SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #666 (33), Friday, May 4, 2001
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TITLE: Burst of Violence Hits Chechnya
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW - An upsurge of violence hit Russia's separatist Chechnya region on Wednesday, with Russian media reporting the deaths of at least 13 people.
A 20-month-old Russian military offensive has failed to snuff out separatist guerrillas.
Seven people, including four teachers and a teenager, were reported shot dead in their homes in Kirov-Yurt village, in the mountains south of the devastated regional capital Grozny. The son of one of the victims told RTR state television a group of men had summoned his father to the door, opened fire and fled.
"This amounts to the destruction of the most educated people in our Chechnya," village school director Srajdi Zumayev told RTR.
The top military officer in the region, General Valery Baranov, said that the victims had resisted an extreme form of Islam.
"These people preached normal Islam," he told Russian television stations, saying that a fundamentalist cleric who had lived in the village was being pursued.
In Grozny's central market, the disfigured bodies of three men were found by a trader. The men were apparently fired on at point-blank range with a grenade launcher, prompting what Russian television said were angry protests by market stall operators demanding additional protection.
Three incidents erupted in and around Kurchaloi, a town 25 kilometers southeast of Grozny.
Two officials working for the local pro-Russian administration were shot dead in a nearby village.
A bomb exploded under a vehicle carrying Russian policemen back to their base near the town, killing one and injuring two, and a bomb attack on a rail carriage converted into a cafe in the town injured eight servicemen.
Rebel accounts of unrest on the kavkaz.org Web site said three military convoys had been attacked in various districts, with more than 50 soldiers killed. The Web site also referred to the cafe blast, saying four officers had been killed.
Russia pulled out of Chechnya in 1996 after a humiliating defeat at the hands of the separatists and gave the territory de facto independence.
It launched its current offensive three years later in response to an armed incursion into a neighboring region and bomb blasts in Moscow and other Russian cities.
Moscow says its forces have established control over all Chechen territory and it has engaged in a high-profile publicity campaign to show that local services are working again.
The local administration, handed back to a civilian authority, returned to Grozny last month from Chechnya's second city, Gudermes. Russian television broadcasts reports showing schools and utilities in action and elderly residents collecting pensions.
But servicemen come under constant attack, particularly in mountain regions, and some 3,000 soldiers and police have already died in the current campaign. Death tolls are impossible to estimate for either rebels or civilians.
q
Two Russian servicemen overpowered a sentry, stole his pistol and fled from their base in eastern Siberia on Wednesday, killing a general who tried to stop them, Russian news reports said.
Television stations said an investigation was under way into why the two men, servicemen who stayed on beyond their conscription period, had decided to leave their base near the city of Chita.
The reports said the pair had traveled three kilometers, when a general passing in his car tried to stop them to demand an explanation for being off base. One of the fugitives opened fire at him at point-blank range and killed him.
The pair were captured after a five-hour search.
Stories of desertion or soldiers running amok occur regularly in the armed forces, where brutality by officers or fellow recruits remains a serious problem.
TITLE: Moscow Pushes NMD Dialog
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Despite Russia's long opposition to a U.S. national missile defense system, Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov responded on Wednesday to President Bush's commitment to the system by accentuating the positive.
At a news conference the day after Bush declared his intentions to go ahead with the defense shield, Ivanov praised U.S. plans to consult with other nations on the program.
"It is extremely important that the U.S. administration does not intend to take unilateral steps, but intends to consult with its allies and friends, including Russia," Ivanov said.
"Russia is ready for such consultations," Ivanov said. "President [Vla di mir] Putin has outlined a complex program on strategic nuclear arms and anti-missile defense."
Other Russian politicians complained the U.S. plans could destroy the foundations of global security and suggested Russia might respond by pulling out of the START II nuclear arms reduction treaty.
But Ivanov's remarks suggested Russia was becoming resigned to U.S. intentions despite months of vehement criticism. Other countries have echoed Russia's concerns, but opponents of the plan have not been able to mount an influential front.
China's state-run news agency quoted unidentified analysts as saying Bush's decision will "spark a new arms race and create a proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."
Russia's prime argument against the U.S. system is that it would violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which allows Russia and the United States only minimal missile defenses under the theory that a country would not launch a nuclear strike if it were unable to defend against a retaliatory attack.
To restore the deterrent balance, Russia would have to mount a nuclear force large enough to overwhelm the U.S. system, which would be a crushing economic burden on the struggling country.
The United States says the missile defense system is needed to counter the potential threat posed by smaller nations believed to be developing nuclear weapons.
Putin last year proposed a small European missile defense system, but the idea was seen as an attempt to drive a wedge between European NATO members and the United States. The proposal has never been fleshed out.
Later Wednesday, the Itar-Tass news agency reported that an anti-ballistic missile using "new technology" had been launched from the Saryshagan base in Kazakhstan, Russia's ABM testing facility. Missile forces officials could not be reached for confirmation.
Russia in recent years has eagerly pursued measures to reduce both sides' nuclear forces and Putin succeeded in pushing through ratification of the START II treaty last year.
But Dmitry Rogozin, head of the international affairs committee in the State Duma, said Wednesday that the Duma would consider pulling out of START II if the United States abandons the ABM treaty.
Reaction from U.S. allies varied. The most favorable response came from Australia, which said it would allow the United States to use joint military bases on its soil for the shield. Asian nations were restrained.
NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson said the allies welcomed Bush's intention of consulting them on his plans. But Robertson said "among some of the European countries there are concerns and worries about what missile defense might mean."
Britain and Canada issued statements that stopped short of endorsing the plan, while Sweden, Germany and others expressed deep concern, fearing the plan could jeopardize global security. But Germany praised Bush for showing readiness to talk to other countries about the plans.
"When you compare this to what we heard in the [U.S.] election campaign, this is essentially a cooperative sign," German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said.
The German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung suggested that may be naive.
"In Europe, there is a suspicion that the Bush administration has confused the verbs 'to consult' and 'to inform,'" the newspaper said.
A French Foreign Ministry statement noted: "We hope these consultations will touch upon all the questions raised by the project."
Moving to calm concern among allies, Bush called South Korean President Kim Dae-jung and U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell talked to Japanese Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka.
TITLE: Riga To Return a Great Statue
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: It's been through two world wars, the Soviet occupation, saved from a watery grave by Estonian divers, auctioned off, detained by officials, and right now is in the shop undergoing renovations. But the Latvian capital Riga's statue of Peter the Great has never been home.
However, by a decision of local and Riga officials, either the statue itself or a replica of it will be arriving in St. Petersburg for the city's 300th birthday in 2003.
At present, though, it is unclear whether anyone from City Hall would recognize Riga's ode to the city's founding father if he were to arrive from his travels today: A description of the statue as being two meters high, given by Governor Vladimir Yakovlev's spokes person Alexander Afanasyev, differed radically from the Latvian Museum's measurements of the work as being four meters.
But even Riga officials strained to give much detail, beyond that it was a bronze statue of Peter, featured the tsar on horseback and was in need of $65,000 of repairs. The cost of a replica - if undertaken - is to be slightly less than that.
A City Hall delegation will go to Riga sometime this month to view the statue in the workshop were it is currently being restored, Latvian officials said.
Sergei Dolgopolov, Riga's vice mayor, said in a telephone interview on Thursday that the recent decision by the Riga parliament to offer the statue - or its copy - to St. Petersburg as a 300th birthday present carried both celebratory banners and political baggage.
"Some want to offer the statue as a present of goodwill," he said. "Others see it as a Russian occupier and want it out."
Regardless of that latter sentiment, he said, the parliament was still undecided as to whether St. Petersburg would get the original or the copy, although added that he himself hopes St. Petersburg gets the original.
The statue was originally erected in Riga in 1910. But in 1915, during World War I, it was taken from its pedestal to be delivered to Russia as metal. It could have been melted into bullets had the boat carrying it from Riga to St. Petersburg not sunk off the coast of Estonia.
In the early 1930s, a team of Estonia divers lifted it from the ocean floor and sold it back to Riga, where it remained as an ambivalently received guest. In 1994, Riga's then-mayor decided not to dismantle it because of its historical significance. But seven years later, there are people who would pull the statue down for its pro-Russian connotations.
Then, earlier this year, the statue was taken down for renovations for Riga's 800th birthday celebrations when the city's Duma made the decision to send it to Russia.
"We have a strong national public mood here, especially before elections," he said, referring to Riga's upcoming mayoral vote. "Some [people] thought, 'why should we have an occupant here?' I wouldn't like to have any political games going around this."
But the politics - or at least the bureaucracy - are likely not to end there. When Peter the Great or his doppelganger arrive for the birthday festivities, they may find he isn't yet entered into the books as an official city resident. According to Afanasyev, a place has not yet been picked out locally for the sculpture. But of the sites the city is considering - which he would not disclose - something would be found.
TITLE: Tito Aboard Space Station As $20M Vacation Begins
PUBLISHER: The Washington Post
TEXT: KOROLYOV, Russia - American multimillionaire Dennis Tito floated out of a Russian capsule through a tight airlock and into the International Space Station on Monday, beginning his $20 million sight-seeing trip in the world's most distinctive vacation resort.
Like many first-time spacefarers, the 60-year-old investment fund manager from Los Angeles suffered from nausea and vomiting during the two days it took to get to the station. But by the time he arrived, Tito looked healthy and hearty again, displaying far more enthusiasm than he did when his Russian rocket took off Saturday.
"I don't know about this adaptation that they're talking about," he said from space, grinning. "I'm already adapted. I love space!"
Talgat Musabayev, commander of the Russian spacecraft that delivered Tito, testified that history's first paying space tourist was faring well. "He looks younger, maybe 10 years younger now."
Tito's flight has attracted worldwide attention to the issue of space commercialization and fostered bitter tensions between the Russians and Americans over the right to use the international station as a draw for space tourism. Although NASA complained that it was improper and possibly unsafe to unilaterally send a dilettante to the station while it was still being built, the Russians maintained that wealthy customers such as Tito will provide desperately needed cash to hold up their end of the project.
The Soyuz TM-32 carrying Tito, Musabayev and cosmonaut Yuri Baturin docked with the space station 336 kilometers above the planet without a hitch and on schedule at 3:57 a.m. EDT.
An hour and a half later, the hatch opened and the passengers disembarked, Tito in the middle, easing through with the help of a couple of crew members who guided his weightless frame into the station.
For the next six days, he will be a passenger with certain restrictions. But the rules will be simple enough: Look, but don't touch. If he breaks it, he buys it.
The accommodations may not measure up to what the multimillionaire is accustomed to on the ground - the best food he said he expects to get are mashed potatoes - but Tito doesn't appear to mind. He plans to spend his time taking photographs and listening to music. He will be able to talk by radio with his girlfriend and family, as well as send e-mail via a ham radio aboard the station.
Russian officials here at mission control center outside Moscow have not expressed any concerns about Tito's health.
"There was a great deal of talk about his being old and feeble, but can an old and feeble man jog 10 kilometers a day?" asked Yury Semyonov, head of the Russian rocket company Energia. Semyonov joked about Tito's "girlfriends" who watched him take off, a reference to his ex-wife and current companion. "He is strong, healthy and cheerful."
Yury Grigoryev, deputy designer at Energia, said the space sickness was normal and offered this assurance: "He will come back to Earth in one piece, safe and sound."
Beyond the novelty of Tito's participation, there is little glamour to this particular mission. The main task has already been accomplished: Docking a fresh Soyuz capsule that will now serve as the escape pod for the station for the rest of the year.
Tito and the two cosmonauts will return to Earth on Sunday aboard an older Soyuz currently attached to the station and due to be put out of service at the end of April.
The new Soyuz almost wasn't able to hook up with the station on time because of an orbital parking jam. But the U.S. space shuttle Endeavor, which had to postpone its departure to deal with computer problems aboard the station, pushed off on Sunday, making room for Tito's taxi.
TITLE: Greenpeace Protests in Kaliningrad
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: Greenpeace activists on Thursday used a fire hose to suck what they said was contaminated water from a Russian factory's pipes and spray it back onto the factory's territory, trying to dramatize the environmental group's campaign to ban toxic chemicals.
Greenpeace said that the Cepruss pulp and paper mill, in Russia's western Kaliningrad enclave, was releasing dangerous pollution created as a byproduct of bleaching pulp for white paper with chlorine gas.
The group said the process can produce chemicals on the so-called "dirty dozen" list of dangerous industrial pollutants that are scheduled to be phased out under a treaty 120 nations will sign later this month. Russia has agreed to sign the treaty.
The "dirty dozen" chemicals linger in the environment and collect in human tissue, causing damage especially to childbearing women.
"The technology to stop this environmental abuse is readily available. The paper industry must make the jump to chlorine-free processes and stop its waste water discharges," Greenpeace activist Wytrze van der Naald said in the statement.
Editor's note: See the Feature article on how Greenpeace prepares for activities in the Baltic Sea on pages 4-5.
TITLE: Borodin Called Back to Geneva
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: GENEVA - Geneva judicial authorities said on Thursday that they had summoned ex-Kremlin aide Pavel Borodin, indicted on Swiss money-laundering charges, to return this month for further questioning.
But Geneva's chief prosecutor, Bernard Bertossa, said he was skeptical that the Russian would appear even though Borodin has stated his readiness to return from Moscow for the Swiss probe.
"The summons has been sent. The questioning is due to take place during the month of May," Bertossa told a news conference.
Neither Bertossa nor Geneva investigating magistrate Daniel Devaud, who sent the summons, would reveal the proposed date.
Devaud has indicted four other people in connection with his two-year inquiry into kickbacks from $500 million Kremlin renovation contracts that were allegedly laundered in Swiss banks and through a network of offshore accounts.
"I have sent a summons for questioning to be held in May concerning the people in the case," he said on Thursday.
Borodin, a confidant of the former Russian president Boris Yeltsin, was formally indicted last month on charges of laundering more than $25 million after being extradited from the United States, where he was arrested last January. At the time, he refused to answer any questions, according to Bertossa.
Last year, Russia dropped its inquiry into Borodin, who denies all charges and remains the secretary of the nebulous union between Russia and Belarus.
Borodin, in an interview broadcast on German-language Swiss Television on Wednesday night, said from Russia: "I have nothing to tell to the Swiss authorities ... the Russian authorities have found no offenses - that is why there is nothing to say to the Swiss authorities ... [however], when I am called upon to go back to Geneva, I will go."
However, Genrikh Padva, one of Borodin's lawyers, told Ria Novosti news agency in Moscow that he did not know yet whether his client would return to Switzerland for further questioning. He said that Borodin had been feeling unwell in recent days, was only working a few hours each day, and had already visited a hospital for treatment.
"He does not deny his willingness to go," said Padva. "But willingness is one thing - ability is another thing altogether."
Padva said that Borodin's return to Geneva "depends on a whole set of circumstances, but above all on his [state of] health."
The 54-year-old flew home to Mos cow on April 13 a day after a Geneva court ordered him released on bail of five million Swiss francs ($2.9 million) - paid in cash by Russia.
While in Geneva, he was hospitalized for heart problems linked to diabetes and high blood pressure, his lawyers said.
Conviction for money laundering carries a maximum three-year jail term under Swiss law, which permits indicted suspects to be tried in absentia.
Bertossa, asked whether he expected Borodin to return, told reporters on Thursday: "I remain skeptical. But the main thing is that he has been indicted."
