quot;Cheney Fluff&quot; over the weekend). The stories cited his &quot;unprecedented sway&quot; over presidential affairs, his &quot;firm command&quot; of governmental power, and his &quot;close, almost fatherly&quot; relationship with the &quot;young, untested president&quot; (who, at 54, is all of five years younger than his &quot;immensely experienced&quot; factotum.)
 A CNN report noted, approvingly, the body language between the two men, how Bush kept looking to Cheney - sometimes subtly, sometimes openly - for direction and approval during policy discussions and public forums. It was touching, they said, to see how George was guided in all things by Dick.
 But wait a minute - isn't that what got Bill Clinton into so much trouble?
 
 Have Mercy
 Speaking of Bill Clinton, another of his dubious pardons came to light last week. It seems Dollar Bill commuted the sentence of a convicted tax fraud and embezzler - at the personal request of a well-connected political insider, one of the key players in the post-election battle between Bush and Gore.
 That would be Theodore Olson, the attorney who represented Bush in the Supreme Court case that killed Clinton's hopes of a Democratic successor to carry on his legacy. Olson, a close friend of Clinton-hater Kenneth &quot;Ahab&quot; Starr, has toted right-wing water for decades and was a prime mover in the Paula Jones-Linda Tripp perjury-trap nexus. He has recently been repaid for his diligent service to the Bush family with the plum job of Solicitor General of the United States.
 Despite this record, Olson went to Clinton seeking a pardon for Paul Prosperi, Olson's old college pal, who'd been jailed for financial chicanery in 1998. Clinton - evil, sleazy and vindictive to the end - er, granted Olson's request and set Prosperi free, The Washington Post reports.
 Unmitigated clemency, favors for an enemy - really, is there no end to the perfidy of this despicable Clinton character?

TITLE: Lawmakers Spotted in Their Natural Habitat
AUTHOR: By Barnaby Thompson
TEXT: WHILE less than half the Legislative Assembly turned up this Wednesday, the week's session did provide a chance for the political naturalist to examine further the eccentric voting habits of the deputies.
 The common or garden lawmaker is equipped with a voting key, looking a little like a bottle opener, which is then affixed to a voting machine, thus activating it and allowing the lawmaker to vote for something, against it, or abstain entirely.
 Very often, the key is more in evidence that its owner. Scientists have put forward a theory to explain some lawmakers' inability to turn up once a week and debate issues that affect the city - a.k.a. doing their job: They are extremely wary beasts, who prefer the safety of their own offices to the wide open spaces of the chamber, where all manner of rivals lurk.
 Instead, deputies leave their keys with more daring fellow members of their pride, trusting them to vote &quot;correctly&quot; and leaving them free to do other things. Some deputies therefore have to whiz round four or five voting machines, attach the key and press the relevant button, all within 20 seconds.
 Wednesday produced some extreme examples of what happens next. At roughly 4 p.m., I counted no more than 20 lawmakers in the chamber. But the screen, which flashes up the results of votes, came up with some extraordinary figures: 16 votes for, five against, no abstentions and 23 present; then 32 for, none against, two abstentions and 35 present.
 In this extremely male-dominated society, Alexei Kovalyov suddenly spotted a female, and started what looked like an elaborate mating ritual, baring his teeth, scratching his beard, fluttering round his target, all thoughts of voting forgotten. Instantly, rival deputies flocked to the female, whose tribe has given her only a minor administrative role, and the show was on.
 Hardly any deputies were left at their tables when the next vote started, so the results of the next vote were startling: 37 for, none against, no abstentions and 37 present. <i>Thirty-seven present? </i>I looked around for someone to explain this to me, but the eyes of most independent observers had glazed over.
 Now, you may remember the ruckus in October 1999 over a vote to bring the elections for St. Petersburg governor forward, a move seen to favor the incumbent, Vladimir Yakovlev, since it would have given any potential opponent very little time to get a campaign organized.
 Some lawmakers claimed that their colleagues had illegally procured their keys and used them to garner extra votes in favor of the governor.
 The Supreme Court duly overturned the vote, but not before one local judge said she could not believe that &quot;the ghosts of deputies&quot; had voted.
 I can believe it all too well.

TITLE: Time for West To Break the Debt Circle
AUTHOR: By Anatol Lieven and Celeste Wallander
TEXT: AMERICAN economic and security interests in the former Soviet Union are fundamentally linked. An economically stable Russia, integrated into the Western economy, would be far less likely to want to damage Western interests or dominate its neighbors, like Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova. Stable and prosperous neighbors would in turn support Russia's new generation of political and business leaders who seek success in the global market through domestic economic reform.
 How could we help build such improved relationships? There is one way the West could help Russia, and at the same time reduce Russian pressure on its neighbors: debt relief. Russia owes $48 billion of former Soviet debt to the Paris Club, the association of creditor nations that includes Germany and the United States. In recent weeks, Moscow has threatened to default on this year's payments and has demanded forgiveness or renegotiation.
 As the Western creditors have pointed out, Russia's complaints about its 2001 payments are unreasonable. Given the robust state of the Russian economy, the $3.4 billion due this year is well within Russia's budget. By 2003, however, Russia will owe $17.5 billion. Since its entire state budget in 2001 is only $42 billion, it will indeed be quite impossible for Russia to pay at that time. If we insist on the full sum, Russia will default.
 Since the West will be forced to renegotiate Russia's debt sooner or later, we should try to get something in return. The most obvious goal should be to reduce Russia's ability to control its neighbors.
 Over the past five years, economic pressure, not military dominance or internal subversion, has become the most important source of Russian regional power. Russia is too weak to exert the kind of military pressure it exercised against Georgia in 1993. Furthermore, any direct military intervention would cause Russia terrible damage internationally.
 But Russia exerts influence over its neighbors through other means. Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova, in particular, have run up enormous unpaid debts to Russia, mostly for gas supplies. Ukraine owes at least $1.4 billion for gas; Gazprom, the state-controlled Russian natural-gas monopoly, claims that the actual amount is more than $2 billion. Moldova owes $861 million for gas, and Georgia owes $179 million. None of these countries can afford to pay these sums. Indeed, their debt burdens are strikingly comparable to the debt burden on Russia: Last year, the annual Georgian state budget was barely $400 million. 
 In recent months, Georgia's inability to pay its loans has led to repeated shut-offs of gas, considerably worsening Georgia's already severe electricity crisis. This pressure contributed to the recent declaration by Eduard Shevardnadze, Georgia's president, that his country may drop its (vain) hope of becoming a NATO member and instead aim at neutral status.
 In the case of Ukraine, Moscow has sought to swap its neighbor's debt for equity in Ukrainian state-owned industries, which is likely to leave Russian businesses in control of much of the Ukrainian economy. Already, the debt burden has forced the Ukrainian government to agree to unify the Russian and Ukrainian electricity grids.
 By international standards, Russian pressure seems fair enough. Why should Russia provide its neighbors with what is in effect heavily subsidized gas and get nothing in return? After all, the West has also told Russia that failing to pay its debts violates international financial rules, and that default would bring Western economic retaliation.
 On the other hand, Russia has no right to expect generosity from the West while taking a ruthless line toward its own debtors. The United States and its European partners should therefore offer to forgive Russia all or part of its debt, while demanding that in return Russia act similarly toward the debts of its neighbors.
 We could then use this window of opportunity to help these countries develop alternative energy sources - assuming, of course, that the elites of these countries can summon up enough honesty and competence to move seriously in this direction.
 Too much of the American approach toward the former Soviet Union has consisted of rhetorical declarations without real content. By contrast, linking Russia's debt to that of its neighbors would be both very effective and entirely legitimate. It is precisely this kind of practical, sober policy - rather than empty geopolitical obsessions - that should characterize our policy toward Russia and, indeed, the rest of the world.
 
 <i>Anatol Lieven is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Celeste Wallander is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. They contributed this comment to The New York Times. </i>

TITLE: Russia's Warm Relations With Iran Chill U.S.
TEXT: IRAN'S relations with Russia have been improving since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and they bode to become even warmer. This week Iranian President Mohammad Khatami is in Russia, finding common ground with President Vladimir V. Putin in opposing growing U.S. influence in the energy-rich Caspian Sea region, and signing deals - over strong U.S. objections - that will bring Iran access to Russian weapons and nuclear technology. 
 A secret 1995 agreement with Washington bound Russia from selling arms to Iran. Late last year Moscow pulled out of that accord. Now, an Iranian official says, Iran could buy up to $7 billion in Russian arms. Ignoring U.S. concerns, Moscow plans to complete an $800 million nuclear power plant in Iran. The U.S. fear is that Iran's nuclear technology could turn to weapons production. Iran is believed to be moving toward a nuclear capability and a missile delivery system. Both presidents expressed displeasure with U.S. activities in the Caspian Sea region, an area of huge oil and gas reserves. Iran and Russia border the Caspian, as do Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan. Expanding energy production from these fields will require new transportation routes to world markets. For political and security reasons the newly independent states don't want to rely on Russia or Iran as their only export outlet. 
 Among alternative routes would be a U.S.-endorsed pipeline across Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. American energy companies are already active in the Caspian region. Increased Caspian exports could reduce the world's overdependence on Middle Eastern suppliers. Caspian development would also probably boost U.S. influence in the area's newly independent states and help them resist political inroads by Russia and Iran. That prospect is one of the considerations working to bring Moscow and Tehran closer.
 
 <i>This comment originally appeared as an editorial in the Los Angeles Times. </i>

TITLE: Unity Shows Its True Loyalties With Phony Opposition
TEXT: THE Unity faction announced Tuesday that it would not support a vote of no confidence in Prime Minister Mikhail Kasya nov's government. All last week, this vote, and Unity's wavering stand on it, was Russia's lead news item.
 Deputies from the Union of Right Forces, Fatherland and the Communist Party - all poorly hiding their confusion - sharply attacked Unity for initially supporting the idea, which transformed the Communists' harmless effort to win political capital through the appearance of opposition into a full-blown parliamentary crisis.
 Imagine for yourselves the feelings of people who invested heavily during the last election and received in return a four-year lease on the production of the nation's laws only to learn now that instead of collecting dividends, they are now being asked to invest still more.
 From the beginning, Unity leaders emphasized that their stand was not a revolt against the government, but a flanking maneuver against the cocky Communists. It was, I imagine, the first time in history that a secret maneuver received so much open advance billing, which in itself is enough to raise doubts about the sincerity of the announcements.
 Unity argued that it is now in a position to garner more votes than it did in December 1999. This is doubtful. I think that the really important point is that Duma elections are now two years off and the presidential election - three.
 Parliamentary elections immediately before a presidential vote can be problematic, especially in 2003, when it is likely that our debts will be greater and world energy prices will be lower.
 It would be to the Kremlin's advantage to hold the Duma elections now: Even if it ends up with basically the same Duma, it eliminates a major headache in 2003.
 That the next Duma will be pro-presidential is a certainty. President Vladimir Putin is equally popular among the people, the oligarchs and the governors, and under these conditions any election will quickly be transformed into a presidential loyalty contest. In Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, for instance, where the populations followed the advice of their local leaders and turned out strongly for Fatherland, voters will be eager to correct their error.
 But it is less clear whether Unity will be the party to benefit from this. From the Kremlin's point of view, it would make sense to create not one, but two or three pro-presidential parties. How to do that is just a matter of tactics: In order to create Unity, the Kremlin needed the political genius of Boris Berezovsky, but it will only take a few PR hacks to clone it.
 What is still more certain is that the present make-up of the Unity faction will undergo serious changes. When the 1999 campaign began, Fatherland was the heavy favorite. According to my sources, people paid as much as $400,000 for a high place on the Fatherland list, while Unity had a hard time giving its slots away.
 Now, however, regional and national forces have coalesced around the Kremlin, and a seat in the Unity ranks will cost a pretty penny indeed.
 Paradoxically, then, it was in the Kremlin's interests for Unity to support the no-confidence vote, and it was in the interest of Unity deputies and the party itself to oppose it. It came down to a matter of whether the party's strategic interests could overcome the self-interest of Unity deputies. The vote not to support the motion, then, was certainly a foregone conclusion.
 
 <i>Yulia Latynina is a journalist for ORT. Vladimir Kovalyev will be back next week. </i>

TITLE: Far East Can Learn From China
AUTHOR: By Russell Working
TEXT: DALIAN, China - One evening in this formerly Russian port once known as Port Arthur, I wanted to find a street lined with popular restaurants. I had dismissed my translator, and experience suggested that waving maps in the faces of cab drivers would only baffle them.
 I recalled that there was a Kentucky Fried Chicken on the street. In my notebook I sketched the face of the chain's goateed founder, Colonel Sanders. For good measure, I drew a plucked hen steaming on a platter. Then I hailed a cab and showed the driver my artwork. &quot;Take me here,&quot; I demanded in English.
 Giggling the whole way, he raced down broad boulevards and alleyways crowded with fishmongers' stalls. We stopped by a restaurant where a life-sized plastic Colonel Sanders stood by the door, beaming in approval. It was the wrong street, but never mind. I had established an essential point.
 The market economy has caught hold in communist China. You see the evidence in Starbucks coffeehouses, in purple buses labeled &quot;Yahoo.com,&quot; in the department stores with entire floors dedicated to foreign perfumes, in the Internet cafe where a red-lighted household god glows in the corner. The Chinese leadership's forecast last Monday - that economic growth for the next five years would fall from 8.3 percent to a mere seven percent - only underscores the point. There are nations that would sell their souls for 7 percent growth.
 Yet Dalian sparks questions for visitors from China's neighbor to the north. Why isn't Russia seeing the same boom? Must the Russian Far East forever satisfy itself with membership, along with North Korea, in a club known as the hoboes of Northeast Asia? Why have Russia's economic reforms failed?
 The Chinese answer would be disturbing for those who love liberty: Moscow got it right by launching the economic restructuring of perestroika, but blew it by permitting glasnost, which undermined Party discipline and therefore unleashed anarchy and gangsterism. Stated differently, the 1989 shooting of students in Tiananmen Square saved China from a future of blackouts and unpaid wages.
 But if authoritarianism were the missing ingredient, then the Russian Far East should be booming. Yevgeny Nazdratenko, the former governor of the Primorye region, seized control of the media and harassed non-Orthodox religious sects in a matter that would make Beijing proud. Yet the Primorye region became synonymous with administrative incompetence, and Nazdratenko became the most despised man in the region. (Do not believe the central media when they suggest that Vladivostok's yahoos revere Nazdratenko. Reporters who write such things should be sentenced to interviewing 1,000 random Primorye citizens about their ex-governor, noting whether anyone fails to use the word &quot;mafia&quot; in the first sentence.)
 Russia's and China's divergent paths have been analyzed by experts more knowledgeable than me, and answers will include references to China's Confucian work ethic and Russia's bureaucracy that dates back through centuries of tsarism. But one lesson is obvious: Russia tolerates corruption; China does not.
 In Russia, as I have noted before, Nazdratenko, accused of looting his region's budget and crippling its industry, was promoted to head the State Fisheries Committee, overseeing an industry awash in foreign cash. In China, a governor charged with such crimes would be shot. I am not arguing for the instigation of firing squads to settle accounts. (Russia has seen enough of that.) But the different responses are instructive.
 So are the differences in how business is done. In Dalian, hundreds business people from throughout China showed up at a recent banquet for New York businessmen, thrusting cards and brochures into the hands of the Americans. An hour later, the hall was empty.
 Vladivostok would have been more gracious. Such visitors would have been treated to hours of bliny and caviar, of vodka toasts, of long soaks in the sauna. Awakening with blazing heads, the foreigners would think, &quot;Ah, at last I have experienced the soul of Russia.&quot; But when it came time to do business, they would be invited to hand over suitcases full of cash that would vanish into bank accounts in the Bahamas.
 And imagine drawing Colonel Sanders for a cabbie in Vladivostok. Most likely, he would respond with a blank stare. Or perhaps he would giggle, speed you through the streets, and deposit you at a monument to another goateed innovator: Vladimir Lenin.
 
