SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #660 (27), Tuesday, April 10, 2001
**************************************************************************
TITLE: Body 'Art' Exhibit Creates a Stir in Novosibirsk
AUTHOR: By Robin Munro
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Prosecutors in Novosibirsk are investigating shipments of Russian corpses from the local medical academy to a German institute responsible for organizing an exhibition of preserved human remains in Berlin.
NTV television reported that local prosecutors were looking into the export of 56 bodies and fragments of the brains of 400 people from the Novosibirsk Medical Academy to the Plastination Institute in Heidelberg, Germany.
According to NTV, customs officials were concerned that the agreement between the Novosibirsk scientists and Von Hagens' Institute did not say the bodies would be returned to Russia and that the Siberian academy did not have statements from the deceased allowing their bodies to be used for scientific purposes.
The Berlin exhibition, called "Body Worlds," features 25 startling "full-body" displays made by replacing body fluids with plastic material - a process developed in 1978 by Dr. Gunther von Hagens, head of the Plastination Institute.
The NTV report showed patches of skin on one of the displays bearing tattoos described as a Russian Orthodox cross and the phrase "I won't forget you" in Russian - both popular among Soviet and Russian prisoners. Some Novosibirsk media have run indignant reports about the use of the bodies.
But in a recent interview with the German FAKT magazine, von Hagens denied that Russian bodies had been used in the current exhibition. He said the tattoos shown in the NTV report did not have Cyrillic letters and the body in question belonged to a German citizen "known to him personally."
Von Hagens confirmed receiving Russian corpses for his work, but said the first shipment came in October 2000, while his process for preserving anatomical "specimens" takes about a year.
Oleg Osintsev, first deputy head of Novosibirsk's customs service, told NTV that he would not give details on the investigation, which began last year. "I can only tell you that this is not a good situation," he said. Reached by telephone, customs officials declined to comment.
Anatoly Yefremov, rector of the Novosibirsk Medical Academy, said in a telephone interview last week that the shipped corpses belonged to prisoners, homeless people and lonely pensioners and that none of the bodies had been claimed from the morgue within 30 days of death - which, under Russian law, allows them to be used in scientific research, as long as they are not part of a criminal investigation.
He said he had the documentation to confirm the bodies' origins and had provided customs officials with papers from the Health Ministry approving the project with von Hagens' institute, which involves the return of the exported bodies for use in teaching medical students.
Von Hagens' plastination process is supposed to produce odorless anatomical specimens that are safer to work with than those preserved using formalin, which emits toxic vapors.
Yefremov said the bodies must be transported back and forth several times so that different stages of the work could be done in different places. Von Hagens, whose spokesman said last week that he was abroad, told NTV that the Russian bodies had been sent to China for preliminary preservation work.
Yefremov said his academy was grateful to von Hagens for his assistance in creating a plastination center in Novosibirsk, which is now under way.
Russia is not the only former Soviet republic von Hagens has worked with.
Valery Gabitov, head of the surgery department at the Kyrgyz Medical Academy in Bishkek, said in a phone interview that his department has been working with von Hagens for six years, exchanging staff and materials.
Gabitov said the academy runs its own center with 1,000 plastinated specimens and that some of the bodies on display in Berlin came from there. He cited the same 30-day rule as Yefremov.
Von Hagens said in a statement e-mailed by his press service last week that all whole-body specimens in the exhibition came from donors who had given their consent to have their plastinated bodies exhibited.
The statement said the Plastination Institute does not pay for donated bodies, but does charge for preservation. But von Hagens' spokesman declined to comment on the financial relationship between the institute and the Russian and Kyrgyz academies.
Predictably, the "Body Worlds" exhibition has drawn a hail of criticism.
According to its Web site at www.koerperwelten.com, a Jewish leader in Berlin questioned the public's taste in finding "dead bodies can be fun," while the Catholic Church held a mass for those whose remains are in the exhibition. German media have compared von Hagens to the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.
However, von Hagens describes his exhibition as "the democratization of anatomy," saying it's a "place where the visitor has the opportunity ... to come to terms with real ... human bodies."
The Web site says more than 6.5 million people have visited the exhibition, which includes 25 full-body plastinates and about 200 displays on body functions, in Tokyo, the German cities of Oberhausen, Mannheim, Berlin and Cologne, Basel in Switzerland and Vienna, Austria.
Staff writer Yevgenia Borisova contributed to this report.
TITLE: NTV Holdout Shows Signs of Crumbling
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: President Vladimir Putin said on Monday the government should guarantee press freedom but would not interfere in what he called a business dispute over control of Russia's only independent national television channel.
Meanwhile, a protest by the station's journalists against a hostile takeover by the state-dominated natural gas giant Gazprom showed signs of unraveling as bitter feuds broke out among staff and a total of 22 were said to be resigning. Among them were three of the station's top journalists who quit, joining the two who resigned over the weekend.
But Putin, ending a week-long silence on the battle for control of NTV, told Germany's ZDF television, in an interview broadcast from St. Petersburg, that "freedom of the press should, of course, be assured but it can be assured only under economic and legal conditions that are equal and acceptable to everyone."
Putin was hosting German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder at a bilateral summit in St. Petersburg, and he spoke again during a break describing the NTV affair as a business dispute among the shareholders and management of the company.
"I don't think I, under these conditions, have the right to interfere in this conflict between different economic players," he said.
"I would agree with you that the state should not neglect to guarantee the freedom of expression of any citizen and especially press freedom."
In a boardroom coup last Tuesday, the gas monopoly Gazprom sacked the station's management, but NTV journalists called the move illegal and staged on-air protests.
The threat to NTV has brought out crowds of thousands for the largest street demonstrations of Putin's presidency. Tens of thousands of people rallied across the country this weekend in support of NTV, including between 5,000 and 6,000 in St. Petersburg.
Bearing placards and banners, the demonstrators, who filled Troitskaya Ploshchad on Sunday, were joined by NTV journalists and Duma deputies.
Among those present from NTV were Svetlana Sorokina from Mos cow, and Alexander Luzhin, Polina Chek hova and Yury Zinchuk from NTV's St. Petersburg bureau.
Duma Deputy Yury Nesterov compared the meeting with the first public surges of the perestroika era. "The fact that we are having the same kind of meeting now means that the country has taken a step backwards," he said.
Some present offered to buy NTV shares from Gazprom.
"Let's buy them now! People and businessmen will help," said clerical worker Mikhail Gisatulin.
"If the Kremlin strangles NTV now, they will strangle the rest of us one by one afterwards."
The mass demonstrations were followed Friday by negotiations of a conciliatory commission of representatives from NTV and Gazprom-Media, a subsidiary of state-controlled Gaz prom. Negotiations collapsed 45 minutes after they began.
Gazprom-Media said that the journalists immediately set an ultimatum, demanding that new NTV chairman Alfred Kokh and his team sign a letter to Putin and the Supreme Court calling for a speedy decision on the validity of Tuesday's shareholders meeting.
"Gazprom-Media is confused by this attempt by NTV to circumvent normal legal procedures," Gazprom-Media spokesperson Aelita Yefimova was quoted by Interfax as saying.
"We consider this demand to be a provocation."
NTV countered that its main goal is to institute a three-month moratorium on any management changes. Such a proposal was first brought up by NTV founder Vladimir Gusinsky - who is under house arrest in Spain and has a warrant out for his arrest in Russia - early last week.
But it was no longer clear how long the station's remaining reporters could stay defiant as resignations at NTV piled up.
NTV journalists say Gazprom is acting on the state's behalf to muzzle their criticism of Putin, but Gazprom says the matter is purely business.
Gazprom acquired a large stake in NTV by guaranteeing founder Vladimir Gusinsky's debts, and says it has control because some of Gusinsky's shares are frozen.
NTV's Internet site (www.ntv.ru) confirmed the resignations of correspondent Andrei Pivovarov, presenter Natalya Zabuzova and war reporter Anton Grishin - though the report on Grishin was later retracted. Those leaving joined commentator Leonid Parfyonov and presenter Tatyana Mitkova who quit on the weekend.
They left amid increasingly shrill rhetoric on both sides. Moskovsky Kom somolets newspaper said the protests had deteriorated into a "suicide live on air."
Parfyonov announced his resignation during a Friday night broadcast of NTV signature program Antropologia. The discussion soon developed into a shouting match with Parfyonov leaving the studio.
He then wrote a bitter letter accusing managing director Yevgeny Kiselyov of using the staff as "cannon fodder" in his fight to keep control.
Mitkova, arguably NTV's most popular on-air face, quit with no explanation at all, but others vowed to stay until the end.
One key element in the dispute could be resolved soon: Gazprom confirmed that it would reply on Tuesday to an offer by CNN founder Ted Turner to buy into the station.
Some members of parliament want to introduce a bill banning foreign investors from buying controlling stakes in Russian stations, but this seems unlikely to threaten Turner's plans.
Turner struck a deal with Gusinsky last week under which he would take the stake provided he also could reach a deal with Gazprom-Media.
Gazprom-Media currently owns 46 percent of NTV and holds another 19 percent as collateral for a Credit Suisse First Boston loan coming due in July.
Turner's bankers from Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank, representing Gazprom-Media, met Thursday to begin negotiations.
Under negotiation is the purchase of the 19 percent stake in NTV that Gazprom holds as collateral to the loan due in July, according to a source close to the negotiations, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The source said that Turner intends to buy 11 percent of NTV from Gusinsky and 19 percent from Gazprom when it takes possession of the stake. Gusinsky would still own 20 percent of NTV but would give Turner voting power.
While Turner has agreed with Gu sin sky in principle on the deal, he has not signed it, the source said.
Getting an agreement from Gazprom on Turner's terms may prove problematic. Gazprom has repeatedly said that it will sell the 19 percent on an open tender organized by Deutsche Bank. According to the source, Turner wants to buy the shares directly from Gaz prom at the minimum price set in a Nov. 17 contract between Gazprom and Media-MOST - $61 million.
If Turner gets his way, he would end up owning about 30 percent of NTV, Gazprom would hold about 46 percent, Gusinsky 20 percent and the U.S.-based Capital Research Management mutual fund 4.5 percent. However, voting power would be divided up among a consortium of investors that Turner hopes to attract to the company.
Yet Kokh said he disapproved of the way Turner is running the show, saying that he doesn't understand the "reality of Russian politics" and that a statement issued Thursday by the U.S. State Department was only making matters worse.
The State Department called for a legal resolution to the struggle for control of NTV and, while cautiously approving Turner's involvement, said its journalists needed to maintain editorial control.
- Reuters, SPT
TITLE: Gazprom-Media Exec Quits Over Feud
AUTHOR: By Yevgenia Borisova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A Gazprom-Media board member turned in his resignation Thursday in protest of what he said were the unorthodox legal methods used by the company to take over NTV television.
"The powers that be, in the face of the head of Gazprom-Media [Alfred Kokh], cannot be allowed to use any methods necessary to achieve their ends," Anatoly Blinov said Thursday night on NTV's "Hero of the Day" program.
Blinov, who also acted as legal counsel for Gazprom-Media, said he was particularly disturbed by a series of court decisions in Moscow and the central Russian region of Saratov that appeared contradictory.
"The initial goal [of Gazprom-Media] was to get back the loan given to the Media-MOST holding," he said. "Now, as I'm leaving, the goal is different. And it is being achieved by such methods that it looks to me that the profession of a lawyer will soon become redundant."
He did not specify what new goal he was referring to.
The former Gazprom-Media board member said that the last straw for him came when Saratov judge Vitaly Nikolayev issued two rulings earlier this week. On Sunday, Nikolayev sided with a Media-MOST appeal to ban a shareholders meeting called by Gazprom-Media for Tuesday. Then on Monday he overruled his earlier decision at the request of Gazprom-Media.
"To cancel the court's decision, the court must accept the complaint and appoint the date of the hearing," Blinov was quoted Thursday in the Izvestia newspaper as saying. "But in this case the regulations have not been followed - look at the [Civil Procedural] Code, it says it all."
Saratov Court officials said Nikolayev was too busy to comment Thursday.
Alexander Sveshnikov, the editor of the Privolzhskoye Information Agen cy, said that he saw Nikolayev on Wednesday and that the judge looked "like he had been hen-pecked half to death at a Communist Party Committee meeting."
"I have known him for seven years," Sveshnikov said by telephone from Saratov. "He is a very active and lively man. But he was obviously pressured and had to succumb because otherwise he would have lost his job. ... Saratov is a small city. If he had disobeyed, it would have ended his career."
TITLE: Putin and Schroeder Stage Summit
AUTHOR: By Andrey Musatov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: German Chancellor Gerhard Schroe der met President Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg on Monday to discuss a range of issues, from freedom of the press to joint business deals to Russia's $16 billion debt to Berlin.
The same day, more than a hundred political, cultural, scientific, media and business figures from Germany and Russia convened at a civil-society conference, entitled Petersburg Dialog, which held discussions parallel to the summit.
"People at different levels should be given the chance to express their opinions freely," said Schroeder, who initiated the conference. "The more opinions, the better."
"Questions of economy, integration, migration and international security should be of international importance," said Putin in remarks broadcast to journalists on a huge screen in St. Petersburg State University, after the conference had finished for the day.
"This forum should become an exchange of ideas and will give an intellectual boost to relations between our two countries."
Putin and Schroeder were due to discuss Russia's Paris Club debt, 40 percent of which is owed to Germany, at the third meeting between the two leaders this year.
Schroeder brought with both Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and Finance Minister Hans Eichel, as well as other government officials. They will meet a long list of their Russian counterparts during the trip, including the new interior minister, Boris Gryzlov, and Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin. The summit ends Tuesday.
On the agenda is a series of debt-for-equity projects, in which Russia is to offer stakes in attractive enterprises in exchange for Berlin writing off some of the debt. The conference Web site (www.peterburger-dialog.ru) said that eight such projects have already been agreed on.
The site mentioned the purchase of furniture and fittings factories in Russia by IKEA - which invests all its money in Russia via its German representative office - as well as a joint venture between Ferroshtal and Russian gas monopoly Gazprom to construct a methanol plant in Arkhangelsk.
The construction company Knauf, which already owns 13 plants in Russia, plans to buy an unfinished cement plant, while baby products firm Hipp is interested in purchasing a food plant in the Mos cow region, according to the site.
Schroeder said he would raise the struggle for control over NTV television, but added that it would not be central to his talks with Putin.
"A strong Russia, and that is the kind of Russia we want, needs such a civil society in the same way as it needs mass media which inform the people and monitor the authorities," Schroeder said in remarks quoted by Reuters.
Fischer met his Russian counterpart Igor Ivanov on Monday, and they were due to discuss the prickly relations between Moscow and the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush. Ties have suffered from spy scandals and tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats, the Che chen War and America's plans for a national missile defense system.
At a press conference at the Astoria hotel Sunday, Interior Minister Gryzlov said the two sides would discuss security issues such as international drugs and weapons trafficking.
The Petersburg Dialog conference was halied by both sides as a free and open forum.
"I attend conferences like this all the time, and I feel a genuine interest from the German people to what is happening in Russia," said Viktor Ples ka chev sky, a member of the Duma committee on economics and finance. He added that many people at the conference had noted an improvement in Russian-German relations in recent years.
"We organized this conference on the basis of the experience of meetings set up by Britain 50 years ago," said Peter Benisch, chairman of the German organizing committee.
"It played, and still plays, a highly significant role in the development of democracy in Germany after World War II, and in relationships between Europe countries."
The forum is centered on a series of round-table discussions, closed to the press, and involves figures such as Lenenergo head Andrei Likhachyov, Baltika Breweries director Taimuraz Bolloyev, and the head of the State Hermitage Museum, Mikhail Piotrovsky. German representatives include Dr. Andre Brie, a member of the European Parliament, and several regional politicians.
Earlier, Schroeder and Putin attended a wreath-laying cerempony at the Piskaryovskyoe Cemetery in honor of victims of the Nazi siege of Leningrad.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Local Reactor Mills
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - This fall, Russia is planning to sign a contract with the Indian government to produce nuclear reactors for the country, which would boost Russia's worldwide production of nuclear reactors from 25 to 30 percent, Interfax reported.
The reactor parts will be produced by the local Izhorsky Works, as well as other local mills like Eletrosila and the Le nin grad Metals Mill, Izhorsky director Kak ha Bendukidze told Interfax Monday.
Bendukidze couldn't estimate exactly how much cash local mills could expect from the contract, the agency reported.
Canine Crime Stoppers
MOSCOW (SPT) - Some 57,400 crimes were solved in Russia with the help of search dogs over the past year, the Kommersant newspaper reported last week.
Sergei Kolchin, chief dog trainer with the Interior Ministry's search department, told the newspaper the ministry has recently doubled the number of police officers serving with dogs from 8,000 to almost 15,000.
Psychosis on the Rise
MOSCOW (AP) - One-third of Rus sians are suffering from mental disorders, the number of which has steadily grown over the past few years, doctors said.
According a report by the Society of Russian Psychiatrists, cited by Interfax on Friday, up to 10 million Russians suffer from disorders such as alcoholism and drug addiction. Cases of psychosis and retardation grew by over 40 percent in the past decade, according to the report.
Elections in Tula
MOSCOW (AP) - Soviet leader Leo nid Brezhnev's grandson and an official who tried to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991 were among the choices in voting Sunday for governor of the Tula region 200 kilometers south of Moscow.
Andrei Brezhnev, head of a minor communist group, challenged incumbent Vasily Starodubtsev. Starodubtsev was a member of the group that staged an unsuccessful attempt to depose Mikhail Gorbachev in August, 1991.
$2.8M for Floods
MOSCOW (SPT) - The government is allotting 80 million rubles ($2.8 million) in reserve funds to fight back spring flooding across the country, the Emergency Situations Ministry said. The threat of flooding comes after record snowfalls this winter. Spokesperson Viktor Beltsov said Friday that the money would be used to purchase explosives to bomb ice jams threatening areas of northwest Russia, the Urals and Siberia.
'Spies' Caught
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Police in the southern region of Stavropol were quoted as saying Friday they had captured two Turkish nationals whom they accused of being spies.
One was named as Khaki Mutlodogan and was alleged to have agents among the local Crimean Tartar community. The second Turk was named as Nesrin Uslu. She was alleged to have offered an FSB officer $50,000 to work for her.
Student's Trial Set
MOSCOW (AP) - The trial of a U.S. student and Fulbright scholar charged with selling marijuana in a central Russian city will open April 24, officials said Friday.
Investigator Andrei Makarov from the Federal Security Service branch in Voronezh said John Tobin, 24, could face between eight and 15 years in prison if convicted, Itar-Tass and Interfax reported.
TITLE: 'Yeltsin Epoch' Takes Fresh Look at Russia's First President
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - "If a leader, a president, begins to put pressure on the free press, the leader is weak."
This line may be timely but it was delivered nearly nine years ago by former President Boris Yeltsin in a meeting with the heads of major media outlets.
It's included in a new book, The Yeltsin Epoch, written by nine former Yeltsin aides and speechwriters.
The book also includes an earlier comment by Yeltsin that is contradictory. In the mid-1980s, when he was the head of the Communist Party in the Sverdlovsk region, Yeltsin once said that a man in his position had the right to forbid the production of any play, the showing of any movie or the publishing of any book if it didn't match the goals of the party, according to the authors.
Like the country itself, the book shows just how much the president changed in such a short period of time.
Despite the title, the 800-page book is not a biography of Yeltsin, but a history of Russia during his rise and fall from power. It begins in native Sverdlovsk, now Yekaterinburg, and runs through his unexpected resignation on Dec. 31, 1999.