Bertossa argued in court against granting bail, citing a risk of him fleeing to Russia, which does not extradite its own citizens. Borodin was "politically protected" there, he added.
Bertossa, who has tracked the illicit financial affairs of several other foreign dignitaries with Geneva bank accounts, last June won the conviction of former Uk rai ni an Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko on charges of money laundering. Switzerland returned to Kiev the $6.6 million it had seized from bank accounts that Lazarenko held there.
TITLE: Underpaid Nuclear Experts Present Risk, Warns Report
PUBLISHER: The Washington Post
TEXT: In the 1940s and 1950s, Russia's 10 "nuclear cities" were places of relative privilege in the former Soviet Union. Scientists living in these isolated, nameless towns and cities, which were not found on any map, were rewarded for their work on the development of nuclear weapons in terms of good wages and access to a large number of scarce consumer goods.
That was then, but times have changed.
Now, six in 10 nuclear experts are earning less than $50 per month, and roughly the same number have to moonlight to get by, according to a groundbreaking survey of 500 specialists working in the nuclear cities. The survey was commissioned by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
"If you're a top manager at Los Alamos, you make about 100 times more than you make if you're a top manager in Russia," said Jon Wolfsthal, an associate in Carnegie's Non-Proliferation Project.
"Their economic hardship dramatically increases the risk that they will be forced to sell their skills or materials at hand to the highest bidder," Wolfsthal and Alexander Pikayev wrote in the report's introduction.
More than one in 10 experts said they would like to work outside Russia, and 6 percent said they would move "any place at all." What would they do once they got there? "What they do best, which is make weapons," Wolfsthal said.
Aside from the risk of secret-saturated scientists settling in the so-called "rogue states" such as Iraq or North Korea, there is also the problem of whether there would be anyone left to mind the nuclear store. Private business is proving to be an irresistible lure for many specialists, and migration to the nuclear cities is on the wane.
The report, authored by Russian sociologist Valentin Tikhonov, is available on Carnegie's Web site (www.ceip.org) and will be officially released in early May.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Rebel Leader Held
NAZRAN, Ingushetia (AP) - Khidir Matgeriyev, a rebel field commander suspected of having killed police officers and ethnic Russians in Chechnya, was detained Thursday along with several accomplices, Interfax reported.
Matgeriyev leads a rebel band of 70 insurgents, the report said.
Meanwhile, Interior Ministry troops on Thursday prevented a group of Chechen gunmen from entering Argun, Itar-Tass said. It said several rebels were killed in the clash. No Russian casualties were reported.
Russian Press Awards
NEW YORK (AP) - Nearly two dozen journalists were honored for their coverage of international events by the Overseas Press Club at its annual awards banquet Thursday.
The journalism club also announced the creation of a new award for outstanding reporting by a Russian. The award was named after Artyom Borovik, a Russian print and television reporter who was killed in an airplane crash in March 1999.
Anna Politkovskaya, a reporter with Novaya Gazeta, won the $3,000 award for a series of articles on Russia.
CBS News' Dan Rather presented the awards, and David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker magazine, gave the keynote address.
Gongadze Tests
KIEV (AP) - U.S. experts studying the body believed to be that of a missing journalist whose disappearance brought about a political crisis in Ukraine may provide answers within a week, an attorney said.
The experts, along with their Ukrainian counterparts and in the presence of attorneys for journalist Georgy Gongadze's mother and wife, carried out the work required for the body analysis last Thursday.
"We have no complaints whatsoever against the experts," said Andriy Fedur, attorney for Gongadze's mother, Lesia. "We have witnessed the high qualification of the whole expert group that worked ... in our presence."
Gongadze, an outspoken critic of alleged high-level corruption, disappeared in Kiev in September.
U.S. To Relax on Visas?
MOSCOW (SPT) - U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell indicated this week that the United States may consider waiving visas for Russian tourists and businessmen.
The matter was raised at a Congress subcommittee hearing late last month by Representative Charles Taylor of North Carolina, who said applying for visas is a complicated, costly and lengthy process for Russians. Powell said he would look into the matter, but did not say when he would provide an answer.
Some 95,000 Russians applied for nonimmigrant visas to the United States last year, according to the U.S. government. Some of them - student visas and visas for longer than 90 days - would not fall into the visa-waiver category. But a relaxing of travel regulations for Russians by the United States would indicate a warming up of a recent frost on ties between the two countries.
Tobin Gets 3 Years
VORONEZH, Central Russia (AP) - A court sentenced American Fulbright scholar John Tobin last Friday to three years and one month in prison on charges of obtaining, possessing and distributing drugs. He was found innocent of another charge, persuading others to use narcotics.
Before the verdict was read, Tobin delivered his final statement to the court from the metal cage where defendants are confined during Russian trials.
"Your Honor, respected participants in the trial, I consider myself not guilty. I am a student. I came here to study," he said in Russian. "I never offered or sold anyone drugs."
Tobin showed no reaction as the sentence was read, and he refused to answer reporters' questions before being led out of the courtroom. His lawyer, Maxim Bayev, said that he would appeal the sentence and demand in particular that the conviction for drug distribution be overturned because it was not upheld by the evidence.
TB Loan Opposed
MOSCOW (SPT) - The Health Ministry said Friday it was opposed to the government taking a $150 million World Bank loan for treating tuberculosis and AIDS. The ministry's position provoked criticism from nongovernmental organizations fighting the rising epidemics in Russia. Russia has one of the highest numbers of TB patients per capita in the world.
An official with an international organization, who asked not to be identified, said the ministry was lobbying on behalf of Russian pharmaceutical companies that fear their drugs may not be approved for use in the World Bank-sponsored program.
The Health Ministry said Friday it was "not satisfied" with the conditions put forward by the World Bank. A ministry official said those conditions "concern the purchase of medication," but refused to elaborate.
The World Bank is financing the implementation of a simple and inexpensive treatment method called DOTS, Directly Observed Therapy Short-Course. The method is recommended by the World Health Organization.
Tang Lays Ground
MOSCOW (AP) - Preparations for a summer presidential summit and the signing of a new friendship treaty top the agenda for Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan's four-day visit to Moscow.
Tang was scheduled to arrive Friday, on the eve of a foreign ministers' meeting of the Shanghai Five: Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
He was expected to meet with Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov on Sunday to pave the way for President Vladimir Putin's July meeting in Shanghai with Chinese leader Jiang Zemin. The two ministers were also to put the final touches on the treaty, the latest sign of strengthening bilateral ties.
TITLE: Europe Uneasy Over Gazprom Relations
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Soviet troops are long gone from Poland and Hungary, but both countries say they're facing a new threat from the east: the growing tentacles of Russia's powerful gas monopoly, Gazprom.
Millions of Europeans would be hard-pressed to heat their homes without Gazprom. The world's largest natural gas producer, Gazprom already exports to 27 European countries.
Gazprom is not stopping with its core business of natural gas. It has been in the news - and heavily criticized - for its disputed takeover of Russia's largest independent television station, NTV.
The company also is seeking a foothold in Europe's chemicals industry, starting with Hungary. And it wants a share of lucrative telephone traffic between Russia and the rest of the continent, via fiberoptic lines being laid through Poland.
In Eastern Europe, Gazprom's overtures are viewed as a sign of a revived Russian drive for control - only this time through corporate muscle and backroom deals.
Gazprom's decisions are widely seen as reflecting Kremlin policy. It is Russia's largest company, 38 percent owned by the government and closely linked to the highest political levels. Its chairman, Dmitry Medvedev, is deputy chief of the presidential administration. Some say Gazprom dictates Kremlin policy, pressuring officials to champion its interests.
"Gazprom means the Russian republic, Russian institutions, Russian military and oligarchy," wrote Poland's Gazeta Wyborcza.
Russian officials and some industry analysts say the fears in Eastern Europe spring from emotional memories instead of economic concerns. And they warn that a backlash against Gazprom would hurt Eastern European companies, cutting them off from cooperation with a major market player.
"There is still a lot of anti-Russian feeling in Hungary and Poland. It makes them nervous to see newly rich Russian companies coming in and taking advantage of their open capital markets," said Steve Allen, oil and gas analyst for Renaissance Capital in Moscow.
But other observers warn the scandals over Gazprom's purchases could hamper its efforts to court Western partners and investors.
Many of Russia's most powerful companies keep finances tightly closed, rely on political ties and have little regard for minority shareholders. Gazprom has been accused of all this - and more.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London postponed a decision on a loan to Gazprom pending a probe into charges of asset-stripping by Gazprom management.
The deputy director of Gazprom's powerful export arm, Gazexport, Sergei Chelpanov, called his company "the most transparent in the world" and played down its recent spending in Eastern Europe.
"To talk about a sharp increase in exports, it is necessary to carry out serious investment within Russia," he said.
Despite large reserves, Gazprom loses money at home. It helps keep inefficient Soviet-era enterprises afloat by supplying cheap gas, but gets paid for only about one-fifth of its domestic gas deliveries, industry analysts say.
One of its key export-boosting efforts is the Yamal pipeline from Siberia through Belarus and Poland to Germany and beyond. It is expected to pump 30 billion cubic meters annually by 2003, and the company has invested $4 billion to $6 billion in the project so far.
But alongside the pipeline is a huge fiberoptic cable that has enraged and embarrassed the Polish government.
The government issued permits for the cable, believing it would only monitor gas flow. Construction was halted in a Polish strawberry plot when reports surfaced that the cable could carry a staggering 37 million telephone calls per second, and officials accused Gazprom of trying to deny Poland profits from the telephone traffic.
Gazprom CEO Rem Vyakhirev was in Poland recently to seek a compromise and emphasized that Poland and Gazprom need each other. But for many Poles, the scandal resurrected memories of Poland's days as a Soviet satellite.
"We do not want to aggravate relations with Russia unnecessarily, but we will not allow for violation of our interests," said Polish Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek.
Meanwhile, Gazprom is stretching its wings in the chemical sector.
Hungary has launched a probe into the September purchase of a 25 percent stake in the country's second-largest chemical company, BorsodChem, by a group of Austrian and Russian investors believed to be led by Gazprom.
The investors have installed Gaz prom representatives on BorsodChem's board and - authorities say - failed to make a public offer for outstanding stock in violation of securities regulations. The deal also gives buyers a say in Hungary's largest chemical company, TVK, of which BorsodChem owns 29.9 percent.
The purchase rattled Budapest's stock market and prompted Prime Minister Viktor Orban to suggest organized crime was involved. Gazprom officials have refused to comment on the deal.
TITLE: AvtoVAZ Niva Set To Get a Makeover
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW - The AvtoVAZ factory's prototype of the new Chevy Niva is only a few months old but it already looks set to become a collector's item.
The first sellable Chevy Niva is expected to exit the Volga region's Tolyatti assembly line in September 2002 - but with half the present parts and features.
In other words, the final product will be less "Russian" than the prototype, with the export version even less so.
The Chevy Niva is the product of a historical joint venture between U.S. giant General Motors, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and AvtoVAZ. GM and AvtoVAZ each have a 41.5 percent stake, while the EBRD holds 17 percent. GM has invested $100 million, while AvtoVAZ will provide about the same amount in terms of intellectual property - the Niva VAZ 2123 prototype - and buildings and infrastructure. The EBRD will contribute $133 million, bringing the total value of the project to $333 million.
GM vice president David Herman said the deal would be finalized in May, and by the time production kicks off, specialists from GM and their Russian counterparts will have unveiled the all-new version of the Chevy Niva.
The look of the car will be "completely different," said Herman. Additionally, the ergonomics will be significantly improved, as will the safety systems and certain elements of the chassis.
GM specialists consider the AvtoVAZ engine currently installed in the prototypes to be suitable for the Russian market. The export version, however, will be fitted with either a 1.8 liter gas engine or a 1.99 liter diesel engine produced jointly by GM and Italy's Fiat. The imported engines will hike the car's price tag by 20 percent.
Herman praised AvtoVAZ specialists, whose design solutions have put the Niva at the top of GM's price-to-quality ratio. The car will cost roughly $8,000 locally and will be more suited to use in Russia than GM's other off-road vehicles, he said. These qualities should also make the vehicle attractive to foreign markets.
Half of the planned annual production of 75,000 units is slated for export.
When preparing its business plan for the deal, GM polled its representative offices in a number of countries to assess potential demand for the Russian-American vehicle. It emerged that the greatest potential success could await the Chevy Niva in Western Europe, South Africa, Mexico and China.
GM's office in China was particularly interested in the car and suggested that production be organized at the GM factory in Shanghai, Herman said.
TITLE: North-West GSM Introduces Federal Number Packages
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: In an attempt to broaden its client base in the city, North-West GSM, St. Petersburg's largest cellular service operator, began signing up subscribers on Tuesday to its "Universal 902" plan, which uses so-called "federal" numbers.
According to company officials, the new numbers were introduced in order to attract customers from segments of the population that have yet to embrace cellular communications. And, although there are certain drawbacks associated with using the numbers, industry analysts say that the move will likely pay dividends for North-West GSM.
The federal numbers are different in that they are 10 digits long, as opposed to the seven digits used in the standard numbers.
Those calling cellular phones working on these numbers will have to follow a process much like making a long-distance call - first dialing 8, and then waiting for a new dial tone before dialing the 902 exchange and then the remaining seven digits.
The federal numbers, because they are based on a countrywide system, do make long-distance calls easier, as subscribers won't need to dial the code for another city, but simply the number of the person they are calling.
North-West GSM is able to supply the federal numbers through an agreement with the Moscow-based Interregional Transit Telecom (MTT), which operates a national digital telephone network integrating 82 cellular operators across Russia.
"Federal numbers have a lower basic cost compared to standard local numbers," Konstantin Sukhin, marketing director for North-West GSM, wrote in a press release at the end of April. "This allows us to offer more attractive prices for our service."
The monthly charges for the federal-number services, as well as the tariffs charged for calls, will be about 40 percent lower than those associated with North-West GSM's "Simple" tariff plan, according to the press release. The Simple plan is the most popular at present with the company's subscribers.
But the service will lack some of the cost-saving aspects of current services.
The Simple tariff plan offered to subscribers allows them to talk for the first 10 seconds of any call without charge. With the federal numbers, this period is shortened to three seconds.
"Of all our tariffs, this will be the cheapest, which should compensate for the loss of the 10-second free-call option," Sukhin said. "I can't really say what kind of volume the 10-second calls represent, but too much of the network's capacity is tied up with these calls."
Despite the more difficult dialing procedure and the loss of the free 10-second calls, analysts believe that the introduction of the new numbers by North-West GSM makes sense.
"That is absolutely normal and proper policy for North-West GSM to follow," Andrei Braginsky, a telecoms analyst at Renaissance Capital, said in telephone interview on Thursday.
"Prior to the beginning of the price war that is expected to start with the arrival of a competitor in the form of Moscow-based Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) in the local market, they will try to attract as many new subscribers as possible."
In 1998, North-West GSM and another company, Telecom XXI, both received licenses to operate GSM-standard networks in Russia's Northwest Region. But Telecom XXI never set up operations and North-West GSM has had the GSM market in St. Petersburg to itself.
But MTS announced in March that it was buying the holder of the city's second license, and intended to begin signing up its own subscribers in St. Petersburg by the end of the summer.
North-West GSM seems to be taking a page out of its new competitor's own book, as MTS itself has enjoyed success in attracting new subscribers by offering the federal numbers in its Moscow operations. Company officials attribute a great deal of their success in achieving a mass market in the capital for the federal numbers.