 <i>Russell Working is a freelance journalist based in Vladivostok. </i>

TITLE: jazz dance festival delivers intensive, impromptu fun
AUTHOR: by Molly Graves
TEXT: March 13 marked the close of eight long days of inspiration - and more than a bit of perspiration - as instructors and students of St. Petersburg's Second International Jazz Dance and Music Festival went all out at the final collaborative gala concert, held Tuesday night at the Theater of Musical Comedy. 
 Jazz artists from all over the world - professionals and amateurs, masters and young students - gathered from March 5-13 for eight days of collaboration, education and performance as part of the festival, which was jointly organized by Kannon Dance School, S'Tantsia Theater, the Fine Arts Institute and the JFC Jazz Club.
 Though festival events also included a series of local concerts and classes in jazz music and vocals, dance definitely took center stage with collaborative projects and performances by local, Moscow-based, and international dancers. In addition to evening concerts, every day from dawn to dusk master classes, seminars, video shows and other events were held at the Kannon Dance School, representing a wide range of jazz dance styles: from Broadway jazz and swing, to lyrical jazz and more modern styles such as street and funky jazz. 
 Among the international crowd participating in the dance instruction and performance were founder of Kannon Dance Natalya Kasparova of St. Petersburg, director of Giordano Dance Center in Chicago Eddy Ocampo and regional director of Rock School West Lucille DiCampli of the United States, Jazz Dance Academy director Rick Odums, dancer Katrin Grouet of France, and Sari Lievonen and Merja Koskiniemi of Finland.
 Besides the long hours, perhaps most impressive was the group's attempt to work somewhat against the odds. While Russia is famous for its classical ballet, the same can't necessarily be said for other forms of dance such as jazz, modern, or tap. Choreographer Odums, a former leading dancer of the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, commented at the end of the final concert that there are most likely a lot of places where such a concert could have been organized with a lot fewer obstacles, but what impressed him most was how hard the dancers involved had worked to make the festival happen in St. Petersburg.
 The gala concert featured performances by master-class students and instructors, members of the Moscow-based dance group Vortex, as well as the impressive young members of Petersburg troupe Kannon Dance, who have obviously benefited from this exposure and experience. And while lack of time for preparation may have been apparent at times, at others it provided a sense of freshness and originality, such as during one of the highlights - a dance with hand-held flashlights, choreographed by Ocampo and performed in near-complete darkness by Kasparova - which, it was announced, was pulled together in just a few hours.
 Once again, at the gala concert music took backstage - literally - though vocal master-class participants, the vocal ensemble MIX, led by Victor Volna, as well as Yana Radion and the group &quot;Jazz Comfort&quot; performed a few short numbers which proved to be great crowd pleasers.
 Perhaps the biggest down side of the concert, however, was the decision to include a sequined pair of announcers, whose job it was to ham it up between acts while the dancers caught their breath. This unfortunately included reading long lists of the dancers' and choreograpers' biographies and achievements - an addition which might have more simply been included in the concert program.
 Over all, the atmosphere of the festival was one of intense collaboration and commitment. Choreographer DiCampli - who has worked with a wide spectrum of celebrities including Will Smith, Grace Jones, and Whoopi Goldberg - commented that the visiting artists had all had a wonderful time and experience. &quot;We especially loved [St. Petersburg's] dancers,&quot; she added, saying she and many others were excited at the prospect of returning next year.

TITLE: library of congress lends mariinsky helping hand
AUTHOR: by Philip Kennicott
TEXT: Western scholars have long had an inkling that there must be a musicological gold mine hidden in the chaotic archives of the St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Opera. But for a Russian opera company struggling to reinvent itself in a new, capitalist society, maintaining a historic music library hasn't been an immediate priority. Now, as the Mariinsky prepares to increase its presence in this country - including a 10-year commitment to perform at the Kennedy Center beginning next year - it has decided to put its musical closet in order.
 On March 30, the Library of Congress and the Mariinsky's energetic leader, Valery Gergiev, will jointly announce plans to catalogue, microfilm and preserve the invaluable collection of musical scores now moldering at the Mariinsky Theater. Librarian of Congress James Billington has offered the Mariinsky the technical expertise of this country's national library to help with preservation. In exchange, a microfilmed copy of the Mariinsky holdings will be made available to scholars at the music division of the Library of Congress.
 &quot;This was the old tsar's archive, and it has clearly never been fully inventoried,&quot; says Billington. &quot;There's a card catalogue, but the collection isn't fully preserved. They're anxious to do it, and we want to help them.&quot;
 Billington, a Russian scholar, first discussed the idea last spring with Gergiev, a farsighted and ferociously effective promoter of his company. That meeting led to an initial survey of the collection by Library of Congress scholars and preservationists; although Billington is hesitant to give specifics, it's clear that a first pass through the archive has turned up an exciting cache of music.
 &quot;This is a treasure trove,&quot; says Billington. &quot;One of the long-range benefits will be to fill in our knowledge particularly of 18th-century composers through the time of Rossini. Without having had time to inspect the material in detail, all of this is a matter of uncertainty. There is a large amount of Rossini, a large number of things by Meyerbeer, and there appears to be a fair amount of Johann Strauss and even some Richard Strauss.&quot;
 Billington is cautious about announcing discoveries because multiple copies of musical scores frequently exist, creating confusion that can take scholars years to sort out. Even scores that appear to be handwritten originals can be copies or revisions of material already known and performed elsewhere. Nonetheless, some material by Rossini not heard for more than a century and a half has now been definitively located. Three marches for military bands have been unearthed in St. Petersburg, according to University of Chicago Rossini scholar Philip Gossett, who has seen an e-mailed copy of one of the pieces.
 Although Western researchers have had access to the collection, the Mariinsky archive hasn't been an easy place to do research. Gossett says the archive traditionally hasn't provided copies of material that scholars would like to examine at greater length. Researchers also found they had to know exactly what they were looking for if they were to have any hope of retrieving useful material.
 The value of the library reflects the importance of St. Petersburg as a destination for Western European composers during the 18th and 19th centuries. As Russia's most westward-leaning city, tsarist St. Petersburg had a particular passion for importing fashionable opera composers. The imperial court paid Italian and French composers handsomely to provide material for its opera houses. In the 18th century, several composers of central importance to the development of Italian opera resided in St. Petersburg, serving as court conductors and composers. Domenico Cimarosa, whose opera &quot;La Cleopatra&quot; exists in autograph score in the Mariinsky archives, spent four years in St. Petersburg; Giovanni Paisiello, whose &quot;Barber of Seville&quot; predates Rossini's, served in the city for eight years.
 After the craze for Italian theater came an equally impassioned devotion to French opera and ballet; the possibility of finding important new discoveries of Giacomo Meyerbeer is one of the exciting unknowns of the archiving project.
 Lavish fees, which continued throughout the 19th century, were the principal attraction luring Western composers.
 &quot;They had to offer pay that would induce composers to put up with the isolation and difficulty of living and working in Russia,&quot; says Richard Taruskin, a scholar of Russian music at the University of California, Berkeley.
 At the height of its extravagance in the second half of the 19th century, the Mariinsky Theater could attract the very best that Europe had to offer. Verdi's &quot;La Forza del Destino&quot; brought the king of Italian opera to St. Petersburg twice. 
 Gergiev has already used material in the Mariinsky archives to prepare a recording of &quot;Forza&quot; that differs substantially from the better-known revised version Verdi made for later performances outside Russia.
 Billington says there is also a collection of vaudeville scores that the library has yet to examine.
 Even if the collection doesn't yield spectacular finds - lost operas by major composers - Billington says the collection still has vital importance for scholarship. 
 &quot;Some of the scores are of very familiar works but appear to have annotations by the composer,&quot; says Billington. These annotations would eventually be reconciled with existing editions. Although the library is still raising money for the preservation project, Billington hopes to include a performance of &quot;at least one piece that's never been heard before&quot; at the March 30 celebration in the library's Coolidge Auditorium that marks the beginning of the project.
 


TITLE: vocal pioneer gives spontaneous concert
AUTHOR: by Sergey Chernov
TEXT: For Meredith Monk, an award-winning U.S. composer, singer, film maker, choreographer and director, the one-off performance in St. Petersburg which she is giving this Saturday is not just another concert, she explained to The St. Petersburg Times by telephone from New York on Wednesday.
 Though the concert was organized very shortly before the actual event, Monk, who has never been to Russia, sees it as a return to her roots.
 &quot;It means so much for me to come. It's going back to my family, going back to my grandfather,&quot; said Monk, whose grandfather, a Russian bass baritone, emigrated to the U.S. from Moscow in around 1890.
 A pioneer in what is now called &quot;extended vocal technique&quot; and &quot;interdisciplinary performance,&quot; she started out as a folk and rock singer with high-school bands.
 &quot;Originally when I was in high school I sang folk music with my guitar,&quot; said Monk, who has created more than 100 works since graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 1964 and was acclaimed by audiences and critics as a major creative force in the performing arts.
 &quot;From that time I started really working with my own music and writing music with my own voice.&quot;
 These early experiments led Monk to the idea of using her voice as a musical instrument.
 &quot;It didn't have words, as the voice itself is a language. And so I worked on creating a vocabulary for my voice,&quot; she said.
 &quot;And it's exploring all the sounds that the voice can make and all the different kinds of colors and movements that a voice has. So it's really like a kind of universe of the voice.&quot;
 The fourth generation singer in her family, Monk said that her main musical influence was her family.
 &quot;My grandfather was a singer, my mother was a professional singer, my grandmother was a professional pianist. I just had so much music in my childhood,&quot; she said.
 In the Western classical tradition Monk mentioned Stravinsky and Bart&oacute;k, whom she listed to a lot and loved as a young person. 
 &quot;Then in the American classical tradition [I listened to] someone like Henry Cowell who was really idiosyncratic, that American tradition of going off into the woods and making up your own world. I think that's something that I feel very close to - we call it the maverick tradition in the United States.&quot;
 Monk, who composed &quot;Road Song&quot; for David Byrne's 1985 film and the album &quot;True Stories,&quot; prefers to stay away from pop music - though there was a definite merger of performing arts and pop in the past few decades.
 &quot;The idea is to make art that human beings can get something out of. And I think that impulse has a lot to do with trying to make the work very accessible to large audiences.
 &quot;There is something really wonderful about the excitement of rock - a kind of rhythmic excitement and energy. Even if I want my work to have that kind of accessibility and I want people to really enjoy it, I always feel that for me the pleasure is finding my own forms, so I didn't want to go into rock particularly. But I still want my work to have warmth, to be something that people can really get something out of.
 &quot;I am more stubborn and I want to do it in my own way. That's more the kind of person I am.&quot;
 Monk's St. Petersburg concert, which will feature her piano piece called &quot;St. Petersburg Waltz,&quot; will start with four <i>a cappella</i> songs from the works &quot;Songs from a Hill,&quot; &quot;Light Songs&quot; and &quot;Volcano Songs,&quot; which use only the human voice with no words.
 The second half will be music for voice and piano. &quot;We'll try to sing this one song called 'The Tale' in Russian. I'm just working on this now. I've sung this song in Chinese, in Korean, in Slovenian, in Lithuanian and in Portuguese and I'm telling you, Russian is very challenging.&quot;
 Monk said she did not identify herself as an American singer.
 &quot;In some ways I feel that my work is not that American - in some weird way it's not. I feel on some level that my work has a kind of timeless quality to it.&quot;
 Monk does not listen to other people's music very much, so that she can concentrate on what she herself is working on.
 &quot;But if I want to relax or something like that, the music that I really love is Brazilian music, like Caetano Velos, Gilberto Gil and Milton Nascimento - those are my favorite singers right now.&quot;
 In concert Monk will be assisted by the U.S. composer and pianist Clark Stiefel, who resides in Essen, Germany, where he is on the faculty of the Folkwang Hochschule for Music, Theater and Dance. 
 
 <i>Meredith Monk in concert at the Hermitage Theater at 7 p.m. on Sat., March 17. It's invitation only, but promoters say you will be able to get your invitation by just coming to the theater before the concert. For more information check out www.meredithmonk.org </i>

TITLE: desyatnikov premiere is triumph for kremer
AUTHOR: by Giulara Sadykh-zade
TEXT: Gidon Kremer is without doubt one of the cultural heroes of our time. His persistent inclination towards the broadening of academic music genres has finally gained him the glory of a trailblazer.
 His young string orchestra &quot;KREMERata-Baltika&quot; has developed an extensive repertoire, in which Piazzolla's passionate and melancholic tango shines equally alongside the meditative Cancelli, the minimalist P&auml;rt and the romantic verbosity of Schubert and Liszt.
 KREMERata-Baltika's tours satisfy the expectations of a wide range of the Philharmonic-going public with its combination of gaiety, well-formed melodies, the beautiful, united sounds of stringed instruments and well-packaged musical postmodernism in all its most comprehensible and easily-mastered forms.
 The orchestra's performance in St. Petersburg last Sunday included the premiere of the 38-minute long Desyatnikov composition &quot;The Russian Seasons,&quot; written for a string orchestra, violin solo and a female voice, which in this case was performed by Yulia Korpacheva. 
 Korpacheva did not perform, however, in the 1999 Arvo P&auml;rt composition &quot;Orient-Occident,&quot; which musically elaborates on the theme of the linking of cultures and the works of Schubert and Liszt. The concert continued with Piazzoli and Latvian composer Oscar Strock's Tango, popular in the 1930s, and the premiere of Cancelli's &quot;Daneliadi.&quot; 
 The work, the title of which is a tribute to the famous film director Danelia, was used for the soundtrack of the film &quot;Kin-dza-dza.&quot; The concert ended with a nostalgic Nino Rota church march from the Fellini chef d'oeuvre &quot;Eight and a half,&quot; performed in the manner of Hayden's &quot;Farewell Symphony&quot;: every orchestra member taking their music and stand and quietly leaving the stage.
 Most remarkable from a sociological point of view was the fact that people went to the St. Petersburg Philharmonic not simply to see Liszt or Schubert being performed by the orchestra - that already happened five years ago - but to see the performances of the contemporary works of P&auml;rt, Desyatnikov and Cancelli. Thus one can conclude that the musical affinity of the Philharmonic regulars on the threshold of the 21st century has not only undergone a change, but a veritable revolution.
 Desyatnikov's &quot;The Russian Seasons&quot; turned out to be a very likeable composition indeed, full of material founded on folk music. Some of the material, both text and melody, were borrowed from Razumovsky.
 A precise structure based on the agricultural calendar, the work is formed from 12 different suites after the manner of Tchaikovsky's &quot;Times of the year,&quot; and even Vivaldi's &quot;Four Seasons.&quot;
 The author's will is present mainly in the original treatment of the songs, the refined instrumentation and the paradoxical harmonisation. Moreover, the conscious self-limitation unexpectedly frees the composer's creative energy. 
 This work, amidst his deliberately programmed manner and its apparent simplicity, is written with more will and with fewer constraints than any previous Desyatnikov composition. 
 On the whole the impression was a favorable one, the separation of the material diversified the sensations it produced, the sound aspect of which was accurately found, in which the unity of the stringed line effectively stratified the second part, in the spirit of the drawn-out polyphonies of Russian songs.
 &quot;The Russian Seasons&quot; is surely one of the most significant of Desyatnikov's compositions over the last few years. True, the oppressive intonation of Russian songs, filtered through a prism of irony (or more accurately, perhaps, through the self-irony of the composer's own sensitivity) leaves in its wake a dual sensation: until the end of the work it is not clear whether or not the author's pronouncement should be taken seriously, or whether it should be considered as a kind of aesthetic discourse aimed at the national tradition.