The transformation of Yeltsin from a Communist Party boss to the leader of non-communist Russia, and his and his country's attempts to adjust to a new world changing at a dizzying pace is the main focus of the book.
With much already written about Russia's first president, including three volumes of Yeltsin's own memoirs, the book offers a view from inside the Kremlin, but outside Yelt sin's office.
Although the authors fail to reveal much that hasn't been printed before, there are several passages that aren't well known - some humorous, some sad.
The authors write, for instance, that Yeltsin's pre-presidential battles with the Communist Party leadership - including Mikhail Gorbachev - became so traumatic for him that on Nov. 9, 1987 he tried to kill himself. The authors mention this episode in a single paragraph, without detail, save that neither Yeltsin nor Gorbachev would talk about it.
On a lighter note, and illustrative of the frenzied fracas surrounding the Supreme Soviet, the authors remind the reader of how a mere typo resulted in the renaming of the country from the Russian Soviet Federalist Socialist Republic to the Russian Federation.
On Dec. 25, 1991, the Supreme Soviet was debating the ratification of an agreement on managing nuclear weapons with former Soviet republics.
During the debate, one of the deputies pointed out that the document listed Yeltsin not as the president of the Russian Soviet Federalist Socialist Republic - the official name of the country at the time - but simply the president of the Russian Federation. This mistake could have technically invalidated the whole document.
Supreme Soviet chairman Ruslan Khasbulatov, however, was quick to solve the problem by offering the deputies a chance to vote immediately on renaming the country. In the excitement the proposal was approved and the country was instantly renamed.
The book attempts to dispell the myth about Yeltsin's ability to make unusual and inventive decisions that were later considered to be wise. Yeltsin himself liked the legend so much that in later years he acquired a firm belief in it. He was known to sit and wait for some kind of "enlightenment" in difficult situations. But in reality the disappearances were a sign that the president simply did not know what to do, the authors contend.
Surprisingly, the retired president's notorious struggle with alcoholism is mentioned rarely, as is his vanity.
Yeltsin paid a lot of attention to his hairstyle, the authors write. But the hairdo came at a price: He used to spend an hour with a hairdresser before any public appearance. The habit became so much a part of the presidential routine that it actually fired back at Yeltsin a few times. It became news and cause for speculation on the rare occasions when his hair did not look as tidy as usual.
q
The Yeltsin Epoch, or Epokha Yelt sina, is published by the Vagrius publishing house. The list of authors includes Ge orgy Satarov, Mikhail Krasnov, Vya che slav Kostikov, Yury Baturin, Alexan der Lifshits, Lyudmila Pikhoya, Alexander Ilyin, Vladimir Kadatsky and Konstantin Nikiforov.
TITLE: Borodin Charged in Switzerland After Extradition
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: GENEVA - Former Kremlin aide Pavel Borodin arrived in Geneva over the weekend after being extradited from New York, and within hours was charged with money laundering and membership in a criminal organization.
Borodin, 54, was arrested on a Swiss warrant Jan. 17 at Kennedy Airport while traveling to Washington to celebrate President George Bush's inauguration. Having been denied bail by a New York judge, Borodin agreed last Monday to be flown to Switzerland rather than face a lengthy extradition battle from his U.S. prison cell.
"Mr. Borodin denies that he committed a crime of any kind," said defense lawyer Dominique Poncet after the hearing Saturday with investigatory judge Daniel Devaud. "We totally reject all the charges."
"We consider that the Swiss authorities have absolutely no competence [jurisdiction] in this affair," Poncet told journalists outside the state court in downtown Geneva. "The Russian authorities have made a formal statement that there has been no crime committed in Russia."
He described Borodin, who at the time of his arrest was the head of the Russia-Belarus Union, as being "jet-lagged but very confident" that he would be cleared.
Poncet, a prominent law professor and veteran criminal counsel, said that the defense team would apply for bail next Tuesday or Thursday, with Borodin staying in Geneva's main Champ Dollon prison in the meantime. He said there was no risk of Borodin fleeing while on bail.
"We are going to present a request for his release, and of course Mr. Borodin would still be available to Swiss justice. It is a personal commitment that he has made and one his country has, too. He has an obligation to uphold it because he can't lose face at home," the lawyer said.
Geneva State Prosecutor Bernard Bertossa has accused Borodin of receiving some $30 million in kickbacks from two Swiss companies, Mercata and Mabatex, that had lucrative contracts to renovate Kremlin buildings.
Some of the kickbacks were allegedly laundered through Swiss banks.
If found guilty, Borodin could face up to five years in prison.
Mabatex chief Behgjet Pacoll has been charged in relation to the case.
Borodin used to be the Kremlin property manager and a member of Yeltsin's inner circle. President Vladimir Putin dismissed him from the Kremlin post in 1999.
There have been demonstrations in Russia against the detention, although Putin's administration has toned down initial protests. Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov has merely urged Swiss authorities to conduct the case according to law and to avoid politicizing it.
After a series of high-level dismissals and resignations, Russian authorities late last year closed their investigation into alleged corruption, saying Swiss authorities failed to provide evidence. During the probe, there were allegations that Mabatex gave Yeltsin and his two daughters credit cards to buy tens of thousands of dollars worth of designer clothing and other items, with Borodin acting as the conduit for payments.
Geneva prosecutors refused to accept defeat, and criticized Russian authorities for showing little interest in pursuing highly placed officials.
Bertossa maintained that there was proof in the form of documents showing that Borodin received commissions on contracts that he signed on behalf of the Russian Federation.
Even though Switzerland has a reputation for being lax on money laundering, the Geneva prosecutors office headed by Bertossa is renowned for the zeal of its investigations.
Bertossa's determination to pursue Borodin comes despite the collapse of a case against a Russian businessman, Sergei Mikhailov, who was acquitted in December 1998 of charges that he was a mafia boss. A court subsequently ordered Geneva authorities to pay 800,000 Swiss francs ($482,000) compensation for the two years Mikhailov spent in jail.
- AP, Reuters
TITLE: Decree Orders Revamp of Movie Studios
AUTHOR: By Larisa Yusipova and Leonid Bershidsky
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: President Vladimir Putin has signed two decrees intended to revitalize the post-Soviet film industry by allowing the gradual privatization of studios and establishing a state system of film distribution.
Under the first decree, signed Thurs day, each studio will be split into two parts: The first - which will remain state-owned and will not be subject to conversion into a stock company - will have control over the studio's film collections; the second will get the studio's remaining property and will be eligible to become a stock company if its management so chooses.
The next step for studios turned into stock companies will be privatization, according to Deputy Culture Minister Alexander Golutva, former head of the erstwhile State Committee for Cinematography, or Goskino, which became a ministry department last May.
Golutva said in an interview that the only real candidate for becoming a stock company right now is Gorky Studios, whose director Vladimir Grammatikov has long insisted on the company's privatization. If the Gorky trial balloon proves successful, Golutva said, St. Petersburg-based Lenfilm may follow suit next year.
"We've been waiting for this decree for a long time, but it [was announced] at an unexpected moment, so it's too early to comment," a press spokesperson for Lenfilm said on Monday.
The second decree, signed on Friday, provides for the creation of a state-owned distribution company called Rossiisky Prokat.
According to Golutva, the first stage of the company's work will be taking inventory of the remnants of the Soviet distribution system - production and reproduction facilities, research institutes and export arm Sovexportfilm - and whipping them "into decent shape."
After that's done, he said, Rossiisky Prokat will undertake to build or renovate about 150 movie theaters nationwide. These theaters would belong jointly to the federal government and municipal authorities and would aim to be as comfortable as their privately owned counterparts.
There are about 40 state-owned film studios in Russia, most of which produce something like a film a year. The exception is Lenfilm, which has been making up to 10 films a year and is often used by Moscow film makers who find it offers the best value for the money.
Alexei Yankovsky, a St. Petersburg movie director, said that any possible privatization would have a negative effect on Lenfilm. He praised the management of the studio's current director, Viktor Sergeyev, and said that the shakeup would only be interference.
"Privatization may lead to the destruction of the present system of management when there is no need for it," Yankovsky said in a telephone interview on Monday. But he added that the movie distribution network was indeed the industry's biggest headache.
Lenfilm was founded in 1918 and has produced about 1,500 movies to date. It has recovered better than other studios from the economic trials of the 1990s, when production sank to one film in 1996 before rising to current levels.
Lenfilm declined to estimate how much the studio might fetch if it was sold.
Taken together, these plans indicate the state is eager to fill the void left on the market by media magnate Vladimir Gusinsky. While his companies NTV-Profit and Kino-Most had recently been producing over 10 films a year, their projects have been put on hold in light of Gusinsky's financial and legal difficulties.
Whether the state will manage to turn a profit remains to be seen: Film industry insiders say that, since the 1998 crash, an average film makes between $150,000 and $200,000 from theater and video sales, while an average production budget is about $800,000.
Staff writer Irina Titova contributed to this report.
TITLE: Nuclear Minister Favors Imports
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: Newly appointed Nuclear Power Minister Alexander Rumyantsev spoke in support of a widely criticized plan to import spent nuclear fuel for reprocessing that helped cost the job of his predecessor, according to a recently published interview.
"It will showcase Russia's technological potential and pave the way for new projects," Rumyantsev, who was appointed nuclear power minister late last month, was quoted by Izvestia on Friday as saying.
He also said a law permitting the imports of nuclear waste is essential for Russia's efforts to exports nuclear fuel. "If we want to sell this product to other countries, we must have a law that allows us to take back spent fuel rods."
The plan foresees importing about 20,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel over 20 years to Russia in special armored train cars for reprocessing and long-term storage.
Rumyantsev's predecessor, Yev geny Adamov, strongly advocated the project, saying that Russia stands to earn $20 billion. He promised to spend $7 billion of the proceeds to clean up radiation spills in Russia and upgrade safety at existing reactors.
But environmentalists and other critics of the plan warned that it would turn Russia into an international dumping ground for nuclear waste and accused Adamov of pursuing his own business interests in the deal.
Adamov has denied the allegations.
Critics also said that there would be no money left to clean up the environment after funds are spent to build and maintain storage facilities - most of which are operating at two or higher times their initially intended capacity. They added that the reactors most in need of retrofitting to make them safer were Russia's Chernobyl-style RBMK-1000 reactors, which have been declared by various experts to be fatally flawed and un-fixable.
Most of Russia's other reactors, including those of the VVER light water series, have been found to be structurally sound, though often old and in need of extensive repairs.
The State Duma approved the bill in the first of three readings last December, but abruptly canceled the second reading last month amid the controversy. Several days later, President Vla di mir Putin fired Adamov as part of a sweeping cabinet reshuffle.
Rumyantsev said that the financial aspect of the plan needs more work. He also sought to allay critics' concerns that the ministry earnings from the deal could be misspent, saying that special panels would "track down every single dollar" of the proceeds.
Rumyantsev had served as head of the Kurchatov Institute, Russia's leading nuclear research center.
TITLE: Gagarin's Image Lives On as Soviet Hero
AUTHOR: By Karl Emerick Hanuska
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: It was 108 minutes on April 12, 1961 that made the difference to Yury Ga ga rin and the world - the time it took for the first man in space to complete his historic dash around the globe.
That trip transformed a former farm boy into one of the greatest icons of the 20th century and stunned the West with the realization that the lumbering Soviet giant was capable of feats it could only dream of.
"There aren't many achievements that can compare to what Gagarin did," said Pavel Popovich, one of the original team of six Soviet cosmonauts and a friend of Gagarin's.
"No matter how much man manages to do in space, none of it will have the same resonance as when Yury flew ... but after putting the first man up there we know there are few barriers that can't be overcome," Popovich said in an interview.
It is tougher 40 years on as Russian space chiefs struggle with the financial crises and conflicting priorities that have slowed progress and claimed victims such as the Mir space station, ditched in March because of a lack of funds.
To the nation's rocketeers, Gargarin's success is a proud symbol of the past, when they left U.S. scientists scrambling in their wake. It is also a beacon of hope for the future.
Part of Gagarin's allure is that like so many of the century's great icons he died before his time, in a mysterious plane crash at the age of 34, just seven years after his historic trip.
So forever he remains the youthful, vibrant figure who won the hearts of millions as he travelled the globe in what was the most successful propaganda effort the Soviet Union ever managed.
Popovich, now 70 but still with a boisterous charm that hints of the charisma the original cosmonauts had, said when he first met Gagarin it was clear he was destined for greatness.
"Yury stood out from the rest of us. He was simple, gregarious, happy and full of life and curiosity. ... He was a nice guy," said Popovich, the fourth man to fly in space for the Soviet Union.
"At one time they asked us cosmonauts who should be the first to go into space and every single one of us said Gagarin."
Gagarin's charm won the approval of Soviet planners when they decided who would ride his way into history aboard the first manned space ship, the Vostok 1.
Handsome, quick-witted and just sufficiently self-deprecating, Gagarin was the perfect figure to bring the nation together and turn people towards the future they were meant to be building.
On trips abroad where musicians, politicians and movie stars jostled one other just to shake his hand, he smashed the Western stereotype of the crude, backward Soviets.
In a moment captured in one famous photograph, actress Gina Lollobrigida pushed through a crowded room to plant a kiss on Gagarin's cheek, fulfilling a personal ambition.
Yet despite his legendary status, Gagarin proved to be not quite the perfect hero.
Soviet officials complained about drinking binges and tales of his alleged adultery had to be hushed up, including an incident where he was caught by his wife with another woman and injured himself leaping from a hotel balcony.
But those problems have done little to tarnish Gagarin's image.
Yury Biryukov, an engineer who helped build the capsule that Gagarin rode, said he had never lost his wonder of Gagarin and the men who took the world's first great leaps into space.
"For all of us these men were like superheroes, larger than life. We knew then that Gagarin was making history. Perhaps then we even understood better than Gagarin the significance of what he was going to do," Biryukov said.
TITLE: Liability-Insurance Law Gets Green Light in First Reading
AUTHOR: By Ana Uzelac
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The times when accidentally scratching a gleaming Mercedes in a traffic jam could mean a month-long financial and legal ordeal might be coming to an end - now that the State Duma has passed in its first reading a bill on mandatory liability insurance.
If passed into law, the new regulation might vex drivers forced to pay additional dues, but the prospect has thrilled insurance companies, which participated in drafting the bill and are gearing up to get a piece of an underdeveloped market.
The bill calls for mandatory insurance policies covering the driver's liability for material damages and for loss of life or injuries sustained by a second party, Igor Yurgens, chairman of the All-Russian Insurance Association said in a telephone interview from London Sunday.
According to press reports, Duma deputies estimated that the annual premium for liability insurance would be 400 rubles ($14). The Kommersant daily reported that the bill sets the minimum coverage by insurers at 400,000 rubles (about $14,000) - up to 240,000 rubles for loss of life and injuries and 160,000 rubles for material damages.
Yurgens called the bill a "victory for common sense," adding that Russia was "the last country in Europe not to have mandatory liability insurance."
In a country with about 40 million registered drivers, the market should exceed $500 million. But apart from the money, insurers are excited about a possible rise in demand for auto insurance beyond the required minimum.
According to Alexei Korolyov, head of the auto insurance department at the East European Insurance Company, one-third of their clients purchase liability policies worth $100 to $170, covering $10,000 to $30,000 in damages.
TITLE: Metals Bill Passed In Duma
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: State Duma deputies for the first time defied a presidential veto Wednesday by approving the suspension of nonferrous scrap-metal exports until 2005.
The bill was passed by 314 deputies, including representatives of all the pro-government and pro-presidential factions. Deputies hope the suspension will prevent the theft of thousands of kilometers of wire from Unified Energy Systems.
"It is a rather crude, clumsy law. While we are fighting against thieves, we will bank rupt a number of honest industrialists. But I voted 'for' [overturning the veto], because there is no alternative," said Valery Zubov, a member of the presidential faction Peoples' Deputy. "Something had to be done. As a result of stealing metal, whole enterprises have abandoned operations, not to mention the deaths."
Zubov said he and other deputies will correct the law if it harms business and might create a list of companies that will be permitted to export scrap metal.
Over the past two years, 8,000 kilometers of wire made of nonferrous metal was stolen from UES, the company recently announced. Nonferrous scrap-metal exports totals from 700,000 to 800,000 tons a year, only 1,000 tons of which are transported through legitimate channels.
Officials say the law will have no effect. "The people who steal metal do not export it. They sell it for kopeks, and they will continue to sell it on the domestic market with the same rate of success after the adoption of the law," said a government source.
Market players agree. "There are schemes according to which scrap comes to the final buyer unsullied in terms of the law and its physical appearance - it is passed around and resold several times," said a worker at a factory processing scrap metal.
TITLE: Pipeline Drawing Ire of Environmentalists
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova and Andrey Musatov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Environmentalists are fighting a futile battle against the consolidated bulk of the Kremlin and various financial interests who are building the Baltic Pipeline System, which is planned to culminate at the Primorsk port near St. Petersburg.
In an effort to draw attention to what they call the destruction of an environmentally sensitive region, St. Petersburg's Greenworld environmental group brought a suit against the pipeline's construction to the Russian Supreme Court.
At issue is the building of the Baltic Pipeline system, or BPS - a 2,700-kilometer oil pipeline from Kirishi, near St. Petersburg, to the port of Primorsk on the Gulf of Finland, and from Kharyaga in the Komi Republic to Usinsk in Western Siberia - and the repair of the existing Yaroslav-Kirishi, Usinsk-Ukhta and Ukhta-Yaroslav routes.
On April 2, the Supreme Court threw out the suit brought by the environmental group Greenworld, saying the group did not offer compelling proof of pending environmental damage.
Alexander Sutyagin, an environmentalist with Greenworld, was sanguine about the results, saying he was neither surprised nor discouraged by the verdict.
"The judge was obviously under pressure - we realize that now, when much funding has already been invested, it is impossible to stop the construction," Sutyagin said in a telephone interview last week. He said Greenworld would appeal the Supreme Court decision soon.
"What we are trying to do is to make the pipeline's builders take better care of the environment. They do nothing to protect the environment and have to be forced to do so."
The $2.5 billion pipeline will have a capacity of 12 million tons of oil a year - something giving pause to environmentalists like Sutyagin, who fear leaks, ground-water contamination and the clear-cutting required to build it.
Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov told NTV television last fall that his office is determined to get the terminal operating by the end of 2001. The first oil tanker is expected to arrive at the Primorsk terminal in December 2001.
Valentin Sidorin, press secretary to Leningrad Oblast Governor Valery Serdukov, poured cold water on the efforts of environmentalists, saying too much money was already involved.
"The planning works were already completed long ago and a half of the pipeline is ready, there's no sense for green parties to be upset," said Sidorin in a telephone interview on Wednesday.
Some 2.5 billion rubles (about $87.4 million) has already been spent on the construction of an oil terminal in Primorsk, he said. It is estimated to cost $400 million in total. It has 10 oil tankers and is almost ready."
He also said that the Baltic states and Finland are against the pipeline project and suggested their governments were backing the green opposition in Russia.
But that hardly matters. Sidorin said the project was supported at the "highest levels" of the government and that "hardly anything can stop the project."
Initially conceived as a project in which private oil companies would receive shares in the pipeline, the government reneged in July 1999, saying the pipeline would be the property of the state-owned Transneft, hitting oil companies with even higher tariffs.
Major oil companies had expected a stake in BPS for $46 million, which they paid Transneft as an investment tariff. According to Transneft Vice President Sergei Grigorieyev, the money was transferred to an escrow account whose fate would be decided by the state.
The tariff increase did not effect oil companies, who were making $10 per barrel, but they were upset that the government ignored their proposals for BPS.
But in the hands of Transneft, BPS's main - government-set - goal seems to be bypassing Baltic ports in favor of the one in Primorsk. Indeed Russia can save $1.5 billion a year in doing so.