"In 1997, no one expected cell-phone service being used by such a wide range of subscribers," Eva Prokofyeva, press officer with MTS, said in telephone interview on Thursday. "They only began to believe that we could achieve such a mass market when we reached a million subscribers in 1998."
According to Prokofyeva, the lower prices for the federal numbers have very little to do with the actual cost of operating them.
"When the federal numbers were launched they were offered at a lower price because of the company's chief goal - to get more subscribers.
"The lower cost is also designed to compensate for some difficulties inherent in the federal numbers, such as the longer number itself and longer procedure of calling from phones connected to local office switching stations," she added. "Also, the long-distance lines the system operates on are sometimes simply busy."
TITLE: Shareholders Endorse Airline Merger
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - Shareholders in regional airline Sibir on Friday overwhelmingly approved the acquisition of No. 6 domestic carrier Vnukovo Airlines at an extraordinary shareholders meeting held in Novosibirsk, company officials said.
Of the 86.5 percent of shareholders represented at the meeting, more than 99 percent voted in favor of the merger, news of which was announced earlier this year when Sibir took over the management of Vnukovo's flights and cash flows.
The deal will give the 25.5 percent-state-owned Sibir, which is the country's No. 3 airline by passenger volume, Vnukovo's extensive route coverage, which consists of licenses to 60 domestic and 80 international destinations. Sibir will also get some 40 aircraft from the acquisition to add to its fleet of 28 planes.
Most importantly for Sibir, however, is Vnukovo's lucrative Moscow hub.
Vnukovo shareholders will meet May 5 to vote on the deal, which a Sibir spokesperson said will be nothing more than a technicality.
If approved by Vnukovo, the new airline will fly under the Sibir brand name, Sibir said in a statement Friday.
The merger of Vnukovo, which is struggling under the weight of millions of dollars of debt, and Sibir, rated as Russia's best-managed airline, was first proposed in 1999.
But the deal failed to get off the ground, in part due to disputes over how stakes in the new company would be divided.
Meanwhile, Sibir is in negotiations with No. 1 carrier Aeroflot, which analysts say could lead to further consolidation in the airline industry.
TITLE: Slow Market Brings Regulator Boredom
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Low trading volumes are making brokers bored and jeopardizing the survival of self-regulatory organizations.
The RTS' average daily trading volume last week was $12.7 million, down 30 percent from the week before.
The miniscule volumes have made market participants rethink the need to pay monthly fees to organizations that oversee broker-dealer relationships and monitor standards.
NAUFOR, or National Association of Stock Market Participants, for example, has kicked out 150 companies this year - 62 last week alone - mainly for not paying dues.
Another group, PARTAD, or Professional Association of Registrars, Agents and Depositories, seems to be in good shape, but only because it allows its members to leave at the end of the financial year, so those companies that filed requests after the New Year are still counted as active participants.
"There is a problem," said Kon stantin Vol kov, president of the National Stock Market Association, or NSA. "We have to talk to our members to convince them that they need SROs."
Russia has three self-regulatory organizations, or SROs - NAUFOR, PARTAD and NSA - that are supposed to monitor standards of conduct in the market, solve disputes between participants and lobby for their interests.
Their future is much less certain now than when the market was tearing up new ground back in 1997.
For a long time, NAUFOR enjoyed a privileged status as a favorite pet of Federal Securities Commission head Dmitry Vasilyev, who ordered all brokers/dealers to participate in NAUFOR. But last year, the bonanza came to an end after President Vladimir Putin canceled obligatory membership in all SROs.
Volkov, who used to blame Vasilyev for all sorts of abuses, one of them being NAUFOR's monopoly status, is not happy with the way things are going. He said Friday that market organizations should participate in at least one organization.
"The FSC has not completed its overhaul of the SRO system," said Vol kov. "It stopped somewhere in the middle of the road after several initial steps."
On one side of the coin is Putin and FSC boss Igor Kostikov. And on the other is the performance of the stock market itself, which remains in the doldrums, leaving brokers with bread but little butter.
"There is no inflow of funds in the market," NAUFOR spokesman Alexander Diakovsky said Friday. "Brokers, especially in the regions, are cost-cutting and refuse to pay fees."
NSA, which lists about 200 members, and NAUFOR, with 870 members, both claim their numbers remain unchanged, while PARTAD boasts an increase of four companies for a total of 266.
The number of brokers who are paying membership fees to the Russian Trading System has also remained unchanged at 258.
However, these figures fail to represent the lack of interest in the market.
PARTAD was unable even to elect its own president earlier this month because it couldn't get the 50 percent plus one participant needed to call a quorum.
"We lacked about seven to 10 ballots," said an official with PARTAD who asked not to be named. "The legality of our executive bodies is now in question."
The reason for the failure was refusal of many members to vote. "They don't care," said the PARTAD official. "Many of them switched to NAUFOR."
Last year, about 15 percent of brokers lost their licenses. This year, Diakovsky said, NAUFOR expects another 15 percent to go.
In PARTAD, annual fees are $3,000.
Meanwhile, traders yawn when looking at their screens because the liquidity of the market is miniscule.
"Russia is one of the best places in the world right now because the market at least is not falling," said one trader.
"But there is no liquidity - people are just sitting on the sidelines."
TITLE: Nation Ranks 45th in Competitiveness
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia is no longer considered the least competitive country in the world.
Over the course of last year, Russia surpassed Colombia, Poland, Venezuela and Indonesia to take 45th place in terms of its competitiveness, according to a poll of business leaders conducted by the International Institute for Management Development, or IMD.
The Economic Development and Trade Ministry said the country's higher ranking demonstrates that attitudes toward Russia are changing.
Every year, the IMD business school in Lausanne, Switzerland, compiles a ranking of countries' competitiveness. This year, the list includes 49 countries, two more than last year. The purpose of the list is to demonstrate to what extent countries help their business leaders achieve greater competitiveness on the domestic and international markets. Countries are rated not only by objective economic factors, such as the rise of gross domestic product, but a long list of criteria that includes:
. 68 criteria for economic activity that evaluate macroeconomic indicators;
. 84 criteria for government performance, including general policies, tax policies and protection of investors;
. 60 criteria for effective business management, including profitability, responsibility and innovation;
. 74 criteria for infrastructure, measuring to what extent local, technical, scientific and human resources meet business needs.
In addition, IMD used statistics received from international organizations, national and private institutes and data compiled from a survey of 3,678 directors of large- and medium-sized companies in the countries studied.
The Economic Development and Trade Ministry said the IMD survey could be used to gauge world opinion. "We keep track of such data," said Deputy Minister Arkady Dvorkovich. "It might not be entirely objective, but it's an indicator of attitudes toward us. Russia's position will continue to improve if the measures we propose are implemented."
However, the government does not study the country's competitiveness in its own analyses. "The rise in exports - that's the rise of our competitiveness," said Alexander Pakhomov, head of the Economic Development and Trade Ministry's trade policy department.
Using exports as an indicator, Russia ranks high. It is fourth in the world for the growth of exports and is second for its positive net trade balance. Moreover, Russia comes out on top in some categories. It has the highest correlation of the value of exports to the value of imports, and the lowest cost of electrical energy for industry. Over the past year, the government achieved the greatest reduction of its state debt among the countries surveyed, with a 30.8 percent drop, not taking into account inflation.
Russia could perform much better if it targeted those areas where it particularly falls behind, said Suzanne Rosselet, who was responsible for the methodology used in IMD's research. If Russia brought results in its 20 weakest areas up to the IMD study's average, the country's rating would rise to 39.
Russia's weaknesses, in IMD's opinion, include the highest foreign debt as a percentage of GDP at 85.6 percent, the highest level of energy consumption at 62.7 kilojoules per dollar of GDP, the absence of a mechanism to protect foreign investment, and drug and alcohol abuse.
The ratings rose the fastest among countries that focused on government performance and effective management of infrastructure, Rosselet said. Finland and Sweden, for example, are increasing their competitiveness through large investments in new technology.
Hong Kong, significantly, improved its rating by returning to sixth place - the position it held in 1999 - from 12th place in 2000. Like Russia, Hong Kong achieved its higher ranking through an improved macroeconomic rating. Last year, Hong Kong's GDP rose 10 percent.
The institute's specialists warn that this year, the arrangement of power could change, given that the United State's economic slowdown and the current economic crisis in Japan will have a negative impact on other countries.
"The year 2000 was a year of economic excess, 2001 could be the year of the economic hangover," the report states.
"The United States and Japan create 46 percent of the world's gross national product," said Professor Step hane Garelli, director of the project. "A worsening economic situation in those countries could hurt every country in the world."
Japan's rating has fallen for the past seven years. For eight years until 1994, Japan held first place. But the country is being undermined by the reluctance of its authorities to undertake reforms that would allow it to overcome stagnation. The Americans, who have held first place since 1994, are not in danger of losing their position.
"The leading countries have created conditions not only for attracting investment, but also the best minds," Garelli said. "The U.S. has been the most active in this area. From 1994 to 1999, they 'imported' 124,000 Indians, 68,000 Chinese, 57,000 Filipinos, 49,000 Canadians and 42,000 British citizens, all highly educated. In the race to increase competitiveness, the struggle is waged for bytes and minds."
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: PTS Retains Director
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - An extraordinary shareholders meeting of Petersburg Telephone System (PTS) overwhelmingly chose Sergey Soldatenkov for the post of general director on Saturday, according to an Interfax report.
Soldatenkov had been serving as acting director for the company and overseeing the merger of PTS with St. Petersburg National and International Telephone and Petersburg Telegraph prior to the vote.
According to the report, Soldatenkov received 99.5 percent of the votes cast at the meeting to serve a two-year term as head of the company.
Inflation Target
MOSCOW (Reuters) - The government hopes 2001 annual consumer price inflation will be 14 percent to 16 percent despite higher-than-expected price rises in the first quarter, local news agencies quoted a government official as saying last week.
"Inflation in the first quarter has actually exceeded the target. In April it will also be higher than we have planned," Interfax quoted Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref as telling reporters.
Earlier this month, the State Statistics Committee said prices had risen 7.1 percent in the first quarter of 2001 and estimated April inflation would be 1.7 percent to 2 percent after 1.9 percent in March.
But Gref said he was sure annual CPI would not exceed 14 percent to 16 percent. The 2001 budget is based on an annual CPI forecast of 12 percent to 14 percent.
Ruble 'Won't Top' 31
MOSCOW (Reuters) - The ruble rate will not exceed 31 per dollar in 2001, news agencies quoted Central Bank chairman Viktor Gerashchenko as saying last week.
The 2001 budget sets the average ruble/dollar rate for the year at 30 rubles.
RIA quoted him as telling a news conference the Central Bank had all reasons to believe that the ruble would be stable and would not exceed 31 per dollar rate.
Gerashchenko also said he saw the volume of the Central Bank's gold and hard currency reserves it uses to support the national currency at $42 billion to $45 billion as optimal.
The reserves stood at $30.8 billion April 20.
Kasyanov on WTO
MOSCOW (AP) - Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov said last week that Russian industries needed three to eight years to reach European standards and make the country eligible to join the World Trade Organization.
However, most industrial sectors have at least a few enterprises that already are capable of competing with European producers, Kasyanov said, according to Interfax.
Kasyanov spoke at a meeting of the Economic Development and Trade Ministry, where he ordered officials to work out a transition schedule for industries. The schedule is expected to be presented at the next round of talks with the WTO officials in Geneva in June.
"For this reason, in the WTO admission negotiations, we will uphold the need for a transition period that could be three years in some sectors and seven to eight years in others to be sufficiently developed and competitive," Kasyanov was quoted as saying by Itar-Tass.
TITLE: Mailbox
TEXT: Dear Editor,
I am writing in response to the article by Irina Glushchenko ["Work the Western Way, Wear Your Short Skirt," April 27].
I completely agree with Irina in her criticism of the way many foreigners are treating their Russian subordinates in their own country.
The only statement I can argue with is that not all Russians were "drinking tea for hours, discussing life with ... colleagues" in the old days. This statement might make one think that the Western bosses are doing the right thing by making those lazy Russians work properly and help them adjust to the "new order." In reality, this is nothing but a mere expression of discrimination and double standards.
Having lived and worked in the United States for the last two years, I can say that no American could even consider implementing any of those appalling "rules" like making women wear short skirts and high heels in his own country. Even for a regulation much less demeaning than this, he would be sued for sexual harassment. Just because of the simple rule of supply and demand where any Russian would be happy to work for a foreign company and earn more money, the foreign bosses see Russia as a perfect ground to rule and feel superior to many locals who, in many cases, are much smarter and more educated than they are.
Olga Phelps (Manyakhina)
Dear Editor,
I loved your article about the trans-Siberian trip ["All Aboard the Trans-Siberian," April 27]. My wife and I will be doing some of the trip between Novosibirsk and Irkutsk and Ulan Ude this summer. My daughter refuses to go and will stay with relatives. Everything you describe is the very reason I want to do the trip and probably the reason my wife is not too enthused about it.
We will also have homestays in that area and live for a couple of days with a previous exchange student we had a few years ago. Thank you for such a perceptive and entertaining article. I am even more thrilled about going.
Gordon Thomas
Tampa Bay, Florida
Dear Editor,
I wanted to comment on your crude and uninspiring article on the Trans-Siberian railway. I am a Canadian who was so enamored by Russia and the same trip four years ago that I have now been in Voronezh teaching English for more than six months.
I wrote a manuscript called Moscow+7 that took a laborious three years to complete. The contrasts could not be any more apparent. Juliet Butler should have attempted to make the journey a bit more of a surreal and timelessly magical incident.
With the Mir space station now dead in the water, Russia has few icons of this sort to boast about, and your article was a tourism re-entry and slow burn-up for the Trans-Siberian railway. I think, instead, the trip is a wonderful experience for the prepared and an amazing accomplishment for the Russia Federation, retaining a major piece of its history. Don't stab Russia as it painfully staggers into a new world of openness and freedom.
Brent Antonson,
Voronezh
Dear Editor,
When I read about Juliet Butler's trip on the trans-Siberian railroad, I was left with a very pleasant feeling. Her discussion of the famous railway was what anyone like myself with an interest in Russian culture would enjoy reading. I am going to show the article to my Russian teachers at Staten Island Technical High School in New York so that they can show their students a little slice of what Russian is like beyond the capitals.
To Americans, the railroad is what the "monster" in Lake Baikal that Butler wrote about is to Russians: We have all heard about it, but we don't know anything about it. So, thank you for that delightful, descriptive, and informative story.
Joseph Caneco
Staten Island, New York
Dear Editor,
I was astonished by the personal attack that Alex Lupis made on Boris Jordan [Letters, April 27]. The content of the letter was frankly ludicrous, and the personal angle was both unnecessary and distasteful.
At the root of Mr. Lupis' attack are two underlying beliefs: (1) that the conspiracy theories surrounding the NTV affair hold true, and (2) that business is somehow a murky affair to be avoided by those who wish to assist the development of Russia.
The hyperbole written about the NTV affair over the past few weeks defies belief, especially since most of it is pure speculation and conspiracy theory. NTV has become the latest in a long series of issues to be misused by domestic and foreign journalists to paint Russia and its president in a bad light.
No doubt this stems from newspaper editors' and owners' demands for sensational copy. A story about the breakdown of democracy in Russia sells more newspapers than a dry article about a media company that over-stretched its balance sheet. A reference to the Russian president's KGB past sells more papers than a comment that the president is actually making a fine stab at one of the world's toughest jobs.