TITLE: chernov’s choice
AUTHOR: - By Sergey Chernov
TEXT: 
 <strong>Faculty </strong>will be a hot site this weekend with the hip-hop/alternative rock <strong>Kirpichi </strong>and the &quot;extreme disco&quot; girl group <strong>Pep-See. </strong>Kirpichi made it big last year with &quot;Kapitalizm OO,&quot; one of the year's best Russian albums, despite the sad loss of their drummer, who died in February 2000. Pep-See, on the other hand, has kept a suspiciously low profile recently, and failed to appear at Faculty for an advertised concert earlier this month. It looks like they want to compensate the damage, as many fans feel deceived. <i>Faculty, Kirpichi, Fri., March 16; Pep-See, Sat., March 17.
 </i><strong>Meredith Monk, </strong>a seminal U.S. performing artist and composer promises a unique experience as she will perform her only Russian concert this Saturday. See interview, page 11. <i>Hermitage Theater, Sat., March 17.
 </i>Big spring concerts will be starting next week with <strong>Melanie C </strong>who will be the first Spice Girl to come to Russia. <i>Spicey </i>Girls, the tribute act, which notoriously dishonest local promoters tried to sell as the real thing in the mid-1990s, don't count. <i>Ice Palace, Sun., March 18.
 </i>Another 1980s pop band has done exactly what Duran Duran and Tuxedomoon did before them - <strong>A-Ha </strong>has returned and come to Russia. Norway's only internationally known pop band has reformed and will be &quot;promoting&quot; last year's &quot;Minor Earth/Major Sky&quot; album - its first since 1992 - at its only Russian concert at the Ice Palace.
 The local promoters went so far as to establish a Web site for the show at www.a-ha.spb.ru - an honor previously given only to Depeche Mode for its St. Petersburg concert in 1998. <i>Ice Palace, Tues., March 20.
 </i><strong>Oleg Skripka </strong>will be do something he has never done before in this city. The high-energy accordion-playing leader of the Uk rai nian band Vop li Vi doplyasova will play a solo concert - for which he will use accordion, guitar, harmonica, keyboards and his memorable voice.
 Though the band is famous for its blend of Ukrainian folk, punk and heavy metal with a strong touch of cabaret, promised are also jazz, hip-hop and acid house. All this is to promote his solo album called &quot;Inkoli.&quot; <i>Estrada Theater, Wed., March 21.
 </i>Andrei Tropillo, the producer and sound engineer who was behind underground albums by dozens of bands, including Akvarium and Kino in the 1980s, is back with a festival and his own awards ceremony on Wednesday. He was largely considered one of Russian rock's godfathers, until he also became known as Russia's No. 1 pirate in the early 1990s.
 It was then that he flooded the country with unauthorized copies of vinyl records by a wide range of artists from the Beatles to Sonic Youth, all bearing his trademark &quot;Antrop.&quot; It's not quite clear who will be playing at <strong>Antrop Festival, </strong>as posters deceptively list dozens of acts, including Tom Waits, but rumor has it that Akvarium's Boris Grebenshchikov has promised to appear.
 However, judging by the way it's organized, there is a danger that the festival might repeat the fate of &quot;Breakthrough 2000&quot; and the &quot;Cactus Awards,&quot; which shamefully bombed earlier this year. <i>Yubileiny Sports Palace, Wed., March 21.</i>
 


TITLE: gypsies are kings at demidov
AUTHOR: by Barnaby Thompson
TEXT: Much of the time I spent at Demidov has stayed in the memory only as a blur of whirling skirts, strumming guitars, the clacking and snapping of fingers and the occasional whoop, thanks to the wild gypsy trio with which my dining companion and I became firm friends by the end of the evening. But if I concentrate hard, certain things swim into focus that enable me to recommend this restaurant heartily.
 Demidov has a fairly unprepossessing exterior that gives no indication of the elegance of what's inside. Our first thought was that it was going to be a bit New Russian, but in fact the tables, chairs and decoration have been tastefully done.
 The restaurant also does the simple things well: You don't get hassled to order the second you've sat down, our waitress knew the details of the menu, the wine list includes pointers as to what goes well with what, but avoids being pretentious in the process, and the food comes promptly but not too much so. 
 Since we were in a joint that goes for the &quot;Old Russia&quot; feel - more successfully than Staraya Derevnya, which it resembles - we had to go for the vodka (75 rubles for a shot of Russky Standart) and pickled vegetables (150 rubles). Two confirmed garlic lovers obviously had no complaints here. The Demidov salad (280 rubles) was chicken and tongue based, palatable but unremarkable.
 At this point the gypsies struck up, and although my instinctive reaction to live restaurant music is to start hurling bread rolls, we were bewitched almost instantly. Our appreciation encouraged them to move closely and serenade us personally, which normally has me crawling under the table but which on this occasion had me buying them a round of vodkas - an incident of largesse on my part unlikely ever to be repeated.
 By the time the &quot;duck for two people&quot; (580 rubles) arrived, we were in such a good mood that anything would have tasted delicious. For the record, however, the duck <i>was </i>excellent, along with the vegetables it came with and the extra boiled potatoes (80 rubles a portion).
 Perhaps the band is a cunning ploy on the part of Demidov's management, for my hair whitened slightly when I looked at the bill the following morning and remembered how we had plundered the menu. Maybe the gypsy lady had added a mystical potion to my wine (Patriarche Merlot, 700 rubles) which led me to order espressos (60 rubles each) two glasses of Jameson's Irish whiskey (150 rubles each) and a Balmoral Panatella (550 rubles). As it happens, we were celebrating, but I didn't realize until later quite to what extent.
 What the hell. When the band accompanies you to the coat check - to the bewilderment of a party of French tourists who were coming the other way - and your dining companion starts doing what looks like the fandango, you know you've been treated well.
 Demidov, 14 Nab. Fontanki. Tel: 272-37-91, 272-91-81. Dinner for two with wine, around 2,100 rubles ($70). Dinner for two with everything else, including vodka for the band, 3,155 ($112). Major credit cards accepted, which is just as well. </i>

TITLE: sturgeon faces extinction, caviar's future in doubt
AUTHOR: by Angela Charlton
TEXT: Poaching and pollution are threatening to wipe out Russia's sturgeon - and the luxurious caviar they produce, officials say, admitting that they're failing in a decade-long struggle to save the lucrative fishery.
 Poorly paid police overlook poachers in exchange for bribes, as the government scrapes for funds to fight the lucrative illegal caviar business. Oil spills and dam construction, meanwhile, have severely diminished the sturgeon's habitat.
 The abolition of the State Environment Committee last spring has aggravated matters, leaving less oversight over the fish and their surroundings, said activists at a round table on Russia's sturgeon, once the source of most the world's caviar.
 Sturgeon stocks nationwide are presently down to about 5,000 tons, from 42,000 to 45,000 in 1980, said Boris Kotenev, director of the state fisheries industry research institute.
 Just a fraction of those are caught legally; poachers take in 11 times as much as the legal catch, round table members said.
 Poaching often starts with desperately poor villagers netting sturgeon whose eggs are worth many times the average monthly salary. They easily evade police in their remote towns, and their contraband is compact and easy to smuggle.
 Caviar poaching has sapped a key source of income to Russia's wobbly economy since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, which used to strictly control the trade. 
 The Interior Ministry estimates that the official caviar trade brought in only $40 million a year for Russia in the late 1990s, compared with $500 million a year for the poachers.
 Russia has dropped to No. 2 world caviar producer behind Caspian Sea neighbor Iran, and exported 60 percent less black caviar last year than in 1999, officials said.
 &quot;Most likely, sturgeon as a species will continue to exist,&quot; said Igor Chestin, director of the Russia office of the World Wildlife Fund. &quot;But it's a question of whether it will actually continue to be a commercial fish.&quot;
 Most attention has been on shrinking sturgeon populations in the Caspian Sea. But the situation is more desperate in the Azov Sea, which is bordered by Russia and Ukraine, warned Georgy Roben, sturgeon specialist with the Institute of Evolution Ecology.
 Russia sets quotas for sturgeon fishing to limit depopulation, and its quota for the Azov in 1999 was 120 tons, Roben said. But only 45 tons were caught.
 &quot;There wasn't any more to catch,&quot; Roben said.
 Russia's government is reportedly considering introducing a state caviar monopoly, which it hopes will stem poaching and also bring more profits into state coffers. Some observers have welcomed the idea, while others have expressed the opinion that it would merely serve to enrich corrupt officials.
 It could also cripple villages in sturgeon-rich areas such as the Volga River delta on the Caspian and the Amur River in Russia's Far East, where over the last decadce poaching has become the sole source of income for many residents.
 A kilogram of poached Caspian beluga caviar can fetch $100 in Moscow, while it could run up to as much as $3,500 in the United States.
 Increased fines for poaching have made little difference, admitted Grigory Kovalev, director of the Glavrybvod fish breeding agency.
 &quot;It's directly tied to the economic situation. People feel they have no choice&quot; but to fish illegally, he said.
 Chestin criticized the dissolution in May of the ecology committee, which was absorbed by the Ministry for Natural Resources - the agency assigned with using Russia's vast territorial resources, not protecting them.
 &quot;That has severely harmed progress&quot; in saving sturgeon, he said.


TITLE: learning to love the turks, and their cooking
AUTHOR: by Penny Krumm
TEXT: I like Turkish people. This should not, in itself, be such an unusual revelation, but I grew up in a Greek-American community in Virginia where people still refer to Constantinople, not Istanbul. My mother was taught virulently patriotic anti-Turk songs as a child, and a friend of hers was whacked across the room by her grandmother for daring to ask what was so bad about the Turks anyway.
 Whether or not the Greeks will admit it, our larger neighbor to the east influenced a lot of Greek cuisine. Most will not, of course, insisting that baklava is uniquely Greek, that so-called &quot;Turkish coffee&quot; is anything but, and that stuffing skewered meat into a pita bread originated back with Plato. All the Greeks I know, however, do use the Turkish name for one of their favorite dishes - imam baildi, a rich vegetable stew. This means &quot;the imam fainted.&quot; The priest was believed to have lost consciousness due to the wonderful flavor of the dish. Or perhaps it was the sinfully lavish quantity of olive oil. Either way, these were the only Turkish words my family ever knew - except for an obscenity I cannot print here.
 This vegetable stew is not only blissfully good, but blissfully easy to prepare. And lest my Greek Cypriot grandfather turns over in his grave, I will also include his family's recipe for kapama, an orange-scented beef stew. This, along with the imam baildi, is delicious served over buttery egg noodles, and I dare the Turks to claim it!
 2 medium-small eggplants
 1 large onion
 1 large bell pepper
 1 large zucchini
 1 large jar peeled tomatoes
 1 large bunch flat-leafed parsley
 50 g (1/4 cup) olive oil
 1 large cinnamon stick
 2 bay leaves
 100 g (1/2 cup) water 
 Salt and pepper to taste
 
 Cut up vegetables into medium-large chunks and combine with all other ingredients in a large, sturdy pot. Cook on medium-low heat for about an hour, adding water if necessary to keep from sticking. Serves 3-4.

 500 g stew beef, cut in chunks
 Strip of fresh orange peel (from about 1/3 of an orange)
 4 ml (1 tsp.) ground cinnamon
 2 ml (1/2 tsp.) each ground cloves and coriander
 Salt and pepper to taste
 Juice from 1/2 a lemon
 25 g (2 tbsp.) each vegetable oil and butter
 70 g can tomato paste
 1 large garlic clove, chopped
 
 Sprinkle beef with spices, lemon juice, salt and pepper and let sit for 10 to 15 minutes. Brown beef in oil and butter, then place in a deep pot and mix with the remaining ingredients. Add just enough water to cover. Simmer for about one hour until the meat is tender and the sauce is reduced. Serves 3.

TITLE: bolshoi theater puts hidden treasures on show
AUTHOR: by Raymond Stults
TEXT: To celebrate its 225th birthday this month, the Bolshoi Theater has brought to the Central Manezh a truly spectacular display of treasures from its archives and workshops.
 Entitled &quot;Artists of the Bolshoi Theater,&quot; the exhibit, which opened Sunday and runs until March 31, puts on view some 1,500 items - paintings and drawings of decor and costumes (see cover: Enar Stenberg's costume sketches for a 1963 production of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's &quot;Spanish Capriccio&quot;), photographs, miniature scale models of stage sets, costumes, props and the enormous backdrops from a dozen Bolshoi productions, both past and present. As the exhibit's dramatic centerpiece, the theater has erected its entire set for the final scene at the Kremlin of Mikhail Glinka's opera &quot;Ivan Susanin,&quot; and peopled it with costume-clad mannequins.
 The Bolshoi dates its founding to a decree of Empress Catherine the Great issued March 28, 1776 that gave to Prince Pyotr Urusov, chief procurator of the Moscow region, the exclusive privilege of operating a private theater in Moscow, and obliged him &quot;to build a stone building of a theater that would decorate the city and also serve as the premises for public masquerades, comedies and comic operas.&quot;
 Urusov, not being a man of business, soon took on as his partner an emigr&eacute; English artisan and entrepreneur named Michael Maddox. By early 1780, Maddox had built and opened a rather homely red-brick structure, with room for 800 spectators, on the same patch of swampy ground next to Ulitsa Petrovka occupied today by what we know as the Bolshoi Theater.
 Maddox' Petrovsky Theater went down in flames in 1805, and only 20 years later did its company of actors, dancers and musicians find a new permanent home on the same site. Called the New Petrovsky Theater, the successor house was a far grander affair, seating 2,200 and eclipsed in size at its opening among the theaters of Europe only by La Scala in Milan, Italy.
 In 1853, the New Petrovsky suffered the same fate as its predecessor, but this time it took a mere three years to complete a replacement. On Aug. 20, 1856, coinciding with festivities for the coronation of Tsar Alexander II, the third and last of the theaters on Ulitsa Petrovka, this one dubbed the Bolshoi, opened its doors with a performance of Vincenzo Bellini's opera &quot;I Puritani.&quot;
 The works from the Bolshoi now on display at the Central Manezh range back in time to the curtain design by Ivan Ivanov for an operatic prologue performed on opening night at the New Petrovsky in February 1825, and forward to the drawings of sets by Sergei Barkhin for the now 2-month-old Bolshoi production of Giuseppe Verdi's &quot;Nabucco.&quot;
 Paintings and drawings of some 80 artists have been placed chronologically in 17 sections along the sides of the exhibit hall, with a dozen particularly important artists allotted individual displays.
 The least distinguished designs date from the 19th century, when the Bolshoi very much played second fiddle to the opera and ballet houses of the imperial capital, St. Petersburg. The arrival at the Bolshoi in the late 1890s, however, of the legendary choreographer Alexander Gorsky and, almost simultaneously, of such formidable voices as those of Fyodor Chaliapin, Leonid Sobinov and Antonina Nezhdanova brought with it an outpouring of fresh and imaginative decor and costumes.
 Perhaps the highlight of the exhibit is to be found in the works of Konstantin Korovin, the Bolshoi's principal designer during the first two decades of the 20th century. In the designs he created for the operas of Rimsky-Korsakov - in particular, &quot;Sadko,&quot; &quot;The Tale of the Invisible City of Kitezh&quot; and &quot;The Golden Cockerel&quot; - one can practically hear the composer's music emerge through the canvas.
 Near the display of Korovin are works by such examples of his distinguished contemporaries as Alexander Golovin and Apollinary Vasnetsov - a large selection of the former's extraordinarily beautiful designs, just a few pieces by the latter, including a marvelously jumbled evocation of a 17th-century town square for a 1904 production of Glinka's &quot;A Life for the Tsar.&quot;
 Further on into the 20th century, the eye is caught by such marvels as the constructivist designs of Isaak Rabinovich, the rich stage pictures of Fyodor Fedorovsky, whose 1948 &quot;Boris Godunov&quot; is still to be seen on the Bolshoi stage, and the diverse and often wonderfully comic sets of Valery Leventhal, a Bolshoi designer from the early 1960s until the mid 1990s.
 Among the costumes on display are many still in use today, as well as some once worn by such famous artists of the past as Chaliapin, Nezhdanova, Galina Ulanova and Maya Plisetskaya.
 &quot;Artists of the Bolshoi Theater&quot; includes sounds as well as sights. A modestly sized stage has been erected just inside the exhibit hall, and every day, for an hour or so starting at 2 p.m., soloists of the Bolshoi perform arias and duets from opera, their singing interspersed with bits of dance by members of the theater's ballet and mime troupes. At other times, a screen on the stage shows filed excerpts and complete performances from the Bolshoi's past.
 The Bolshoi's anniversary exhibit brilliantly underscores the theater's enormous contribution to the cultural life of Moscow and of Russia as a whole over the past 2 1/4 centuries. Coming away from it, one can hardly help but sense the importance of its succeeding with the difficult tasks that lie immediately ahead - refurbishing its repertoire and raising artistic standards after years of drift and neglect, and finding the huge sums of money needed to complete its new second theater and reconstruct its beloved, but dangerously dilapidated, principal home.
 