It also stands to make a great deal of its own cash. According to the Leningrad Oblast official Web site, $400 million in revenues are forecasted during the pipeline's first 20 years of operation.
Of that, the spokesperson said, 25 percent will go to the federal budget with the rest being doled out to regional government. The Leningrad Oblast itself expects to receive $259 million.
Steve Allen, an oil expert with Renaissance Capital estimated that the Russian government would be getting about $225 million in extra tax revenues.
"A little under $300 million would be going to Transneft and the port operators," Allen said. He couldn't say exactly which oil companies would benefit.
As the pipeline winds its way though St. Petersburg, it will be laid under the Neva river, St. Petersburg's main water source. The pipeline will be buried 10 meters under the river bed, and wrapped in a protective coating. The project's constructors guarantee no harm to the natural state of the river and local fishery.
But a major oversight committed by the now defunct St. Petersburg Environmental Committee -the local branch of the State Environmental Committee - which approved the pipeline, suggested BPS find alternative water sources in the event of a disaster. This alternative was never found. The State Environmental Committee last May was put under the authority of the Ministry of Natural Resources by President Vladimir Putin.
Environmentalists say the government's ecological abuses in building the pipeline are limitless. Among them is the breach of the Ramsar Convention, signed by Russia on Sept. 13, 1994, which obligated the country protect its birch forests, the natural habitat for waterfowl. Many of these birch forests are located squarely in the Primorsk port area - which Greenworld said is a clear violation of the contract.
Dmitry Artamonov, head of Greenpeace St. Petersburg, said that the construction would mean the loss of the Karelian Isthmus as resort and recreation area.
The placement of the actual terminal - a shallow, rocky beach - is, according to ecologists, dangerous, said Sutyagin. "There are too many risks," at the Primorsk spot, Sutyagin said.
Vladimir Yegorkin, president of the Russian Association of Maritime Pilots, supported this. He cited high winds, a rocky coastline and winter ice as dangers to tanker pilots.
"What surprises me most of all is that nobody bothered to do a comparative analysis [between possible ports] which would clearly have shown the best spot for the oil terminal," Yegorkin said in an interview Monday.
"To me it looks like Primorsk has won because it simply happened to have stronger lobbyists in Moscow," he added.
According to Artamonov, various environmental groups, including himself, tried to protest construction of the pipeline, but all the attempts failed.
"It is too late now to seek justice in the court, and the best thing we can do is provide watchful monitoring of the pipeline's work," Artamonov said.
TITLE: Putin Orders Gazprom Changes
AUTHOR: By Anna Raff
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin on Monday ordered gas giant Gazprom to take steps to increase its transparency and raise a cap on foreign ownership.
Putin also told a regular government meeting that it is high time to move Gaz prom's stocks away from a two-tier system under which shares traded in Russia are sold at a large discount to American Depositary Receipts in Europe.
Markets greeted the president's comments as a much-needed sign that the government would finally tackle Gaz prom's murky dealings and provide a more level playing field for Russian and foreign investors. Gazprom shares shot up 6 percent to close at 35 cents in Mos cow. But the ADR price fell 0.8 percent to $6.08 in London.
Calling for "new energy" to be sunk into the liberalizing of Gazprom shares, Pu tin said a working group will be formed to come up with a plan within three months. The group is to be led by Dmit ry Medvedev, the Kremlin's deputy chief of staff and the board chairman of Gazprom.
The plan should include a lifting of the curb on foreign ownership in the company from 20 percent to 40 percent, Putin said.
Currently, foreigners are prohibited from buying shares on the local market. Foreign ownership is estimated by analysts to amount to 11.5 percent, but the number is probably much higher because many foreigners invest through gray schemes that give them access to the cheaper local market.
This two-tier system, created by presidential decree, has been coined by market players as a "ring fence" that keeps foreign investors out of the Russian market.
Stock prices - both at home and abroad - have been suffering for the past few years, largely because of the ring fence that limits share liquidity and foreign investor enthusiasm.
"Right now, the situation doesn't completely satisfy market players, shareholders and the government, which is also a shareholder," said Medvedev.
The government owns 38 percent of Gazprom.
Charges will be made by amendments to existing laws and presidential decree, Medvedev said.
Analysts cheered Putin for speaking out on Gazprom, Russia's largest company, which produces about a quarter of the world's gas.
"This shows the particular way that Putin works," said Stephen O'Sullivan, oil and gas analyst for United Financial Group. "He holds these regular Monday morning Cabinet meetings and the process starts."
Even though the announcement is the latest in a long line of plans to change things around at Gazprom, this one is significant because it has the explicit backing of the president, O'Sullivan said.
Interestingly, the working group's proposals are set to be released in July, shortly after a Gazprom shareholders meeting set for June 29. Thus, the group's proposals will only be released after the old guard at Gazprom has had an opportunity to exit.
"The timing can't be a coincidence," O'Sullivan said.
The announcement's timing also signals that Putin wants to discuss Gaz prom with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who arrived in St. Petersburg on Monday for talks with Putin, said Jonathan Stern, a gas expert with the Royal Institute for International Affairs.
TITLE: Investors Satisfied With New Image of LUKoil
AUTHOR: By Natasha Shanetskaya
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Top oil producer LUKoil scored positive image points on a variety of fronts Friday and gained considerable ground on its self-professed drive to become more "transparent and understandable" for investors.
Despite warning of lower unconsolidated profits this year, the company said Friday that it would triple dividend payments for 2000 and swap its preferred shares for ordinaries one-for-one.
The prognosis for a drop in unconsolidated profits by Russian accounting standards from 45 billion rubles ($1.56 billion) last year to 33 billion rubles this year was shrugged off by investors, who more closely watch consolidated data and expect lower profits given this year's lower oil prices.
"The [share] conversion is required because of a serious infringement of the interests of ordinary stock holders," the company said in a statement.
The plan was announced at the meeting of the company's board of directors Friday and will be put to a shareholders meeting scheduled for June.
Reuters quoted LUKoil Vice President Leonid Fedun as saying that his company hoped to complete the swap by the end of the year.
Preferred shareholders do not have voting rights, making them vulnerable to unfriendly management decisions.
Preferred shares closed 4.43 percent higher at $10.60. Ordinaries slipped 0.43 percent to $9.35.
LUKoil also mapped out plans to improve its image and relationship with investors in an attempt to boost its share price.
A blue-chip company that was once synonymous with the Russian oil industry, LUKoil has been struggling recently to keep its leadership position over main rival Yukos.
"[LUKoil's] stock price is flat this year, compared with a 14 percent rise in the RTS and a 45 percent increase in Yukos," Renaissance Capital wrote in a morning note Friday.
Yevgeny Satskov, an oil and gas analyst at Renaissance, said LUKoil is viewing its new investor relations effort as a priority because it could provide a catalyst for reversing this trend.
LUKoil's head of strategic planning, Andrei Kotchetkov, met with Renaissance Capital's analysts Thursday to outline the company's new strategy.
"We are re-engineering our corporate structure to become more understandable and transparent," Kotchetkov said in a telephone interview.
Kotchetkov disagreed with those who see Yukos outperforming LUKoil and defended his company's strategy, saying, "it is more stable and solid than Yukos' strategy."
"Yukos is just trying to pump up its market capitalization ahead of its ADR [American Depositary Receipts] issue," he said.
Some analysts, however, said LUKoil's efforts to advance its share price are also tied to an ADR debut. The Russian government, which holds about 16 percent of the company, plans to float about 50 million shares, or roughly 6 percent of LUKoil, as ADRs on the New York Stock Exchange later this year.
"Today, the government is not ready to sell because it is looking for a higher valuation," probably closer to $16 [a share]," said Leonid Mirzoyan, an oil analyst with Deutsche Bank.
"It is achievable if the company lowers risks that bother shareholders," he said. "The efforts will move valuations closer to the government's target price."
In addition to hiring Andrei Volpin, a new investor relations manager, LUKoil is working on several other projects that will "foster openness with shareholders," said Kotchetkov.
Firstly, LUKoil published detailed financial results for 1998-99 audited to U.S. accounting standards on its corporate Web site Friday.
TITLE: Baltika Posts Record Growth
AUTHOR: By Simon Ostrovsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Baltika Brewery on Monday posted bullish financial results for 2000, as the company continues its strategy of focusing on volume and revenue growth.
Russia's largest brewery reported a 66.7 percent increase in revenue to $333 million from $199 million in 1999. Gross profit rose 50 percent year-on-year to $108.9 million, a Baltika spokesperson said. Total output increased 65 percent, beating out the industry average of 22 percent and hitting 999 million liters.
"The figures speak for themselves," said Yekaterina Ozimkina, head of Baltika's finance department.
"Last year's growth outdid our expectations, and we're on the road to our goal of capturing 25 percent of the entire beer market in Russia."
Ozimkina estimated Baltika's current market share at 20 percent, but said more exact figures would be available by April 30, when the company announces its first-quarter results for 2001.
However, analysts say Baltika's marketing strategy may have its pitfalls.
"The segment of the market which Baltika is targeting is more competitive, as margins are lower in a mass market," said Kim Iskyan, a retail and consumer analyst for Renaissance Capital, in a telephone interview from Moscow on Monday.
A Renaissance Capital report released Monday said the company's strategy "has its risks," but that Baltika was still a solid performer.
Baltika is planning to increase its foreign market share. Iskyan said Baltika plans to boost exports to China, Mongolia, Europe and the United States, and build a new brewery in Belarus.
Seventy-five percent of Baltika is owned by the Swedish Baltic Beverages Holding, which has large stakes in breweries throughout the Baltic states, Russia and Ukraine. Remaining shares in Baltika are owned by the company's management and other minority shareholders.
TITLE: Producers Struggling To Fill Russia's Beef Void
AUTHOR: By Robin Munro
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: LOTOSHINO, Moscow Region - Just mention foot-and-mouth disease and meat farmer Viktor Legezin squirms.
Although no cases of the disease that has raised an uproar in Western Europe have been reported in Russia, Legezin is taking no chances.
Legezin has banned everyone other than his staff from entering the long, low barns where he fattens bull calves on the 10,000-head Kirov state farm, located about 155 kilometers west of Moscow.
Farmers like Legezin are hoping that the food-and-mouth crisis sweeping Europe will boost sales, which have fallen to miserably low levels over the past 10 years as state subsidies dried up, costs soared and a flood of cheap imported meat hit the market. A recent Russian ban on European meat and dairy imports has fueled their expectations, but with farms producing about half the amount of meat as in Soviet times they clearly lack the means to feed a meat-hungry population.
Six hundred young calves arrive at the 10,000-hectare farm each month, and 600 fattened ones are sold for about 50 rubles a kilogram.
Legezin, who has been director of the farm since 1987, complains that he makes only a few rubles profit on each kilogram. The farm's profit for last year was about $800,000, he said. The 460 staff get paid an average of 2,500 rubles ($86.60) a month, a fairly high salary for the region.
Legezin took heart from meat-industry forecasts that prices would jump 15 percent or more after the government banned European meat last week. He said prices would need to reach 60 rubles to 70 rubles a kilogram to allow him to increase production.
But local meat companies are continuing to look overseas instead of at local farmers to fill the hole left by banned European imports, he said.
The main problem with Russian meat, according to the nearby Motodel sausage factory, is that there isn't enough of it. Meat factories would have to pay higher prices for Russian meat to give farmers the cash needed to produce more meat, a move that would mean prices for sausages and other products would jump.
"People don't have the money to pay more for meat," said Motodel spokesperson Yelena Komosa.
Motodel pays 45 rubles to 50 rubles a kilogram, she said.
That amount is just above the 43 rubles a kilogram that the Meat Union, whose members are the largest players in the meat industry, estimates is the production cost for a kilogram of beef.
Last year, European beef cost about $1.15 (33.50 rubles) a kilogram, which was comparable to domestic beef prices.
However, government officials say the ban could last from six months to a year, meaning it would be only a matter of time before farmers get the prices that they are waiting for.
There were signs that meat prices were already on the rise before the ban. Average prices rose 4.3 percent in January and 3.3 percent in February, according to the State Statistics Committee. Beef and pork prices rose more than the average in February, with beef up 4.9 percent and pork up 3.6 percent.
European countries last year exported to Russia 221,089 tons of beef, or 59.6 percent of all beef imports, the Meat Union said. Altogether, 2.2 million to 2.4 million tons of meat was imported last year, or about half of domestic beef, pork, poultry and sheep and goat meat production.
One of the incentives for importing European meat has been heavy EU subsidies that aim to make exports competitive on the Russian market. Food aid from the EU and the United States has also kept meat prices low.
In Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russian suppliers account for perhaps as little as 30 percent of the meat market, said Nathan Hunt, president of U.S. meat exporter Skylight Inc.
Hunt said Russian meat processing companies are, for now, dragging their feet about paying higher prices for imported meat.
He said a major problem with Russian meat was its quantity, not quality.
Meat Union spokesperson Viktor Yatskin said farmers would need about $1 billion a year in investment for at least 10 years to raise production to a level that could replace imports.
Kirov farm's Legezin said that in Soviet times the Moscow region had 600,000 milking cows. Now it has only 300,000. The 18,000 bull calves in the Moscow region are also a far cry from the 100,000 it had a decade ago.
TITLE: Mobile-Phone Market Gets More Competitive
AUTHOR: By Thomas Rymer
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: When Moscow-based cellular telephone service provider MTS purchased Telecom XXI last month, St. Petersburg finally seemed set for the type of competition between mobile operators that has taken place in the Moscow market in recent years and may soon spread to the rest of Russia.
Telecom XXI owned one of the two licenses which the Communications Ministry has granted to operate on the Global System for Mobile (GSM) standard in the city. The other belongs to North-West GSM.
Although Telecom XXI received the license in 1998 - at the same time as North-West GSM - the company never built a network or began operations, leaving the city with only one GSM-standard cellular provider.
But MTS' officials said at the time of the purchase that they plan to have Telecom XXI's system operating and to begin signing up subscribers by the end of this summer, and to have 20,000 to 30,000 subscribers by the end of the year. MTS has 1,190,000 subscribers at present, while its competition in Moscow, Vimpelcom, has 810,000. North-West GSM had 255,000 subscribers at the beginning of 2001, up from 130,000 the year before.
The move could well bring lower service rates and calling tariffs for mobile users in the city. In Moscow, MTS has been involved in price wars with competitor Vimpelcom, and the result has been much lower prices for users than those presently offered by North-West GSM.
Connection fees at North-West GSM are about $65, while MTS charges $10 to hook up non-MTS handsets, and provides free connection to customers who buy MTS phones.
North-West tariffs for local calls run from 22 cents to 33 cents, depending on the time of day and whether the calls are outgoing or incoming, while MTS tariffs run from 17 cents to 24 cents per minute.
"There's no question that [the arrival of a second GSM provider] will create more competition in the St. Petersburg market," said Maria Chernobrovkina, commercial specialist with the United States and Foreign Commercial Service in St. Petersburg.
"For prices to come down is just a natural reaction."
Moscow's cellular penetration rate is about 14 percent, while that in St. Petersburg is about 6 percent, according to statistics from Renaissance Capital, suggesting that there is significant room for growth in the local market.
While the arrival of competition might shake things up at North-West GSM, analysts are divided on the benefits of moving into the region for MTS. In particular, they point to one of the conditions MTS will have to meet to have the deal approved by the Antimonopoly Ministry - the surrendering of some of MTS' Moscow bandwidth.
The Communications Ministry attempted to commandeer some of the bandwidth held in the Moscow market by both MTS and Vimpelcom so that it could be handed to new license holder Sonic Duo. However, faced with strong negative reactions from industry players, foreign investors, and even the government of Norway, the ministry backed off the demand.
"I'm not sure that the move to purchase Telecom XXI holds that much value for MTS if it means that they have to give some of their Moscow frequency to Sonic Duo," Chernobrovkina said.
But Andrei Braginsky, telecommunications analyst at Renaissance Capital, was more upbeat about the deal.
"It's definitely positive for MTS," Braginsky said. "This is the second most lucrative market in Russia, the penetration level [in St. Petersburg] is about half that in Moscow, and the presence of only one provider means that competition isn't that tough there."
"MTS, because of its holdings in Moscow and the Moscow Oblast, will be able to offer more unified services," he added. "It will be able to create favorable tariff packages for roaming, or perhaps even get rid of roaming fees altogether.
So the Telecom XXI deal will create competition in the local mobile-communications market, but this may only be the first step.
The Communications Ministry has maintained that it will not grant new GSM licenses in any of the eight regions before penetration levels reach 10 percent. Moscow reached that point last year, leading to the Sonic Duo license.
If competition leads to lower prices in the local market, the penetration rate might reach 10 percent relatively quickly - as early as the end of this year, according to some analysts.
And if a third license is made available, there should be no problem finding a taker.
"At some point, you may see Vimpelcom move into the northwest," said Tom Adshead, senior analyst at Troika Dialog. "I'm prepared to bet that if another license came up for tender, they would participate aggressively."
Should Vimpelcom move into the local market in the near future, then St. Petersburg would become a sort of testing ground for a competition taking shape for Russia's cellular market as a whole.
That competition will be between three companies: Sistema Telekom, which owns 43 percent of MTS; Telecominvest, the chief shareholder in North-West GSM; and Vimpelcom. Analysts say that the nature of the competition will largely be the result of the interplay of three factors - licenses, money, and politics.
None of the three has made major moves into the regions to date, but the number of licenses each holds in the regions will be the first factor that comes in to play in determining their success. In this case, Telecominvest holds an early advantage.
"Telecominvest certainly has licenses in all of Russia's regions except for the Urals, Central Russia and Mos cow," Braginsky said. "There's been talk that they have effectively picked up an Urals GSM license, and a further partnership between Sonic Duo and Telecominvest in Moscow is also very possible because it would be dealing with many of the same people."
Sonic Duo is part owned by the national telecoms holding, Svyazinvest. Svyazinvest general director Valery Yashin is the former director of Petersburg Telephone System (PTS), and was in charge of that firm when it set up Telecominvest.
Vimpelcom has stated that it owns licenses covering regions containing 70 percent of Russia's population.
But skeptics in the industry point out that money or political pull, or a combination of the two, can make problems with acquiring licenses go away.
A case in point occurred last October, when the Communications Ministry suspended the GSM operating license of Samara-based SMARTS because it had failed to meet deadlines for instituting services which were contained in the licensing agreement.
Many industry insiders complained that the decision was the result of favoritism toward Telecominvest on the part of the ministry, which is headed by Yashin's former deputy at PTS, Leonid Reiman.
Suspicions grew stronger when the reinstatement of the license in January coincided with the granting of a third license in the region to MCC-Saratov, a small provider 98-percent owned by Telecominvest.
"Telecominvest has government backing, which is very important for operations in the regions," Braginsky said. "To have short- and medium-term success, you really need to have good relations with local governments and with the owners of the local ground lines."
The ground-line factor itself could be a very strong one in Telecominvest's favor. Cellular operators need access to local ground-line systems, both for transferring calls between their broadcasting points and switching systems, and for linking up with homes and businesses with standard telephone services. The majority of Russia's local telephone service providers are at least part-owned by Svyazinvest, so its ties with Telecominvest could be vital.
St. Petersburg is an excellent example of this situation, as each of the three major hard-line providers are tied to one of the two companies. PTS is a Svyazinvest holding, while Petersburg Transit Telecom (PTT) is 100-percent owned by Telecominvest, which also holds a 29-percent stake in Peterstar.
Although Telecominvest is in a strong position with relation to the number of licenses already held and degree of political backing, the question of financing muddies the waters.