When will domestic journalists realize that this kind of ill-informed negative reporting damages the country? The media has a professional duty to look at both sides of an argument. There is very strong evidence that the NTV affair is a purely commercial matter. It seems that the business has been mismanaged, possibly criminally mismanaged, and that its creditors have stepped in to pick up the pieces. This happens on a regular basis throughout the world, not just in Russia.
Mr. Lupis describes Boris Jordan as a "political stooge" of President Putin. Businessmen of Boris Jordan's stature must inevitably foster good relationships with key political figures to a certain extent. However, this does not make them yesmen. Boris is actually the antithesis of a stooge, as his scrapes with Russian authority over the past decade have shown. I recall the day in 1996 when I saw Jordan walking down Fifth Avenue in New York clutching a newspaper. That very newspaper carried a story explaining why he was in the United States and not Russia that day - a long-running dispute with the Russian authorities that led to his work permit and visa being withdrawn.
Jordan is alleged to have taken "the ethically compromised path of money and power rather than respecting the heritage of his own ancestors." It is naive to argue that businesspeople come to Russia for purely selfless reasons. Boris Jordan wishes to make excellent money from his business pursuits, and indeed owes this profit motive to himself, his family and his business partners. This is the essence of capitalism, and Jordan is capitalism incarnate.
However, believers in the capitalist doctrine hold that the country benefits most from this method of organizing its resources. Boris Jordan is keenly aware of this, and knows that the side effects of his business activities in Russia have and will reap great benefits for the country. Jordan is one of Russia's most prominent investment bankers, and has assisted the flow of billions of dollars into the country over the past decade. This money has built and renovated factories, created thousands of jobs, stimulated the economy and helped develop Russia's financial capital markets.
Mr. Lupis' and the motives behind his letter intrigue me. Does he advise that all businessmen sever theirs ties with Russia until an entire post-Soviet generation peoples its shores? Apart from making candles for the Russian Orthodox Church, what has this gentleman done for Russia in recent years, and how does this compare with the efforts of Boris Jordan? And what causes someone to publicly denounce an acquaintance from his or her close-knit, small Russian-American community? Especially the person that found you your first job.
Stephen Ogden
St. Petersburg
TITLE: Having It Both Ways
TEXT: MIKHAIL Gorbachev, the father of free speech in the former Soviet Union, says he was dismayed by the state-sponsored takeover of Russia's NTV television network. "It has split our society," he says, and will make further reform harder to achieve. But is Vladimir Putin to blame? Certainly not, Gorbachev insisted during his recent visit to Washington, where he lobbied U.S. President George Bush on Putin's behalf. "It doesn't necessarily mean the president has reversed himself on a free press," he said. "Maybe his advisers pulled the wool over his eyes."
Maybe we shouldn't expect passion about democracy, or even candor, from Moscow's last Communist tsar. But Gorbachev's defense of Vladimir Putin is interesting precisely because it is so typical of the liberal political elite Gorbachev helped to create 15 years ago - a generation of free speakers and free marketeers who once seemed committed to establishing capitalism and democracy in Russia. They are mostly still around, still helping to run the country. Many of them say they were disturbed by Putin's destruction of the country's independent media - the elimination on successive days last month of the most prestigious and independent journalistic teams in television (NTV), newspapers (Segodnya) and magazines (Itogi).
And yet, in one way or another, virtually all of them are casting their lot with Putin. There is Anatoly Chubais, the architect of the mass privatization of the Russian economy, who describes the NTV takeover as an unfortunate business dispute, and former prime minister Yegor Gaidar, who said last week he is "certain" that Putin "wants to build a democratic state." There is Boris Nemtsov, the leader of the Union of Right Forces political party; after first criticizing the crackdown, he emerged from a two-hour meeting with Putin a week ago saying he had reached agreement with the president "on nearly every issue."
And there is Boris Fedorov, a former deputy prime minister, who, like Gorbachev, recently visited Washington to make the argument that Putin's real problem is not the strong-arming of the press but his failure to strong-arm the economy. "There are several layers of truth in Russia," he argued. "Nothing is black or white, fortunately or unfortunately."
The dilemma Russia's liberal reformers face is this: The first decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union saw an explosion of freedom but also a creeping chaos under president Boris Yeltsin, who governed erratically even when he was healthy and sober. The disorder fostered a wide-open press but also mafias and monopolies that robbed the country's resources and made it impossible to establish a working economic system. Putin, as the liberals see it, may have autocratic tendencies - but he also offers the prospect that the economic lawlessness that they find so frustrating can finally be reined in.
Yeltsin stood on a tank to save democracy. But Putin, says Fedorov, is "much younger and basically healthier and much better organized." Under his government, said the man once charged with collecting taxes for Yeltsin, "it became more, let's say, civilized. People started paying better taxes."
That's the bargain Russia's liberals have essentially made: NTV for better tax collection. Nemtsov all but formalized the pact in his meeting with Putin a week ago. Putin told Nemtsov's party - which represents the most Western-oriented and liberal members of Russia's parliament - that he "received with understanding" their pro-forma requests that he allow NTV to be taken over by new private owners and that he settle the war in Chechnya. That opened the way for agreement on what Nemtsov called "the most important issues: that taxes be reduced and the dominance of bureaucrats curtailed."
Fedorov would like to strike his own economic deal with Putin. He represents minority stockholders in the giant Russian gas company Gazprom, who are trying to stop the systematic looting of the company's revenues and assets by its directors. The solution, he says, is for Putin to use the state's 40 percent share of the company to impose a new team of managers, who would clean up the alleged corruption.
It was Gazprom, of course, that Putin just used to take over the management of NTV - a fact that suggests that his assertion of even tighter control over the company and its cash flow might not help the cause of democracy. But for Fedorov, NTV is an annoying distraction. "Nobody discusses stealing in Gazprom," he complained at a meeting at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Nobody discusses inefficiencies in Gazprom, changes or not. Everybody discusses NTV." Putin, he insists, is the victim of bad advisers and corrupt Gazprom managers who launched the war against the media to avoid management reform.
The liberals' bargain on NTV may very well mark a turning point for democracy in Russia - the moment when any chance of serious political opposition to Putin's consolidation of power disappeared. The remaining defenders of free speech are those who first appeared when Gorbachev began his policy of glasnost: writers and human rights campaigners such as Sergei Kovalyov, Sergei Grigoryants or Lev Ponomarev, or gadfly politician Grigory Yavlinsky. But they have little more power or influence than the old Soviet dissidents.
Gorbachev seems to understand the stakes, despite his diplomatic defense of Putin. "Without freedom of speech the president will not be able to implement the mandate for reform that he received in the election," he said. "Economic reform is not possible without free speech." The last Soviet leader always understood that - but apparently Russia's liberals do not.
Jackson Diehl contributed this comment to The Washington Post.
TITLE: City Must Push Hard for Visa Reforms
TEXT: SEVERAL weeks ago, Governor Vladimir Yakovlev suggested that visitors to St. Petersburg from Scandinavia should be entitled to cheaper visas, in an effort to lure tourist dollars away from the Baltic states and bring them to the city.
A spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry - where ultimate responsibility for such a decision lies - did not exactly rule it out. But he didn't exactly rule it in, either. "We could only do this without damaging our own interests ... if such a move was reciprocated," the spokesperson said.
In an earlier editorial on the issue, we argued that not doing everything possible to entice tourists to the city is damaging their interests. We went further and said that a one-stamp, short-term entry visa would bring in even more tourism, as evidenced by Turkey - a highly popular destination for Russian travelers.
As our report on tourism in St. Petersburg illustrated, the problem is worth raising again. Not only do industry analysts identify the endless problems associated with getting a visa to Russia as one of the top three reasons for relatively low tourism levels (others being media reports of crime, and bad marketing tactics), but the head of the City Tourism Committee himself was unimpressed by the figures. Three million visitors to St. Petersburg is not enough, he said, even if it's more than last year. Prague, Helsinki, Stockholm, Warsaw, Vienna, Paris. ... If such illustrious cities comprise your competition, then you need at the very least to make it easy to come to this city.
So we propose that the city administration force the issue. First, it should estimate just how much money St. Petersburg loses each and every year when a tourist decides not to stand in a queue for a visa, or is unable to take a last-minute city break because the forms can't be processed fast enough.
The next step should be to present those figures to the Foreign Ministry - along with a draft law authorizing the lifting of visa restrictions for short-term visitors. A ready-made bill to put before the government and the Duma will not give the Foreign Ministry the chance to do what it almost certainly did last time, which was to screw the proposal up and drop it in the wastepaper basket.
City Hall should invite the press, present the bill to Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov in front of the cameras, garner the support of the embassies and consulates of Scandinavian countries ... anything it can to shame the government into action. It won't lead to an influx of foreign spies, but it will bring in a whole lot more money.
TITLE: Governor Who Mixes Stalin And the Market
TEXT: "WHAT is the Vologda region famous for?" was the question posed at a press conference held in St. Petersburg late last month by the governor of that very region, Vyacheslav Pozgalyev.
The assembled journalists were a little puzzled by this, and gave a few tentative answers such as "Vologda butter," "Vologda flax" and "Vologda lace." But we were all wrong. The right answer, according to Pozgalyev, is the Vologda prison escort, made famous during the reign of Josef Stalin. Apparently, local soldiers charged with marching prisoners from one place to another devised a rule by which anyone making one step either to the left or the right out of line would be shot for attempting to escape. "The Vologda escort doesn't like to joke," as a 1930s saying had it.
In some bizarre way, Pozgalyev - who was in town to discuss President Vladimir Putin's visit to his region with Viktor Cherkesov - is proud of this. He even presented a fur coat to a woman who gave the right answer to the same question on a game show on Petersburg Television - then Channel 5 - a few years ago.
When I spoke last week to Veniamin Ioffe, head of the Memorial group that searches for victims of Stalinist repression, he said that regional authorities were starting to regard the Kremlin with the same kind of awe that was given to Stalin himself.
On first inspection, Pozgalyev is not like this. He is an ally of Anatoly Chubais and a strong supporter of the market economy, for instance. So what's with the Stalin references? He even tried to pay St. Petersburg a backhanded compliment by quoting the dictator, who once called city residents a nation unto themselves. Pozgalyev added, however, that it was time for St. Petersburg to turn its face to Russia, claiming that the "Window on the West" theory was "made up by somebody."
This kind of remark would not have gone down so well with any local residents who are proud of St. Petersburg's distinct character and European flavor - particularly those who recall that Stalin distrusted Leningrad because of its liberal tendencies and had thousands of its citizens murdered.
But Pozgalyev is a politician of the new era, who supports a strong political hand that echoes the Soviet era and a free market at the same time. So he can say that everything that's been achieved in Vologda over the last decade is thanks to the market economy ("We took all the best things from it") but also make proposals to the president for the construction of a $1 billion paper production factory in his region - not to develop the domestic paper industry, he said, but to assist the information security doctrine. He believes that by ensuring that publications in Russia are printed on homemade paper, the authorities will have greater control over those same documents.
It sounds a like a mildly deranged idea at best, but it's the kind of thing that proves Ioffe's point. Governors are trying to get out of the way of the Kremlin's big stick before the Kremlin starts wielding it.
And if that means talking about Stalin in St. Petersburg, telling the city to turn inward towards Russia and suggesting that paper factories be built to protect the state, then so be it.
TITLE: Got a Confession? Case Closed
TEXT: ON Oct. 13, 1999, police booked a 29-year-old junkie named Olga Bogdashevskaya into Vladivostok's trial-pending unit on Partizansky Prospect.
While suffering from heroin withdrawal, the inmate asked for a paper and pen. She wanted to unburden herself. She said she knew who had murdered Gary Alderdice and Natalya Samofalova, a New Zealand barrister from Hong Kong and his Russian prostitute girlfriend, who were slain here in 1994. Bogdashevskaya herself was even involved.
The confession - part of which the police released to me last week - marks the apparent resolution of a case of love and murder. The slayings, which drew feverish headlines both here and in Hong Kong, were not a gangland hit, as many had speculated, but a robbery gone bad. Bogdashevskaya had never meant for the couple to die. After all, she and Samofalova had worked together as prostitutes in Macao.
Samofalova, who was 20 when she died on June 24, 1994, was a call girl in Macao in 1994 when she met Alderdice, a wealthy barrister who had been living in Hong Kong for 21 years. Alderdice fell in love with the tall blonde Russian. From April 5 to May 9, the couple holed up in the five-star Westin Resort Hotel, a stay that cost him $43,864. He paid his bill in cash.
Samofalova's club withdrew its support when she moved in with Alderdice, and it appealed to Macao immigration authorities to cancel her visa. She was forced to return to Russia, but Alderdice promised to get her out.
When Alderdice came to Vladivostok that summer, Samofalova confided in her friend that she would soon be marrying him. Thus, Bogdashevskaya hatched a robbery plan. She finagled a dinner invitation for herself, her boyfriend, Andrei, and a friend named Sergei at Samofalova's apartment.
The five chatted in the kitchen, and then the women strayed to the living room. Sergei and Andrei decided to make their move.
"Natasha and I were sitting in the living room, talking and listening to loud music," Bogdashevskaya wrote. "At that moment, Natasha and I heard a crack and the sound of some object falling down. Natasha and I rushed toward the kitchen, and at that time Sergei came out of the foyer and kept us both back. Natasha asked where Gary was, and he answered that he had struck Gary on the head, and in 15 minutes he would be better."
Sergei ordered Bogdashevskaya to come to the kitchen and wipe his fingerprints from the glass that he had drunk from.
"When I went to the kitchen," she wrote, "I saw Gary lying on the floor. Gary was covered with a blanket. I didn't see any blood, either in the kitchen or the foyer."
Bogdashevskaya wiped Sergei's glass and fork, and then Andrei ordered her to go down and wait with him in the car, she wrote. She gave a last glance at Sa mo falova on the way out. Bogda shev skaya does not record her reaction.
"Sergei didn't show up for a long time, and then he came toward the car with bags stuffed with some items. After that, Sergei took me home where my parents live. On the way in the car he gave Andrei some money in rubles and dollars. I don't remember how much - somewhere between $1,000 and $1,500."
On the way home, Sergei warned Bogdashevskaya that he would kill her if she breathed a word to anyone, she wrote. She had a daughter, and she was afraid. She said nothing.
The next day police, called by Samofalova's mother, discovered that the killer had produced a TT-762 pistol and shot the barrister in the eye. While Bogdashevskaya sat in the car with her boyfriend, Sergei tortured Samofalova in an attempt to get what he thought would be an enormous sum of money, police say. Samofalova had left $20,000 of her own money with her mother, but she evidently never told Sergei about it.
For all its interest, the confession proved to be of minimal value to prosecutors. Bogdashevskaya died in jail amid the ravages of a heroin withdrawal, said Sergei Filatov, senior investigator with the Primorye prosecutor's office.
As for the men, police showed their photographs around among the informers, wise guys and thugs of the city's underworld. Everyone said the culprits were beyond reach.
"People said, 'These guys are dead,'" Filatov told me. "'They were killed in Zavodskoi village, and they threw them in the sewer.' But we were never able to find their bodies."
Russell Working is a freelance journalist based in Vladivostok.
TITLE: Western Laws Not Cure For All That Ails Russia
TEXT: IF you take the commentators seriously, you might well get the impression that all of Russia's problems are caused by bad laws.