 <i>&quot;Artists of the Bolshoi Theater&quot; (Khudozhniki Bolshogo Teatra) runs through March 31 at the Manezh Exhibition Hall, located at 1 Manezh Square in Moscow. 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sat. and Sun. noon to 5 p.m. </i>

TITLE: spartak theater revives WWII movie with a difference
AUTHOR: by Kirill Galetski
TEXT: Byelorussia, winter 1942. Rybak (Vladimir Gostyukhin), a former partisan and an officer named Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov) forage for provisions to feed their unit. Their search takes them to the hut of a farmer and his wife, who provide them with food and refuge. The Germans patrolling the area find them anyway, and they are taken into town, where a deadly ordeal awaits them.
 Thus begins Larisa Shepitko's classic psychological drama &quot;The Ascent&quot; (Voskhozhdeniye,) adapted from the short story &quot;Sotnikov&quot; by Vasily Bykov and originally released nearly 25 years ago. The film is showing next week in a revival at the Spartak Cinema and only now has been released on officially licensed video. It is one of the best Russian WWII films because of the way it personalizes the horrors of war. Shepitko was one of a handful of directors from the era who managed to make a thoroughly serious, intellectually and emotionally challenging work about the war, along with such notables as Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexei German and Shepitko's own husband, director Elem Klimov, who portrayed the annihilation of Byelorussia in his brutally affecting 1985 work, &quot;Come and See&quot; (Idy y Smotry.) Apart from Tarkovsky, the work of these directors has been shown very seldom and has been rarely available on video.
 Rather than go for action, suspense, or social drama, Shepitko's film takes the viewer on a voyage into the dark corners of the mind, places where one seldom goes in normal life, but which are brought to the forefront in the film by the terrible dilemma facing the main characters: to betray and live or refuse to cooperate and die.
 The thin and balding Portnov (Anatoly Solontsin) was an administrator at the local House of Culture before he became a Nazi collaborator. He is calm, no-nonsense, totally uncompromising and ruthless, but human nonetheless. His encounter with the Christ-like, equally uncompromising Sotnikov is a battle of the wills with disturbing parallels to the Inquisition. Rybak, however, gives in to fear, talks and thereby gets away with his life, but has to betray his brother-in-arms to do so. His rationale is to run and live to fight another day. Sotnikov does not give in to interrogation and is tortured and condemned to hang with some of the other captives which include the farmer and his wife.
 The film is simply told, with drab black and white cinematography and a progressive, minimalist score by Alfred Schnittke. It is devoid of any flag-waving patriotism and does not make easy judgments of any of its characters. It is an example of an alternative, thinking person's cinema that led an uneasy coexistence with the more mundane forms prevalent in the Soviet period such as patriotic propaganda, politically neutral literary adaptations and comedies. The performances are uniformly excellent. Plotnikov and Solonitsin burn with conviction. 
 Director Shepitko was born in Ukraine in 1938 and started working at Kyrgyzfilm Studios in 1961. She completed directing courses at the All Union State Institute of Cinematography in 1963. A promising young director, she made the award-winning films &quot;Smog&quot; (Znoy) and &quot;You and Me&quot; (Ty y Ya) before making &quot;The Ascent,&quot; which was released to critical acclaim in the Soviet Union and abroad and had a successful run in the country's cinemas. It was seen by over 10 million viewers. Besides winning the award at the Berlin Film Festival in 1977, the film won several other Eastern European film awards, and Shepitko was awarded the U.S.S.R. State Award posthumously in 1979. &quot;The Ascent&quot; is her eighth film, and her crowning achievement. She made only one film after it, which had to be completed by her husband Klimov because she died in a car accident in 1979 at the age of 41.
 
 <i>&quot;The Ascent&quot; is playing at the Spartak Cinema on Sun., March 18 at 6 p.m. and on Mon., March 19 at 4 p.m. It is also available on video from Krupny Plan. </i>

TITLE: mtv russia: a shot in the arm for music industry?
AUTHOR: by Sergey Chernov
TEXT: In the 2 1/2 years since its debut, MTV Russia has changed the face of Russian music drastically. In the thoroughly corrupt sector of music business, where $40 could put any video on air, the free-to-air, advertiser-supported customized service set a new standard by banning bribes and paid screenings, and made a major breakthrough in forcing Russian acts and producers to compete with the Western standard of quality.
 Initially available only in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Voronezh, MTV Russia has now expanded to reach an estimated 58 million viewers (21.5 million households) in 68 towns in Russia, plus Kazakstan and Kyrgyzstan. The channel, which employs over 200, is produced by ZAO Energiya TV and broadcasts from Moscow.
 The history of MTV Russia started in 1993, when music biz mogul Boris Zosimov, infected by U.S. MTV which he first saw on a business trip to New York in 1989, signed a syndication deal to broadcast MTV programs on the territory of Russia - &quot;to overcome a total shortage of quality music on Russian screens.&quot; Various MTV programs then started to be shown on several Russian channels.
 &quot;Viacom, the company which owns MTV, is very serious about choosing partners on territories,&quot; said Zosimov, now chairman and CEO of MTV Muzykalnoye Televideniye, which is the official name for MTV Russia.
 &quot;So to do a Russian version of the channel we had to prove for many years that we were capable of doing it, and that we had a team which we wouldn't let down a brand which costs many billion dollars. 
 &quot;For five years I kept persuading them that MTV is necessary in Russia, because it's a huge part of the globe, where a great number of young people live, and that they like not only Western music, but Russian music as well.&quot;
 The 12-year licensing agreement between MTV Networks and Biz Enterprises - the multi-profile entertainment company founded by Boris Zosimov in 1992 - was made public in April 1998.
 MTV Russia made its debut at midnight on Sept. 26, 1998, with the concert special &quot;Prodigy Live in Moscow,&quot; taped in September 1997. The first Russian video was Mumii Troll's &quot;Vladivostok 2000,&quot; while the first international video was &quot;Come With Me&quot; by Puff Daddy and Jimmy Page.
 Launched amid the 1998 financial crisis, the channel had to cancel the planned launch event, but the very next year promoted the massive MTV Party'ya, an open-air concert on Moscow's Red Square. Headlined by The Red Hot Chili Peppers, it drew an estimated 150,000 fans on Aug. 14, 1999.
 The channel initially belonged to an investment fund and Biz Enterprises, until last year when Viacom Inc., the owner of MTV Networks, bought a major share in the Russian channel, turning MTV Russia into a joint venture. 
 From the start, MTV Russia had to compete with MuzTV, the Russian music channel co-founded by Zosimov himself and fellow entrepreneur Sergei Lisovsky in 1995 - which was a tool in the 1996 youth-oriented campaign &quot;Vote or Lose!&quot; to support Boris Yeltsyn's presidential bid. It was masterminded by the duo and modeled after U.S. MTV's pro-Bill Clinton &quot;Rock the Vote&quot; campaign. However, Zosimov quit soon after.
 &quot;I sold my part. If I owned two music channels, it would be a distinct conflict of interests, which both my partners and I disagree with categorically,&quot; said Zosimov.
 &quot;I made the decision that I would be better off establishing MTV, and sold my share. That was in 1996.&quot;
 Despite the domination of alternative music in the early stages, the programming has changed noticeably over the past 12 months. According to Zosimov, the scheme was to grasp media attention at the beginning.
 &quot;When we were starting MTV, it was absolutely clear to me that I needed to satisfy interest and get a positive reaction from journalists, from advanced public and so on in the first place. That's why the channel was more hard-edged, it was an alternative channel, it was more of a foreign channel - foreign music made up 80 per cent.&quot;
 &quot;Then looking at the process strategically and contantly studying public tastes very attentively, we began to shift the proportion between Russian and non-Russian videos a little, and reorient the programs primarily to average people who mostly listen to popular music - Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Ricky Martin, Five, Backstreet Boys and the like.&quot;
 The sophisticated viewer got a break in the shape of programs &quot;Dance Zone,&quot; &quot;Alt Zone&quot; and &quot;Hard Rock Zone,&quot; each shown one hour a week. 
 Though at the press conference devoted to the launch of the channel Zosimov claimed that &quot;many well-known artists have no chance to get on Russian MTV, especially those whose work ... isn't in the format of youth-oriented television,&quot; the presence of Russian pop performers, such as 51-year-old pop diva Alla Pugacheva, is now strongly felt in the channel's programming.
 &quot;It's not that there's much Pugacheva - the thing is that she is probably particularly noticeable. Pugacheva's new video was shown only 21 times in four weeks, less than once a day,&quot; said Zosimov, claiming that almost every video to be screened is tested at focus groups, while decisions on inclusion are made by a 18-member strong commission which meets every Tuesday.
 &quot;Youth reacts to [Pugacheva] very positively. She is a very rare exception, when a woman who is, let's say, not of the MTV age, gets a 100 per cent interest from our audience, even if from the point of view of 'God, how good she looks, what trendy arrangements she has, how she tries to keep up with the times.'&quot;
 According to Zosimov, there's a 55/45 correlation between Western and Russian videos. &quot;If our artists make more good videos, I'll bring it to 50/50, definitely,&quot; he said. Eighty per cent of programs are locally produced, while 20 per cent are international.
 MTV Networks has no influence on local programming. &quot;They don't affect the content even half a percent. They believe us completely and we choose what is interesting to us from their catalogue ourselves,&quot; said Zosimov.
 &quot;There's no dictate but only one contractual condition. There's the concept 'look and fill.' The channel should be not strikingly different from the other MTV channels in the world, first of all graphically. The contract says we should follow a definite standard, which is defined by these three letters - MTV.&quot;
 Unlike rival MuzTV channel, notorious for screening videos for a price, MTV stated it would avoid the manipulative practice, which is common in Russia. 
 &quot;We changed the rules of the game on the market completely. We demonstrated that you could have as much money as you like, invest enormous sums on videos, but if you make music which lacks the honesty required by our viewers, you have no chance to get on MTV,&quot; said Zosimov.
 &quot;Our channel was the first to reject payola, and this motivates artists to orient not to money in the first instance, but to quality. Take Tatu - they made a good project, which we liked. We were the only channel to launch it and now they have become incredibly popular.&quot;
 However, corruption remains rampant on many other music programs and channels in Russia.
 Music journalist [and Russian Playboy's founding editor] Artyom Troitsky said, &quot;There's such a huge amount of total crap produced in this country that alongside MTV we still have the absolutely monstrous MuzTV, which mainly rotates loathsome videos by obscure pop artists, gangsters' molls and bankers' sons for money. Having absolutely no ratings, the channel flourishes because of these bribes.
 &quot;The fact that MTV doesn't charge money is a great initiative, although there's a drawback in repertoire, when some interesting things are discarded because they don't fit into the format,&quot; said Troitsky.
 Zosimov rejected rumors about problems which might lead to the channel's closure, suggesting that they stemmed from the recent staff reduction. &quot;We fired a few idlers, probably because they started to talk nonsense like this with great pleasure ... It's absolute rubbish. I can say one thing - this channel will stay in Russia forever.&quot;
 Though striving to avoid political bias in the channel's content, Zosimov estimates the role of MTV Russia as being more than just entertainment.
 &quot;I believe we are doing major social work, probably even political,&quot; he said.
 &quot;It's a great breakthrough, because music is the only means of universal communication among young people - they know Michael Jackson and Madonna everywhere in the world. And we do everything so that our viewer feels like an inhabitant not of one country but of the whole planet.
 &quot;MTV is not simply a consequence of videos, it's a lifestyle, and a person brought up on this lifestyle will never be able to conform to totalitarianism.&quot;