"The problem for Telecominvest is that it doesn't have a lot of money or experience," Braginsky said.
"North-West GSM is a good - but small - business. When you compare it to MTS, it doesn't have a significant number of people with the expertise to work in larger markets, along with the fact that they have no presence in Moscow."
And Braginsky says that this is exactly where MTS and Sistema, its parent, are strong.
"MTS has the cash and a very profitable market in Moscow," he said. "They can go back to capital markets whenever they need to and also have the backing of Deutsche Telekom, one of the largest and strongest companies in the telecommunications industry."
Vimpelcom is disadvantaged, lacking either the political ties of Telecominvest or the war chest at MTS. Nonetheless, the firm seems close to alleviating both those problems to at least some degree.
Vimpelcom announced in January that it had entered into negotiations with Alfa Eko, the trading arm of the Alfa financial industrial group, which has significant economic dealings in Russia's oil, wine and sugar markets, as well as significant political pull of its own. While no agreement has been announced, recent reports have been that the two sides are close to reaching an agreement.
"My guess is that they're very close to reaching a deal," Braginsky says. "I wouldn't be surprised if Alfa ends up buying a stake in Vimpelcom or in its regional arm."
"Vimpelcom's best hope is to find a domestic investor because they've apparently been talking to many potential foreign backers without much success," he added. "Because of very low valuations, their ability to raise money on the markets is very limited."
And the political value of the partnership shouldn't be underestimated.
"The competition at the national level is ultimately about business, but you still need to have relatively equal weight to that of your competitors," Adshead said. "I don't think that you have to have more backing necessarily, but a degree of parity is important."
TITLE: Cellular Internet Starting Slowly
AUTHOR: By Andrey Musatov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Cellular-communications industry representatives tend to speak glowingly of the technological innovations that have expanded in recent years the range of services providers offer. But, while it is now possible to use handsets to perform as wide a variety of tasks as trading stocks, setting home alarm systems or operating home appliances, cell-phone users - particularly in Russia - continue to be happy to use their phones for calls and simple text messages.
Cellular Internet has been the most touted of the new services offered, but demand for the capability has lagged far behind what companies in the industry had predicted. Market analysts have gone so far as to refer to wireless Internet access as "a stillborn technology."
Access is provided using a special, cellular-based browser, which operates on a different protocol from computer-based browsers. A protocol is a set of rules that electronic devices - in this case, a server and a cellular handset - follow when communicating with each other.
In Russia, Europe and North America the standard is Wireless Access Protocol (WAP), while a second system - i-mode - is the standard in Japan. In the future, this may turn into a battle as NTT DoCoMo, the Japanese company that created the i-mode system, has already announced plans to try to move into the European and North American markets.
I-mode has a number of advantages that might allow it to supplant WAP as the standard technology in these markets. I-mode-equipped handsets have color screens and more advanced sound systems, which makes them more attractive to users wishing to access Internet-based entertainment services.
But, before such a competition can be discussed, the prospects for mobile Internet itself have to be determined. And the gloss has come off many of the industry's early expectations.
According to Sotovik.ru, an Internet-based information agency that monitors trends in the industry, the number of cellular-subscribers who have opted for Internet service remains small. T-Mobile, a cellular-service provider in Germany and subsidiary of European telecommunication's giant Deutsche Telecom, has reported that, of its cellular-phone subscribers, only 1.3 percent use WAP technology and those who do hook up to the Internet using their handsets only about once a week.
In Russia's northwest region, mobile-Internet penetration has also been weak. According to Sotovik.ru, since North-West GWAP-enabled handsets are only a little above 2,000 - close to the European penetration level of about 1 percent.
In Moscow, Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) provides WAP to about 3000 subscribers, of whom only about 100 use WAP once in a day, according to Yuri Rovensky, general director of RosBusinessConsulting, a Moscow-based information agency
"There really hasn't been the kind of breakthrough we thought there would be," Eva Prokofyeva, press officer at MTS - which has been offering wireless Internet access since May 2000 - said in telephone interview. Prokofyeva claims that the chief reason the service has been unpopular is that the rate of data transmission to mobile phones is just too slow, with transmission speeds of under 10K per minute.
"Beyond the question of low transmission speeds, we're also faced with a list of other problems," Prokofyeva said. "People aren't prepared to use the small screens on their phones to do things they are used to doing on the larger screens of computer monitors and televisions."
"One thing that we've discovered is that there are more people with vision difficulties than people with hearing problems."
Svetlana Issayeva, an analyst for Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States at Pyramid Research, says that demand for cellular-Internet services may be low for the simple fact that the number of Russians who have computer-based Internet access is itself relatively small.
"Russia's Internet market is lagging behind the market in Europe," she said last Tuesday at the Strategies for Success in the Russian Internet Industry conference, organized by the Adam Smith Institute in London, England. "We believe that the number of mobile-Internet users in Russia will increase to 500,000 by 2005, which still is not a number that allows us talk about mobile Internet as a very popular technology."
And some industry players say that the lack of interest in cellular-Internet access in Russia may also stem from the basic lack of content offered.
"To make it in the market for these kind of services, what the companies really need today are more content-providers - the people to find the things to put on WAP pages," Dmitry Kondrattsev, manager of the advanced technologies department at MTS, said. "In this case, I agree with the view that WAP services have failed."
TITLE: 3rd-Generation Dreams Have Lost Their Luster
AUTHOR: By Simon Ostrovsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: So-called "third-generation" (3G) technologies once appeared to be the future of cellular communications. While this may still be the case, it now seems that the future is further away than the mobile communications industry previously believed. And while licenses have already been granted in a number of countries, it seems that this step is even further away in Russia.
The auction of Global System for Mobile (GSM) standard licenses in 1998 marked the arrival of second-generation cellular technology in Russia. Two licenses were granted by the Communications Ministry in each of eight regions, and the new standard has quickly come to rival older, analog systems in popularity among subscribers.
3G standards offer certain advantages. They operate using broad-band technology, allowing them to support much higher volumes of information transfer than the GSM standard.
But, partially as a result of European experience with the granting of 3G licenses, Russian cellular companies remain skeptical about the desirability of investing heavily in a technology which may not bring immediate economic returns. The Communications Ministry says it has no concrete plans for issuing 3G licenses, and the lack of interest in these licenses will probably lead the ministry to wait until it can attract higher bids.
The experience with 3G standards in Europe up to now demonstrates why Russian firms have so far been wary of the technology.
Qualcomm, a San Diego, California-based communications technology company, developed the first 3G system - w-CDMA - in the early '90s, touching off a flood of investment on the part of Europe's telecoms heavyweights in the purchase of licenses and bandwidth to operate the new system. The companies ended up paying about as much for these - about $300 billion in total - as they will have to invest in developing the necessary infrastructure to use the new technology.
Soon after coming up with w-CDMA, Qualcomm CEO Irwin Jacobs decided to move in another direction, with Qualcomm and U.S. companies like Verizon and Sprint now planning to utilize a standard which will require less overhaul of existing networks, and is incompatible with the w-CDMA standard. Unlike w-CDMA, the newer 3G standard - CDMA2000 - can work on existing bandwidths and does not require the construction of new relay towers.
The switch ruffled some feathers. British cellular giant Vodafone has feuded with Verizon wireless, a U.S. provider in which it has significant ownership, over the latter's plans to work with the CDMA2000 standard, sparking rumors that Vodafone could pull out of Verizon or, conversely, try to take it over.
At the root of the conflict is the question of handset sales in the United States. When European governments and companies opted for the w-CDMa standard they assumed that the U.S. cellular market would also operate on the standard. But the CDMA2000 standard means either producing two lines of products - one for each standard - or surrendering the market to U.S. producers.
All of these hardware questions aside, the biggest fear is that the new standards may not be as popular as initially expected.
Analysts say that this lack of demand for services on 3G standards will probably affect the situation in the Russian market.
"A lot of people will wait and see before they invest money in a technology that may not take off," said Tom Adshead, senior analyst at Troika dialogue.
Adshead also said it was likely that 3G licenses would be offered for tender before the end of the year, but that companies would spend more for the bandwidth needed to run the systems than for the licenses themselves.
Despite the number of factors that have dampened earlier enthusiasm for 3G standards, industry officials and analysts say CDMA standards still hold promise.
"The critical thing will be what the 2.5G services provide," Adshead says. 2.5G is the label given to the intermediary level between handsets of the GSM standard and those of the third generation. They offer some of the services that the newer handsets will provide, and GSM subscribers may warm to 3G technology if they are attracted by the possibilities offered by the new sets.
Another factor is that cellular companies don't want to get left behind by new technologies. Two St. Petersburg providers - Fora and Delta - both offer services based on older, analog standards. Both trail North-West GSM in total number of subscribers.
"Operators are going into 3G as if it were a beauty contest," Andrei Braginsky, a telecommunications analyst at Renaissance Capital, says, "They're doing it even if they don't plan to provide services in the new standard any time soon."
So Russian companies are hedging their bets. Most major GSM providers have already acquired 3G test packages and are in the process of setting up trial networks.
"Our 3G technology trials will begin in April," said Yeva Pro ko vye va, a spokesperson for Moscow-based cellular provider Mobile Tele System (MTS). "The test packages we're working with were provided free of charge by Motorola, Lucent and Siemens."
North-West GSM is at an earlier stage of developing 3G services then their Moscow counterparts.
"Right now we are deciding whose technology to use in our 3G tests, and are working on the development of a test network," said Mikhail Mantsirev, who works at North-West GSM's department of new technologies and regional development. "My personal opinion is that North-West GSM will start providing 3G services in St. Petersburg in 2003, but that the network will grow slowly because coverage will be limited. Second generation technology will coexist with 3G for a long time."
TITLE: St. Petersburg Realtor One of Few Who Stayed
TEXT: Sebastian FitzLyon holds a British passport, lives in an apartment along the Moika River that once belonged to his grandfather, Lev Zinoviev, and came to St. Petersburg 10 years ago from Australia.
That a businessman with such a list of diverse addresses should be involved in real estate probably makes sense. That his company, S. Zinovieff and Co., is named after his grandfather, who owned a timber mill and a foundry near St. Petersburg and was also a deputy in the last Russian Duma in 1917, is a testimony to his pride in his Russian roots.
FitzLyon talked with staff writer Thomas Rymer about the changes in St. Petersburg's business climate and the nature of doing business in Russia today.
Q: Could you give us a little background about your company?
A: We are a relatively small company. We have about three dozen people working here, and we have three functions: real estate evaluation and appraisal, architectural consultancy - including project management and building and surveying, and then thirdly we have a small real estate agency, so we buy and sell buildings and lease off-season apartments.
Q: Are your sales largely commercial?
A: Yes, largely commercial, but we do some residential as well.
One of the projects we're involved in right now is quite interesting on the architectural side. We are restoring a pavilion on Yelagin Island. On the island there is an 18th century pavilion built by Rossi and our client, the World Monuments Fund is paying for us to organize the restoration of the pavilion to its former glory.
We've had quite a bit of coverage in the Russian press because when we started the work we dug out the earth floor and discovered the walls of a previous pavilion, which no one had known about.
Q: What's the total cost of the project?
A: It's under a quarter of a million dollars, so it's not very much. But it's the first of what could be quite a large number of projects here. The World Monument Fund has actually been looking, with our assistance, at the Chinese Palace and at the eastern wing of the General Staff Building on Palace Square.
Q: Is that in connection with the work the Hermitage is doing there in conjunction with the Guggenheim Museum?
A: Very much so, yes. That project was one of our jobs. We had to take a look at the condition of the General Staff Building and examine various parts of the building, so it was very interesting.
Q: You were one of the first western businessman to set up a business here in 1992. What was it like working here then?
A: Well, it was a very different situation than today, there was a lot less pessimism than there is now. Nobody really knew how Russia would turn out, but quite a few people were here on the basis of the idea that it was going to turn out very well. I think that it's too easy to look back and laugh at developers who were looking at working on quite big schemes in St. Petersburg and Moscow back then, because if it hadn't been for the political problems that have continued to flair up here and there, there would have been quite a bit of development here. So I don't think one should criticize the early developers too much.
But most of the people who looked at St. Petersburg in the early '90s left not so much when Yeltsin fired on the parliament building in the autumn of 1993, but in the following spring when the Liberal Democratic Party won such a large block of seats in the parliament.
One can look at the development of business here, particularly in real estate, as being pre-spring 1994 and post-spring 1994. That was the watershed. Those who stayed on were few and far between.
Talking about real estate, there are probably only about 10 firms who have stayed on and managed to flourish.
Q: How have they managed to flourish?
A: If one tries to find a common thread through those 10 or so businesses, it is probably the fact that they have got permanent representation here. It's impossible, or at least very difficult, to do anything here unless you have some sort of permanent representation. Some people have succeeded, but it's extremely difficult.
I think that sheer determination is the second point, and the third is a love for St. Petersburg over other Eastern markets, such as in Poland.
Q: You mentioned the Polish market. Have realtors been more successful in the Polish market?
A: Yes. The market there has organized itself more quickly and I think the reason for that is that the destruction of, to put it bluntly, the people and their souls and their ability to organize themselves as individuals has been far more complete than it was on the Soviet satellite states. Poland was a free and capitalist country - more or less democratic - until it was invaded in 1939, whereas Russia had three quarters of a century of the rubbing out and destruction of the ethos of personal initiative, personal responsibility, competition and enterprise. Perhaps it's better to talk about the destruction of the ethos than of the people. Those natural human instincts were almost totally obliterated by the communist regime. That's one of the biggest difficulties.
Two stories [last] week tend to epitomize for me the good and the bad - the transformation and the lack of transformation.
I was queuing up for lunch in a cafe with one of my colleagues, and someone I know very well here who is a very good businessman and consultant and, I would say, a well-rounded modern capitalist who would fit in any developed society.
My colleague said to him: "I think I know you. Back in 1981 you were our lecturer in scientific communism." [laughs]. The poor chap went bright red and was embarrassed that she had said this in front of me because I'm one of his business contacts. He was sort of upset that I knew about this. I was just in hysterics. I found it incredibly funny.
The second happening is very sad. I know this week of quite a thing - a doctor, the head of a department who was still working well after reaching retirement age, and she died last week.
She worked all of her life as a doctor. During the Second World War she was in the Soviet Army and took part in the defense of Leningrad from the Pulkovo heights.
When she died, her family simply did not have enough money to bury her, so her body was taken to the hospital and put in the morgue freezer, because they didn't know what to do with her body. They didn't have the money to pay the bribes and whatever else was necessary to have this fantastic, wonderful person buried.
This is the other end of the scale, showing how little progress there has been and the terrible state the city is in. Anyone who tries to pretend that this situation doesn't exist is just burying his head in the sand.
Q: If we've come to this point here, then I guess the question is 'Is there a way out.' Another thing that happened [last] week is that President Putin gave a so-called "State of the Nation" address. We hear all the time about transparency, better corporate governance, and the dictatorship of laws. How would you evaluate the first year of the Putin administration and its commitment to moving forward in connection with these issues?
A: I think they do have a commitment. Nothing has really happened this year because I think that Putin and his friends and advisors - many of whom are his former colleagues - are very careful people. This comes basically from the nature of the business they were in before - the security forces - and the sort of people that the Soviet security forces tended to take on.
Ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union - almost 10 years after - it's becoming quite clear how the amoebae under the microscope has been splitting up, subdividing and reforming. The business amoebae is beginning to develop so that there are several distinct layers of business which really haven't been talked about that openly, but which exist.
Q: For example?
A: Well, I'm not so sure I should say this, but I will. One is the very effective strata of businesses here of the Communist Party and the KGB.
Business is really segmented into four basic segments. The first is the ex-Communists and KGB group. Another is largely ethnic in nature. A third consists of very young, talented and energetic Russians who are getting where they are by dint of their personality and strength. And the fourth is the criminal segment. There are other sub-groups, but those are the four chief segments of business in Russia today.
The Communist Party-KGB layer is extremely effective, and it's very much like the American old-boy network, the Harvard network, or the British private school network. It's important for me to stress that I'm not in any way trying to justify or dismiss the very negative and brutal actions of the organizations these people worked for, but I think that this segment of business is extremely well-organized. The people are very reliable, honest, intelligent and well-educated. There is nothing evil and sinister about this segment of business society today. I think they do have the country's best interests at heart.
When one thinks about it, it's really quite a logical development because the Party, and the security forces to an even greater extent, deliberately went out looking for talented and, at the same time conformist, people in the universities and the schools ...
Q: Vladimir Putin, for example.
A: For example, Vladimir Putin. After the collapse of the Soviet system, what could one really expect these people to do. It's not as if we could expect them to throw their hands up and say "we are all bad, we are all evil because we served in an evil system so for the rest of our lives we're just going to hang our heads in shame." Of course not. Because they are intelligent people who have received very good organizational training, they have tended to, naturally, go into business and help each other in business. People in business tend to form associations with and to employ people they know - especially in Russia.
Q: Is that goup moving fast enough to limprove business conditions?
A: Of course they're not. The bureaucracy here is absolutely terrible and the result of the non-privatization of land is also terrible. Why else does a country import 60 percent of its food. A country can't become stable and successful if it can't feed itself. You just have to take a drive outside St. Petersburg to see that there are no farm animals, there are no crops and the countryside is just dead. Drive across the border to Finland and it's like you're driving onto another world. That story is repeated all the way across Russia. Of course they're not moving ahead fast enough.
The question is really "Can they move fast enough, can they move faster?" The answer is that, if they did try to move faster, they would run the danger of civil unrest. I assume that Putin is trying to avoid this by moving ahead very carefully.
TITLE: Telecom Companies Face Monopoly-Law Changes
AUTHOR: By James T. Hitch and Sergey Nosov
TEXT: THE Russian Federation's Antimonopoly Ministry has recently changed the rules for the maintenance of the Register of Natural Monopolists, which may seriously and adversely affect all of the telecommunications companies doing business in Russia.
In accordance with RF Law No. 147-FZ "On Natural Monopolies" of August 17, 1995, a "natural monopoly" is defined as a state of the market, where the satisfaction of consumer demand is more effective in the absence of competition; the goods (services) produced by the "natural monopolists" cannot be replaced by other goods (services); and, therefore, the demand for such goods (services) of the natural monopolists relies on price fluctuation to a lesser extent than the demand for other goods (services).
Natural monopolies are possible only in a limited number of areas of the economy, which include primarily publicly available services, such as electric power and other utilities, telecommunications, and postal services.
Consequently, the inclusion of a telecommunications company into the Register of Natural Monopolists would make such a company subject to tighter antimonopoly regulation and control, which could well have a serious adverse effect on its business.
In particular, such regulation and control include: (1) determining the prices, i.e., tariffs for the services of such natural monopolists or the thresholds for such tariffs; (2) giving binding orders to such natural monopolists requiring them to provide mandatory services to certain consumers; (3) exercising control over the general business and investment activities of such natural monopolists, which includes the imposition of quite significant disclosure requirements on such natural monopolists; and (4) exercising stricter control over transactions involving shares of natural monopolists.
The procedure for maintaining the Register of Natural Monopolists in the area of telecommunications was determined by Order No. 21 of the ministry of Jan. 18, 2000. From that date until Oct. 13, 2000, Order No. 21 provided that the ministry could include a company into the Register of Natural Monopolists in the area of telecommunications on the basis of several criteria taken together, such as: (1) the actual impossibility of consumers to get the same or similar services from other companies; (2) a valid telecommunications license; and (3) the actual providing of telecommunications services by such company to consumers.
After the introduction on Oct. 13, 2000, of certain amendments of Order No. 21, the ministry may now include into the Register of Natural Monopolists any company, which has a valid telecommunications license, even if the providing of telecommunications services is not the main business of such company.