A whole horde of Russian and foreign analysts has emerged that studies Russian laws in order to find how they differ from Western models and then proceeds to blame all of the country's shortcomings on those deviations. In doing so, they avoid noticing that Russia has no fewer problems in those areas regulated by laws that copy the West's prescriptions.
In general, laws in the West are written by people who try to reflect in them various norms and prejudices that are accepted by large segments of their societies. This is one reason why laws are changed from time to time. The strength of a democratic society is that its laws form constantly and gradually, reflecting the evolution of the society itself. What is legal and normal today may be outlawed tomorrow and vice versa.
Laws only work when they embody principles that are accepted by the majority of the people. If a state tries to bind people with laws that they don't accept or don't understand, it ensures that they will not be obeyed. Or, to be more precise, they will only be obeyed if the state uses mass repressions.
As long as Russia preserves at least some of the features of a democracy, we will continue to buy pirate CDs, walk on the grass and cross the street against the lights. We will continue to make use of our own original interpretations of property rights, preferring to resort to criminal groups rather than the courts. And our nominally independent judges will continue to listen to the advice of influential people. Everyone understands that these are our customs.
In fact, by attempting to copy Western legal norms, the Russian elite is following a path that is opposite to that followed by the West.
No one in the West ever dreamed of passing a law for no other reason than because a similar one was on the books in, say, China.
It is a fact that the more our lawmakers try to adopt all sorts of "civilized" documents to regulate all aspects of our life, the more corruption we see. In such cases it is impossible to obey the law without going against the very nature of our social fabric and, of course, it is impossible simply to ignore the law. The result is corruption. Corruption is a type of compromise, a bridge between our official ideology and the reality of life here.
Of course, tolerating corruption is no answer, because it pushes aside any respect for legality. We saw this under Boris Yeltsin. The war against corruption, however, is also doomed: Russian society is at a dead end. The authorities are only half-heartedly fighting against corruption, trying to limit it rather than rooting it out. Unfortunately, the limits of corruption are politically defined: Those who are loyal to Putin may indulge and those who are not will be punished.
Boris Kagarlitsky is a Moscow-based sociologist. He contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.
TITLE: American Policy on Cuba Needs a Change of Direction
TEXT: THE Bay of Pigs invasion 40 years ago this month was, as historian Theodore Draper observed, "a perfect failure." Washington's attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro by sending 1,400 Cuban expatriates ashore to spark a popular insurrection not only proved ineffective, it was also premised on a profound misunderstanding of Cuba by U.S. policymakers that persists to this day.
The invasion, and later CIA campaigns of sabotage and attempted assassination, grew out of Washington's conviction that Castro's government was so antithetical to U.S. interests that coexistence was impossible: He had to be overthrown. These policies failed because Washington did not comprehend how Castro could rally nationalist sentiment behind his revolution in any confrontation with the United States.
The world has changed since 1961, but U.S. policy toward Cuba remains unaltered. Washington still cannot conceive of coexisting with Castro and is still trying to overthrow him, albeit by means other than military force. It is still deaf to the ways in which its actions enable Castro to appeal to Cuban nationalism. Current U.S. policy employs a combination of severe economic sanctions, designed to weaken the Castro regime, and "people-to-people" contacts, intended to foster the development of civil society.
People-to-people contacts - through academic and cultural exchanges, improved air and telecommunications links - are laudable in principle. They serve the immediate interests of ordinary citizens on both sides of the Florida Straits. But the policy has a double edge. From the outset, Washington has conceived of these contacts as a way to subvert the Cuban government. That's how the policy, dubbed "Track II," was promoted when introduced in the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act. Its author, Senator Robert Torricelli, argued that central European communist regimes "ultimately fell from the power of ideas." By analogy, Castro would, too.
Washington has also taken a more direct hand. In addition to academic and cultural contacts, the 1992 law authorizes U.S. government aid to "individuals and organizations to promote nonviolent democratic change in Cuba." Former president Bill Clinton approved the first such program in 1995. The following year, the Helms-Burton law expanded the "democracy-building" mandate of this political program, authorizing assistance to democratic and human rights groups in Cuba and to former political prisoners and their families. About $10 million has been spent since 1996, and another $5 million allocated in the next budget cycle. A new bill just introduced by Cuban American Representative Lincoln Diaz-Balart would channel this political aid exclusively to "opposition groups" and former political prisoners.
The idea of fomenting and supporting opposition to regimes that Washington dislikes is by no means new. Overtly and covertly, the United States has funded newspapers, trade unions, political parties and nongovernmental organizations in scores of countries with the aim of destabilizing their governments. The strategy has an impressive record of success: It disposed of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, Salvador Allende in Chile (where the policy was also called "Track II"), the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia.
But exploiting whatever political liberty exists in another country to foment its subversion inevitably puts real democrats at risk. Advocates of political aid reply that Cuba's dissidents themselves are the best judges of whether receiving outside assistance is worth the added repression they endure. No one is forced to take U.S. aid, they point out, and some, like human-rights activist Elizardo Sanchez, consistently refuse. The problem, however, is that a chill in the political climate affects everyone. When Castro's regime cracks down, everyone suffers, not just those who have consciously decided to risk antagonizing state security by accepting U.S. aid.
In 1996, soon after passage of Helms-Burton, Cuban Defense Minister Raul Castro, younger brother of Fidel, denounced Cuban intellectuals for developing dangerously close ties with U.S. NGOs and foundations. They had been seduced by U.S. plans to create a "fifth column," he warned. An ideological housecleaning of Cuban think tanks commenced.
Cuban intellectuals and mid-level officials trying to find ways to solve their country's problems are far more numerous and politically well-positioned than the tiny opposition movement. Europeans recognize that these are the people most likely to chart Cuba's future course, and so have tried to build constructive relations with them. U.S. policy fails to distinguish them from regime hardliners, betting instead that the future belongs to the small, fragmented and isolated dissident community.
From its first intervention in Cuba in 1898, the U.S. has adopted a tutelary attitude toward the island. The Platt Amendment, imposed on Cuba in 1901 as the price for ending U.S. occupation, gave Washington the right to intervene in Cuba at its discretion, a right exercised twice in the following decade. In 1933-34, Ambassador Sumner Welles engineered the replacement of two successive Cuban presidents and installed Fulgencio Batista's military government. In late 1958, the CIA tried in vain to find some alternative to Castro as Batista's replacement, and even after Castro's victory, the agency tried to build an opposition movement to challenge Castro's leadership. Then it tried to assassinate him.
Castro has made a political career reminding Cubans of this history of imperial arrogance. It was no coincidence that he chose the moment of the 1961 invasion to declare the Cuban revolution socialist. In the months leading up to the Bay of Pigs, internal opposition to Castro had been rising as he pushed the revolution to the left. The invasion gave him the perfect opportunity to wrap socialism in the Cuban flag, making it a nationalist project. Several months later, Castro's comrade in arms, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, met White House official Richard Goodwin at an Organization of American States meeting in Punta del Este. "He wanted to thank us very much for the invasion," Goodwin reported to President John Kennedy in a memo recently declassified. "It had been a great political victory for them [and] enabled them to consolidate." Forty years later, the Elian Gonzalez affair demonstrated that nationalism remains a potent political force, regardless of how disheartened ordinary Cubans may be about the decline in their standard of living or the sclerotic pace of change.
Washington should cancel its program of overt political aid to opposition groups. Given the history of U.S. hostility to the Cuban government, there is no way this support can avoid tainting everyone who receives it, casting suspicion on everyone who interacts with foreigners and exacerbating internal divisions in ways that make peaceful change less likely. Authentic people-to-people contacts ought to be truly nongovernmental, not orchestrated and manipulated by government behind the scenes.
William Leogrande is professor of government in the School of Public Affairs at American University and author of "Our Own Backyard: the United States in Central America, 1977-1992." He contributed this comment to the Los Angeles Times.
TITLE: stereolab plays one-off concert
TEXT: Stereolab - labeled the "thinking person's pop band" - will come to Mos cow to play its first-ever Russian concert at the 16 Tons club on May 12. The Anglo-Gallic outfit, renowned for its blend of past and future, have recently recorded its 11th full-length album, which is due at the end of August.
Londoner Tim Gane, who formed Stereolab with Parisian Laetitia Sadier in 1991, spoke to Sergey Chernov by telephone from London Wednesday.
q: Will you play any material from this new album in your concert in Moscow? Do you already know what you'll perform?
a:To be honest, I think not. There are two reasons - we haven't rehearsed any tracks. This is because we don't have a keyboard player at the moment, so Sean O'Hagan [of The High Llamas] is going to help us out for this one concert.
So we're going to have a couple of rehearsals this weekend before we leave. And I really don't think we have time to work out all our new songs.
We'd like to play one or two tracks here, but I think because we've never been to Russia, I don't mind playing a kind of retrospective program with different songs from different records.
q:Were you interested in rock music before you became disappointed in it?
a:Yeah. The first music I got into was punk music. A lot of the music that we play is sort of after-punk music.
Rock music as such is something I don't like much, but I did like stuff from the '60s and '70s. It's not a major influence on the music, I don't think.
When live, it's different, we tend to use more rock dynamics.
It's more direct, more amplified. As such, I wouldn't call us
a rock band, really.
q:Has the band's philosophy changed over the past 10 years? Do
you still view Stereolab as "amateurs?"
a:We're just a group of people who got interested in music at
different points. I don't think it's important necessarily to
be amazing musicians - I think it's the personality of the people
and the willingness to explore ideas. In the early days we didn't
have any kind of set lineup; it was mainly just me and Laetitia
[Sadier], and then other people came to help us out.
But when we began to record a couple of LPs and do tours, we
needed more kind of stable line-up of people. So we still use
basically the same people.
I wouldn't call us "amateurs" [Laughs]. I would say we are more
interested in ideas and arrangements than we are in technique
of playing, if you see what I mean.
q:Why did you decide to start your own label, Duophonic? What
were the ideas behind it?
a:That goes back to the very early ideas of the band, when I
was in a band called McCarthy in the mid- and late '80s. We got
signed to a pretty horrible label. We were trapped there, and
after two LPs decided to stop, because it was an unpleasant experience
having to justify everything that you do, having someone judge
your music whenever they want to.
So afterwards Laetitia and I decided to make music on our own
terms, really. I didn't want to send any demo tapes anymore.
We would just have our own label and do records we wanted to
do. So for us, even though we have records on other labels, we
can always come back to do music for ourselves.
The basic point is that we are just doing music for the reasons
we enjoy doing it. What happens is that you begin to make music
that you enjoy, then all of a sudden you have all this business,
you have all this other people saying: "I like that, I like this,
don't do that, do this," and for me that is not acceptable to
my way of thinking. So we just don't go down that road.
q:Both McCarthy and Stereolab have a political component to their
lyrics. Still you'd object to being labeled as "Marxist pop."
a:[Laughs] I think people don't know what the word means. That's
a kind of a little sound bite that some journalists made up years
ago and everybody uses it now. I think it's a long way from the
truth. The fact that we have a political component to the ideas
and the music is not strictly up to me, because although I was
the guitar player in McCarthy, I didn't write words and I do
not write words in Stereolab, so often the direction is obviously
from the point of view of the person who writes the words.
Laetitia is aware that a lot of people don't listen to the lyrics
- they only listen to the sound of the voice. That's fine - we're
not trying to push a doctrine. A lot of lyrics are really just
preoccupation's with a particular point, and only a percentage
of them are really concerned very directly with what you would
call left-wing.
I am very much not really into that. I'm not very left-wingish
as such. My political upbringing was art movements like Dada,
surrealism and situationalism, and for me I always connect political
advancement with the artistic process. So in creativity, for
me I'd rather just see things than tell people about things.
I don't want to explain anything.
q:How has the British music scene changed since you started the
band? And do you think England is still a center for interesting
music?
a:The second question first. [Laughs] I don't think England is
a center for music as such. I think it has a fair share of interesting
music, but I think its golden days are gone, really.
The problem is that I don't listen to what you would call mainstream
or chart music in England or anywhere. I've never liked it and
I don't like it now. I think the charts are really just for children
nowadays, you know. They don't really have musical content in
any way or have any long-lasting kind of resonance.
I mean these are areas I have no interest in. I don't think about
them - it's just advertisement music as far as I'm concerned.
But underneath those things there's always a certain percentage
of people doing music which is interesting at any one point,
say about 2 percent. There are periods where it increased - I
think the last period when they increased is probably in the
late '70s.
I think when we started the British thing was quite dull - it
was just a kind of grunge. There were interesting things every
so often like My Bloody Valentine or something like that, but
in general there was not a lot happening then.
But during the '90s things opened up quite a lot. There seemed
to be quite a lot more widespread influences entering into music
and people beginning to be influenced by lots of other things,
which weren't really there before. Since that point things have
kind of gone back again and are now very regressive again and
retrospective and uninteresting.
There are still some great bands around. But at the moment the
music business has changed so much that the idea of another wave,
another punk, another '60s is not really going to happen any
more, because it's too much under control.
TITLE: theater-going made easy
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: It can be a frustrating reality that in a city with such a thriving theater scene, tickets to the most popular plays, ballets and operas are sometimes seemingly impossible to find in St. Petersburg. Without having connections or planning far in advance, good tickets to many shows are difficult to come by, and the enthusiastic theater-goer is reduced to visiting one theater kassa after another in the hopes of finding a ticket - often ending up with a restricted view from the third tier.
Enter Axioma, a private company that has invested $400,000 in a project to make information about repertoires, prices and availability available through a new Web-based system linking theaters to ticket outlets - the first of its kind in Russia.
While theaters such as the Mariinsky and Mussorgsky already have computerized ticketing systems, these are only internal, whereas the new project seeks to employ technology to link theaters and kassy so that the necessary tickets can be found, wherever they may be.
During the summer closure of the city's theaters, the new system will be put in place, with the aim of making tickets easier to track down and buy, come the new theater season in September.
The St. Petersburg City Administration's culture committee, chaired by Yevgeny Kolchin, gave preference to Axioma's bid, as the company was planning to invest its own money in the project, rather than that of City Hall. While Kolchin emphasized that the "conditions are still being negotiated with the investors," Axioma will take a share of ticket sales as well as charging money for advertising spaces on the tickets, which from next season will all have one format, meaning an end to the Soviet-era ticket books printed on what appears to be substandard toilet paper.
This is not to mean that the new system will make it unnecessary to travel around town to get your ticket, however. The creators of the project are not yet considering the credit card sale of tickets over the Internet, but just the free flow of information about availability. "Russia has its own specific conditions, and the reliance on buying things in cash is one of them," said Oleg Gavrilishin, deputy general director of SOFT Mekhanika, the company employed by Axioma to install the technology.
Yet, in time, credit card sales are planned, with an estimated arrival date of "by 2003," to coincide with the influx of tourists that the city is expecting for its 300th anniversary. The theory is eventually to make things easier for foreign tourists as well as to offer the opportunity for theaters to sell tickets for other establishments, ranging from other theaters to sports events and nightclubs.
However, despite grand plans, the actual realities of how the system will work and its ramifications for theater-goers are as yet far from clear. Yevgeny Basov, director of the city's prestigious Kommisarzhevskaya Drama Theater explained "the company setting up the computerization of the box offices showed us all a wonderful demonstration, although exactly how this thing will work, I have absolutely no idea."