TITLE: the music business, where pirates reign
AUTHOR: by Sergey Chernov
TEXT: &quot;The Russian music business is dead,&quot; was a common phrase in the trade after a financial crisis hit Russia in August 1998, burying many companies and projects.
 But last year the local music industry started to show signs of recovery, although years must pass until it turns into a healthy and civilized business, which it has never been in this country.
 The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), a global recording-industry trade group which represents some 1,200 record producers in over 70 countries around the world including 21 Russian companies, noted the growth of the trade in Russia last year. 
 &quot;There was an improved performance in Russia, resulting from an economic turnaround and a growth in sales of local repertoire,&quot; said IFPI in its press release in October 2000.
 Currently there are 11 plants in Russia capable of producing 20.5 million CDs per month, IFPI estimates. However, CDs constitute only 20 percent of the market, while the rest are tapes, for which Russia is described as a &quot;cassette country.&quot;
 &quot;The situation is difficult on one hand, but interesting on the other,&quot; said Igor Pozhitkov, the freshly appointed head of the IFPI Moscow regional office.
 &quot;After the 1998 financial crisis everything became smaller,&quot; said Po zhit kov. &quot;Some companies folded or decreased their operations, but now the situation is starting to improve, as there are more projects from both Russian companies and Russian branches of Western record companies. But it's serious in a sense that the level of piracy is still high.&quot;
 Record companies reacted to the challenges of the crisis and piracy by adopting the system of &quot;special prices&quot; and introducing &quot;simplified,&quot; or &quot;cheap&quot; CDs and so-called &quot;Cyrillic CDs,&quot; the latter being Western CDs with some additional information on inlays and the CD itself translated into Russian.
 &quot;Both BMG and Universal now offer [cheaper] 'Cyrillic CDs' - not $18 imports [as before the crisis],&quot; said Alexander Tilkhonov, leading expert of the Intermedia agency.
 &quot;It's done to prevent re-export. With some text in Russian, no self-respecting shop in the West will sell these CDs.&quot;
 One of the main differences from the pre-crisis situation is that all the five majors have arrived in Russia, and now influence the local situation.
 With Sony Music Entertainment (Rus) launched in December 1999 and BMG's fully fledged affiliate opened in October 2000, all the major companies are now represented in Russia.
 Starting by trading and producing expensive CDs by international artists, Western majors are now showing an interest in local projects. Universal is counting on pop singer Alsou, whose international English-language debut is scheduled for April, while Sony has signed four Russian acts for the local market, the latest addition being St. Petersburg pop/rock band Splean last month.
 The legal market remains pretty small, with Russia, which dominates the Eastern European market, occupying the 26th position in the world, according to IFPI. A recent record for legal sales was Modern Talking's &quot;Year of the Dragon,&quot; of which 100,000 copies were sold, as BMG reported last month.
 &quot;The situation is getting better, but very slowly, because the main problem, the problem of piracy, has not been solved,&quot; said music writer and Playboy founding editor Artyom Troitsky, who was a partner of General Records, the label which closed down due to the crisis.
 &quot;Because of it, although the population here is five times greater than that of Poland, we have even fewer legal sales than they have in Poland. Which is ridiculous enough on its own.&quot;
 According to IFPI, the piracy level was 62.9 percent in unit terms in 2000 while annual pirate sales are estimated as $300 million. However, many observers see the situation as being even more grave.
 &quot;Whatever the liars from IFPI say about a 65 percent level of piracy, 90 per cent of the music market in the country is a pirate market, and if we take provincial Russia it's a full 99.9 per cent,&quot; said Troitsky.
 &quot;As much as 95 per cent of all music sold in Russia is illegal,&quot; said Eric Schwartz of the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), which represents U.S. copyright holders, in the online publication Wired in October 2000.
 Despite police raids which seized 1,237,500 CDs, 5,786 CDRs (one CDR can hold eight to 12 &quot;normal&quot; CDs) and 308,104 cassettes in 2000, according to IFPI, and the closure of the Gorbushka market in Moscow, piracy remains rampant. IIPA said one of the main reasons is that seizures of pirate production normally do not lead to serious prosecution.
 In January, then U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky announced that the U.S. government had accepted IIPA's petition to examine whether Russia continues to be eligible to receive duty-free trade benefits under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) program.
 Russian Federation is on the Priority Watch List, which it was elevated to by the U.S. Trade Representative in 1997. Placement on the list means that the U.S. Administration has determined that the lack of adequate and effective intellectual property rights protection or market access barriers in these countries are particularly troublesome to U.S. interests.
 Troitsky had to review his opinion of the mid-1990s when he claimed that piracy would end when Western majors arrive on the scene.
 &quot;Thank God that the majors have arrived on this market; they won some 10 percent of this market - if it wasn't for them, there would be even more piracy, but pirates are still stronger,&quot; he said.
 &quot;The reason is not in our music business, but in Russia as a whole, in the Russian mentality, Russian bureaucracy, Russian corruption and maybe even in the Russian national character. It's certain that no Warners or Universals are going to get past this hurdle in a hurry.&quot;
 &quot;To overcome piracy with the forces of even very strong companies is impossible,&quot; said Boris Zosimov, a chairman of Universal Music Group (Russia) and the head of MTV Russia, who describes Russia as &quot;the country of total piracy&quot;.
 &quot;Only the state can overcome piracy. The state has to realize what it loses on piracy, what it doesn't get in taxes and how much money is lost - it's billions of dollars. Until they realize, nothing will happen.&quot;
 Russia's record industry remains very closed with few figures and no detailed sales charts available.
 &quot;It's difficult for me to say if there are any sales charts in Russia,&quot; said Leonid Fomin, editor of the music magazine Fuzz. &quot;There were attempts to do such charts but none of them were trustworthy.&quot;
 However, Zosimov, who met with Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov to discuss primarily the problem of piracy last year, sees signs of change. &quot;I believe that the meeting led to a very positive change in Moscow. Gorbushka has been shut down, and while going to shops I see that they hide pirate production somewhere behind the counter. The ice has moved at least in Moscow.&quot;
 &quot;In Poland they've dealt with it for three years - but here it's of course more difficult. Piracy will exist forever. If it's 80-85 percent, like it is now, for this business it's a catastrophe. When piracy is around 10 percent, there will be a golden era for the recording industry, for sure.&quot;
 Despite a current discussion of Napster and Internet piracy, it has not had a big influence in Russia, as due to the country's bad telephone lines it can be effectively used only by a small group of people who work in offices.
 &quot;Much bigger harm [than Napster] is done by MP3 collections on CDRs, which - unlike Napster - are available to everybody, and usual pirate CDs,&quot; said Daniil Dugayev, the editor of the online publication Internet.ru. &quot;For some reason, I haven't seen that they were fought in a very effective way. Well, they smashed a couple of trucks [of counterfeit CDs], closed down Gorbushka - but what's the effect?
 &quot;There won't be any effect until there are enough people ready to pay $10 to buy a Filipp Kirkorov album. As for me, I don't know any such people,&quot; he said.
 Not only fans, who happily buy counterfeit CDs for $2, but some musical acts advocate piracy.
 &quot;Everybody has an equivocal attitude toward piracy,&quot; said Boris Grebenshchikov of the rock band Akvarium.
 &quot;As Akvarium, of course, we'd like our recordings to cost a decent price, so we can get some good kopecks for every copy sold and live comfortably.
 &quot;But speaking in real terms, only one in a thousand, if not less, can afford to pay $15 for a record. And that's just in the European part of Russia - in Siberia it's probably one in 40,000.&quot;
 &quot;As long as there's no money in the country, pirates are God's blessing for people who can't afford to buy a legal album. There won't be a real music business until people in the country have money. That's why pirates are simply inevitable at the moment.&quot;

TITLE: dishonest sentiment from the family man
AUTHOR: by Kevin Thomas
TEXT: &quot;The Family Man&quot; is an ambitious, carefully crafted Christmas movie that tries to be &quot;It's a Wonderful Life&quot; for the new millennium but lacks the honesty to pull it off. Not even a sincere and heroic effort by Nicolas Cage can redeem the film's essential phoniness. Still, Cage's charisma and a lot of shameless heart-tugging will surely prove a potent lure with many moviegoers.
 Cage's Jack Campbell, the hard-driving president of a major Wall Street corporation, is on the brink of closing a $130 billion merger deal. Deciding to stroll home on Christmas Eve, he stops by a convenience store, where he defuses a rapidly escalating and dangerous racial clash between its Asian proprietor and an African American customer.
 The customer named Cash (Don Cheadle) proves to be an angel in street punk disguise. In a brief exchange with Cash, which brings out Jack's rusty humanitarian impulses, Campbell assures him that &quot;I have everything I've ever wanted.&quot;
 Stretched out on his bed in his sleek, high-rise apartment, Jack falls asleep, only to awaken in a suburban New Jersey bedroom. Writers David Diamond & David Weissman and director Brett Ratner are going to give Jack a glimpse of what his life might have been had he not, 13 years earlier, disregarded his college sweetheart's dark premonition of disaster and flown off to London for a year's internship at a bank. He assures Tea Leoni's Kate, who's off to law school herself, that their love will survive the one-year separation, but clearly their relationship did not.
 Jack awakens to discover that he's married to Kate and is a tire salesman, working for his highly successful father-in-law (Harve Presnell), that Kate is a pro bono attorney, that they have a 6-year-old daughter and a baby son and a big mortgage on a comfortably cluttered house. Since this is a Hollywood movie, Kate is more gorgeous than ever and their marriage is intensely passionate. Nobody takes much notice that Jack is acting mighty peculiar, as if he didn't quite know his neighbors or what was going on, except for his precocious daughter, Annie (Makenzie Vega), who decides he's an alien and keeps him clued in.
 Now, Jack does find himself warming to the idea of a wife and children, and that's certainly understandable, but everybody and everything else seem pretty boring - perhaps more boring than the filmmakers intended. Just when the film begins to cloy in earnest, it takes off in an unexpected and encouraging direction when fate gives Jack the opportunity to hold on to his newly acquired family life while earning back his old corporate job.
 Kate lays on a massive guilt trip about him wanting to move back to Manhattan as part of the deal - just as she had done 13 years earlier about him going off to London. Haven't these people heard about commuting?
 It all makes you wonder: What is going on here? Kate is presented as the perfect wife, but if so, why can't she understand that a man of Jack's obvious brilliance might not be fulfilled selling tires? For that matter, what if it had been Kate who had wanted to go off to London? If Jack had tried to stop her, he would have been labeled a male chauvinist pig.
 &quot;The Family Man&quot; is trying to make a grand statement about the value of family over career, and in doing so, paints Jack, before the &quot;what if?&quot; fantasy overtakes him, as a ruthless materialist. Everyone knows striking a balance between career and family requires the skill of a master juggler, but there are plenty of hugely successful men who are also dedicated husbands and fathers - and some of them are plenty ruthless in the boardroom.
 There's a false dichotomy running through this film, making career and family an either-or choice, and Kate, for all Leoni's radiance, is more killjoy than dream girl. Cage is a protean actor of wide range and authority, and the film's cast is large and substantial, including Saul Rubinek, Josef Sommer and Mary Beth Hurt as Jack's business associates, Jeremy Piven as Jack's New Jersey neighbor and best pal, and Francine York as his mother-in-law. But in terms the corporate Jack would understand, it's still no deal.

TITLE: pride of georgia woos parisians with piaf
AUTHOR: by Vladislav Schnitzer
TEXT: Tamara Gverdtsiteli, a tiny woman with a voice of amazing timbre and range, has graced the stages of prestigious concert halls all over the world, from Moscow's Rossiya to New York's Carnegie Hall. Born and raised in Tbilisi, Gverdtsiteli became a child star in her native Georgia before launching her international career in Paris. The singer recently took time out from her busy concert schedule to speak with The St. Petersburg Times about her musical career as well as her longstanding cooperation with one of the living legends of modern stage and film music, French composer, songwriter and singer Michel LeGrand.
 Q: </strong></i><i>How did you come to know Michel LeGrand?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>We met when I was performing in Paris in 1991. My first Paris concert was very nerve-racking. In Paris they do not want to hear Americans, or other foreigners, so from the start the public was very cautious about me. But as soon as I started singing their caution melted away and I began to feel calm. I sang in Russian, Georgian and French. Later a member of the audience came on stage and said that Paris would remember the name &quot;Tamara.&quot; That was an acknowledgement. It was after one of those concerts that I was introduced to Monsieur LeGrand.
 
 <i><strong>Q: </strong></i><i>You recently performed together with LeGrand in Kiev. Can you tell us about that concert?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>Now that was an unforgettable performance! The hall, which accommodates thousands of people, was overflowing. There were people sitting on the steps in the aisles, standing in the doorways, hovering around the orchestra pit. And what an ovation the audience gave the maestro! I've never seen Michel so exultant, so inspired. He led me by the hand on stage as if I, not he, was the main attraction.
 After he quieted the hall - which took some time - we sat down at the two pianos and started to play his music. Those were unforgettable moments, but they weren't easy. LeGrand was in his own element; he improvised, changed key as he went along, and I had to keep up with him.
 
 <i><strong>Q: </strong></i><i>How old were you when you started singing?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>My mother swears that by the age of one I already had a &quot;repertoire&quot; of Georgian and Russian songs and Gypsy romances. At 3 I was already picking out melodies on the piano with one finger; I held the rest of my fingers in a fist so they wouldn't get in the way. When I was 7, I was first introduced to the musical genius of Michel LeGrand. I saw his movie musical &quot;The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.&quot; I couldn't exactly understand the music, but I felt it was somehow different - not like other music. I wanted to hear it again and again. Now I sing his songs myself, and, to my great joy, the maestro writes them especially for me!
 
 <i><strong>Q: </strong></i><i>Do you have a favorite song?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>That's hard to say. I know I love a song if I don't get tired of singing it in concert. I have as many as 15 concerts a month - sometimes even a concert a day. There are songs I'm willing to sing every time. Just as every day is different from the next, so is today's performance different from yesterday's.
 There are songs that stay in your repertoire for a long time. Their longevity is determined by fate, timing and the audience. For me, these traditional parts of my repertoire include Georgian folk songs, songs based on the poetry of Marina Tsvetayeva. I've just finished recording songs I composed to Tsvetayeva's verse. I also sing Jewish songs in Hebrew and French songs. The songs don't change, but when I sing them the audience hears them as if for the first time.
 
 <i><strong>Q: </strong></i><i>What influence did Paris have on you as a young performer?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>Paris helped to refine my taste. It educated and influenced me. The French, as well as the Italians, are very close to me. Maybe that's because in my native Georgia we have always looked West, to Europe. Or maybe it's because the French accepted me as I am, with my own voice and temperament. They understand that no one can be more temperamental than a small woman with a big voice.
 
 <i><strong>Q: </strong></i><i>You now make your home in Moscow, but you lived in America for over four years. What new creative elements did you discover there?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>I really love European and American pop and jazz. But, having lived in America, I now understand that you have to be born a jazz singer - you can't learn to be one. You have to have special blood. There are, for example, musicians who play brilliantly on a wide range of instruments, but they'll never play the duduk, a [reed] instrument indigenous to the Caucasus. To play that well you have to be born with a certain blood and temperament. It's the same with jazz.
 But I'm lucky. I've found my music - that which is truly natural for me. And music is like a force of nature, just as wind or snow. A musician's greatest achievement is to find himself. In the United States I studied ethnic music of various origins. This made me realize that you can combine the uncombinable, by weaving your own elements into different genres of music. I certainly try to do that.
 <i><strong>Q: </strong></i><i>Your concerts often take you away from home. As a single mother, do you find it difficult to be away so often?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>My mother has assumed all the domestic duties at home. She's helping me raise my son, Sandro, who is 14. My mother is also my first adviser when it comes to any of my creative endeavors. I can't imagine life without her.
 
 <i><strong>Q: </strong></i><i>Do you have a lot of fans?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>Fans of my music? They say that I do.
 
 <i><strong>Q: </strong></i><i>As a performing artist you have had a lot of ups and downs in your career. Can you tell us about your best and your worst day? 
 </i><strong>A</strong>: As for my happiest day, I'll answer in the words of a heroine from a French film: I hope the happiest days are yet to come. Now for the hardest. There are a lot of those.
 Once while I was on tour in Odessa I needed an operation. My next concert was in Donetsk, but I didn't cancel it even though I was still weak. The audience knew about the situation, and no sooner had I walked out on stage did they stand up and applaud me for about five minutes.
 Q: </strong></i><i>What do you find most difficult about launching a new concert series?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>Getting it right, emotionally, is very difficult. One false step - if it's not the right song or the right introduction - and it all falls apart.
 I put a lot of thought into developing a new concert. It's like a patchwork quilt of varied melodies, poetry and composers, only the &quot;patches&quot; should not be discernible. The concert needs to develop as one emotional whole. That's really hard to do. Even the great Edith Piaf worried a lot about it.
 
 <i><strong>Q: </strong></i><i>I'll admit that at first I was dismayed by your audacity when I heard one of your compositions based on a Piaf song.
 </i><strong>A: </strong>You're not the only one! You should have seen the French react when I dared sing that song in Paris!
 I had to totally turn myself off in order to have the courage to walk out on that stage and sing Piaf's songs in front of the French. But my producer assured me I was doing the right thing, and he was right. After a brief hesitation the audience started to sing with me. And then came the applause. The Parisians presented me with a complete set of Piaf's recordings. That is a precious gift.