It should be noted that, due to the above-mentioned amendments of Order No. 21, all telecommunications companies in Russia, regardless of their respective shares of the Russian telecommunications market, may now be included into the Register of Natural Monopolists, which appears to be questionable from the legal point of view.
Having said that, it may be extremely difficult for a telecommunications company to challenge a decision by Antimonopoly Ministry to include that company into the Register of Natural Monopolists without also challenging the legality of the amendments of Order No. 21 themselves.
Unfortunately, since these amendments represent a normative act of a federal ministry, i.e., the Antimonopoly Ministry, a telecommunications company may need to bring legal action in the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation in order to challenge the amendments of Order No. 21.
James T. Hitch is managing partner and Sergey Nosov an associate at Baker & McKenzie's St. Petersburg office.
TITLE: Local Radio Lost in the Shuffle
AUTHOR: By Anna Shcherbakova
TEXT: TWO conflicts - both concerning the mass media - were the focus of public attention last week. One was the scandal surrounding the national TV channel NTV and the abrupt and highly contested change of management there. The channel even stopped broadcasting anything except news and advertisements for a day (meaning that in times of emergency NTV wanted to keep both its audience and its ad revenues).
The second conflict had more of a purely St. Petersburg angle, when a local radio station controlled by City Hall lost influence when switched from the first button to the third on fixed receiver radios. Ultimately, by losing its first-button place, Petersburg Radio lost everything.
The management of the station claims it has lost the majority of its audience, as well as 99 percent of its advertising revenue. But it is well known that Petersburg Radio was never a magnet for advertisers, and its employees are paid miserable salaries. Furthermore, its high ratings were no great feat, given that when you're on that first button, you have nothing in the way of competition.
So, unlike struggling NTV, Petersburg Radio does not operate as a commercial enterprise at all. Political factors aside, this is the main difference between the two outlets.
The Petersburg Radio and Television Company is a rare beast: It is not part of a network, and has no external shareholders. All it does is point like a weathercock in whichever direction the winds of Smolny dictate.
It is also suspicious of outsiders - strange, given that investment in the publishing and television business comes mostly from Moscow or abroad. Scandinavian companies own a couple of successful newspapers in St. Petersburg, for example.
Usually, modern technology and know-how come hand-in-hand with money invested. The latest example is the Finnish publishing concern, Sanoma WSOY, which purchased 19 percent of the local daily Smena. Sanoma is going to change the printing house, raise circulation and increase advertising revenues.
Given what happened to Petersburg Radio, it's worth noting that Smena will be competing with another city daily, Vecherny Peterburg, whose connections to City Hall are very tight. Vecherny Peterburg recently changed its management and announced plans to invest $350,000 in turning the paper into a tabloid. Has Smolny recognized it's time to develop the local publishing sector?
TITLE: Out of Control
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kuznetsov
TEXT: IN the wake of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the Soviet government suspended the development of its nuclear industry. For 10 years no nuclear power plants were brought into operation, and the nuclear research industry suffered severe cutbacks. But over the last few years, Russia's Nuclear Power Ministry has once again begun to expand - and, unfortunately, to expand at the expense of safety.
Originally created to produce plutonium for weapons, the former Soviet Union's nuclear-energy program still retains many of its old trappings: secrecy, a dubious safety record and considerable lobbying power with whoever is in power. A 1998 report from Russia's State Atomic Inspection Agency, or GAN, which is not usually very critical of the ministry, highlighted increasing instability and worsening safety conditions at Russian nuclear power plants. Moreover, outdated and unreliable equipment, as well as the lack of proper training for plant technicians, do not bode well for safe nuclear-power development in Russia.
As strange as it may seem, money from Western governments donated to Russia for the reconstruction and upgrading of existing nuclear-power stations plays an important role in the Nuclear Power Ministry's expansion. Western aid frees large sums of money from state coffers that would otherwise have to be spent making existing plants safe. Western aid, therefore, only hastens the construction of new nuclear power stations. The Rostovsky plant in Volgodonsk, which has benefited from Western cash, is expected to come into operation in the near future, although officials have repeatedly postponed the start-up date. The construction of outdated and potentially dangerous projects continues, such as block number 5 at Kurskaya (in southern Russia near Chechnya) with Chernobyl-type RBMK reactors and block number 3 at Kalininskaya.
In terms of the likelihood of a nuclear accident, Russia is more dangerous than ever before. Twenty-nine reactors are currently in operation at nine nuclear power stations in Russia, producing 21,242 megawatts of electricity per year. In 1998 there were 102 incidents at Russian nuclear power stations, 23 more than in 1997. One of these incidents had a third-level classification and two were given a first-level rating. Incidents at nuclear power plants are rated by international energy agencies from zero to seven, the disaster at Chernobyl being a seven.
Most functioning plants operate according to outdated security rules and norms that were instituted back when the plants were originally constructed. Today not one of Russia's nuclear power plants fully meets modern safety requirements, especially in terms of breaches in reactor operations. Serious violations of regulations and technical requirements occur regularly, occasionally resulting in radiation exposure to plant personnel.
Such violations usually occur because plant workers are either poorly trained or simply incompetent. A 1998 report by GAN noted the increasing number of shutdowns at nuclear power plants. The report concluded that "recent personnel changes in management of the state energy company Rosenergoatom and certain nuclear power stations have led to the worsening management of nuclear energy and reduced stability in the functioning of nuclear power stations." Russia's brain drain is also cause for concern, as highly qualified personnel have left the country for better jobs and are often replaced by underqualified technicians.
This perilous situation is made still worse by wear-and-tear on existing equipment. Financing for replacement equipment is insufficient or even non-existent. Some aging reactors lack proper containment vessels, reliable control technology and emergency core-cooling systems, all of which are normal features of modern plants. Perhaps even more than cash, however, these plants need greater regulation and a timetable for the permanent shutdown of first- and second-generation reactor types, which simply do not meet modern safety requirements. A mechanism for the proper disposal of radioactive waste is also imperative.
Observers have also been alarmed by a 1998 European Union report on the TACIS assistance program. Of the $1 billion that the EU has donated to this program, only one-third was spent as it should have been. Evidence suggests that the bulk of the money was stolen or, at best, misappropriated. Analyzing the results for 1990 to 1997, the report's authors came to the worrying conclusion that no progress in the field of nuclear energy had been made and that the world is not necessarily safe from a second Chernobyl.
Because of Russia's long-term economic slump, power plants are increasingly operating with a deficit. The state-mandated low price of nuclear energy does not cover the cost of production. Nonpayment by commercial and private consumers is rife, barter payments are still widely used and funds allocated from the state budget are frequently not disbursed.
In recent years, power station debts to their suppliers have grown faster than debts owed to the plants by their customers. The prices charged by outside companies for such services as the removal and burial of radioactive waste and the decontamination of radiation suits have risen significantly. As of last August, Russian nuclear power plants owed 23.8 billion rubles to suppliers, while they were owed 21.8 billion rubles by their customers.
As the country seeks a way out of its economic malaise, the outlook for nuclear power seems bleak. Even a small nuclear accident would wipe out any progress that has been made over the last decade and could even threaten the stability of the entire political system. Nonetheless, the Nuclear Power Ministry continues to lobby every government that comes to power with new schemes and development plans. But none of them have taken into consideration the needs of the people of Russia or the country's long-term interests.
Vladimir Kuznetsov is the editor of Radiation and Society published by the International Green Cross. He is also a member of the Independent Experts Association, an organization that campaigns for the safe use of nuclear energy. He contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.
TITLE: Apathetic Generation Has To Wake Itself Up
AUTHOR: By Maria Danilova
TEXT: AS I was turning the pages of a thick tourism magazine, I sighed at how frustrating it was facing the choice of a zillion cities and resorts to spend my summer holidays. When my mother heard me, she said sadly, "I wish we had the same opportunities to travel anywhere we liked when I was your age."
It seems that already the people of my generation - high-school and university students - can barely imagine what it must have been like when travel abroad was prohibited. We have, it seems, already grown accustomed to the rights and freedoms that our parents were denied and for which they had to fight.
Nonetheless, I felt obliged to attend the rally in support of freedom of speech that was held on Pushkin Square in Moscow on March 31. I was very glad to see some students dancing on top of cars and a few others even climbing trees in order to get a better view of the stage. But I have to admit that it was mostly older people who crowded the square that day. I saw mostly people over 40.
It is not hard to understand why these people joined the rally. They will never forget the years of repression, fear and hypocrisy that they endured under the Soviet Union. They will hardly forget Soviet television, where faceless anchors with mechanical voices were telling them non-stop bullshit about our country being the biggest, the strongest and the most prosperous. Now that I think about it, I suppose the part about being "the biggest" was true... But I am sure that it was these memories that brought the older generation out when NTV came under threat.
However, traditionally, it has always been young people who stood at the center of protests, demonstrations and meaningful social movements. Such efforts depend on the courage, romanticism and optimism of students.
But have Russia's younger generation fallen asleep? Why were there more pensioners dancing to the popular rock bands than students for whom they were invited?
Fortunately, we - the younger generation - don't share the bitter memories of Soviet times that our parents and grandparents have. Maybe that is why the threat of lost freedom doesn't seem as real to us. But in spite of that, we must be conscious of what is happening around us. If we - the future of Russia - do not respond and react now, who will?
Ten years ago, our parents won the rights and freedoms that we posses now. Back then, we were too young to take part. Today, on the other hand, we have no right not to do so. Today we must participate. Because if we remain passive and indifferent, all that our parents have acquired will go down the drain.
Maria Danilova is a third-year student at Moscow State University. She contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.
TITLE: U.S. 'Realism' Seems Arrogant
AUTHOR: By Pavel Felgenhauer
TEXT: THE ousting of Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev and his replacement by President Vladimir Putin's right-hand man, Sergei Ivanov, has generated some hope that meaningful military reform will get underway at last. But this hope of reform will be unlikely to improve U.S.-Russian relations at all.
In February, Ivanov surprised an international security conference in Munich with an uncompromising speech that denounced Western plans to further expand NATO as well as America's intention to deploy a national missile defense. Ivanov announced that the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty is a cornerstone of international security and that it forbids the deployment of any NMD. Ivanov added that abrogation of the ABM Treaty would begin a new arms race, including an arms race in space.
U.S. President George W. Bush has stated that NMD is a national priority and has announced his intention to proceed no matter what Moscow says. This position contrasts with that of the Clinton administration, which also wanted to deploy a limited NMD but recognized the need to negotiate with Moscow changes to the ABM Treaty. Bush's administration seems to be characterized by a tendency toward unilateralism and particularly a desire to withdraw from the existing network of international agreements in order to gain a free hand in foreign affairs.
Several months ago the Kremlin hailed Bush's election victory. The political elite believed that a Republican administration would be "realistic" and would be accommodating to Putin and his party of Kremlin "realists." However, it now appears the Kremlin got more realism from Washington than it bargained for. Quite realistically, the Americans consider Russia a weak nation that is getting weaker with each passing year. Of course, they are unwilling to seriously negotiate on strategic matters or make any significant concessions to such a country. Last month Ivanov met with Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, in Washington and the meeting did not go well. By all accounts, both sides agreed to disagree and parted.
Bush wants to create a "robust" missile defense: a system that would include not only land-based interceptors, but also sea-, air- and space-based interceptors ready for forward deployment near the territory of any potential enemy and capable of shooting down missiles at their boost stage immediately after take-off. This means that Clinton's offer to renegotiate the ABM Treaty is off the table, because it would mean forfeiting this robust option.
Evidently, the best Moscow can hope for now is an open-ended proposal that would allow the United States to deploy land-based interceptors that are already under construction and allow for development of non-land-based systems with an understanding that they will also be deployed as soon as they are ready. Such a proposal is, of course, not a modification but a demolition of the ABM Treaty.
At the same time that it is destroying the ABM Treaty, the Bush administration also seems intent on undermining offensive arms-control agreements by announcing a unilateral cut in U.S. strategic warheads that means the end of the START arms-control process. A unilateral arms reduction may be a good public-relations exercise, but it will also remove all binding international limitations on U.S. weapons - meaning that America will be equally free to unilaterally build up its arsenals at any time.
The ABM Treaty issue is not the only sign of the Bush administration's unilateralism. Last week, Bush announced that the United States is withdrawing from the Kyoto agreement on greenhouse gas emissions. It's also clear that the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would ban nuclear testing altogether, will never be ratified under Bush. The United States seems enchanted with its status as the world's only superpower and is ready to completely disregard the opinions of its closest allies - to say nothing of Russia. Instead of global leadership, the United States is demonstrating arrogance and unpredictability.
The Kremlin, in turn, is acting no less irresponsibly by providing excuses for U.S. hawks to ruin international security. Moscow's efforts to occupy the moral high ground on arms control or the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia have been invalidated by atrocities committed in Chechnya and Russia's eagerness to sell modern weapons to states like Libya, Cuba and Iran. Russian enthusiasm for sharing sensitive technologies with anyone who has cash is one of the main U.S. excuses for pushing ahead on NMD, a step that will only produce more proliferation.
Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent Moscow-based defense analyst.
TITLE: NTV's Fate Is Schroeder's Problem, Too
TEXT: ACCORDING to reports, discussions between German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and President Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg will touch (but not dwell) upon the NTV crisis.
Most likely, Schroeder will express his "concern" and Putin will respond by assuring his guest that he is committed to freedom of the press. And then they'll change the subject.
But that would be a shame. Many in the West do not seem to understand the broad significance of the NTV conflict. The NTV journalists have clearly struck a chord with citizens throughout Russia. Some regional cities held rallies and started gathering signatures in opposition to the takeover of NTV and a de facto state monopoly of national television even before Moscow did. In recent days, these protest actions have touched dozens of cities.
If these citizens put no stock in Putin's lukewarm defense of press freedom and the Kremlin's claims that the takeover is merely a private business dispute (albeit one with extremely convenient consequences for the authorities), then neither should Schroeder. Europe needs not just a stable neighbor (such as it had during the Soviet era), but a stable, democratic neighbor (such as it has never had in Russia).
If Russia had a more vigorous non-state press, countries like Switzerland and Spain would probably not find themselves dragged into its murky legal disputes, and the contours of the international debt problem that Schroeder and Putin will also discuss would most likely be entirely different.
And then there is the regional dimension. The West does not seem to realize that NTV was a vital source of information not just for Russia, but for the entire former Soviet Union.
Liberal-minded citizens throughout the FSU are worried about NTV. Activists from Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia and other FSU countries have expressed alarm. "We citizens of other countries also need NTV, just like free-thinking Russians do," wrote Azer Hasret, chairman of the Journalists' Trade Union of Azerbaijan. "By attacking NTV, Russia is setting a bad example for the other post-Soviet countries, including Azerbaijan. The struggle for freedom of the press in Russia is also the struggle for the same freedom in the other countries of the FSU."
Schroeder should keep all of these issues in mind when Putin trots out the "it's just a business dispute" line. The truth is that this conflict will have long-lasting ramifications throughout the region, ramifications that could cost Europe a bundle. Some serious talk from Schroeder now could really make a difference.
TITLE: Kremlin Is About To Reap What It Sowed
TEXT: WELL, the Kremlin has stepped on its own rake. For an entire year now, the Kremlin has been suffocating the non-state media and has made itself believe that the only true information is what it receives from those media outlets that are loyal to it. Thus, the Kremlin has left itself without any means of assessing the real state of affairs across the country. By doing so, it has proven the wisdom of the axiom that there is no good management without good, unbiased information.
The blow-up came on the very day that President Vladimir Putin delivered his annual state-of-the-nation address to parliament. On the same day, Gazprom-Media - the state's surrogate in its war against the only national, opposition-oriented television network in Russia - held a shareholders meeting that changed the top management of NTV's news room. By appointing Boris Jordan, a businessman with a murky reputation, as general director and Vladimir Kulistikov, the current head of RIA-Novosti (the state-propaganda news agency and the former journalistic cover of the KGB), as editor-in-chief, Gazprom and the Kremlin made it perfectly clear even to those who wanted to give the state the benefit of the doubt that this conflict is not just about business. It is about politics.
The spate of public demonstrations in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other cities across the country have proven that the people have figured this out. The state, which during the last year has emerged as the biggest and most powerful oligarch in Russia, already owns two major national television networks and is eager to put the third - and last - under its thumb as well, leaving no room for discord.
The NTV crisis has placed another big question mark over President Putin's real intentions. His speech last week was widely regarded as extremely liberal, especially its emphasis on the de-bureaucratization of economic life. However, the Kremlin's deeds of the same day speak much louder than Putin's words.
After the non-state media is swept aside, the hands of the bureaucracy will be even less restrained than they are now, lacking in fact any control whatsoever. It sounds like a cruel joke: Russia's bureaucracy waging the fight for de-bureaucratization.
Almost as funny is the attempt to present Boris Jordan as a savior of the free press for no other reason than that he was born in America. By this logic, Marc Rich can claim to be a human-rights activist and Al Capone a champion of individual entreprenuership battling state regulation. The other day I asked a well-known Moscow financial manager (who asked not to be identified) why the Kremlin chose Jordan. He responded: "Because no businessman with any decent reputation would get involved in these dirty games."
Sources close to the Kremlin have a somewhat different answer. "Jordan's appointment will be well-received in the West," they say. "He is American, so Westerners will think that he cannot be against freedom of the press." This simplistic logic illustrates the intellectual level of those who are running the Kremlin now. By the same logic, they thought that the timing of the two events - Putin's speech and the NTV crisis - would do Putin no harm.
In short, the Kremlin made a huge, but unavoidable mistake. Enchanted by Putin's high popularity rating and lacking proper information, his advisers decided that no dissident voices had survived the last year. In fact, the opposite has happened. Independent-minded people see the state's assault on NTV as the last straw. They were ready to tolerate Putin's KGB-influenced management style until he decided to nationalize what these people see as the only property they have acquired over a decade of dubious reform - their freedom of speech.
The Kremlin has gotten used to overlooking people with brains and voices but with little money, believing cynically that everyone can be bought. It will soon learn that there are still people in Russia capable of valuing freedom higher even than their own self-preservation.
Yevgenia Albats is an independent, Moscow-based journalist.
TITLE: Monumental Work on Auschwitz Should Put an End to Holocaust Denial
AUTHOR: By Hans Knight
TEXT: ONCE upon a time, as a reporter for the Philadelphia Bulletin, I asked a group of bright high-school seniors what they knew about Adolf Hitler. By then, the Fuehrer had long been dead, so most of the answers were not surprising. They went something like this: "He was a bad character. He started World War II. He did a lot for the German people."
Then, I asked the group what they knew about Hitler's attitude toward Jews.
"Oh," replied one young man with a touch of boredom, "You mean that 6 million bit?"
I felt a chill then and, so help me, I feel a chill now, as I write this and ponder his words: "You mean that 6 million bit?"
What brought this memory back was a recent New York Times article reporting that researchers in Poland, drawing on captured German documents newly available from Russian archives and more than five decades of Auschwitz studies, have compiled what experts call the most complete and authoritative history of the vast killing center.
"Auschwitz 1940-1945," is a five-volume work that fills 1,799 pages, and includes construction plans for gas chambers, crematories, prisoner lists, first-hand accounts, rare photographs, an almost day-by-day calendar and a 49-page bibliography.
The exact death toll at Auschwitz probably will never be known. Too many thousands of documents were destroyed by fleeing camp guards. But the history establishes that by the time the Russian troops liberated Auschwitz 56 years ago, about 1.3 million men, women and children had been transported there and at least 1.1 million, including 960,000 Jews, perished there.