TITLE: chernov's choice
TEXT: There's a suspicious silence from local promoters about the forthcoming concerts of Placebo and Mark Knopfler , which they seemed eager to tell the world about a few months ago.
But Knopfler doesn't seem to be worried, with both shows at St. Petersburg's Oktyabrsky Concert Hall on July 30 and Moscow's Kremlin Palace the very next night marked "confirmed" on his Web site, www.mark-knopfler-news.co.uk.
Placebo is not that sure at all; the U.K. pop band's brand new site www.placeboworld.co.uk lists a concert at Riga, Latvia on August 9, but no gigs in Russia.
Meanwhile, the most popular question among the older rock fans last week was, "Is Gary Brook er playing with Procol Ha rum or not?" The reformed band's site at www.procolharum.com is elusive about Procol Harum's current lineup, while the band's history placed there stops in the late 1990s. Keyboard player and vocalist Brooker, who founded the band in 1967 and who is responsible - with a little help of Johann Sebastian Bach - for the music to "A Whiter Shade of Pale," made low-profile performances in Moscow and St. Petersburg as a member of Ringo Starr's All Starr Band in the memorable August of 1998.
Procol Harum's Russian concerts are due at St. Petersburg's Yubileiny Sports Palace on May 27 and Moscow's Kremlin Palace on May 29 and 30.
The latest international tour news comes from Depeche Mode who included Russia in the schedule of its "Exciter Tour," which will start in Quebec City on June 11. Russian dates will follow in autumn - Moscow's Olympiisky Stadium on Sept. 16 and St. Petersburg's now seldom used Sports and Concert Complex (SKK) on Sept. 18. SKK was the place Depeche Mode made its Russian debut in 1999. Tickets are already available.
Helsinki-based Sputnik Club, which has something to do with the Finnish Oranssi Ry movement and promotes rock concerts of Helsinki bands in St. Petersburg, will stage a two-day festival at Moloko on May 18-19, but unlike last year's event there will also be Icelandic bands Apparat Organ Quartet, Borko and Big Band Brutal. But the headliner is definitely Aaviikko, who got positive reviews when playing here last year. Its label describes this electronica band as "All-instrumental semi-psychedelic carny/tivoly music in the spirit of '60's Italo-Westerns and (gasp) Slavic pop melodies with a definite hard noise edge."
The local scene is pretty boring, as the same old bunch of favorites (Kirpichi, Markscheider Kunst and Tequilajazzz) play the same old bunch of clubs (Moloko, SpartaK and Poligon). The only hope is Leningrad's and 3D's Sergei Shnurov who will attempt a solo concert entitled "Shnurov the Best" at Manhattan/Kotel on Saturday. We only hope it will be more convincing than Shnurov's solo spot at Mike Naumenko's tribute earlier this month. Reports from Leningrad's concert on May 1 when the band played a full two-hour set to a crowd of ecstatic fans are very enthusiastic. Watch for 3D's CD debut in specialized record shops.
TITLE: a rare look at russian jail life
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Russian jails are so overcrowded that it may be a surprise to hear that there is any space left for art.
A new documentary exhibition called "Man and Prison" running through May 27 (Wednesday through Sunday, 3:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.) at the Museum of Nonconformist Art on Pushkinskaya 10 will give you an idea of how life, death and art mix behind bars.
The exhibition, prepared by the Moscow-based Non-government Center for Cooperation with Criminal Justice Reform, is comprised of documentary photographs, inmates' letters handed over illegally through helpful friends, and traditional prison art - wood and bread miniatures.
Despite the fact that 10,000 inmates die annually in the country's jails, with one out of four prisoners dying before trial, the jails are constantly overflowing. And though most people may feel that prison matters are unrelated to them personally, the center's statistics indicate quite the opposite, stating that every fourth adult Russian male has a jail background.
Many people have heard that the conditions in Russia's jails are awful, but few would want to pay a visit to find out. The exhibition thus provides an opportunity to explore this world safely.
These skin-and-bones figures, virtually skeletons, with no sign of hope in their weary eyes, may well be confused with concentration camp inmates. Their gazes look straight into the viewer's eyes, which is not easy to bear.
As if these photographs aren't disturbing enough, the project organizers provide statistical information to illustrate the state of health in Russian prisons.
One man's sad story seen from a photograph multiplies into thousands of similar tragedies as you read: Russia's convicts suffer from tuberculosis 60 times more often, and die of the disease 30 times more often, than those at liberty. When you see a photo of a tiny ultra-overpacked cell, you really wonder why the figures are not even more depressing.
The organizers of the project have done a tremendous job: Once you have plunged yourself into this world of grim photos and grimmer statistics, you get a real feeling of what is going on behind bars in Russia. And some of the figures speak for themselves: Russia now contains one 40th of the world's population, but one in eight prisoners on the planet is doing time in the country's jails. And through the accompanying photographs, you get a vivid picture of the kind of existence they have to endure.
The courtyard of a female prison in St. Petersburg is decorated with white wooden panels with various moralizing sayings on them. Seneca's "To show mercy to a criminal is to harm ordinary people" is one of them. Though it may require some real effort, it is time to learn to stop taking such ideas literally. After all, these convicts have been sentenced to imprisonment - not to be tortured.
"Man and Prison" currently on display at Pushkinskaya 10. For more information, call the Museum Of Nonconformist Art at: 164-52-58. Links: http://www.prison.org/
TITLE: breaking with tradition
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Not many restaurants can claim to have been officially opened by Placido Domingo and Valery Gergiev, but Backstage (Za Stsenoi) is no ordinary eatery, being the recently unveiled restaurant of the Mariinsky Theater.
And this is no half-time stolovaya where you can buy a red-caviar sandwich and a warm bottle of Borjomi and be back for the forth act of Swan Lake.
Situated right next to the famous Petersburg institution, the restaurant looks out onto the pretty Kryukov canal on a quiet side street.
Backstage was surprisingly empty on Wednesday, with only two groups of very obviously theatrical people supping. The restaurant's brochure boasts that the establishment has a "fully operational ballet bar," whatever that may mean, and that its old piano conjures up images of Tatyana Larina from "Yevgeny Onegin" and Liza from "The Queen of Spades." Whether or not these rather dubious assertions hold any water, Backstage certainly can boast magnificent design and stunning lighting.
Indeed, for the official restaurant of a such bastion of tradition as the Mariinsky, Backstage is surprisingly unconventional in its appearance, fusing white tablecloths and silver service with a minimalist decor of scrubbed wooden floorboards and graffiti-like decoration, occasionally embellished with the more traditional trappings you'd expect, such as a grand piano complete with photographs of visiting musical notables and various original stage props from across the street. Particularly imposing are two large statues that gaze down on the diners in one room, as well as shields, swords and candelabra from bygone Mariinsky productions.
The large, somewhat chaotically organized menu features a range of modern European, distinctly un-Russian cuisine. One Russian tradition was unfortunately continued, as my vegetarian friend commented, in the lack of non-meat dishes, however.
After a period of deliberation, he opted for the intriguing Gado-gado salad (150 rubs.), a large, delicious mixture of lettuce, baby tomatoes, quail's eggs, cashew nuts, lime, pear, apple and cucumber. He followed this with a superlative mushroom miso soup (70 rubs.) with cottage cheese tofu.
I ordered zucchini with herbs and chicken (150 rubs.), with the chicken wrapped in the baked skin of a zucchini in a delicious sauce, which also proved to be very filling, although the chicken was rather dry.
Our main courses were served with some flair, and were to our relief both surprisingly smaller than our starters and beautifully presented. My companion's "egg noodles" with herbs and a selection of vegetables (100 rubles) actually turned out be scrambled eggs rather than noodles, but were very tasty indeed. My "Network of ducks eggs with three types of meat" (I was compensating for my friend's vegetarianism) was superb - delicious meats with mushrooms in a rich sauce, wrapped in a lattice of duck's-egg noodles (180 rubles). This was complemented by a good, spicy and relatively inexpensive 1998 Rioja (660 rubles) and rounded off with two espressos (30 rubles each).
Both the wine list and desert menu are extensive, with a reasonably priced selection of French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Georgian wines on the former and a rich, tempting range of sweets on the latter (although the almond parfait with hazelnuts at 450 rubles must surely be a misprint).
The fact that the restaurant was deserted was in fact very pleasant, with bluesy music filling the void as the night wore on. We couldn't understand why the place was so empty, although presumably it fills up when the audience leaves the theater. Backstage is a great success from all perspectives - and makes for the perfect post-Mariinsky dinner spot.
Backstage, 18/10 Teatralnaya Plo shchad, 327-06-84. Credit cards accepted. Dinner for two with wine, 1,430 rubles ($50).
TITLE: Observing Life on the Inside as Greenpeace Crusade Goes West
TEXT: After scaling the chimney of a St. Petersburg incinerator and unveiling banners in protest against the pollution of the Baltic Sea, Greenpeace activists left the city last week and sailed for a similar action in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. Tom Masters joined them aboard their ship, the MV Greenpeace, to sample the life at sea of members of the world’s most famous environmental group. Stepping aboard the MV Greenpeace in the filthy docklands of St. Petersburg is like passing through a portal into a different world. Away from the brown, oily water of the Neva and the air thick with industrial emissions and traffic pollution, the inside of the Greenpeace ship is a model of environmental respect.
Refuse is strictly divided up for recycling, the use of detergents for washing up is kept to an absolute minimum, and a biological sewage treatment system on board uses bacteria to consume human waste, rather than dumping it into the sea.
The atmosphere on board last Wednesday evening was upbeat, as the 36-strong crew prepared to sail from St. Petersburg to the open Baltic Sea and south to Kaliningrad, following the scaling of the towers of the Aeration Station incinerator on Bely Island to protest its emission of persistant organic pollutants (POPs) and other highly toxic chemicals. Despite the arrests of 15 Russian Greenpeace activists, none of the ship's crew was detained, and the action is pronounced a success, particularly when those detained are released within a few hours with just a 25-ruble fine.
As the ship sails out into the Gulf of Finland, the team crowds into the crew cabin to watch the evening news. NTV's coverage of the events is cheered, much to the delight of NTV correspondent Alexei Ivliyev, seated on one of the sofas, who is also traveling to Kaliningrad on the boat.
The crew then relaxes with a large dinner and plenty of alcohol, taking advantage of the fantastic weather out on deck, and reflects on the previous week's achievements. It had been 10 years since the last Greenpeace boat visited St. Petersburg, and while the crew was expecting a warm welcome, no one was prepared for the lines and lines of people wanting to come on board and see the ship up close, or the estimated 10,000 people who attended a Greenpeace rock concert the previous Saturday.
"It was just amazing to have so many visitors to the boat," says Matilda, Greenpeace's press officer. "We had over 5,000 visitors on the first day alone. On Saturday, a newly married couple came straight from their wedding ceremony to the ship."
The trip to Kaliningrad is one leg of Greenpeace's Toxic Free Future Tour, a global tour undertaken to promote awareness of POPs that will end later this month in Stockholm, Sweden, with the signing of a treaty that the organization has worked towards for three years, banning the use of "the dirty dozen," a variety of toxic pollutants produced in industrial processes.
Greenpeace first enjoyed fame when it chartered the Phyllis Cormack and sailed into the site of U.S. nuclear testing on Amchitka Island off the coast of Alaska in 1971, and, borrowing a tradition that had its roots in Quakerism, bore witness passively to events that were outside their power to prevent. While bearing witness has often been replaced by non-violent direct action, Greenpeace remains an essentially maritime organization and currently operates six boats, a helicopter, an action bus and a hot-air balloon. Later this year, Greenpeace hopes to launch its seventh boat, which, as radio operator Emily explains, "will be nothing short of revolutionary," since it is equipped with a specially designed engine that, using cutting-edge technology, will give off almost no emissions whatsoever. The vessel is also unique in that it has already become the first boat ever to have its name chosen by an Internet vote. The name, Esperanza, beat out rivals when voting took place through the Greenpeace International Web site.
The MV Greenpeace itself is an old yet well-maintained vessel. Built in 1959, the Dutch ship was bought by Greenpeace in 1985. Since then, the hull of the MV Greenpeace has been strengthened against ice, the inside is now equipped with satellite communications, and there is also a helicopter pad for the Greenpeace chopper, Tweety. The boat uses the most refined oil available, which helps reduce exhaust fumes despite being far more expensive than ordinary fuel. In 1989, when protesting the U.S. testing of Trident missiles from submarines, the Greenpeace was rammed by two US navy vessels, leaving a hole in the side of the boat. The Greenpeace, however, managed to get into port where it underwent extensive reconstruction to become seaworthy again.
But inside, the ship's age is visible. A pipe in the toilet has a plaintive inscription scrawled on it: "I am an old pipe; rust, sicaflex and ducttape are holding me together. Please, don't hold on to me."
A Serious Business
The general euphoria as we leave St. Petersburg means that I am handed a beer even before I know where I am supposed to be sleeping. It transpires that I am to share a six-berth cabin with the NTV crew, Radio Rossiya producer Yelena Uporova, and Australian deckhand Jock.
The ship's captain, Peter, seems to keep his distance from the rest of the crew. He appears for meals, but otherwise he remains on the bridge or in his cabin. Madeleine, the first mate, is the one who runs the show on the lower decks. She exhibits a deep mistrust of journalists: As Matilda explains, reporters masquerading as sympathizers have managed to bluff their way onboard in the past, and gone on to write what she calls character assassinations of crew members and damning reports of the team generally. Another big concern for Greenpeace is legal protection - employed activists are only to be refered to by their first names unless an individual gives his or her permission to a journalist to use a full name.
Hopes of a relaxed relationship between the crew and journalists are shattered on the first morning of the trip, when the overzealous NTV team decides to barge into people's cabins and film them sleeping, and then proceeds to film in the showers without letting anyone know. Later on the first day, we are politely told to do everything via the press officer.
Whatever preconceptions about tree-huggers or hippies staffing Greenpeace boats one might have had, they are swiftly dispelled. This is not a boat that resounds to singalongs and starry-eyed rhetoric about saving the world. Instead, we are faced with a very disciplined, steely-eyed group of professional activists for whom protecting the environment is so axiomatic that they rarely even discuss it. The general atmosphere is one of the boat being a small cog in an enormous machine, vital yet insignificant against the wider background. The comaraderie on board is born of one central conviction beside which nationality, age and even language cease to be factor.
As on any boat, the regime on the Greenpeace is strict. Breakfast is taken between 7:30 a.m. and 8 a.m., followed by an hour of cleaning the ship. The morning is usually taken up with training the crew for direct action, with lunch at 12 p.m., more training in the afternoon and dinner at 6 p.m.
"If you think you are too special to clean," Madeleine tells the new arrivals to the boat, "then you had better stay out of my way between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m." After eating breakfast alone on our first morning, a distinctly cowed NTV crew and I dutifully start cleaning the ship, only to be met half an hour later by a bleary-eyed Madeleine, who explains that today is a day off, and so there was no need to be so well behaved.
The Crew
As Madeleine stresses when I enquire about who exactly scales towers or fights to stop whales being harpooned, "Every member of the crew is an activist - any other activity is a addition." This includes the 10-or-so non-permanent crew who usually work behind a desk: From press officer to photographers, everyone theoretically takes part in direct action.