TITLE: coens take homer to the deep south
AUTHOR: by Kenneth Turan
TEXT: The Coen brothers did not make their reputation by taking things too seriously, and in that sense &quot;O Brother, Where Art Thou?&quot; is of a piece with what's come before. An eccentric, picaresque Southern period comedy, &quot;Bonnie & Clyde&quot; as told by Monty Python, &quot;O Brother&quot; is rife with the kinds of genial madness only writer-director Joel and writer-producer Ethan can come up with.
 The Coens, however, have treated one element with respect this time around, and that's made quite a difference. Fans of traditional American music, country, blues and bluegrass, they've worked with composer T Bone Burnett to select nearly 20 prime examples and seen them superbly recorded by top-of-the-line contemporary musicians such as Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss, Gillian Welch (who has a cameo as a record buyer) and Ralph Stanley.
 As a result &quot;O Brother's&quot; music is more than pleasant background; it is a living presence, and with apologies to an excellent cast, just about the star of the picture. By enlivening things to an unprecedented extent, the songs turn &quot;O Brother&quot; into perhaps the warmest production in the Coens' repertoire.
 &quot;O Brother's&quot; inspiration and story line are a typically eclectic Coen brothers mix. The film's title and its opening 1930s chain-gang setting are a tip of the hat to Preston Sturges' classic Hollywood comedy &quot;Sullivan's Travels,&quot; but what &quot;O Brother&quot; is really riffing off is something different. With whimsical glee, it cross-pollinates two vivid and distinct mythologies, contrasting the ancient Greeks with the cliched movie South.
 &quot;Based upon 'The Odyssey' by Homer,&quot; reads an opening title card, and, like another deadpan card the Coens considered but rejected (&quot;Portions Also Based on 'Moby Dick'), it is as true as it is amusing.
 Here's a hero named Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) who sets out on a long and difficult journey, encountering along the way a bad-tempered Cyclops named Big Dan Teague (John Goodman), a trio of honey-tongued sirens (sung but not acted by Harris, Krauss and Welch), even a wife named Penny. It's enough to make you want to rent the old Kirk Douglas-starring &quot;Ulysses&quot; to compare and contrast plot points and adaptation styles.
 Just as much fun to notice are the endless chestnuts about the Old South that dot the landscape, mocking our thirst for standard plot elements. Ignorant farmers, mass riverside baptisms, burning crosses, crooked politicians and more, they've all made it into the Coens' rambling plot.
 &quot;O Brother&quot; also delights in working up connections between the music and the mythology. So, spoofing the legends surrounding blues giant Robert Johnson, there's a singer named Tommy Johnson (Chris Thomas King) who talks of meeting the devil by a crossroads. And Charles Durning's irascible singing governor Pappy O'Daniel, host of the &quot;Pass the Biscuits Pappy O'Daniel Flour Hour,&quot; brings to mind Jimmy Davis, the real-life singing governor of Louisiana and the author of the &quot;You Are My Sunshine&quot; song that is Durning's theme.
 The story all these references get worked around begins with a trio of manacled convicts fleeing a Mississippi chain gang. With a fondness for Dapper Dan hair pomade and a misguided belief in his own powers of persuasion, Clooney's McGill may be dumb, but his fellow escapees Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson) are dumber and dumbest, respectively.
 All three have departed the chain gang in search of a $1.2 million stolen treasure McGill has secreted in a cabin that is in imminent danger of being flooded by a dam. Trying to get the money and avoid the law, our boys take time out to cut a record as Jordan Rivers and the Soggy Bottom Boys and cross paths with everyone from manic-depressive bank robber George &quot;Don't Call Me Baby Face&quot; Nelson (Michael Badalucco) to Homer Stokes, the Reform candidate for governor (Wayne Duvall), an enemy of O'Daniel who is such a friend of the little man he has his own little man accompany him on campaign swings.
 Helped by computers able to desaturate color, cinematographer Roger Deakins has given &quot;O Brother&quot; an old-fashioned patina that matches its music. &quot;It's a fool who looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart,&quot; one character says, and while it may be equally foolhardy to look for logic in a Coen brothers film, this one makes it most pleasant to try.

TITLE: the last will and testament: pretty, but empty
AUTHOR: by Tom Masters
TEXT: The heavily-wigged intrigue surrounding the death of Peter the Great is the subject of actress-director Svetlana Druzhinina's film, &quot;The Emperor's Last Will and Testament,&quot; the first part of a series of Druzhina films entitled &quot;The Secrets of Palace Coups.&quot;
 Both brutal and amusing, the film opens with the aging Peter (Nikolai Karachentsov) torturing and finally killing his son and heir Tsarevich Alexei, as he himself gradually succumbs to violent madness. Skip forward seven years to 1725 and a capricious, unstable Peter is attempting to kill his wife whom he correctly accuses of having a lover.
 Such a refreshingly new take on a man whose reputation as a vigorous reformer and as the founder of St. Petersburg often eclipses his well-documented brutality and temper promises much in the opening minutes. However, Peter quickly becomes bed-ridden and is just a mere prop in the power struggle for the succession. While Peter had written a will, he later destroyed it and his attempt to write a new one in his weakened state culminates in an incomplete sentence, stating &quot;give it all to ...&quot;
 As the news spreads that the tyrant is expiring, two rival camps of ministers plot to see that their chosen favorite ascends the throne. The &quot;baddy&quot; camp, led by Prince Golitsyn, seeks to make Peter's young teenage grandson the next tsar, while Peter's wife's lover Prince Menshikov, wants to see the tsar's widow rule in his place, knowing that he will be the real power behind the throne.
 Sumptuously shot at Petrodvorets during winter, The Emperor's Last Will and Testament is another expensive foray into increasingly popular Russian period drama. Luckily, Druzhinina steers the narrative carefully between historical accuracy and artistic license, permitting much humor in her portrayal of a key historical event.
 Particularly amusing is the wig-snatching fight between a group of ministers jumping around the imperial throne, which can only be subdued by the Orthodox Patriarch wielding his cross from which the bloated aristocrats shrink like vampires.
 The absurdities of the situation are highlighted by the more than mildly ironic take on most of the court being German - &quot;Mein Gott!&quot; is a repeated exclamation and many of the royal family are accurately portrayed as having thick German accents.
 Even though Tsarina Catherine makes love with Menshikov as Peter is having the last rites administered to him by the patriarch, she is nonetheless represented as a strong, caring person, and retains the respect of the viewers. Menshikov (a very strong performance by Sergei Shakurov) is similarly so, depicted as an ambitious but talented man, with hints of the role he will play in the second film of the series, &quot;The Empress's Last Will and Testament.&quot; The Golitsyn cabal, on the other hand, are portrayed as nothing but scheming gluttons, hungry for power and willing to send the tsarina to a nunnery - the typical sorry fate for unwanted female royals in Russian history.
 Despite an obvious directorial bias, the film is compelling viewing, right up to its rather saccharine closing scene. Despite this, though, there is doubtless the sense of a missed opportunity, as challenging portrayals of the period are very thin on the ground. 
 As the action of the film takes place entirely within the confines of the imperial residence at Petrodvorets, there is a sense of complete detachment, both geographical and historical, from the outside world. While this might well have been intentional on Druzhinina's part, as this was certainly the daily reality for most of the royal family, there is nothing to peg the film to the early eighteenth century, no sense of Peter's significance or even that the characters are in Russia. 
 With costume changes, the film could be easily readjusted to fit the succession intrigues that followed Ivan the Terrible's death or even the death of a random king of any European country. When dealing with the end of the petrine era with all its achievements and atrocities, this is indeed a shame. Moreover, the subject of choosing one's successor - one that without question has resonance in modern Russia - is not explored as far as it could be, despite a few interesting yet all too brief attempts. Ultimately, historical dramas which have little significance to the present are limited to pretty costumes and grandiose sets. The Emperor's Last Will and Testament is just that.
 
 <i>&quot;The Emperor's Last Will and Testament&quot; is currently screening at the Avrora cinema. See listings for details. </i>

TITLE: encyclopedia of women's woes
AUTHOR: by Oliver Ready
TEXT: &quot;Russia is a land of female Homers,&quot; Lyudmila Petrushevskaya told her English translator Sally Laird in 1993, a year after her most important work of fiction was published in Moscow. &quot;I'm just a listener among them. But I dare to hope that The Time: Night is a kind of encyclopedia of their lives.&quot;
 There is little to suggest that a woman's lot in Russia has improved very much since this brief &quot;encyclopedia,&quot; a depiction of femininity that is almost medieval in its ugliness, first appeared. Yet, with the moral extravagance of the early 1990s long forgotten, one can't help feeling that the tone and premise of &quot;The Time: Night,&quot; once again available in English, is already dated.
 Petrushevskaya balks at the notion that she is a &quot;women's writer&quot; engaged in &quot;women's literature,&quot; yet &quot;The Time: Night&quot; is a prominent example of recent fiction that tries quite explicitly to rewrite the Russian woman.
 This is a novella that deals not with fathers and sons but with mothers and daughters, not with ideas and wasted youth but with abortions, maternal jealousy and aging flesh. If in the 19th-century tradition, heroines fell into predictable stereotypes (Dostoevsky's prostitute-saints or Turgenev's pale, enigmatic belles), for Petrushevskaya it is the man who is a known quantity (morally degenerate and bestially attractive), a spectator to the real drama of womanhood.
 &quot;The Time: Night&quot; has little grip on language; these are breathless notes penned by Anya late at night when the horrors of <i>byt</i> (that untranslatable word for life's daily scrap) have finally receded. The conceit is a clever one, since night conflates time and people, and through Anya's disordered memories we see how she, her daughter and her mother are all of a feather, merely at different stages of evolution; their daily trading of insults, behind which Petrushevskaya only rarely allows us to glimpse stubborn flickers of affection, are nothing but a means of concealing this truth.
 Petrushevskaya's characters see themselves as &quot;leftover human garbage&quot; and console themselves with the proverb, &quot;Beat up your own family and strangers will keep away, too.&quot; The traditional distinction between Russian public and private life (coldness vs. warmth, hostility vs. love) is mercilessly destroyed.
 There is much to admire in &quot;The Time: Night,&quot; not least the powerful finale in which Petrushevskaya does achieve something of the &quot;catharsis&quot; that she has stated as her aim.
 As an &quot;encyclopedia&quot; of Russian women's lives, however, it seems unconvincing. Petrushevskaya makes her characters exclusively the victim of their circumstances and of what is perceived as the extended concentration camp of late communist Russia. No positive force of personality, the kind that Russian women do in fact have in abundance, is allowed to transcend events.
 Perhaps the problem with &quot;The Time: Night&quot; is that ancient chestnut: the vexed relationship between the Russian intelligentsia and the <i>narod</i>, or &quot;ordinary folk.&quot; Petrushevskaya has always been a member of the former, and one senses in the &quot;The Time: Night&quot; the characteristically confused efforts of the Russian intelligent to stoop, if that is the word, to the level of byt.
 This &quot;love of ordinary people&quot; springs, as Petrushevskaya tellingly told Sally Laird, from a &quot;feeling of guilt and exclusion before them.&quot;
 The result is a portrayal of the narod and the Russian woman that is far too simplified. Perhaps Petrushevskaya should indeed have aimed to be &quot;just a listener,&quot; taking a tape recorder with her on the trams and buses where she says she heard the grim stories that make up this novella.
 Instead, &quot;The Time: Night&quot; is a very literary work, where Anya's recollections are interspersed with extracts from the saucy diary entries of her daughter. As such, it still has plenty to offer the reader today, although younger women writers, such as Svetlana Vasilenko, have since followed Petrushevskaya's lead and taken these thematic concerns in far more interesting directions.
 
 <i>&quot;The Time: Night,&quot; by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, translated by Sally Laird. 155 pages. Northwestern University Press. Paperback. $14.95.
 Oliver Ready's translation of &quot;The Train Zero,&quot; a novella by Yury Buida, will be published by Dedalus in June. </i>

TITLE: death of the octopus: how great empires fall
AUTHOR: by Turi Munthe
TEXT: Empire, on the cover of Dominic Lieven's new book, is a mammoth octopus, sleepily slipping its tentacles around the countries of Europe. Like &quot;apartheid&quot; or &quot;nationalism,&quot; the word symbolizes, near-universally, one of those great misguided human enterprises that casts our ancestors in the roles of criminals. To most, it evokes one or other of the many thousands of little pockets of misery that empire's handmaidens - conquest and exploitation - created across the length and breadth of the globe. In England, even the old pre-war colonialists will know to mention it only with a roguish wink. In Russia, the land that for most of the 20th century fought imperialism as its greatest enemy (second perhaps only to God), it reached even deeper into the well of the criminal.
 It may seem strange, therefore, that an ostensibly English scholar (with some Russian ancestry) should take up the subject of empire with a view to rehabilitating it. Empire, Lieven tells us, was not only the greatest force for good, but rather it represents history at its most fundamental. Lieven is an imperialist, politically speaking; but more, imperialism is his very methodology.
 &quot;Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals&quot; is divided into four parts: &quot;Empire,&quot; on the notion of empire; &quot;Empires,&quot; on the history of the British, Ottoman and Habsburg empires; &quot;Russia,&quot; on the last 300-odd years of Russian history; and &quot;After Empire,&quot; on how empires end. 
 Lieven's main purpose is to write a book on Russia today, and show how it got there. His secondary purpose is to prove that the history of the world can very well be seen as the history of that octopus on his cover - its anatomy and behavior in different climates. For Lieven, the dictates, tenets, constraints and impetus of empire have remained constant throughout history: Empire is a historical absolute - the very rules of its game. To write Russia's history, therefore, he must first explain the principles upon which the game is played: how empires work, what affects them, how they run their course. This dual purpose is justified, in the end, because Lieven's Soviet empire was the grandest, most ambitious, most far-fetched articulation of empire that history has yet known. He also believes it is the last that history will know.
 Empire, in the Lieven sense, is more a paradigm than a historical event. An empire is a notional matryoshka. Once you have cracked your beatific empress open, you will find a venal queen, and inside her, a distrustful mayoress, who will give birth to a happy housewife: empire, nation, region, home. But, as Lieven shows, the paradigm is transferable: class, for example, can make an empire out of a country because it embodies &quot;nation&quot; within it. Religion, in contrast, can make nations out of empires by cloaking them with its even greater mantle - as Islam did when Arabism splintered the last imperial pretensions of the dying Ottoman empire at the end of the 19th century.
 If empire itself is to be grounded in Lieven's six immutables - his &quot;six sources of power&quot; (military, economic, political, demographic, topographic and ideological) - its workings have all the slow, prehistoric mutability of the octopus: They are tendencies. Its perennial dilemma is the balance between power's requirements for land on a continental scale and necessary multiethnicity within it. From a vast comparison that includes Czech-German infighting in late 19th-century Bohemia, the Russian experience in Ukraine, and British rule in Malaya, Lieven deduces that partial integration, as opposed to outright integration or rule from above, will always outclass its variants in the virulence of its destructiveness. &quot;Empires that rule over indigenous peoples without colonizing their lands,&quot; on the other hand, &quot;almost always in the end lose the territories in question but they tend to do so relatively easily and bloodlessly.&quot; The Balkans, where partial integration is played at its shrillest pitch, would today seem to prove him right.
 But this sense of empire's immutability allows Lieven the scope for some grandiloquent, if prescriptive, history writing. Unencumbered by the historian's obsession with objectivity (he purports instead to deal in &quot;common sense&quot;), he can dance around his subject in great, comparative pirouettes. He is free to see Indonesia today as a variation on the tune of late Soviet experience, and Brezhnev and Gorbachev as Nicholas I and Alexander II, respectively.
 But this is not just a virtuoso performance in the practice of comparative history. Lieven's history is compounded with ceaseless &quot;what ifs'&quot; - what if Gorbachev had focused on economic rather than political reform in the 1980s, what if the British had foreseen the crumbling of their empire prior to the signing of the Balfour agreement - that tend all toward one thing: his view of political good.
 Lieven, a historian teaching political science at the London School of Economics, writes history, as might be expected, like a political thinker, but a political thinker who firmly believes in history as a teacher - that in learning to decipher it you can learn how to control it. Nowhere does he apply this logic more than in trying to determine how his beloved Russia, that so amputated itself from her past, might have served itself better. Perhaps the point of the book lies hidden behind the following assertion: &quot;Had it [the Soviet regime] better understood the recurring dilemmas of imperial rule in Russia, the 1980s elite should have predicted many of the dangers it was to encounter in the era of perestroika.&quot;
 Lieven's politics are those of a realist, but a liberal one. He believes in power as the great dictator, but that only in its most flamboyant articulation - self-conscious empire, as opposed to nation - can the greatest good be achieved. That the Jews of Vienna in the 1870s, '80s and '90s were the most vocal high-imperialists of the Habsburg empire serves, in hindsight, as final justification.
 But the great empires of old are dead and the Soviet Union was the last, with its obsession with territory, autarchy and military power come what may. That vast, antediluvian monster, whose slow but unstoppable perambulations across our globe dictated all human experience of time, has died. So what is to happen now? How will history express itself?
 For Lieven's Habsburgian Europe, perhaps an entirely new system of empire lies ahead - legal regional federalism nursed in the womb of fading nationhood. But for his post-imperial Russia, the writing seems to be on the wall. Its historical reference points, he tells us, must be post-colonial Africa and inter-war Europe: post-colonial Africa, because a worst-case scenario sees Russia as a latter-day Nigeria or Congo, its immense resources squandered and misused by the weakness of the state and accompanied by endemic corruption and a total absence of patriotism in its population; and inter-war Europe, because Russia, like Germany among its neighbors at the time, remains at once the most powerful of the ex-Soviet states and the greatest loser from the 1991 settlement. It will take all Russia's historical memory to avoid the Mobutus and Hitlers of post-imperialism, and fulfill all the hopes that Peter and Catherine, and even Gorbachev, had for this great country. Lieven's book is trying to help it.
 