The monumental work has evoked well-merited praise. "It is by far the most comprehensive in its detail and level of source material," said Rabbi Irving Greenberg, chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. And Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting office of Special Investigations, calls it "clearly a landmark work and a major contribution to scholarship."
These are fine words. Certainly, telling the whole story - can there ever be such a thing? - of the efficiently administered murder machine that was Auschwitz might help lift the shroud with which we often cover horrific events. At the very least, it should inspire some of us to urge the grave-defiling Holocaust deniers (there are still too many of their ilk around) to get a life. Better yet, to shut up.
Not long after that bored high school kid favored me with his icy remark, I met a survivor of Auschwitz. The woman's tattoo was barely visible. "I had it taken off in London, years ago. Why? Because people would constantly ask me, 'My God, what is that?'
And I would start to explain, but this is not a subject to talk about at a cocktail party for polite conversation." For the record, her number was 31386.
She held a photograph up to the light in her apartment. It showed a young girl in a short woolen dress. The girl is skating. At the moment the camera clicked, she was skating on one leg, her arms spread out like a bird's wings.
"My sister, Sala," the woman told me. "A beautiful girl full of fun. A fine athlete. She died in my arms. She was 17, and she died with a faint smile on her face. The probable cause of death was typhoid. The date was April 10, 1943. The place was Auschwitz."
The woman was 12 years old when her sister died in the death camp. She was born in the town of Grodno, now located in Belarus. In June of 1941, the German army conquered the town. "As Jews, we were not allowed to walk on the sidewalks. We had to wear a yellow band, then a blue Star of David."
"Whenever a German soldier wanted some fun, he would just walk into a home and break objects of great sentimentality. Pictures, toys, instruments. I saw people clubbed to death in front of our house."
One Sunday in November 1942, without warning, the Jews were rounded up. Her parents were taken to Auschwitz in a cramped train. She never saw them again.
In a ghetto set up by the Nazis, the two girls worked in a tobacco factory. One morning their luck ran out.
"The sun was very bright and it was bitter cold. We were rounded up by screaming German guards with dogs and whistles and swinging rubber sticks. We were shoved into cattle cars. Destination Auschwitz. Many people died before we got there. They were lucky. We were cramped like sardines. We had no sanitation facilities, water or food.
"I kept thinking of the times my mother would make me eat and I would refuse because I wasn't hungry. We finally stepped off at a platform. The wind and the cold hit my face and it was the only nice thing I remember. The name Auschwitz was clearly written on a sign, but I didn't know yet what the name would mean to us. The devil in his wildest dreams couldn't have conceived such a place."
Most of the new arrivals, she said, never saw the inside of the camp. They were immediately sent to the gas chambers. The SS man making the selection would simply flick his thumb either to the left or the right. "My sister noticed the small group and pushed me toward it. I wore my mother's long coat, which partly covered my face so they didn't see how young I was. Perhaps that saved me."
In the block to which she was assigned, somebody usually died during the night. "I remember thinking, I hope the space next to me will be empty so I can breathe during the night. Around 5:30 in the morning came roll call. Everybody was ordered outside. We would then stand for a few hours in either heat or cold.
"The first few months I worked in a kommando, carrying heavy stones to build ammunition depots. It was very heavy labor. Twenty minutes for lunch. Every single day, when we came back from work, there were selections for the gas chambers. There was a man named Tauber. He was in charge of the women's camp. He made us jump across a ditch. Those who could not make it were killed.
"I don't know where I got the strength, I guess it was an escape from reality that saved me. I became terribly ill. Somehow, I wound up in the gentile hospital in the camp, and I was hidden by the inmates who were Christians. My sister had died by then. Because I was so young, I was like a novelty and people were more human to me."
After the camp's liberation in the spring of 1945, her odyssey took her to Prague, London and eventually to America.
"There were 48 members in our family," she said. "I alone lived. I will never know why. I know one thing. I do not want to live through another Auschwitz. I would rather kill my children and myself."
My guess is that the book called "Auschwitz 1940-1945" will not be a bestseller. Not enough happy endings, too many repetitions of oft-told tales, presumably.
But there is a chance that some of it might filter through to our young, and the "6 million bit" might not trip so easily off their tongues.
Hans Knight is a professional journalist who also worked as a translator at the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi war criminals. He contributed this essay to The Baltimore Sun.
TITLE: RUBLE AROUND TOWN
TEXT: Monday's ruble/dollar rates in St. Petersburg:
Address Buy Sell
Avto Bank 119 Moskovsky Prospect 28.30 28.95
Alfa Bank 6 Kanal Griboyedova 28.00 28.90
BaltUneximbank Grand Hotel Europe 27.40 29.20
Baltiisky Bank 34 Sadovaya Ulitsa 28.40 29.19
Bank Sankt Peterburg 108 Ligovsky Prospect 28.30 28.95
Impexbank 58 Nevsky Prospect 28.25 29.00
Petrovsky Narodny Bank 7 Moika Naberezhnaya 28.30 28.95
Promstroi Bank 4 Mikhailovskaya Ulitsa 28.35 28.95
RusRegion Bank 54 Nevsky Prospect 28.72 28.95
Sberbank 4 Dumskaya Ulitsa 28.00 29.05
Viking Bank 17 Vladimirsky Prospect 28.00 28.95
Average 28.18 29.00
Change from last week -0.03 +0.11
TITLE: The Rough Guide to Arrest and Detention
AUTHOR: By Masha Kaminskaya
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Editor's Note - This is the final part of a series of articles dealing with legal problems in St. Petersburg.
According to Russian law, every individual is subject to the same provisions and entitled to the same rights, no matter whether he or she is a citizen of the Russian Federation or a foreigner on Russian soil. Law is not always applied correctly in everyday situations in Russia, but one should bear in mind that however accurately enforced it is, Russian law, and particularly encounters with the police, should never be taken lightly.
If you are a foreigner, however, you will still be given a degree of special treatment if you find yourself handcuffed by someone in uniform who does not understand English, or if you have been robbed on the street and want to make an official statement and look into the possibility of retrieval.
"Visitors from Western countries are usually law-abiding people," says a police officer from Police Precinct No. 28 in central St. Petersburg, who wished to remain anonymous. "They stick to the rules and don't go in for wild behavior such as domestic fights or hooliganism."
The officer's most important tip is that those who cannot speak good Russian should carry a Russian phrase book with them. If, for example, a foreigner is a victim of a robbery, he says, then communication with police officers will be vital if there is to be any chance of getting the stolen goods back quickly. Otherwise, knowledge of Russian always helps with common document checks that police conduct on the streets.
According to lawyer Vadim Buyevich of the International Collegium of Lawyers, foreigners are most often detained for something termed a misdemeanor. A little disorderly behavior after too much vodka in a bar, and ending up in police precinct, arguing with the officer about your rights is not out of the question.
Since the conditions you could find yourself in as either a suspect or victim of a crime are equal for both foreigners and Russians, you may find it useful to learn what an ordinary otdeleniye militsii, or police precinct, looks like in Russia.
There are twenty district police departments, or raionnniye otdely militsii, in the city. In a district, about six precincts divide the work among themselves, with additional police posts at every metro station, railway station and the like. A police precinct unites about thirty uchastkoviye militsionery (district officers who are all responsible for a certain area and usually know its residents in person), patrulniye (patrol officers), ugolovny rozysk (criminal police), sledovateli (investigators) and pasportnaya sluzhba (the organ responsible for issuing passports to those over 14 years old, at which age a Russian automatically becomes a citizen).
Once there, you will find the officer on duty in his booth. Usually, right opposite him there will be an akvarium, or a glass box, where the detained are held. A special bench will welcome those who have come to complain and wait for an investigator to take their evidence down.
If you are a suspected offender, the glass box will be your home for the next several hours, while the officers sort out your case.
As the officer from Precinct No. 28 says, after detaining an individual who has no documents or who has committed a misdemeanor, the policemen have three hours to establish his or her identity, write out a fine and fill out a report (raport), which will then be confirmed by the officer on duty for his records.
According to Kodeks ob Administrativnykh Narusheniyakh (the Code on Administrative Violations), drinking alcohol in public and being intoxicated alone do not carry any legal consequences unless you allow them to. You have probably noticed that Russian teenagers have no trouble carrying beer bottles in their hands quite openly. If a metro police officer demands that you pay a fine for being drunk, he has no right to do so - his responsibility is only to prevent you boarding a train and putting yourself and others in danger, for example. However, according to the code, consuming alcoholic drinks in public places (referring more to parks or playgrounds than the street) and particularly appearing heavily or "insultingly" drunk in public places may lead to a fine from 20 to 50 rubles ($0.7 to $1.7) to one to two months of corrective labor to 15 days of detention, depending on how often you've had such dealings with the police.
Just as scary is the punishment for melkoye khuliganstvo (disorderly behavior) - dirty language, fighting or sparring with passersby and the like.
If 24-year-old John Tobin, the American Fulbright scholar arrested in Voronezh in February for allegedly "keeping a marijuana den," had not been seized with so much cannabis, the charges would have probably been less severe: According to the same code, illegal buying, possession and consumption of small quantities of narcotic substances without a doctor's prescription would be punishable in the same way as intoxication, only with the sum of the fine raising to $3.40. However, quite how "small quantities" are defined is another question entirely.
As the officer from Precinct No. 28 explains, the police have the right to keep a drunken individual detained for three hours until he or she gets sober. If that is insufficient, the individual can be taken to a vytrezvitel (sobering-up station) - something that became a frequent theme of Soviet-era comedies and gags. However, according to Andrei Stanchenko, deputy head of the St. Petersburg Special Service Squad that deals exclusively with foreigners, sobering-up stations have saved many a life. In Russia, where the drinking tradition is the most notorious national trait, there is a high risk of buying poisonous moonshine instead of vodka at a kiosk.
Cases in which the police illegally hold intoxicated individuals for a whole night instead of three hours are frequent. In such cases, and indeed in any case of police violations regarding foreign citizens, as well as any case where a foreigner is involved - as a suspect or a victim - the Special Police Squad (Spetsialnaya Sluzhba Militsii) is legally required to be present for supervision. Special squad officers must be informed immediately by police upon the detention or arrest of a foreign citizen. The Squad works 24 hours a day, ready to come down to the precinct for even a petty case, with their own interpreter to help the foreigner. According to Stanchenko, most of his special officers speak a foreign language sufficiently enough to translate, too. However, an independent interpreter is obviously preferable to avoid the possibility that the police could interpret in their own favor.
While a detained individual is free to make a call, there is not a chance that a lawyer will be given if he or she is only charged with a minor misdemeanor. However, in the case of a criminal investigation, a state or a private lawyer will be on hand to consider your case. At the end of each day the special squad must also summarize the cases it's dealt with and send a report to the representatives of the Foreign Affairs Ministry in the city, from where information will be passed on to foreign consulates.
According to Russia's Criminal Proceedings Code (Ugolovno-Protsessualny Kodeks), the investigator dealing with your case has the right to detain you for up to three days. During this time, he or she may decide to charge you, which will lead to up to a 10-day detention until an official charge is brought against you.
Buyevich, who is accustomed to providing legal services for both foreigners and Russians, says bail (zalog) is not as common in Russia as in the West, although it does exist in criminal cases. Bail is provided for under Russian law along with a guarantee (podpiska o neviyezde) that you will not leave the city.
Hopefully, this information will only be needed to deal with the police when you are not a suspect. According to Stanchenko of the Special Police Squad, the most frequent cases they deal with involving foreigners are robberies, thefts and losses. Westerners who are not particularly security conscious with their belongings, says Stanchenko, are often unpleasantly shocked when things are stolen in, say, downtown St. Petersburg. Such cases are almost impossible to solve.
"Drink less, be on the lookout, don't put your thick wallet into your back pocket and don't trust every beautiful Russian girl," is Stan chen ko's final advice.
Special Police Squad, 19 Zakha ri yev skaya Ulitsa, tel. 278-30-14
TITLE: Woods Claims Another Piece of Golf History
AUTHOR: By Paul Newberry
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: AUGUSTA, Georgia - The vanquished usually make a mad dash to the parking lot on the final day of the Masters.
This time, it was different.
Some gathered in front of televisions in the Augusta National clubhouse. A few more actually wandered out to the 18th green to witness in person. Tiger Woods was making history, and even the guys he beats week in and week out wanted to see.
"It's a great time to be involved in the game, whether you're a player or a spectator," Steve Stricker said. "It's a great time to watch."
Woods kept his rivals around until the end Sunday, even those who completed their 18 holes with no chance of denying his destiny.
Call it a Grand Slam, call it a Tiger Slam, it really makes no difference. This was something special, a moment that transcended the game of golf to become one of those landmark moments in the American sports lexicon.
DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak. Chamberlain's 100-point game. Tiger's four straight major championships.
"He's not like anyone we've seen before in the game," said Mark Calcavecchia, who returned to the course in time to watch Woods wrap up a clean sweep of the U.S. Open, British Open, PGA Championship and Masters - albeit not in the same calendar year.
Woods held off his two most dangerous rivals, David Duval and Phil Mickelson, with a 16-under 272 total to win the first major of 2001.
In a span of 294 days, Woods routed Pebble Beach, conquered St. Andrews, hung on to win a heart-stopper at Valhalla, and picked up a second green jacket at Augusta National.
"It is special," he said. "It really is."
Four years earlier, Woods introduced himself to the world with a remarkable 12-stroke victory at this very course. It was his first major title and one he didn't fully appreciate at age 21.
"I guess I was a little young, a little naive," Woods said. "I didn't understand what I accomplished for at least a year or two after that event."
Now an old man of 25, he fully comprehends the gravity of the moment. It's tough enough to win one major professional title. Two in a row is something special.
But four in a row? That was thought to be unattainable, until Woods set the bar so high that only he can reach it.
"This year, I understand," he said. "I have a better appreciation for winning a major championship. To win four of them in succession, it's hard to believe, really."
Woods raised his arms in triumph after his final shot, an 18-foot putt, curved gently into the cup for a birdie. He wound up two shots ahead of Duval, with Mickelson in arrears by three.
"He seems to do just what is required," Mickelson said. "I think if I was making a run, he may have followed suit."
Duval and Mickelson were both doomed by bogeys at the par-3 16th.
Duval rocketed a 7-iron over the green, and couldn't get up and down with a slippery, downhill chip. Mickelson's tee shot reached the green, but in the worst possible location - an upper tier that led to a 3-putt bogey.
Woods began the day with a 1-stroke lead and closed with a 4-under 68, thanks to a spectacular 8-iron from 150 meters that grazed the cup at the 11th hole for a tap-in birdie. He went to No. 18 needing just a par to clinch victory, but went the extra step - as usual - with a birdie.
"I was so attuned to each and every shot," said Woods, who took a congratulatory call from President George Bush. "I finally realized I had no more to play. That's it. I'm done."
Woods buried his face in his cap, the only time all day he wasn't in control. Then he strolled off the green into the embrace of his father, who taught him the game, and his mother.
"I started getting a little emotional," Woods conceded. "That's why I put the cap over my face, to pull it together."
It will be left to others to determine where this achievement ranks in the annals of golf.
Woods now has won six majors, as many as Nick Faldo and Lee Trevino and only one behind the likes of Palmer, Sam Snead and Harry Vardon. Woods swept the last four with a combined score of 65-under par, breaking records just about every step of the way.
Bobby Jones, who helped design Augusta National, won the only undisputed version of the Grand Slam in 1930, when the U.S. and British Opens and U.S. and British Amateurs were the most prominent tournaments of the day.
Some, including Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer, have dismissed Tiger's slam as falling short of a true Grand Slam, arguing that it must be accomplished within the calendar year.
Others say that standard is far too demanding.
"He's got four together on the mantle right now, and that's a Grand Slam," said Chris DiMarco, who led the first two rounds but faded over the weekend. "It doesn't matter what order it came in.
"Of course, he might go out and win three more in a row and shut everyone up."
Next stop, the U.S. Open.
"We'll find out in June," Woods said.
TITLE: Trying Not To Stand Out: One Man's Quest for Assimilation on the Street
AUTHOR: By Glenn Geiser-Getz
TEXT: Someone once said you feel most American when living abroad, and this has certainly been true of my experience in St. Petersburg. My wife and I cannot walk down Nevsky Prospect without getting curious stares from people who pass; each cautious glance reminds us that we are, indeed, outsiders.
I am an American college professor working in Russia on a Fulbright Fellowship. Among other things I am researching intercultural communication, a discipline that examines cultural differences in customs, values and nonverbal behavior.
Of course, my understanding will always be limited because I am an outsider, and any investigation of this type may ultimately reveal more about the student than the topic being studied. My brief musings, therefore, may tell you more about my own culture than Russia's.
Many of my observations have been collected in a fabulously unsuccessful effort to blend in with the local population. I often wonder, in the case of my wife and myself, what gives us away - our clothes, our glasses, our facial expressions?
We wear as much dark clothing as possible. We mimic the neutral looks typical of many faces on the street. We wear our wedding rings on our right hands. We avoid speaking in public. Regardless of these and other changes, however, the panhandlers, pickpockets, tour guides and museum administrators sniff us out with apparent ease. My students here explain that Americans look quite different from Russians, but they rarely articulate specifics. My guess is that there are at least three cultural characteristics that distinguish Americans from Russians in St. Petersburg: appearance, face, and space.
Appearance may be the most obvious of the three. Clothing styles in Russia tend toward extremes: elegant/expensive or functional/modest. Both styles feature an abundance of black, a color many Americans lack in their wardrobes. The hopelessly lost-and-overwhelmed demeanor of the average tourist is easy to spot almost anywhere, but particularly in Russia. My wife and I avoid this look like the plague and always walk with great purpose, as if we are on some critical mission of state (this performance is exceptionally difficult to maintain when one is struggling with the complicated foldings of a tourist map).
Face is the most universal of nonverbal communicators; apparently a smile is a smile anywhere. However, while the basic meaning is the same, the connotations of a given facial expression change from place to place. The tendency to smile as a greeting (even among strangers) may strike some Russians as odd. One of my students told me of her first trip to Europe, where in a shop she was startled by a salesperson who offered smiling assistance even though the student clearly had no money to spend (she rushed from the shop, worried the woman had some devious purpose). In this respect the smile can serve as an interesting metaphor of differences between East and West. The American smile is often an example of phatic communication - a ritualistic, empty gesture valuable as a social lubricant. Phatic rituals initiate the flow of communication, invite future contact and are typical in cultures with well-developed service economies ("service with a smile"). Smiling in business is also a type of public relations, something I am told some Russians do not fully appreciate.
Differences in the use of space are also notable between Americans and Russians. My wife and I are still startled by the willingness of Russians to stand terribly close to one another, even when not in crowded places. Building managers unlock only one door, regardless of customer traffic, so people must enter and exit through the same relatively small place (the Americans are the ones breathing huge sighs of relief after successfully crossing the threshold).
Clearly these observations are based on limited experience; it is often difficult to understand what a particular gesture or facial expression might mean, and much intercultural communication is shaped by stereotypes. When the mother of a student saw my image on the evening news last year (attending a consulate reception), she warned her daughter that I could be a spy and should not be trusted. Others ask me about America with great fascination in their eyes. A young man who assisted me at a local market showed me his paperback copy of The Wizard of Oz, explaining proudly that he was learning English and thought America was "a great country."
It is difficult to convince people on the street that America is neither as good nor as bad as popular wisdom suggests, but as time passes I feel less and less like an outsider in this great city. Perhaps the locals are staring less; perhaps I am just getting used to it. An increasing number of people here have spoken to me in Russian, which suggests my effort to adapt to Russia's cultural norms is not completely in vain. I just hope I don't have to go through the same process in reverse when I return home.