The MV Greenpeace's full-time crew comprises an international collection of lean, tanned, frighteningly healthy people largely from Western Europe and Australia, oozing confidence and familiarity with life at sea, and telling stories of being arrested in Denmark for preventing the delivery of genetically-modified foodstuffs, disrupting whaling ships in the southern oceans and holding up French nuclear tests on the Pacific atoll of Moraoa as if they were discussing the dull minutiae of everyday life.
The gray complexions of the journalists and the Greenpeace Russia volunteers, on the other hand, marks us out like a uniform. The Russians, all of whom are based in Moscow and few of whom have sailed before, are a mixed bunch. Lina, 25, is the receptionist at Greenpeace's Moscow office. She joined Greenpeace when she was just 17 and still at school. "I knew nothing about Greenpeace except that they protected the environment. When I saw one of their campaigns on TV, I wrote to them for more information and they said that I could be a volunteer at their [Moscow] office. I worked as a fundraiser and later became a full-time employee. I see my future on Greenpeace boats, after taking part in actions on the Rainbow Warrior against the export of wood from Russia in the Far East last year."
Anastasia, 27, a former manager in a Moscow-based company, joined Greenpeace 2 1/2 years ago, giving up a good job for a badly paid one that better suited her convictions. She is now assistant coordinator for the Russian environmental protection program. "There were only two places on the boat and seven people [from the Moscow office] who wanted to take them," she explained. "We ended up drawing straws to decide who should come."
The foreign Greenpeace employees tend to be career activists, from the captain down to the deckhands. Dan Broadley, a 31-year-old from Somerset, Britain, has been an environmental activist for 10 years now, and works for a host of groups in the U.K., as well as being periodically employed by Greenpeace as a deckhand.
"I started out by forming a fundraising group in Somerset. With a chain of events over 10 years, I learned the ethics of non-violent direct action, and met new people. Now I climb, drive boats and make banners."
In addition, some of the crew are freelance photo-journalists sympathetic to the Greenpeace cause. As an advocacy group, Greenpeace is reliant on media coverage of its actions, and the job of the photographers is to capture front-page grabbing pictures, distributed to the international media via the organization's Web site.
John, a British photographer, is not a Greenpeace member himself, but frequently travels on Greenpeace boats as a freelancer, and often gets involved in direct action. "My last trip was 70 days long, disrupting Japanese whalers in the southern oceans," he said. "Thanks to Greenpeace I've seen parts of the world that I could never have hoped to see, from Antarctica to Japan."
Life on board is surprisingly comfortable, with creature comforts such as an enormous range of videos, a library and even e-mail access (although each crew member is limited to one e-mail a day owing to the cost of sending them via satellite phone). The food, too, which is served in a buffet, was some of the best that I had eaten for a long time, prepared by Swedish chef Amanda and her Russian assistant Tanya. "The issue of genetically modified foods sprung up when I was working as a cook in Stockholm," explained Amanda, "and because of my work it obviously really concerned me. I contacted Greepeace because I couldn't find any information about GM foods, and before I knew it I was involved in a non-violent direct-action campaign stopping GM soya coming into Sweden."
Action Stations
Even though the journalists were able to establish good personal relations with many of the crew members during the journey, we were nonetheless outsiders, and treated as such without ceremony.
Conversations would sometimes come to an abrupt end if we walked into the room, we would be asked to leave if sensitive topics were to be discussed - such as what the target for direct action was in Kaliningrad - and sometimes we were banned from certain areas of the ship altogether.
The Greenpeace team had already done its testing of the Baltic Sea for pollution and its sources, so much of the trip was spent training and preparing for the action to be taken shortly after arrival in Kaliningrad. It is obvious that the element of surprise is key to the success of any such plan - but the security surrounding preparations reaches military levels. "I'm constantly surprised by how much Greenpeace resembles the army," said British ex-paratrooper Donald, now the ship's medic.
Even so, a combination of rumor and eavesdropping makes it clear that the Kaliningrad action is not planned until Thursday. Various parties drop hints about the target - "It might be a moving target;" "This is a toxics campaign;" "We may have to leave the country in a hurry afterwards."
Friday morning sees the poop deck out of bounds for journalists as activists undergo HazMat (Hazardous Material) training, and the afternoon sees the helipad and half the upper deck as well as the poop deck out of bounds for various confidential goings-on. Sitting around with a disgruntled NTV crew, we watch "Alien" on video in English and wait to be called for the part of the training that we are allowed to see.
This involves people dressing up in chemical protection outfits, again disappointing the NTV journalists, who complain that they saw far more interesting suits on the crew of the Rainbow Warrior. Press officer Matilda, herself obviously trying to keep the precarious balance between the crew and media, promises to find equally interesting suits for NTV to film, volunteering to dress up in them herself if the rest of the crew are too busy to do so.
Later on, true to her word, Matilda comes up with the suits as well as half a dozen volunteers, and NTV's wishes come true. Environment program "Sreda" host, Lyudmila Filipova, presents part of her program dressed in a flotation suit from the ship's helipad.
Destination in Sight
We drop anchor in Russian territorial waters at 7 a.m. Saturday morning. The natural sea canal that leads from the Baltic Sea to Kaliningrad has to be navigated by one of the local pilots, none of whom is free until the afternoon. The crew prepares for landing by scrubbing the ship for arrival.
Radio operator Emily watches her favorite game show on video and calls out the answers, while others read books and sunbathe. Eventually, the boat is on its way on the four-hour passage that leads to Kaliningrad. The environment is striking - what begins as a beautiful landscape, the habitat for enormous numbers of birds, gradually becomes a military-industrial nightmare. As home to Russia's Baltic Fleet, it is no surprise that Kaliningrad has a history of secrecy. Indeed, until 1990 the entire region was closed to foreigners. I am told not to take photographs by one Greenpeace photographer, who himself is filming the coastline with a hidden camera as we proceed down the channel. We pass several industrial plants spewing toxins into the atmosphere, one of which is to be the target of the direct action.
On arrival in port, we dock next to the Mstislav Kaldysh, a naval reconnaisance vessel that one of the photographers says was first to investigate the Kursk submarine disaster in the Barents Sea.
Ten customs and immigration officers come on board and thoroughly check out the boat, stamp passports and obtain a written document from the captain promising that crew members who only had single-entry visas, which expired on leaving St. Petersburg, will not go ashore during the stay.
Greenpeace Russia activists meet the boat enthusiastically, despite having to wait several hours in the rain. Those on board greet them in return, as the van accompanying them carries hundreds of bottles of beer, which is much needed on the Greenpeace, having been forcibly dry since supplies expired the night before.
The warm, stormy evening has people all drinking out on the poop deck, as people discuss the upcoming action. Maria, a Finnish activist, is preparing an enormous banner with a sewing machine. Around her hang protective clothing and masks, while several engineers tinker with the outboard motors of the five onboard boats that are usually involved in actions while the MV Greenpeace acts as a base.
"Another port, another action," says Vadim, a Russian photographer and full-time Greenpeace staffer. "Somehow, though, it never gets boring."
TITLE: Violence Rages On in Macedonia
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: SKOPJE, Macedonia - Ethnic Albanian rebels killed two Macedonian soldiers on Thursday, hours after U.S. President George Bush gave his backing to a search for a political solution in the troubled Balkan country.
Defense Ministry spokesperson Georgi Trendafilov told reporters the rebels ambushed a border patrol in an armored vehicle early on Thursday on the outskirts of Vakcince village northeast of the capital Skopje.
Two soldiers were killed and a third was captured while others escaped.
Interior Ministry spokesperson Stevo Pendarovski appealed to the population of Vakcince and neighboring villages to leave the area and head to the town of Kumanovo by 3 p.m. Vakcince is on a road leading to the area where Macedonia borders Kosovo and southern Serbia.
A Reuters crew in Kumanovo saw a column of security troops and armored cars heading toward the area. The Kumanovo region has a potentially explosive mix of Slav Macedonians, local Serbs and ethnic Albanians.
The government press service said Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski would take over the defense ministry until a new minister was appointed.
Spokesperson Antonio Milosovski said Georgievski had accepted the resignation which Defense Minister Ljuben Pawnovski offered on Monday over a row which the local media linked to transfers of funds to a private firm run by his father-in-law.
Last Saturday, ethnic Albanian guerrillas killed eight Macedonian troops in the Tetovo area northwest of Skopje.
It was the highest casualty toll in a single incident since the conflict between security forces and ethnic Albanian rebels of the National Liberation Army (NLA) erupted in the former Yugoslav republic in February.
The official death toll including Thursday's killings is three civilians, 13 soldiers and seven policemen. Rebel casualties were not known.
Four other people, including a British television producer, were killed in a mortar attack on a village in Kosovo close to the border. The origin of the bombardment is still under investigation.
Macedonia has won strong Western backing for its fight against the rebels but is under international pressure to make concessions to its Albanian minority, who form about a third of the country's 2 million people.
Both the killings and the riots have triggered international condemnation and renewed fears that a new ethnic war is about to break out in the Balkans, Europe's most troubled region.
The NLA, in a statement given in the Albanian capital, repeated its demand for inclusion in political talks, which the government has ruled out, and appealed to Macedonian Albanians to stay calm.
In Washington Wednesday, Bush offered support for Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski's efforts to find a political solution. "The president stressed the importance of breaking the cycle of violence, the potential cycle of violence, and the importance of leadership in uniting the people," a senior official said.
The White House said the United States would increase bilateral economic and military assistance.
TITLE: Swiss Firm Offers Cheap Malaria Drug
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: GENEVA - As drug makers come under fire in Africa for the high cost of their AIDS medicines, Swiss company Novartis AG said Thursday it has agreed to slash the price of a new drug against malaria.
"We'll offer it at a price at which we don't make any profit, but we won't make a loss either," said Novartis spokesperson Felix Raeber, who added that the cost in the West was in the order of $40 to $50 for a full treatment.
Malaria kills 1 million people annually, most of them African children under 5, the World Health Organization says. The disease has become resistant to other treatments in many countries.
The New York Times said Novartis agreed with the WHO to sell the drug in Africa for about $2 for a full treatment.
Dr. David Heyman, head of the World Health Organization's communicable diseases program, told The Associated Press that the UN agency was in final negotiations with Novartis on an agreement to sell the product and that the price had yet to be determined.
But he said the company had committed to selling the drug at cost in the developing world.
"We're very, very pleased with this," said Heyman. "It's a very generous and very important offer" that will give authorities a broader range of treatments to combat resistant strains of malaria.
The drug is available in some Western countries as Riamet and is to be launched as Co-Artem in developing countries.
Linda Stevens, the product manager at the company based in Basel, Switzerland, said Novartis has completed the registration in some developing countries and hoped to start selling the drug in them as soon as possible.
"It depends too on whether access is through the public or private sector," she said. "We're hoping for some decision there in May."
The company couldn't give more specific guidelines on the price and said that discussions were still under way.
Daniel Berman, spokesperson for Médécins sans Frontières' campaign for access to essential medicine, said the offer was a good deal because in some countries resistance to other malaria treatments was up to 80 percent.
Because health authorities cannot afford to try more than one drug at a time, weaker patients - such as children - often die before an effective treatment can be found.
"If Novartis comes in at $2, that is really good news because it is a price that some countries could afford and for others it makes it practical for donors to step in," he said.
In March WHO said it had joined forces with GlaxoSmithKline to develop LAPDAP, a combination therapy for malaria.
Under pressure to reduce their prices in poor countries, drugs companies have moved to cut the price of treatments for AIDS in recent months. Other companies also supply free or cut-price drugs for a number of other diseases that affect developing countries.
Raeber said Novartis is interested in expanding the types of drugs it offers in developing countries and would provide free leprosy drugs for the next few years.
"We're moving in this direction and will do some more research into possible projects," Raeber said.
Malaria kills more people than any other communicable disease except tuberculosis. Victims suffer fever, shivering, pain in the joints, convulsions and comas.
The disease is spread by the Plasmodium parasite transmitted in the bite of the Anopheles mosquito.
TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: Milosevic Indicted
BELGRADE (Reuters) - A Yugoslav court on Thursday said it had delivered the UN tribunal's indictment for war crimes to former leader Slobodan Milosevic, who is in custody in a Belgrade jail.
The move by Belgrade's district court came about a week after chief UN war-crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte demanded that Yugoslavia reveal whether its authorities, as required, had delivered the indictment to Milosevic.
The court said in a statement it received the indictment on April 26 from the Yugoslav justice ministry, adding that the reason for handing over the document to Milosevic was for him to learn about its content.
The UN war-crimes court based in The Hague indicted him in May 1999 for alleged atrocities committed by Yugoslav troops under his command against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
Taleban Attacks
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Afghanistan's ruling Taleban movement launched a major assault against its opponents in the central province of Bamiyan on Thursday, capturing a bazaar and a disused airfield, an Afghan news service reported.
The Taleban forces first captured the Darrae Shaheedan bazaar, about 19 kilometers west of the provincial capital Bamiyan town, and then the Shibar Two airfield, about 20 kilometers further west, the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) said, quoting its sources in the area.
The agency, which is close to the radical Islamic movement, said the assault was mainly aimed at taking the strategic opposition-held town of Yakaolang.
Epidemic 'Almost Over'
LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Tony Blair declared that the last funeral pyre for animal carcasses was to be lit on Thursday as the battle to stamp out Britain's foot-and-mouth epidemic appeared to be won.
Blair said the nine-week-old epidemic had posed a tougher logistical challenge than the 1991 Gulf War.
But the country's government, army, veterinary experts and scientists had done a "remarkable job" in bringing the livestock disease under control, he said.
"The battle is not over yet but I believe we are on the home straight," Blair told reporters.
A British election had been expected to take place on Thursday but Blair was forced to delay the poll.
A general election is now expected on June 7.
German Pilots To Strike
BERLIN (AP) - Lufthansa pilots voted Thursday to hit the German flag carrier and thousands of passengers with weekly strikes to press for higher wages.
Members of Vereinigung Cockpit, the union representing some 4,200 Lufthansa pilots, said 96 percent voted to strike. The first stoppage will take place from midnight Thursday until noon Friday.
Strikes will continue each Thursday for four weeks unless an agreement is reached, the union said.
The pilots are seeking an average wage increase of 30 to 35 percent, saying they accepted low raises during the early 1990s when the airline's finances were stretched.
Lufthansa has offered increases of 10 to 16.7 percent.
The strike is another blow to the airline, already under pressure after last week posting a 94 percent plunge in first-quarter operating profit because of high fuel costs and investment in electronic commerce.
Zambia Re-Election?
KABWE, Zambia (AP) - Zambia's ruling party on Monday nominated President Frederick Chiluba for re-election, though the country's constitution has not yet been changed to allow him a third presidential term.
The Movement for Multiparty De mo cracy elected Chiluba as party leader and its presidential nominee after amending the party constitution to allow a person to serve more than two terms.
That step was seen as the first of two hurdles Chiluba had to clear before he could begin his controversial run for another term as president of this country in southern Africa. The second would be amending the nation's constitution to allow him to run for a third term.
Chiluba, 58, was elected party leader at the MMD convention that ended Monday in Kabwe, about 140 kilometers north of the capital, Lusaka.
His effort to secure a third term has engendered fierce opposition within the country, the party and even his own cabinet. Opponents boycotted the convention, saying it had been called in violation of party rules.
Siamese Twins Born
BRISBANE, Australia (AP) - A set of Siamese twins joined at the head was born on Thursday in the Queensland state capital, Brisbane - the second set in just over a year.
Siamese twins occur in about one in every 150,000 to 200,000 births, but those joined at the head are estimated to occur only one in every five million births.