 <i>&quot;Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals,&quot; by Dominic Lieven. 527 pages. Yale, $35.
 Turi Munthe, who lives in London, is a publisher at I. B. Tauris and a freelance writer. </i>

TITLE: actors go solo with monocle festival
AUTHOR: by Natasha Shirokova
TEXT: The International Theater Festival of solo performances, &quot;Monocle,&quot; recently took place in St. Petersburg for the third time. Held in the Baltiisky Dom Theater on March 1-8, it included the best of European productions, with participants from Italy, Croatia, Lithuania and Finland. Russia was represented mostly by St. Petersburg actors, save one theater group from Chelyabinsk.
 The idea of creating a separate festival of solo performances occurred to the organizers of the festival a few years ago. It has become obvious that the genre should be judged separately, as it has its own artistic criteria. It is also gaining in popularity, and there are more and more actors who want to try out the medium. The main peculiarity is, that the major focus is on the actor, his ability to hold the attention of the audience, and to involve it not in the action, but in a singular story. That's why the performances resemble a private audience, when an actor has a chance to share his worries and reveal his personality.
 This year's program was extremely varied. Croatian actor Zheljko Vukmirica put on a pantomime performance &quot;Mr. Single,&quot; a parody of the busy life of an office clerk and a mockery of the cliches of modern society. The Finnish production of &quot;We Need God,&quot; based on the works by early 20th century Finnish poet Lasse Heikkila, demonstrated the masterful work of Martti Makela, who read the poetry accompanied by a live jazz performance.
 The jury had difficulty in choosing the best production, and the main award was divided between an Italian production based on Lev Tolstoy's &quot;The Confession&quot; and a Lithuanian production based on Marguerite Duras' novel &quot;The Lover.&quot;
 &quot;The Confession&quot; is a co-production from director Riccardo Sottili and renowned Italian actor Franco di Francescantonio, who used to work in the famous Piccolo di Milano theater and who has also worked with such prominent directors as Georgio Streller and Franco Zeffirelli. Both an actor and dancer, Francescantonio astounds with the variety of his talent. The new Tolstoy production is about the great doubts of a great man. The production has been realized with a deep knowledge of Toltsoy's life and works, containing the essence of his philosophy.
 But as a whole, the production is monotonous. The reason for this is quite simple - Tolstoy's later works are hardly transferable to the stage at all. Still, Sottili and de Francescantonio have done the best they could with the material, and have at least managed to enter into the spirit of Tolstoy's work.
 Birute Marcinkiavichiute, a young Lithuanian actress, not only performed in &quot;The Lover,&quot; but also directed it. A graduate of the Academy of Theater Arts, she has also studied traditional theater and dance in Tokyo, and currently works at the Lithuainan National Theater in Vilnius. The production tells the story of a European girl in Indochina who falls in love with a local. Marcinkiaviachute effortlessly combines the elements of European theater with Oriental traditions. This combination helps her to underline the cultural differences that interfere with the happiness of the couple. The girl recollects the love story, telling it to the audience and thus reliving it. It is a bright and highly professional production, not just due to the acting, but also due to the sets and music.

TITLE: Indian Comeback Ends Aussie Win Streak
AUTHOR: By Himangshu Watts
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: CALCUTTA - India pulled off one of the greatest comebacks in test-match history to end Australia's world-record streak of 16 successive victories by winning the second test by 171 runs on Thursday.
 It was only the third time that a side following on in a test has won the game. Australia has been the losing side on all three occasions - in 1894 against England in Sydney, in 1981 against England at Headingley and in Calcutta on Thursday.
 India, dismissed for 171 in its first innings and beaten in the first test by 10 wickets, had followed on 274 behind.
 But an Indian test record 281 by Vangipurappu Laxman and 180 by Rahul Dravid spurred them to 657 for seven before they declared on the morning of the final day.
 India then dismissed Australia for 212 after a post-tea collapse triggered by young off-spinner Harbhajan Singh - who took 13 wickets in the match - and Sachin Tendulkar.
 The last seven Australian wickets tumbled for only 46 runs in the final session with India clinching victory with 6.3 overs remaining.
 The 20-year-old Singh struck twice in the second over after tea - which Australia had reached at 161 for three - to capture 6-73 and a match haul of 13-196 that included the first hat trick by an Indian bowler.
 Tendulkar struck three quick blows, all leg before, with his spin on a cracked pitch to finish with three for 31.
 The Australian last-wicket pair of Michael Kasprowicz and Glenn McGrath stubbornly resisted for a few overs before Singh trapped McGrath leg before padding up to an off-break to set off wild Indian celebrations.
 The Eden Gardens ground, which was overflowing beyond its capacity of 100,000 spectators, erupted as the Indian players rushed to hug each other and picked up stumps as souvenirs before being congratulated by the Australian players.
 &quot;Absolutely great. I never imagined we could win after being asked to follow on,&quot; Indian captain Saurav Ganguly said.
 &quot;It's a big, big victory. Laxman, Harbhajan and Rahul all contributed superbly. An all-team effort.&quot;
 Australian captain Steve Waugh was disappointed but gracious in defeat. &quot;It was a fantastic win. My goodness - the way India played. I've never seen it before,&quot; Waugh said.
 The final test begins in Madras on March 18. Australia's last defeat came in the first test against Sri Lanka in Kandy in September 1999. Australia drew the next two matches in the series before beginning its winning streak.
 Australian hopes of scoring its 17th straight test win looked all but dashed as India resumed at 589-4 in the morning, but most spectators were thinking of a draw rather than an unlikely victory.
 Australian openers Matthew Hayden - who top-scored with 67 - and Michael Slater (43) began confidently in a 74-run partnership. But Singh had an impact immediately on being brought into the attack, extracting sharp turn and maintaining an excellent line.
 He had Slater caught by Ganguly at forward short leg gloving a defensive shot and ended an aggressive knock by left-hander Justin Langer when the Australian mistimed a sweep to Ramesh at short backward square leg for 28.
 Experienced left-arm spinner Venkatapathy Raju raised Indian hopes of victory when he trapped Mark Waugh leg before for nought to reduce Australia to 116 for three.
 But India looked set to rue catches dropped off left-hander Hayden and skipper Steve Waugh by Venkatesh Prasad and Ganguly respectively.
 India also briefly lost the services of wicketkeeper Nayan Mongia after he was hit on his nose by a rearing Singh delivery to Mark Waugh. Dravid, his replacement behind the stumps, struggled.
 But Singh, riding high on confidence after his seven-wicket first-innings haul, turned the match India's way in the second over after tea.
 He forced first-innings century maker Steve Waugh (24) to flick awkwardly off the hips and substitute fielder Hemang Badani took a sharp reflex catch at shortleg.
 Four balls later, Singh had Ponting caught by a diving Shiv Sunar Das at leg slip trying a leg glide to leave Australia at 166-5.
 Tendulkar, bowling his mixture of off-breaks and leg spin, struck a big blow in the very next over by trapping Adam Gilchrist leg before for a golden pair.
 In his next over, he trapped Hayden going for a sweep shot and foxed Shane Warne - also for a pair - with a googly as he shaped to pull.
 Jason Gillespie, who played a good knock with Steve Waugh in the first innings, was also caught in the close cordon off Singh.
 Just as the last pair raised hopes of pulling off a draw, Singh sealed victory by trapping McGrath leg before padding to an off-break.

TITLE: Williams Sisters To Square Off in Semifinals
AUTHOR: By Ken Peters
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: INDIAN WELLS, California - Serena Williams has a role model, housemate and tennis practice partner all rolled into one: her sister, Venus.
 At this Masters Series tournament, however, Venus also will be her younger sibling's opponent in the semifinals, a rare match between the two.
 Venus overpowered Elena Dementieva of Russia 6-0, 6-3, and Serena beat defending champion Lindsay Davenport 6-1, 6-2 in Wednesday's quarterfinals.
 Serena, 19, laughed about being a typical &quot;baby sister.&quot;
 &quot;I just find myself copying her all the time,&quot; she said. &quot;It's really ridiculous. Now that Venus and I live together, I'm always trying to peek over on her side of the house, see what's she's doing.
 &quot;She sets a good example for a younger sister. She's not really doing anything crazy and wild. We stay out of trouble.&quot;
 Venus, 20, also laughed about being &quot;big sister.&quot;
 &quot;When we go to restaurants, she'll ask me, 'What are you getting?' I say, 'Why?' And she takes a lot of my things. I can't find things and I know she has them,&quot; Venus said. &quot;I guess she has the right to do that, though, the little sister.
 &quot;I feel happy to be the big sister; I do what I can.&quot;
 However, neither will be helpful Thursday night, when their showdown - a rematch of their Wimbledon semifinal last year - is expected to highlight the evening session at Indian Wells.
 They rarely play in the same tournaments except for the Grand Slams, so they will face each other for just the sixth time as pros.
 Venus, who won last year's Wimbledon and U.S. Open championships, has beaten her sister four times, including a 6-2, 7-6 victory at Wimbledon. Serena's only victory in the sibling rivalry was a 6-1, 3-6, 6-3 decision in Munich in 1999.
 &quot;I don't even remember the first match we played against each other, but that was tough. Ever since then, it's been a lot easier for me,&quot; said 1999 U.S. Open champion Serena, referring to a 7-6, 6-1 loss to Venus in the 1998 Australian Open.
 Venus said that she will have no trouble getting motivated for the match.
 &quot;It's pretty easy, because she's really a great player and a tough player. If I don't bring my best game, I'll be defeated,&quot; she said. &quot;At the Wimbledon semifinal, I really wanted to win Wimbledon so I guess I played a little better that day. She played me in a final at the Grand Slam Cup [in Munich] and that day I really was scraping to get one set from her, because she was really playing well.
 &quot;So it's easy to focus; if I don't, the result will be terrible.&quot;
 The winner plays Saturday against the winner of the Martina Hingis-Kim Clijsters semifinal.
 In the second-round action of the men's Masters Series, Andre Agassi beat Tommy Haas 7-6, 6-3; Pete Sampras defeated Fabrice Santoro 6-3, 3-6, 6-0; and top-ranked Gustavo Kuerten beat Taylor Dent 6-4, 6-7, 6-2.

TITLE: Swingley Takes 4th Iditarod
AUTHOR: By Mary Pemberton
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NOME, Alaska - Doug Swingley won his third straight Iditarod sled dog race early Wednesday, a win he said was made special by tough conditions on the 1,760-kilometer trail from Anchorage.
 A winter with little snowfall in Alaska left the trail icy with long stretches of bare ground, making for slower times this year.
 Swingley, who won his fourth overall Iditarod, drove his dog team 1,760 kilometers through the Alaska wilderness to reach Nome at 6:55 a.m., finishing the race in nine days, 19 hours, 55 minutes.
 &quot;This was a special race to win, because it was really difficult,&quot; Swingley said. Strong headwinds blew along the trail at the Yukon River and the Bering Sea coast, and the icy barren ground injured dogs in other teams.
 &quot;These dogs are the athletes. They're the ones that are fabulous,&quot; Swingley said.
 His closest rival, Linwood Fiedler, reached Nome eight hours later to claim the second-place prize. Three-time winner Jeff King finished in third place, finishing 3 1/2 hours behind Fiedler.
 Spectators lined the finish chute in this historic Gold Rush town to cheer the mushers in what is a celebrated event in Alaska. The Iditarod commemorates the efforts of mushers and sled dogs who relayed lifesaving diphtheria serum from Anchorage to Nome in 1925.
 Sixty-eight teams started the race in Anchorage on March 3. Swingley won $62,857 and a quad-cab pickup truck. The first 30 finishers share in the race's $550,000 purse.
 Swingley, of Lincoln, Montana, got his first win in 1995 and tied Susan Butcher with four wins overall.
 After his victory, Swingley paid homage to Rick Swenson, the race's only five-time champion.
 &quot;Rick Swenson is still the greatest musher to me,&quot; he said. &quot;If I get a fifth championship, it naturally will be a great thing.&quot;
 Swingley said his winning formula hinges on the relationship he has with his dogs.
 &quot;I raise all my pups,&quot; Swingley said.
 Swingley also benefitted from good conditions where he trains on the logging roads near his home in Montana. An unusually warm winter left Alaska mushers traveling far and wide to find good conditions to train.
 A rough Iditarod trail kept Swingley from breaking his own record race time of nine days and 58 minutes. He set that record a year ago.
 The trail also was hard on the more than 1,000 dogs that entered in this year's race. Some were dropped at race checkpoints along the way inorder to be shipped home because of soreness. Two dogs died during the race, one from a rare bacterial infection and the other from fluid in the lungs.
 Eleven teams scratched, including Chuck King of Tempe, Arizona, who has AIDS, and was competing as an inspiration to others, and Michael Nosko of Willow, whose lead dogs were injured after being hit by a snowmobile.

TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: Barkley Coming Back?
 