Dr. Glenn Geiser-Getz is a Fulbright Scholar in Journalism and an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He submitted this article to The St. Petersburg Times. If you would like to write 1 in 4.7 million, please contact masters@sptimes.ru
TITLE: NHL Wraps Up Season With Avalanche on Top
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: ST. PAUL, Minnesota - The Colorado Avalanche put the finishing touches on a sensational regular season Sunday with Joe Sakic and Patrick Roy adding personal milestones to a 4-2 triumph over the Minnesota Wild.
Sakic, a favorite for the Hart Trophy as the league's most valuable player, scored his 53rd and 54th goals and added an assist to finish with 118 points, second behind Pittsburgh's Jaromir Jagr in the NHL scoring race by three points.
His empty-net tally in the final minute moved Sakic past Michel Goulet as the franchise's all-time leader with 457 goals.
Future Hall of Fame goalie Roy, who earlier this season set the NHL record for most career victories, made 19 saves to reach the 40-win mark for the first time in his brilliant career. His previous best had been 38.
Alex Tanguay added a goal and an assist for the Avalanche, who won the Presidents Trophy for the NHL's best regular season record - 52-16-10-4 - shattering the previous team record with 118 points.
"This was a good win for us," Colorado coach Bob Hartley said. "Patrick gets his 40th win for the first time in his career, we played with good intensity, Joe got another two big goals. It was very positive.
"We're looking forward to Thursday," Hartley said of the playoff opener against the Vancouver Canucks.
Philadelphia 2, Buffalo 1. In Buffalo, Ruslan Fedotenko scored with 7:34 remaining and Roman Cechmanek outdueled Dominik Hasek as the Philadelphia Flyers edged the Sabres 2-1 to secure home-ice advantage when the teams meet in the first round of the playoffs.
Buffalo outshot Philadelphia 37-17, but Cechmanek made 36 saves as the Flyers swept the four-game season series from the Sabres, limiting them to just two goals.
"He's dominated this season, he's the reason we're here," Flyers coach Bill Barber said. "The guy has been absolutely great all year long."
Only Donald Audette was able to get past Cechmanek, who was Hasek's understudy on the gold-medal Czech team at the 1998 Olympics. Audette buried a rebound for a powerplay goal that tied the game 1-1 at 6:33 of the third.
Fedotenko ensured the Flyers will open the playoffs at home when he took a pass from Simon Gagne, rushed up the ice and snapped a wrist shot into the upper portion of the Buffalo goal for his fourth game-winner.
Derek Plante scored the first Flyers goal 57 seconds into the final period, also with an assist from Gagne.
Pittsburgh 6, Carolina 4. At Carolina, Alexei Morozov scored twice and Alexei Kovalev set up three goals as the Pittsburgh Penguins squandered a three-goal lead before rallying for a 6-4 win over the Carolina Hurricanes.
The Hurricanes, who needed a win to avoid meeting the top-seeded New Jersey Devils in the first round of the playoffs, erased a 3-0 deficit with three second-period goals.
But Jan Hrdina tallied on the power play late in the second to put Pittsburgh back in front, and Andrew Ference and Morozov scored 32 seconds apart in the third period to pad the lead as Pittsburgh won despite resting superstars Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr.
"Nobody can play like Jagr, but I just wanted to play my game and do my best to score goals," Morozov said.
Washington 2, Tampa Bay 1. In Washington, Olaf Kolzig made 23 saves and Ulf Dahlen scored 32 seconds into the third period to lift the Capitals to a 2-1 victory over the Tampa Bay Lightning.
Steve Konowalchuk scored the other Washington goal and assisted on Dahlen's game-winner.
Adrian Aucoin scored a powerplay goal in the first period for Tampa Bay.
The Southeast Division champion Capitals open the playoffs at home against Pittsburgh.
San Jose 4, Anaheim 1. In Anaheim, Alexander Korolyuk had two goals and an assist and rookie netminder Miikka Kiprusoff came within 1:52 of his first NHL shutout as San Jose set a team record with its 40th win in a 4-1 season-ending triumph over the Mighty Ducks.
The Sharks, who open the playoffs at St. Louis, got some welcome news with the return of Vincent Damphousse, who missed 37 games after undergoing shoulder surgery.
Damphousse, who was among the NHL scoring leaders when he suffered a dislocated shoulder in mid-January, was not expected back in time for the first round of the playoffs.
Columbus 4, Chicago 3. In Columbus, Tyler Wright scored 2:41 into overtime as the expansion Blue Jackets ended their inaugural season on a winning note with a 4-3 triumph over the Chicago Blackhawks.
Columbus tied Chicago at the bottom of the Central Division with 71 points and finished ahead of fellow expansion team Minnesota and Anaheim in the Western Conference.
TITLE: VOX POPULI
TEXT: With last week's developments in the NTV/Gazprom-Media power struggle, Russian television audiences are soon to be left with no national television network independent of government control. How do locals feel about this and what are the chances for an objective state-controlled media in Russia? Irina Titova asked passersby for their opinions.
Yelizaveta Rozova, 75, pensioner
I trust everything that a journalist says or writes. I believe that all of them should be telling the truth as that's their duty - to describe things as they are. If they make things up they are not journalists.
As for NTV, there are many things I don't understand about their situation. Moreover, I wonder if our support is of any use to them? If they do need our support, however, we should definitely help them.
Inna Matveyeva, 55, flight controller
I don't really trust the media as a whole because we now live in times when people say one thing and do the opposite. Besides, it's hard for me to judge who is more objective because I barely watch TV.
However, if I watch the news at all, I'll watch ORT just out of habit. I know that their news program starts at 9 p.m., so I can have a quick look at it before going back to the housework.
As for NTV, let them solve their problems themselves, because we live our lives and they live theirs. I don't even know who is right. I think they are just fighting for their jobs, just like I would fight for mine.
Yury Grebennikov, 14, schoolboy
I think there can be no truly independent media. Even those that belong to private companies still depend on their shareholders who tell them what to say. However, in covering politics private media can be more objective than the ones run by the government.
As for the NTV scandal, it's probably worth giving the new leaders a chance to try their business. Who knows, maybe the channel will become better and they can find good new journalists.
Alexei Ivanov, 18, student
I trust the official media about 70 percent - that is, for everything except politics. At the same time, I don't fully trust NTV. Besides, I do not totally understand the situation with NTV at the moment. What are they talking about?
Mikhail Terentyev, 35, St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly employee
I trust government controlled media to the fullest extent. I don't believe NTV, because if Ted Turner bought shares in the company, thenthere are obviously reasons for that. There can ultimately be no independent media because someone always pays for it.
Concerning the situation with NTV, I'd say it's a storm in a teacup. It's just a financial argument and nothing more. They shouldn't have drawn the country into their argument. It's totally their own problem and yet they behave as if someone is about to kill them all, when it's obviously not so.
Boris Mityurin, 45, head of one of St. Petersburg's municipal boards
If I watch the news at all, I watch all three major channels: ORT, RTR and NTV. However, I think ORT gives the most objective information.
As for NTV, I support them, but as I see it, it's a petty financial intrigue, a fight for money. However, I don't fully understand the situation. There is not enough objective information about it, and we mostly see only one side of it - NTV's version.
Timofei Kozyrev, 68, pensioner
It's worth watching all the major channels. However, ORT usually doesn't give the whole picture of some of the more ambiguous events. NTV gives a more objective picture. Let's take Chech nya, for example - what is going on there? It's a crime, and NTV shows it.
The basic aim of the present campaign against NTV is to block the only source of true information as the government is not willing to have it informing the population.
Artyom Filler, 31, trade agent
Usually I trust particular personalities rather than particular channels. There are some journalists whom I like and therefore trust. For instance, I trust Lev Novozhonov from NTV, and if I watch the news I tend to watch it on NTV, as well.
However, I don't understand the current situation with NTV and Gazprom. Not understanding it, I support NTV, because it's an interesting channel.
Irina Kosaryeva, 43, marketing expert
I trust NTV because I just believe the NTV staff. It's almost like a personal trust. It's hard to judge who is right in that situation because there are many interests mixed together, but I still think that the NTV journalists are right. I doubt they would organize such opposition without having good reason. Although from other channels you hear that a change of NTV management won't necessarily bring any changes into NTV policy, I don't trust that for a second because if that were so, NTV journalists wouldn't fight the take-over.
Yevgeny Belous, 14, schoolboy
I don't trust what ORT news programs say, because the channel mainly belongs to the government and therefore is dependent on it.
TITLE: East and West Seek Easter Parity
AUTHOR: By Naomi Koppel
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: GENEVA - Christians everywhere will celebrate Easter on the same day this year because of a calendar quirk, a coincidence that has revived interest in trying to set a universal date for the observance.
Both Western and Eastern churches agree that the date should be based on a principle set in the year 325, which states that Easter falls on the Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox.
However, the dates vary because Protestant and Catholic Churches follow the 16th-century Gregorian Calendar, while the Orthodox churches use the older Julian Calendar. The two currently differ by 13 days.
Easter can occur between March 22 and April 25 for the Western Christian churches, while the range for Orthodox Easter extends from April 4 to May 8.
"Especially in regions where Christians of the Western and Eastern traditions live closely together and may even constitute a minority, as for example in the Middle East, this situation is extremely painful," said a statement Monday from the World Council of Churches. The council includes non-Catholic Christian churches, as well as Orthodox faiths, from across the world.
This year, by chance, both calendars set the same day for the spring equinox and the full moon following it, meaning that Eastern and Western churches will celebrate Easter on the same day.
In 1997, at a meeting in Aleppo, Syria, participants agreed that Easter should be set according to the method established in 325, using accurate astronomical data to establish the date of the spring equinox.
"But for some Orthodox, the calendar is so closely related to the tradition that changes are unthinkable," said Dagmar Heller, of the Evangelical Church in Germany.
There's no agreement on the horizon, but the issue will likely be revisited over the next 20 years - during which the Easter dates will coincide six times.
The problem has already been solved in Finland, where the Orthodox Church has since the 1920s celebrated Easter according to the Gregorian Calendar.
TITLE: Pakistan Hosts Radical Islam Conference
AUTHOR: By Kathy Gannon
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PESHAWAR, Pakistan - In the largest-ever gathering of its kind, hundreds of thousands of radical Muslim men poured into a Peshawar suburb on Monday to celebrate hardline Islam and shout slogans against what they see as the corrupting influence of the United States.
The giant conference was called to pay tribute to the Deoband Dar-ul-Uloom brand of Islam, which inspired the fundamentalist Taleban militia that controls most of neighboring Afghani stan. Followers of the 143-year-old seminary in Deoband, India, arrived from all over the Islamic world, many in brightly colored buses so crammed they had to sit on rooftop luggage racks.
Participants chanted religious slogans as they passed Coca-Cola signs obliterated with globs of black paint. Vendors boycotted U.S. products and sold posters depicting burning U.S. and Israeli flags.
"We want to send the message that only Islam has the capability of bringing peace and stability in the world. The West has failed," said Mohammed Rahim Haqqani, a conference organizer.
"The Taleban are the practitioners of the pure Deoband Islamic thought," he said, "They have implemented laws in the real spirit of Islam. This is what we want here in Pakistan. We do not have true Islamic laws here."
The Islam of the Deoband seminary dictates that men are born smarter than women, music is evil, and education for girls beyond the age of 8 is a waste of time. It considers the West to be decadent, immoral and against Islam.
The seminary is the ideological foundation of Afghanistan's Taleban movement, as well as that of many hard-line religious groups in Pakistan including the convention organizers, Jamiat-e-Ulema or Organization of Islamic clerics, which is led by Fazle-ur Rehman.
Rehman promises to bring about an Islamic revolution in Pakistan, and some analysts say the conference is his attempt to show Pakistan's military government the strength behind his movement.
As many as 200,000 worshippers have arrived so far and organizers hope to welcome 1 million to the three-day convention in a large field outside Peshawar, Pakistan's northwest capital.
The 100 or so restaurants and food kiosks at the convention site are adhering to a strict boycott of U.S.-made products to protest fresh UN sanctions imposed on the Taleban to press the militia to hand over suspected Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden.
The Taleban has refused, saying that bin Laden is a guest and that handing him over to non-Muslims would go against Islam. Giant posters of bin Laden adorned several booths at the convention site and participants extolled the virtue of holy war.
"Deoband has given birth to mujahedeen [holy warriors]. Deoband has kept the spirit of jihad alive and the imperialist powers are very much afraid," said Abdul Mujeeb Nadeem, a speaker at the convention.
The army that rules Pakistan says it wants to see a modern Islamic state that gives equal rights to both men and women. The military government has said it wants to see religious schools known as madrases controlled and the curriculum dictated by the government.
But so far the government has not taken any action, and the Islamic clerics who run the schools say they will riot if controls are imposed.
Clerics are a powerful force in Pakistan where most of the 140 million population earn barely $400 a year, can neither read nor write and are mostly devout Muslims.
TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: British Chopper Crash
KACANIK, Yugoslavia (AP) - A British helicopter with seven on board crashed Monday in heavy rain above mountainous terrain close to Kosovo's tense boundary with Macedonia.
NATO officials said some on the chopper were injured but gave no details beyond saying they were being treated at Kosovo's main U.S. military base, Camp Bondsteel, about 40 kilometers southeast of Pristina, the provincial capital.
In London, a Defense Ministry spokes man said three crew members and four passengers were on the Puma chopper, which can carry up to 15 people.
The chopper went down about 3:45 p.m. near Kacanik, 50 kilometers south of Pristina, said Major Axel Jandesek, a spokesman for the 45,000-member peace force, or KFOR. Visibility was poor, with heavy rain and low clouds.
Guilty Grocer
LONDON (AP) - Greengrocer Steven Thoburn fought the system - the metric system, that is. And lost.
On Monday, the 36-year-old fruit-and-vegetable vendor - dubbed the "Metric Martyr'' by the British tabloids - was found guilty of selling his wares in pounds and ounces, without the metric measures mandated by European law. It was the first prosecution of its kind in Britain.
Thoburn, whose plight generated a groundswell of public support, now faces a maximum fine of $1,500 on each of two offenses, and court costs that could run as high as $90,000.
He was also put on six months' conditional discharge, which is similar to probation in the United States.
Thoburn, who had pleaded innocent, was expected to appeal.
Toledo Faces Runoff
LIMA, Peru (AP) - Alejandro Toledo finished first in Peru's presidential election, but the U.S.-trained economist and self-styled "Indian with a cause" failed to gain a majority needed to avoid a runoff, according to preliminary results.
He will likely face former president Alan Garcia, a left-leaning populist, in a second round in late May or early June.
Toledo, 55, who boycotted last year's fraudulent contest against disgraced former president Alberto Fujimori, is still a favorite to win in a runoff vote.
Official returns representing 50 percent of the vote gave Toledo 36.3 percent early Monday, compared to 26.2 percent for Garcia and 23.7 percent for veteran politician Lourdes Flores, election officials said.
Israel Lifts Ban
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel on Monday partially lifted a six-month-long ban on Palestinian laborers crossing into its territory and voiced regret over its troops firing on a convoy carrying Palestinian security chiefs.
But Israeli diplomatic sources said security talks with Palestinians that the sides had agreed to hold on Monday had been canceled. Palestinian officials said their leaders had never actually decided whether to meet the Israelis.
An official spokesman said Israel had issued permits for 3,200 Palestinian laborers to cross into Israel to work. He said up to 1,000 were expected to resume work in Israel on Tuesday.
Citing security reasons at the start of the Palestinian uprising more than six months ago, Israel imposed a blockade on Palestinian areas from where up to 120,000 laborers used to travel to Israel.
Zimbabwe Quells Riots
HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) - Police sealed off the University of Zimbabwe's main campus Monday after using tear gas to disperse students protesting economic hardships.
The protests began late Saturday, when rioting students stoned cars in a rampage triggered by the apparent suicide of a female student in a love tryst, police said.
Student leaders said their classmates were angered by visits to the campus by "sugar daddies" who use flashy cars and money to woo impoverished female students.
The Students Executive Council said economic woes have forced many female students to entertain "nonacademic" dates.
Angry students wielding stones and tree branches tried to march Monday, but police fired tear gas to disperse them and then sealed off the campus in the capital, Harare. Rocks littered the highway outside the campus.
The weekend rioting began out of sympathy for Tecla Tom, a first-year arts student, who was found dead Friday in a female hostel. A note was found beside her body that referred to a relationship. No information on the cause of her death was available.
Internet Twins Ruling
LONDON (Reuters) - The twin baby girls at the center of a transatlantic custody battle after being bought via the Internet are to return to the United States following a British court ruling on Monday.
The twins adopted for a fee through an Internet adoption broker by British couple Alan and Judith Kilshaw, will be sent back to the state of Missouri where they will be cared for by foster parents following the London court decision.
The ruling means the bitter and highly publicized legal custody battle that has raged since the twins were taken from the Kilshaws by welfare officers in Wales in January now moves to the United States.
A Californian couple, Richard and Vickie Allen, who said they also adopted the twins over the Internet, have now dropped their claim.
Rebels Slay 11
BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) - Colombian right-wing militias this week advanced toward an area the government wants to cede to leftist rebels as a venue for peace talks, sparking clashes that killed 11 people, local media said on Sunday.
The offensive by the outlawed United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) came after President Andres Pastrana, struggling to end the country's 37-year-old war, pulled troops from the territory in the Bolivar region, north of the capital, to begin talks with the National Liberation Army (ELN).
At least seven ELN rebels and four AUC combatants were killed in the week-long clashes, centered around the villages of Vallecito and Diamante, traditional ELN strongholds, the daily newspaper El Tiempo quoted Army General Martin Carreno as saying.
TITLE: U.S. Impatience Growing Over Spy-Plane Crew
AUTHOR: By Christopher Bodeen
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: HAIKOU, China - After a weekend of hardline rhetoric and growing U.S. impatience, two American diplomats met Monday with all 24 crew members of a downed U.S. spy plane.
Army Brigadier General Neal Sealock, the U.S. military attaché to Beijing, said the crew members were in "excellent health and their spirits are extremely high."
"They are well taken care of," said Sealock, who met for 40 minutes with the Americans along with a consular official. He described their living conditions on Hainan island in the South China Sea as like a "hotel environment."
It was the fourth meeting with the crew members since they were detained after making an emergency landing on Hainan following an April 1 collision with a Chinese fighter jet.
The meeting came amid growing U.S. impatience for the release of the crew. In Washington, President George Bush cautioned that any delay could be detrimental to U.S.-China ties.
"Every day that goes by increases the potential that our relations with China will be damaged," Bush told reporters during a Cabinet meeting.
China insisted anew Monday that Washington apologize and take responsibility for the collision. It gave no direct reaction to a weekend statement by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell that Washington was "sorry" for the fate of the Chinese fighter pilot, who is missing.
"In consultations, the Chinese side has emphasized that the entire responsibility for this incident rests with the U.S. side," the Xinhua News Agency said, citing China's Foreign Ministry.
"The U.S. side must apologize to China and adopt measures to ensure this sort of event will not reoccur."
In Haikou, the head of Hainan's foreign affairs office reiterated China's frustration with surveillance by U.S. spy planes. He said they had "seriously disturbed" local lives and tourism.
"Hainan people demand the U.S. side stop such spying activities and apologize to the Chinese people for this incident," Chen Ci said at a joint press conference with Sealock.
"We welcome American tourists to Hainan for holiday-making but not the spy planes."
Returning from a meeting at the Foreign Ministry on Monday, U.S. Ambassador Joseph Prueher said talks were "making progress."
"We hope we are moving a little closer toward a solution," Prueher told reporters.
U.S. diplomats visiting Hainan have sought daily access to the detained crew.