A hospital spokeswoman said the mother and babies were progressing well but did not release any further details.
Dr. John Menzies, the hospital's district manager, said it was unusual for Brisbane to have two sets of twins joined at the head born within 13 months of each other.
He said last month that an ultrasound had shown the babies were joined at the side of the head and facing in the same direction.
It will take up to three months to one year before doctors will know whether they can separate the latest Siamese twins.
Drive-Thru Dope
VENLO, Netherlands (AP) - Dutch authorities plan to open two drive-thru shops next year where "drug tourists" can buy marijuana and hashish.
The officials in Venlo say they want to make it easier on Germans who flock to the southern Dutch border town for drugs by opening two coffee shops with drive-thrus selling drugs such as marijuana and hashish.
They also want to keep the "drug tourists" from lingering in the Netherlands, where so-called soft drugs are legally sold in small quantities.
Venlo spokeswoman Tamira Hankman couldn't say exactly what the shops will offer, but she said they would not be like Amsterdam cafes where visitors can enjoy a cup of coffee and a joint, but no hard drugs or liquor.
Marijuana and hashish are technically illegal in the Netherlands, but authorities tolerate their use and they are openly sold in small amounts. The distribution of marijuana in bulk and its cultivation are considered serious offenses.
TITLE: Kings Fight Back To Oust Suns
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: PHOENIX - The Sacramento Kings stormed back from a 19-point deficit to beat the Phoenix Suns 89-82 on Wednesday and win their Western Conference first-round playoff series 3-1.
Red-hot Peja Stojakovic scored a playoff career-high 37 points to lead the Kings to their first playoff series win in 20 years.
"He's the best shooter in the league right now," Sacramento center Vlade Divac said of Stojakovic. "When he's hot, nobody can stop him. He really took over the game."
Stojakovic hit 10 of 18 shots from the floor and was also a perfect 14-for-14 from the line to help offset the erratic performance of star forward Chris Webber, who missed his first 12 shots.
They celebrated victory as if they had won the NBA title instead of earning a second-round meeting with the defending champion Los Angeles Lakers.
During a long, shocking stretch of the first half, Sacramento went 12 minutes without a basket, missing 22 shots in a row from the floor.
Phoenix took the opportunity to close the first quarter on a 16-1 run for a 29-14 lead.
A basket by Tony Delk gave the Suns a 34-15 lead with 8:39 left in the first half, but the Kings cut the deficit to 47-36 at the interval.
Sacramento took control in the second half as the Suns appeared to run out of gas.
Cliff Robinson, who led Phoenix with 24 points, sank a pair of free throws to pull the Suns within two at 80-78.
But Scot Pollard, who had 13 rebounds for Sacramento, hit a fadeaway jumper and Doug Christie stole a pass from Jason Kidd and converted a layup for an 84-78 lead with 62 seconds to go as the Kings kept the Suns from making a late run.
The Kings must now turn their attention to the Lakers, who will host game 1 of the best-of-seven Western Conference semifinals on Sunday.
Philadelphia 88, Indiana 85. The visiting Philadelphia 76ers beat the Indiana Pacers 88-85 on Wednesday to eliminate the defending Eastern Conference champions from the NBA playoffs.
Indiana, which had ousted the 76ers from the playoffs the past two years, stole the opening game of the series in Philadelphia on a late three-pointer by Reggie Miller.
But the top-seeded 76ers won the next three games to take the best-of-five first-round series 3-1.
Allen Iverson scored 33 points without finding his best form, while Dikembe Mutombo and Aaron McKie carried the play for the Sixers down the stretch.
Miller scored 32 points to lead the Pacers, who reached the NBA Finals for the first time last year, but his potential go-ahead three-pointer with under 10 seconds remaining banged off the back of the rim.
Jermaine O'Neal contributed 16 points and 14 rebounds and Jalen Rose had 18 points for the Pacers, though he missed a potential tying three-pointer at the buzzer.
Toronto 100, New York 93. Vince Carter set the tone with a huge, high-flying dunk and finished with a playoff career-high 32 points to carry the Toronto Raptors to a 100-93 win over the visiting New York Knicks.
The victory forces a fifth and deciding game in the best-of-five first-round NBA playoff series.
Carter's first touch of the game was a soaring windmill dunk that sent a message to everyone in the building that he had come with his "A" game after a disappointing performance in a game 3 loss.
The All-Star forward made 10 of 22 shots from the field and 10 of 14 from the line as he fought through double-teams to attack the basket.
TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: Peca Out of Worlds
HANOVER, Germany (Reuters) - Canada's hopes of winning the World Ice Hockey Championship suffered a blow as team captain Mike Peca was ruled out for the rest of the tournament with a broken cheekbone.
Peca was injured in the first period of Wednesday's 5-1 victory over Russia.
The former Selke trophy winner as the NHL's best defensive forward, played on until the final buzzer, claiming a goal and an assist and being named man of the match.
X-rays taken after the game confirmed the injury that was announced by team doctor Jim Thorne.
Team Canada officials said Thursday that Peca would be returning home.
Cubs Pitcher Fined
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Chicago Cubs pitcher Julian Tavarez was fined but not suspended for making anti-gay remarks last weekend in San Francisco.
The Cubs announced Wednesday that Tavarez would be fined an undisclosed amount to be distributed to charitable organizations with input from the San Francisco Giants. Tavarez also was told to undergo sensitivity training.
After a loss to the Giants at Pac Bell Park, Tavarez made a vulgar characterization of Giants fans and gays who live in San Francisco. He apologized for the remarks on Sunday.
Baseball commissioner Bud Selig was satisfied with the action taken by the Cubs and said he planned to meet with the Cubs righthander at a later date.
Browns' Pick Arrested
SEATTLE (Reuters) - Former University of Washington linebacker Jere mi ah Pharms, a fifth-round draft pick of the Cleveland Browns, was arrested in Sacramento, California Tuesday, and could face charges for an armed robbery in Seattle more than a year ago.
The 21-year-old Pharms was selected with the 134th overall pick by the Browns in the April draft.
According to a Sacramento police official, Pharms has been identified as the alleged triggerman in an armed robbery on March 14, 2000, in Seattle during which the victims suffered injuries.
The King County District Attorney's Office and Seattle police conducted the investigation leading to the arrest.
Pharms was a starter at Washington and played in the Shrine Game in San Francisco in January. He had 5 1/2 sacks and 46 tackles last year and helped the Huskies reach the Rose Bowl.
TITLE: Playoff Round Takes Shape at Hockey Worlds
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: HANOVER, Germany - Mike Peca and Scott Walker each had a goal and an assist as Canada cruised past arch-rival Russia 5-1 on Wednesday to end preliminary-round play unbeaten at the World Ice Hockey Championship.
On a busy day, Nordic rivals Sweden and Finland also went through without a loss.
The Finns disposed of Slovakia 5-2 in a fight for top spot in Group B, while Sweden needed a third-period goal from Mikael Renberg to earn a 2-2 tie with the United States and first place in Group C.
Also in Group B, Austria edged Japan 3-2 to lock up a place in the next round, while Ukraine beat Latvia 4-2 to advance.
And in Group A, Leonid Fatikov earned the shutout as Belarus beat Germany 2-0 and handed the hosts their first loss.
While both Canada and Russia had already secured places in the second round, the contest still held some significance, with the winner carrying over two more valuable points to the qualifying phase.
But, as usual, there was no need for any added incentive when Canada and Russia clashed.
"Since '72 there's been a great rivalry and anyone who would tell you any different would be lying," said Canada captain Peca, who sat out the entire NHL season embroiled in a contract dispute with the Buffalo Sabres.
"Even though it's a little different now with the Soviet Union breaking up, Canada and Russia is still something exciting."
Once again, the Russians brought out the best in the Canadians, who produced their best period of hockey at this championship in the opening 20 minutes, storming to a 3-0 lead.
Maxim Sokolov, who had not given up a goal in Russia's opening two games, surrendered two in the first 10 minutes.
Tampa Bay Lightning's Brad Richards, the NHL's leading rookie-of-the-year candidate, collected his third of the tournament when he opened the scoring, deflecting Kyle McLaren's slapshot past Sokolov.
A shorthanded goal from Edmonton Oilers defenseman Jason Smith increased Canada's lead to 2-0, while Peca capped a sparkling period by backhanding the puck between Sokolov's pads and chasing the netminder from the game in favor of Mikhail Shatalenkov.
The two rivals traded goals in a more even second period, Andrei Ra zin scoring on the powerplay for Russia and Nashville Predators Walker answering for Canada just 43 seconds later with another shorthanded effort.
San Jose Sharks Patrick Marleau completed the rout, counting the third period's only goal with three minutes to play.
Canada coach Wayne Fleming continued to rotate his netminders, going back to Calgary Flames Fred Brathwaite, who shut out Norway in the opener, turning aside all but one of 18 shots.
Austria 3, Japan 2. Chris Yule shocked the Austrians with a goal just 15 seconds into the game when he slid the puck past a surprised Reinhard Divis to give Japan a 1-0 lead.
But the Austrians regrouped six minutes later to even the score when Gunther Lanziger found the back of the net.
Simon Wheeldon and Tom Searle scored in the second period to put Austria in front but Masaki Shirono got one back just 16 seconds before the intermission to breathe new life into Japan.
The Japanese, looking for a first world-championship win that would put them into the second round, attacked at every opportunity but Austria's veteran team held off the charge.
Belarus 2, Germany 0. Having already secured their place in the second round with an upset win over Switzerland and a 2-2 draw with defending world and Olympic champions the Czech Republic, Germany appeared to suffer an emotional letdown against Belarus.
Despite the urgings of another raucous sellout crowd, Germany was unable to find a way past Fatikov, who kicked out all 26 shots directed at him.
Belarus scored powerplay goals in each of the first two periods then rode Fatikov's sparkling goaltending to clinch its only win.
Oleg Romanov opened the scoring 4:18 into the first and Alexander Andriyevsky added an insurance marker midway through the second.
Ukraine 4, Latvia 2. Ukraine did most of its damage in the opening period, jumping out to a 3-0 lead over Latvia.
Vadim Slivchenko, Vadim Shar hrai chuk and Vasyl Borovnikov all found the back of the net in the opening 10 minutes, forcing the Latvians to play catch-up the entire game.
Kaspars Astasenko got one back before the first intermission, but after a scoreless second period Vitali Lytvynenko restored the Ukraine's three-goal lead.
TITLE: Sabres Cut Up Penguins To Even Semifinal Series
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: PITTSBURGH - Stu Barnes scored twice in a three-goal third period and Dominik Hasek stopped a penalty shot as the Buffalo Sabres beat the Pittsburgh Penguins 5-2 on Wednesday to even their Eastern Conference semifinal series at two games each.
NHL scoring champion Jaromir Jagr returned to the Pittsburgh lineup after missing the previous two games with a variety of injuries. But the presence of the Czech superstar, who picked up one assist, was not enough to spark the Penguins to victory. J.P. Dumont, Curtis Brown and Valdimir Tsyplakov also scored for the Sabres, who never trailed.
Hasek faced 17 shots and made 15 stops, none bigger than when he denied Czech Olympic teammate Martin Straka on a penalty shot at 8:07 of the third to preserve a one-goal lead and keep the Penguins from seizing the momentum.
With Buffalo leading 3-2, Straka was pulled down from behind by defenseman Jason Woolley as he bore down on Hasek on a breakaway, drawing a call for a rare penalty shot.
Straka, who had scored a powerplay goal in the first period for Pittsburgh, faked a forehand shot and went to his backhand but failed to lift puck and a sliding Hasek stacked up his pads to block the penalty shot.
The pivotal fifth game is set for Saturday afternoon in Buffalo in a best-of-seven series in which the home team has so far lost all four games.
Colorado 3, Los Angeles 0. Patrick Roy stopped all 21 shots he faced to record his second shutout of the series and Colorado scored three times in the second period as the Avalanche blanked the Los Angeles Kings 3-0 in Los Angeles. After dropping the opening game of the second-round series, the top-seeded Avalanche have taken three in a row and can advance to their third straight Western Conference-finals appearance with a win at home on Friday night.
Roy, criticized after an uncharacteristically shaky performance in game 1, was outstanding. He stopped 10 shots in the first period, when the Kings dominated the play, and added six saves in the second and five in the third.
The future Hall of Famer, who has already won three Stanley Cups - two with Montreal and one with Colorado - extended his own NHL record with his 17th career playoff shutout.
Milan Hejduk and Peter Forsberg, who assisted on the first Avalanche goal, have at least one point in each of Colorado's eight playoff games so far this year.
TITLE: Valencia, Leeds Utd. Play to Scoreless Draw
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LEEDS, England - Valencia had goalkeeper Santiago Canizares to thank for helping them to hold Leeds United to a 0-0 draw in the first leg of their Champions League semifinal on Wednesday.
Valencia, now in the driver's seat for the home leg next week, enjoys a perfect record from their five previous European semifinals including qualifying for last season's Champions League final.
The Spanish side was reinforced by the return of Argentina's Kily Gonzalez and Fabian Ayala, who missed Saturday's 1-0 win over Real Valladolid in the Spanish league.
They faced a Leeds side still underdogs in the tournament despite beating Lazio and Barcelona in earlier rounds.
David O'Leary's side went straight on the attack and dead-ball specialist Ian Harte had a curling free kick palmed over the bar.
Juan Sanchez probed on the right in the 12th minute and tall striker John Carew launched himself acrobatically at his cross, forcing an excellent full-length save from Nigel Martyn.
Then midfielder Gaizka Mendieta headed against the bar after Leeds failed to clear a Gonzalez cross.
Leeds came close to snatching a goal minutes before the interval when Harry Kewell headed a free kick back into the heart of the penalty area.
Rio Ferdinand touched the ball on and Alan Smith inexplicably nodded wide at the far post.
Canizares produced a wonder save in the 51st minute to claw out Dominic Matteo's header after he was left unmarked at the far post to latch onto Lee Bowyer's flick on from a corner.
And the bar was next to save Valencia as Smith's deflected cross took an age to drop and Bowyer could only guide his header against the woodwork.
Valencia was denied a lead in injury time by Ferdinand's header off his own line that kept out Vicente's dipping shot.
Leeds will have to hope their missed chances don't comeback to haunt when they travel to Mestalla next week to face a Valencia side that will be missing the suspended Amedeo Carboni and Ruben Baraja, both booked at Elland Road.
The winners of the second leg will meet either Bayern Munich or Real Madrid in the final in Milan on May 23.
Bayern Munich 1, Real Madrid 0. A 55th-minute goal from Elber gave Bayern Munich a 1-0 victory over Real Madrid in an absorbing Champions League semifinal, first leg at the Bernabeu Stadium Tuesday.
One lapse in the Real defense was enough to allow Elber to pounce on a loose ball and send a superbly taken 20-meter volley bouncing inside the near post of a dumbfounded Iker Casillas.
Real had monopolized possession up until then, but a highly accomplished defensive display by Bayern enabled them to keep the reigning champions at bay.
Raul and Luis Figo managed to break through the German defense on a number of occasions in the first half, but were unable to add the finishing touch.
Stunned into action Real laid siege to the Bayern goal in the second half, but despite two fine shots from Steve McManaman Bayern keeper Oliver Kahn kept a priceless clean sheet.
The second leg is in Munich Wednesday, but Bayern's skipper Stefan Effenberg will miss it after being booked in the second half.