ATLANTA (AP) - Charles Barkley says he is considering making a comeback next season, perhaps with the Washington Wizards.
 "I am still thinking about it," Barkley said during halftime of TNT's telecast of the Minnesota-San Antonio game. "If I get myself in great shape and I feel good physically, I am going to play next year - but only if I can help a team.
 Barkley, an 11-time All-Star, retired last year after playing 16 seasons.
 His statement on a possible comeback came one day after Sports Illustrated reported that Michael Jordan was strongly considering a comeback - a report quickly denied by Jordan and his agent.
 "I can't control what Michael does. He's a grown man. Michael is Michael and Charles is Charles, but I speak only for Charles. It might be fun to play for Michael. He'd just have to get me under the cap.
 "It s a long way away, and when I'm ready to make a decision I'll tell everybody," Barkley said. 
 
 
Graf's Bad Advice
 

BERLIN (Reuters) - Former world tennis No. 1 Steffi Graf said on Thursday she had lost $600,000 on the stock market.
 Graf told the business newspaper Handelsblatt that she had invested the money with a financial adviser in New York in 1996.
 "I relied on the recommendation of acquaintances who said they had known the adviser for years and had made huge profits and that I should listen to his offer," Graf said.
 Graf, who won 22 Grand Slam singles titles in her career and spent a record 378 weeks ranked No. 1, said she had never met the adviser and only talked with him on the phone.
 
 
Karl Fined
 

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Milwaukee Bucks coach George Karl was fined $50,000 by the NBA Wednesday for recent comments he made regarding the management of the Seattle SuperSonics.
 Karl, who coached the Sonics for 6 1/2 seasons, had been fined $25,000 in March of 1999 for similar comments he made criticizing Sonics general manager Wally Walker and vice president of operations Billy McKinney.
 The league, which had warned Karl to refrain from making and further disparaging remarks about his former bosses, did not specify what he said to bring about Wednesday's sanction.
 
 
Blues Get Tkachuk
 

SCOTTSDALE, Arizona (AP) - Keith Tkachuk began hearing the trade rumors when he signed a three-year contract extension for $8.3 million a season through 2002-03.
 So Tkachuk wasn't surprised when the Phoenix Coyotes dealt him to the St. Louis Blues shortly before Tuesday's NHL trade deadline for three players with potential and a first-round draft pick.
 "I knew it was coming," Tkachuk said. "They told me this deal was obviously financial. I really, really wanted to stay here and try to win a [Stanley] Cup, but I'm going to a better situation. This team - the St. Louis Blues - is committed to winning."
 In return for Tkachuk, Phoenix received center Michael Handzus, right wing Ladislav Nagy and Jeff Taffe, the Blues' first-round pick in last year's draft. 



TITLE: England, Spain Send 3 on to Quarterfinals
AUTHOR: By Mike Collett
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON - Three English teams qualified for the quarterfinals of the Champions League for the first time on Wednesday when Arsenal joined Manchester United and Leeds United in the last eight.
 Despite losing 1-0 at Bayern Munich in its final second-phase match, Arsenal narrowly edged Olympique Lyon out of the competition.
 Bayern's 1-0 victory in Munich - courtesy of Brazilian Elber's 10th-minute diving header - coupled with the 1-1 draw between Spartak Moscow and Lyon in Moscow - meant Arsenal squeezed into the last eight because it took four points off Lyon during the group stage.
 Bayern won Group C with 13 points, followed by Arsenal 8, Lyon 8 and Spartak Moscow 4.
 Both goals in Moscow came from penalties with Dmitry Parfyonov scoring for Spartak after four minutes and Sonny Anderson giving Lyon some hope with a 68th-minute spotkick, although that proved to be not enough.
 Like England, Spain also has three teams heading into Friday's draw with champions Real Madrid, last season's runners-up Valencia, and reigning Spanish champions Deportivo Coruna all safely through.
 The last-eight lineup is rounded out by Bayern and Galatasaray of Turkey.
 Arsenal, runners-up to Galatsaray in the UEFA Cup final last season, last reached a comparable stage in Europe when it made it through to the quarterfinals of the European Cup in 1972.
 Valencia and Manchester United had previously qualified from Group A, with Deportivo Coruna and Galata saray going through from Group B and Real Madrid and Leeds United qualifying from Group D.
 Real Madrid lost its first match of the second phase when it was beaten 2-0 by Anderlecht in Brussels, although the game was meaningless as a contest as Real had already wrapped up first place in the group and Anderlecht was already eliminated.
 The Belgian side won with late goals from Aruna Dindane (85) and Bart Goor (89).
 Real's Manuel Sanchis, who is retiring at the end of the season after 18 years with the club, became only the fifth player in history to make 100 European club appearances when he made a nostalgic return to the side after making only limited appearances recently.
 Leeds United, which had already clinched the runners-up spot behind Real, was held to a 3-3 draw by Lazio at Elland Road with the Italians equalizing three minutes into stoppage time with a blistering free-kick from Sinisa Mihajlovic.
 Leeds scored through Lee Bowyer (27), Jason Wilcox (43) and Mark Viduka (62), while Frabrizio Ravanelli (21) and Mihajlovic (29) scored Lazio's earlier goals.
 The four group winners - Valencia, Deportivo Coruna, Bayern Munich and Real Madrid - will all be seeded in Friday's draw for the quarterfinals and will play against one of the teams that finished second. The group winners also have the added advantage of being at home in the second leg.
 However, two teams from the same second-phase group will not be drawn to play against each other in the quarterfinals. The draw for the semifinals is also being made on Friday and no seeding will apply to that.

TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: West Bank Grenade
 

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Six Pa les tinian children suffered burns on Thursday when Israeli soldiers threw a stun grenade into a West Bank schoolyard during new violence after an Israeli pledge to ease its blockade on Palestinians.
 The Israeli army said it was checking the report. 
 It was not clear why the stun grenade was thrown but witnesses said there were no clashes in the area at the time.
 Israel promised earlier on Thursday to relax its blockade of Palestinians, but vowed not to make such "gestures" to Palestinian leaders and security forces whom it accuses of fomenting violence.
 Palestinian leaders say the easing of the blockade was only cosmetic and shopkeepers and ordinary workers in Arab East Jerusalem declared a one-day strike, which closed shops and schools.
 
 
Pro-Wahid Rally
 

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) - Thousands of supporters of Indonesia's embattled President Abdurrahman Wahid rallied on Thursday, threatening to kill the head of the country's highest legislative body, a leading Wahid critic.
 In the port town of Ketapang in Wahid's heartland of East Java province, about 3,000 demonstrators, carrying sickles and machetes, vowed to attack Amien Rais, the speaker of the 700-member Supreme Consultative Assembly.
 In the capital Jakarta, 10 people forced their way into Rais' office at the national legislative building, shouting abuse at his staff. They left the building under police escort after finding Rais was not there, the state Antara news agency said.
 Rais has been one of Wahid's most outspoken critics.
 
 
Haider Renews Attack
 

VIENNA (Reuters) - Austrian far-right leader Joerg Haider, defying a barrage of criticism at home and abroad, renewed his attacks on the leader of the country's Jewish community Wednesday.
 In an interview, he said Jewish leader Ariel Muzicant had stabbed Austria in the back during Holocaust compensation negotiations, used his political connections to help his business and did not belong "in the spectrum of democratic forces."
 Haider led the Freedom Party into a national coalition with Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel's conservatives in February 2000 but did not take a government post, remaining provincial governor of Carinthia.
 He then resigned as Freedom Party leader but continues to dominate the anti-immigration grouping. Haider is playing an active part in campaigning ahead of local elections in Vienna on March 25.
 
 
Museveni Victorious
 

KAMPALA, Uganda (Reuters) - Incumbent Yoweri Museveni won a big victory in Uganda's hard-fought presidential election Wednesday and ruled out any reconciliation with his main challenger.
 Kizza Besigye refused to accept defeat, accusing his former comrade-in-arms of stealing the election through vote rigging.
 With the results in from all but 14 of the 17,308 polling stations, Museveni was believed to have 69.3 percent of the vote, while Besigye had 27.8 percent, the Electoral Commission said.
 Museveni had been expected to win a final five-year term as leader of the east African nation, but the poll was marred by reports of vote-rigging and intimidation of Besigye supporters.
 
 
Fiji Reappoints PM 
 

SUVA, Fiji (Reuters) - Laisenia Qarase, leader of a post-coup Fiji government that a court ruled was illegal, was recalled as caretaker prime minister on Thursday to lead the racially split country to elections expected in August.
 Qarase's government stepped down on Wednesday when President Ratu Josefa Iloilo unexpectedly named his nephew, Ratu Tevita Momoedonu, as prime minister of the South Pacific nation of some 800,000 people.
 But on Thursday Iloilo reinstated Qarase.
 A court ruled on March 1 that Qarase's military-backed government was illegal, deepening the political crisis that began when nationalist rebels toppled Fiji's first ethnic Indian prime minister, Mahendra Chaudhry, in May last year.
 Fiji's military quelled the rebellion but installed Qarase's government rather than reinstating the elected administration. Momoedonu's brief appointment was seen as a tool to allow Iloilo to follow the constitutional mechanism for dissolving parliament.
 A caretaker prime minister cannot be appointed to lead Fiji to elections until the incumbent premier quits. 
 
 
Pinochet a Free Man
 

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) - General Augusto Pinochet became a free man again on Wednesday after a court lifted his house arrest after 43 days.
 The Santiago Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to uphold a decision by Judge Juan Guzman granting the former dictator freedom on $3,450 bail.
 The end of Pinochet's house confinement came after the Court of Appeals dropped homicide and kidnapping charges filed by Guzman. The charges stemmed from the "Caravan of Death," a military group that executed 75 political prisoners in various cities shortly after a 1973 coup led by Pinochet. He ruled Chile until 1990.
 In dropping those charges, the court ruled that Pinochet must still face cover-up charges for the crimes, because while he learned of them after they occurred, he failed to report them to the courts of justice.
 
 
Mbeki: No Emergency
 

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) - President Thabo Mbeki rejected calls Wednesday to declare a state of emergency to allow South Africa to import generic, cheaper drugs to deal with its AIDS crisis.
 Most of the 4.5 million South Afri cans estimated to be HIV-positive cannot afford the drugs that could prolong their lives.
 Declaring a state of emergency would allow South Africa to produce the generic, cheaper drugs without breaking World Trade Organization rules on bypassing patent laws.
 But Mbeki told parliament a state of emergency is not needed because South Africa has its own law permitting both importation and production of generic drugs.
 The law, however, has been stalled by a lawsuit brought by major drug companies, arguing the act gives South Africa arbitrary power to control the import and price of medicines. 



TITLE: Government Bribery Tapes Anger India
AUTHOR: By Nirmala George
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW DELHI, India - Opposition lawmakers called the prime minister a thief and shut down parliament on Wednesday, demanding the government resign after videotapes showed officials purportedly receiving bribes to facilitate a fake arms deal.
 Punching their fists in the air, the lawmakers stood before the elevated chair of the speaker, pointing angrily at ruling party legislators. As Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee entered the house, the legislators shouted, &quot;He's a thief,&quot; Press Trust of India reported.
 The scandal claimed its first victim Tuesday night when the president of the ruling party, Bangaru Laxman, resigned after an Internet media company, Tehelka.com, released videotapes of him apparently accepting $2,175.
 On Wednesday, Mamata Banerjee, chief of the Trinamool Congress opposition party and railroad minister, demanded that Defense Minister George Fernandes resign and threatened to quit the government if Fernandes stayed on.
 The government's coalition partners rallied behind Fernandes, saying there was no need for him to resign since there was no evidence against him.
 After the lawmakers forced the adjournment, Vajpayee told reporters there was &quot;something fishy&quot; about the tapes' release, but did not elaborate.
 The videos portrayed a string of party, Defense Ministry and military officials discussing or receiving bribes from journalists posing as weapons contractors trying to push through a $870,000 deal for hand-held thermal cameras and other defense equipment.
 The government suspended army Major General P.S.K. Choudhury and three other Defense Ministry officials who appeared on the tapes.
 &quot;Strict action will be taken against any other official if any delinquency of conduct is established,&quot; Defense Ministry spokesperson P.K. Bandopadhyay said.
 &quot;We are ready for any sort of inquiry,&quot; said V.K. Malhotra, a leader of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
 Opposition Congress Party workers held demonstrations in the capital, New Delhi, and other parts of the country demanding the Vajpayee government's resignation.
 In New Delhi, angry Congress workers pulled down billboards outside the ruling party office and set them ablaze. Rival Congress and ruling party workers also pelted each other with stones, before police arrived and chased them away with bamboo canes.

TITLE: Foot-and-Mouth Goes Global
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON - World governments scrambled to build defenses on Thursday against foot-and-mouth disease that has now spread to livestock in parts of the Middle East and threatens to cripple Europe's meat industry.
 Britain, where the three-week-old outbreak is now an epidemic, announced a wider slaughter program, while Gulf Arab states erected barriers to halt the spread of the highly infectious disease that officials said was imported.
 Ali Arab, head of the livestock department at the United Arab Emirates' Agriculture Ministry, said in Dubai that eight infected cattle had been killed and a quarantine imposed on farms where the cases had been found.
 That outbreak and a report from Saudi Arabia that two calves had been found with the disease were the first in Gulf states.
 &quot;The [United Arab Emirates] is now free of foot-and-mouth disease,&quot; he said, denying some media reports of further foot-and-mouth cases.
 &quot;Coordination was launched among the Gulf Arab states to take all measures to ensure that the disease does not spread in the region.&quot;
 The Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar have joined a string of countries that have put bans on certain imports of meat and livestock from Britain and other European countries, sending consumers searching for alternative supplies.
 In Japan, traders said importers were seeking pork from the United States and Canada to replace supplies from Denmark.
 &quot;Some importers have already started seeking pork from the United States and Canada to replace Danish pork after a one-day import ban by the government early this month,&quot; said a meat trader at a leading company.
 With U.S. meat markets up on news the epidemic had extended its reach, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman said on Wednesday her government would take every precaution to keep the disease out of the United States, which has not had a case since 1929.
 Officials said they would start disinfecting the feet of some travelers from Europe, using foot-sniffing dogs and questioning airline passengers from Europe closely.
 Foot-and-mouth is a virulent disease in cattle, sheep, pigs and goats who, when infected, suffer a fever and then develop blisters, chiefly in the mouth or on the feet.
 It is not believed to readily affect humans, but the U.S. Agriculture Department has labeled it &quot;one of the most dreaded of all animal diseases&quot; because of its potential for economic catastrophe as it disables entire herds.
 Britain confirmed three more cases of foot-and-mouth disease on Thursday, bringing the total number of affected farms and abattoirs across the United Kingdom to 233.
 With the stench of rotting animal corpses hovering over swathes of the countryside, many ewes dying in labor as they give birth alone in fields and the isolation of being trapped at home, farmers have been driven to despair.
 Some farmers have had their guns taken away from them by police for their own protection and one Welsh farmer was reported to have committed suicide.
 European countries are on red alert after France reported a case earlier this week.
 German police began guarding border crossings with France, with police checking everything from British soccer fans to frozen veal schnitzels.
 In Portugal, officials said they had detected antibodies to foot-and-mouth disease in two cows imported from Holland.
 The country's agriculture minister said on Wednesday that the presence of antibodies does not mean the cattle have the disease, but they had been destroyed &quot;as a precaution.&quot;
 The EU Food Safety Commissioner David Byrne has also hit out at countries' bans on European meat and grain, calling them &quot;unnecessary and excessive&quot; measures.
 Argentina feared for its own export markets after it reported an outbreak of foot-and-mouth.
 Bulgaria was the latest country to ban imports from Argentina, following the United States and the EU, and the country's neighbors moved to protect their cattle.