American officials were allowed to see eight crew members during their last meeting Saturday. They gave them printouts of e-mails from their families, said Salome Hernandez, another diplomat.
Meanwhile, Xinhua cited officials describing "perilous" rescue conditions in the region where a search is under way for the missing Chinese pilot. It added to reports that appear to be intended to prepare the public for a declaration of his death.
High winds and waves, sharks and water temperatures of less than 30 degrees Celsius mean the longest anyone can survive is about three days, Liu Shi, head of the State Maritime Search and Rescue Center, was cited as saying.
Nevertheless, Liu said that if Wang used all of his emergency supplies, there was a chance he could have survived.
"Wang Wei could still be alive. We sincerely are hoping for a miracle," Liu said.
Analysts have said China's military is unlikely to agree to release the Americans until the fate of its pilot is known. Chinese authorities have confirmed they questioned the U.S. crew. They accuse the U.S. pilot of breaking the law by making an emergency landing at a Chinese air base without applying in advance for permission.
The White House has not apologized for the incident, saying it believes the collision was an accident. China's Defense Minister Gen. Chi Haotian said over the weekend that the army wouldn't let Washington "shirk responsibility."
Chinese leaders could be reluctant to compromise for fear of alienating the influential military or looking weak before major leadership changes to be decided next year at a Communist Party congress.
U.S. officials have warned that further delay could cause strains that spill over into other issues, such as trade ties and U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan.
In his first public comments on the dispute, Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian said Monday that he hoped Washington and Beijing would quickly resolve the impasse and that it would not cause the United States to cut back on arms sales to Taipei.
TITLE: Hewitt Leads Aussies to Win in Davis Cup
AUTHOR: By Ossian Shine
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON - Australia battled its way past a determined Brazilian side and a ferocious Florianopolis crowd on Sunday to win a place in the Davis Cup semifinals.
Lleyton Hewitt beat world No. 2 Gustavo Kuerten 7-6, 6-3, 7-6 to give the 1999 champions a decisive 3-1 lead.
"I feel almost speechless," Hewitt said afterwards. "That's the best I've ever hit the ball."
Australia will now host Sweden in the last four after the Swedes beat Russia 4-1 in Malmo.
France completed the semifinal lineup by beating Switzerland 3-2 in a thriller in Neuchatel, which went to the final set of the final rubber before Nicolas Escude edged George Bastl 1-6, 7-5, 6-7, 6-4, 8-6.
Switzerland has never bounced back from a 2-0 deficit in its 72-year Davis Cup history, but hopes were high when Bastl gave them a two-sets-to-one lead in the deciding fifth rubber.
Escude fought back to deny the Swiss, though, and the French team will next travel to the Netherlands after the Dutch brushed aside Germany 4-1 to reach their maiden semifinal.
Tiebreaks were again Brazil's undoing against the team that beat them in last year's semifinals.
Kuerten and Jaime Oncins lost three tiebreaks as they crashed to a straight-sets defeat in Saturday's doubles to Hewitt and Patrick Rafter, and Kuerten lost two more on Sunday.
Hewitt, who also beat Fernando Meligeni on Friday, completed his three rubbers without losing a set.
Sweden had its semifinal spot wrapped up by Saturday evening when it took an unbeatable 3-0 lead over a depleted Russian side.
Top-ranked doubles player Jonas Bjorkman partnered Davis Cup novice Simon Aspelin to beat Yevgeny Kafelnikov and Andrei Olhovskiy 4-6, 6-1, 7-5, 6-7, 6-2 in a three-hour-20-minute thriller.
The victory puts Sweden into the Davis Cup semifinals for the 23rd time since 1946.
Russia was missing U.S. Open champion Marat Safin, the world No. 1 in the ATP Entry System rankings, because of injury.
The Swedes ran out 4-1 winners, Norman losing a meaningless fifth dead rubber to Andrei Stolyarov.
The semifinals will take place in September.
(For more results see Scorecard.)
TITLE: Baseball Great Loses Long-Term Battle With Kidney Disease
AUTHOR: By Alan Robinson
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania - Willie Stargell, the thunderous home run hitter who carried the Pittsburgh Pirates into two World Series with his power and helped win them with his patriarchal leadership, died Monday. He was 61.
Stargell had been in failing health for several years due to a kidney disorder, according to officials at New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he died.
One of the greatest home run hitters ever, in volume and in distance, Stargell hit 475 homers - many of them soaring, majestic shots that rattled a pitcher's confidence. With Stargell batting cleanup for most of his 20-year career, the Pirates won World Series championships and NL pennants in 1971 and 1979 and six NL East titles from 1970-79.
Nicknamed "Pops," Stargell was a dynamic leader on the field with his tape-measure shots and a fatherly yet forceful presence off it, distributing his coveted Stargell stars for extra effort to teammates who proudly attached them to their ballcaps.
"When you had Willie Stargell on your team, it was like having a diamond ring on your finger," said Chuck Tanner, the Pirates' manager for Stargell's final six seasons.
Despite being overshadowed at times by more prolific home run hitters Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, and by his own Hall of Fame teammate, Roberto Clemente, Stargell's sheer power was unrivaled. He hit seven of the 18 homers over the right-field roof at Pittsburgh's Forbes Field from 1909-70 and once held the record for the longest homer in nearly half of the National League parks.
"He didn't just hit pitchers, he took away their dignity," former Dodgers pitcher Don Sutton said.
Stargell enjoyed his best season in 1971, with 48 homers and 125 RBIs. However, he was 0-for-14 in the NL playoffs against the Giants and had only one RBI in the Pirates' seven-game World Series victory over favored Baltimore. He left center stage to the 38-year-old Clemente, who, fearful he would never play in another Series, turned the postseason into a personal showcase of his grace, talent and determination. Only 14 months later, Clemente was dead.
In 1979, it was Stargell's turn to transform the World Series into a one-man act for an aging star. At 39, seemingly several years past his prime, and after knee injuries had robbed him of his mobility and some of his strength, Stargell's postseason performance was every bit as haunting and as driven as Clemente's.
After hitting 32 homers during a memorable regular season, he had two more during an NL playoff sweep of Cincinnati. He had three homers, including the decisive shot in Game 7 in Baltimore, as the Pirates rallied from a 3-1 deficit to wrest the World Series from the favored Orioles.
Only months from his 40th birthday, he made an unprecedented three-way sweep of MVP awards, sharing the NL award with Keith Hernandez of St. Louis and winning it in the playoffs and World Series - a feat still not matched. He remains the oldest player to win an MVP award.
The Pirates fell apart after Stargell retired in 1982. A clubhouse drug scandal and subsequent 1985 federal court trial in Pittsburgh implicated more than 30 major leaguers and badly tarnished not only the Pirates' image, but baseball's as well. Trying to win back their disillusioned fans during that 104-loss season, the Pirates had rehired Stargell as a coach but he left again a year later to rejoin Tanner, who was hired by the Atlanta Braves after being fired in Pittsburgh.
The Pirates unveiled a 4-meter-high statute of Stargell on Saturday outside their new stadium, PNC Park. Statues of Honus Wagner and Clemente are also on the grounds of the park, which opened Monday.
TITLE: Official: U.S. Doping Is Widespread
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NEW YORK - CBS News on Sunday quoted a former U.S. Olympics Committee doping-control official as saying the United States routinely sent drug-using athletes to the Olympics.
The network's "60 Minutes II" program to be broadcast Tuesday quoted Wade Exum, a top doping-control officer until last year, as saying the drugs involved included the anabolic steroid nandrolone, stimulants and pain killers.
Asked if he believed the United States had sent athletes to Sydney who had been using performance-enhancing drugs, Exum said: "Yes, I believe that. I believe that we sent athletes to every games that have been using performance-enhancing drugs."
CBS also interviewed two cyclists, Greg Strock and Erich Kaiter, who said their coaches had given them pills and injections that they now believed to have been banned drugs.
The network quoted the cyclists as saying the administration of drugs by their coaches reached a peak in 1990.
"Neither Kaiter nor Stock know what was in those syringes ... they say injections were given by the USA Cycling team staff," CBS said.
It said both cyclists had developed immune problems that they now believed were caused by cortisone in the injections. The network said the U.S. Olympic Committee and USA Cycling had written letters denying the doping charges.
"The allegations by Dr. Wade Exum are patently false," the committee's letter said in part. USA Cycling said Strock's allegations dated back more than 10 years and a legal suit he had brought against the organization over the injections was without merit.
TITLE: Liverpool Ends Wycombe's Run
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON - FA Cup reality took over from romance in England where Arsenal and Liverpool reached the final while France's Nantes, like Liverpool, stayed on course for a treble. Juventus kept the heat on Italian leaders AS Roma.
Real Madrid opened a potentially decisive eight-point lead in Spain, while Bayern's advantage was down to a single point in Germany as Europe's league races reached the final lap.
Spain. A single goal, scored by Guti at the second attempt, gave Real Madrid a 1-0 victory over Las Palmas to open an eight-point lead at the top of the Liga. Second-placed Deportivo Coruna slipped 2-1 at Real Zaragoza to give Real, with nine games left, a clear chance of lifting its first league title since 1997.
Valencia, which needs to beat Arsenal on April 17 to reach the Champions League semifinals, is still on course for next season's competition after a 4-1 win at Rayo Vallecano that left it in third place, two points behind Deportivo.
Barcelona's comeback from 3-0 down for a 4-4 draw at Villarreal, courtesy of a Patrick Kluivert hat trick, means it is fourth, two points behind Valencia.
Italy. With league leaders AS Roma playing at Fiorentina on Monday afternoon, due to fears of crowd trouble, the way was clear for Juventus to make up ground. Carlo Ancelotti's men duly seized their chance, albeit with a penalty won by Filippo Inzaghi and converted by strike partner Alessandro Del Piero in a 1-0 victory at Verona.
Second-placed Juve is six points behind the leaders and six ahead of reigning champions Lazio, whose game against fourth-placed Parma was postponed. Atalanta's 2-0 win at Lecce puts them level on points with Parma and in with a chance of a Champions League place.
Inter and AC Milan both did their campaigns little good by two draws, against Vicenza and Napoli, which left them sixth and seventh respectively.
England. The romance that has been a feature of this season's FA Cup, with thrilling comebacks and last-minute victories, all came to an end on Sunday as Second Division Wycombe Wanderers were beaten 2-1 by League Cup winners and UEFA Cup semifinalists Liverpool.
Liverpool will now take on Arsenal - who rallied from a goal down to outclass their north London rivals Tottenham Hotspur 2-1 at Old Trafford in the other semifinal - in Cardiff on May 12.
Scotland. Celtic won the Scottish league for the 37th time with a 1-0 victory over bottom-club St Mirren at Parkhead.
Celtic's title, which reversed Rangers' 21-point winning margin last season, was secured by the scoring talents of Swede Henrik Larsson, 33, and the management of coach Martin O'Neill in his first season in charge.
Second-placed Rangers are 21 points behind, albeit with a game in hand. They should get Scotland's second Champions League slot after holding third-placed Hibernian to a 0-0 draw Sunday to stay six points ahead of the Edinburgh club.
France. Leaders Nantes stayed on course for a treble after a 2-1 win at Metz. Nantes is two points ahead of second-placed Lille in the first division with four games to play and is through to the semifinals of both the French Cup and the French League Cup.
Olympique Lyon, which nearly made it into the Champions League quarterfinals at Arsenal's expense, is in the running for next season's competition after a 2-1 win over Monaco left it third, just two points behind Lille, and two ahead of Bordeaux.
Germany. Reigning champion Bayern Munich slipped up with a 1-1 draw at Borussia Dortmund that left it just one point ahead of three title challengers.
Schalke 04, convincing 5-1 winners over Kaiserslautern, lead the trio on goal difference, followed by Bayer Leverkusen, who were 3-1 winners at Eintracht Frankfurt and Dortmund, in what is set to be a tight finish to the Bundesliga season.
Portugal. A goal by Brazilian striker Elpidio Silva gave Boavista a 1-0 home win over Farense and took it closer to its first Portuguese championship.
With seven games left, Boavista leads with 59 points, seven points ahead of second-placed Sporting, whose hopes of retaining the title faded when it lost 2-0 at Uniao Leiria on Saturday.
TITLE: Zenit Remains in 2nd With Victory
AUTHOR: By Christopher Hamilton
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Zenit striker Yevgeny Tarasov scored his third goal of the season leading the Petersburg side to a 2-1 victory over Saturn Ramenskoye Saturday at Petrovsky Stadium.
The blue-and-white home team dominated play during the first half, keeping Saturn pinned on its own part of the field. Halfback Maxim Demenko's stellar performance in the midfield was the cornerstone in Zenit's attacking game.
The Visiting team's goalkeeper Valery Chizhov moved to the left to save a kick made by Zenit captain Alexei Igonin. Chizhov mistakenly cleared the ball to Tarasov who easily beat the netminder who slipped trying to move back into position.
Demenko gave Zenit a two-goal lead when he rushed up from midfield and scored in the 42nd minute on a pass from Gennady Popovich.
Saturn scored its lone goal on a penalty kick by Moldovan international Sergei Rogachev in the 49th minute.
At the start of the second half Valery Kechinov made a run for the Zenit goal and looked to have a great scoring chance, but Igonin tackled him before he had a chance to net the tying marker.
Zenit, which maintained its second-place position in the Russian Premier Division standings, next plays Sokol in Voronezh on April 14, before returning home to take on Dinamo Moscow on April 18.
TITLE: Space Race Won by Soviets 40 Years Ago
AUTHOR: By Tom Masters
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Russian space program's proudest day was April 12, 1961, when Yury Gagarin made history as the first human being to leave the earth's atmosphere and travel into space, at the age of just 27. During his short flight, Gagarin tested his hand-eye coordination and tried eating, to see if it was possible. He also saw for the first time in history what the earth looks like from space, reporting to ground control, "The sky looks very, very dark and the earth is bluish." The flight took little more than an hour and a half, with Gagarin landing by parachute in a Siberian village. There, he was greeted by an old lady who perceptively asked, "Have you come from outer space?" Gagarin replied, "Yes, would you believe it ... Don't be alarmed, I am a Soviet!"
Immortalized in the poetry of Pushkin and music of Mussorgsky, Tsar Boris Godunov died on April 13, 1605. Godunov took the throne after the death of Ivan the Terrible's son, Fyodor, for whom he had previously been regent. Godunov had no legitimate claim to the throne and was not even an aristocrat himself, but just a high-ranking member of Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnina, who had managed to organize the marriage of his sister to Tsar Fyodor. When the weak-minded Fyodor died, Godunov became tsar in 1598, after being elected by the Zemsky Sobor, which he ultimately controlled. Although Godunov showed some interest in education, his reign was hindered by several bad harvests that caused wide-spread cannibalism and uprisings among the peasantry, and led to what would be a succession of pretenders to the throne. The first "False Dmitry," Grigory Otrepyev, who claimed to be Ivan the Terrible's second son who was in fact dead, led Polish troops against Godunov and was supported by the Romanovs. Godunov died unexpectedly in unclear circumstances, often put down to either a stroke or self-administered poison. Dmitry took the throne, and Russia entered its turbulent "time of troubles."
Soviet poet laureate Vladimir Maya kov sky committed suicide at his Mos cow office on April 14, 1930. The depressive, brilliant poet's death has been ascribed to many different reasons, not least his own recognition that there was no place for him in the state he had so vehemently propagandized, as well as the end to the love affair between himself and Lily Brik and the continued stifling of any form of individual expression by Stalin. Although there have been many claims that Mayakovsky was murdered, the most plausible account of his death is that, like several times previously, he had been playing Russian roulette - and lost.
Finally on April 15, Alla Pugacheva celebrates her 52nd birthday. The legendary singer was toasted by then president Boris Yeltsin on her 50th birthday two years ago, and, love her or hate her, Pugacheva is undeniably the queen of Russian pop. The diva has sold 150 million records worldwide and was made a national artist of the Soviet Union as well as being recognized for her contributions to music by UNESCO. However, international success has somewhat eluded Alla - her 1997 Eurovision song contest bid with the song "Primadonna" came in just 15th out of 24 entries.
TITLE: Dissent at NTV Reveals Its New Crusading Direction
AUTHOR: By Masha Kaminskaya
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: It's a thankless task to write about issues whose complexity has long proved a headache generations. However, I am sure that of those millions of people who found themselves near their TVs last week, I am not the only one trying to answer the painful question: What is happening to freedom of speech in this country?
I have been an admirer of NTV since it began broadcasts eight years ago. The team's professionalism and taste stand out; while state channels hire tongue-tied amateurs to translate low-budget foreign movies and continue to sicken audiences with age-old Kremlin-loyalist comics who joke about Tampax, on NTV high-quality programming is the norm and Viktor Shenderovich has become something of a satiric legend with his shows "Itogo" and "Kukly." As a crime reporter, I always notice that NTV employs the term "alleged criminal" when referring to a crime suspect, unlike state channels which prefer the "guilty until proven innocent" approach, and I was greatly impressed by NTV's coverage of the Kursk catastrophe as well as the Far East energy crisis.
So much the stronger my concern over this past week, then.
The arbitrary court decisions, the questionable methods of the Tax Police and the prosecutor general's dubious actions - not to mention the shady reputations of the channel's self-proclaimed benefactors, Boris Jordan and Alfred Kokh - have been transparent enough to suggest that it is the government who is really behind the whole affair. Indeed, NTV journalists are not the only ones in this country to have felt such pressure exerted upon them. The more I listened to NTV's opponents, the more compelled I feel to express my support for the channel, and my heart sank and leapt as I was mesmerized by their live reports last week - and wasn't that a riot!
The media swarmed the Ostankino television center; young right-wing and liberal politicians stood elbow to elbow with protesting journalists; the channel's former general director Yevgeny Kiselyov led his team in ideological rebellion as the usual programming schedule was replaced with news monitoring the strike, interspersed with mute shots showing the station's corridors awaiting a special task force to burst in at any moment and clear the way for the new, Gazprom-appointed masters. Even Mikhail Gorbachev - long remembered for an ugly clash with freedom-of-speech advocate Andrei Sakharov, and now a democratic public figure himself - had his share of applause as he stood up for the channel.
But in the midst of the protest, the audience had a sudden blow as two of the channel's leading journalists, Leo nid Parfyonov and Tatiana Mitkova, quit the scene. On leaving, Parfyonov openly criticized Kiselyov for his authoritative manner of leadership, comparing his style to that of the Soviet polit bureau.
And freedom of speech is finally at issue, once the public have dismissed the commercial claims and journalistic ethics of the debate, and only the future of the country remains in question.
The tangle of problems that NTV has found itself in will become as key to its history as the rest of its impressive biography: The conflict we are watching is an example of the kind of stand-offs by which Russia has been plagued for ages.
It has been a Russian tradition since time immemorial to have journalists function more as the nation's conscience than as sources of reliable information. Just as the intelligentsia in general during the country's upheavals, journalists were meant to call for the brightest possible future, often at the cost of opposing those in power - becoming a form of power themselves. As a still familiar historic example, the oppressive Soviet state that replaced an equally undemocratic tsarist Russia showed us the main tricks and principles of just such propaganda.
NTV has become a unique, unrepeatable mixture of Western-style tolerance and reason coupled with traditional Russian aspirations for higher truths, with a bent for extremism. Such a tendency became obvious with NTV's apparent support for Boris Yeltsin's 1996 re-election campaign, and even more so with the recent revolt. Parfyonov left when he felt that the team's journalistic code of objectivity was being violated, but arguably this is precisely the kind of television Russia both needs and deserves now, with a possible slide toward totalitarianism on the cards.
Let NTV remain as it is - free to speak - if only to let the audience decide what side they want to be on.