SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #689 (56), Tuesday, July 24, 2001
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TITLE: Survey of Elite Shows Who Is in Charge
AUTHOR: By Andrey Musatov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Want to know who the elite of St. Petersburg's elite really are? Perhaps the only way to answer that question is to ask the members of the elite themselves. That is the approach taken by a recent study by Gallup, Channel 6 television and the Smena newspaper.
According to the study, the city's 20 most influential people now include Hermitage Director Mikhail Piotrovsky and Valery Gergiev, artistic director of the Mariinsky Theater - both of whom rated considerably higher in this survey of the elite than they have in similar "most influential" studies in the past.
Rubbing shoulders with them in the top five spots according to the survey are Governor Vladimir Yakovlev in first place, President Vladimir Putin in second, and Northwest Region Governor General Viktor Cherkesov in third.
The rating, presented at a press conference Friday, raised eyebrows because it provided an interesting contrast between those who the pubic thinks are powerful and those who the powerful themselves consider powerful.
For instance, Cherkesov, who is often touted in local media - some of which have close ties to him - as being St. Petersburg's main power broker, finished third to Yakovlev, who himself is often dismissed as a puppet of Putin.
These heavy hitters were shown to vie for influence not just with other politicos, but with scholars, physicists, artists and businesspeople as well.
Gallup General Director Roman Mogilevsky argued on Friday that the new methodology gives a clearer picture of who is holding the city's reins.
"This list doesn't seem strange to us," Mogilevsky told reporters. "The list doesn't show positive or negative attitudes to the city authorities. It shows figures and the strength of their influence on what is happening in the city. The continued high ratings of politicians, for instance, naturally comes due to their 'administrative resources.'"
According to the project's director, Alexander Lisovsky, who is Gallup's director of qualitative and marketing research, the most interesting thing about the study was its methodology. It was created by surveying the city's top dogs themselves and asking them who they thought were the biggest local movers and shakers.
The company chose 120 influential people who had appeared on previous lists to include in this survey, Lisovsky said.
Of those that Gallup reached, 75 actually participated. "This elite [list] was compiled from inside the elite itself," Lisovsky said.
Lisovsky explained further that respondents were not given a list of names to choose from. Instead, they answered independently and without prompting.
Although Gallup declined to name the 75 voting participants, the company said that there were 18 representatives of the city administration; 14 from business; 14 from culture and science; 20 from the mass media; five from the police; and four from sports and show-business.
Rounding out the top 10 were Legislative Assembly Chairperson Sergei Tarasov in sixth place; Nobel laureate, Duma deputy and the head of the St. Petersburg Russian Academy of Sciences, Zhores Alfyorov in seventh; Taimuraz Bolloyev, general director of the beer producer, Baltika, in eighth; Vladimir Kogan, chairperson of the supervisory council of Promstroi Bank, in ninth; and scandal-tainted Vice Governor Valery Malyshev in tenth.
Other representatives of the local cultural elite who made the top 20 include St. Petersburg University Rector Lyudmila Verbitskaya in 18th place and Oleg Kuzin, editor of the newspaper Sankt-Peterburgskiye Vedomosti, in 20th.
In addition to Bolloyev and Kogan, business was represented on the list by Lenenergo Regional Utility General Director Andrei Likhachyov in 11th place.
Lisovsky told reporters that business may have been under-represented because even influential personalities never gain a foothold on such lists because they are not often featured in the mass media.
In general, only bankers and the heads of major concerns such as Lenenergo, Vodokanal, Rubin and Kirovsky Zavod attract sufficient publicity.
Nonetheless, politicians held half the positions on the list. Unified Energy Systems chair Anatoly Chubais; Vice-Governor Yury Antonov; Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref; Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin; and St. Petersburg's representative on the Federation Council, Sergei Mironov, made the list.
Some observers were surprised to see Irina Yakovleva, wife of Governor Vladimir Yakovlev, at No. 13, apparently for her work as the chair of the Mother and Child Protection Fund.
"Plenty of lists and ratings of this sort have been done before we did ours," Mogilevsky said. "But the more lists there are, the more we will know about which people have huge financial resources - and not only financial resources - in their hands."
"The public shouldn't feel indifferent to these people and how their resources influence our city," Mogilevsky said. "People should know their faces, and these people should know that we know who they are."
TITLE: Olga Berggolts Will Not Be Forgotten
AUTHOR: By Liza Utkhina
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Maria Fyodorovna Berggolts, 89, is the only surviving family member of poet and blockade-era radio voice, Olga Berggolts. Puttering among the books cluttering her intelligentsia-style apartment with a view of the Neva River, she endlessly recites, with heartfelt intonation and longing, the hundreds of her sister's poems that she knows by heart.
Between these recitals, she pauses to offer her opinion of Stalin - "A mafioso from the Caucasus!" - or his secret-services chief Lavrenty Beria - "debauched and dirty" - or just to recall a recent conversation with a friend - invariably some well-known artist or writer.
Listening to her at these moments it is easy to imagine the voice of her sister, Olga, born in 1910, broadcasting on the one working radio station during the blockade of Leningrad, a solitary familiar voice that many survivors have reported literally kept them alive during those dark and lean days.
From her microphone straight into the barricaded apartments of the besieged city, Olga read her own poems and those of other poets, delivered news about bombings or fires in the city, and, above all, encouraged the besieged Leningraders to hold on to their last hope of life.
"She was always admonishing us," Maria said of her older sister in an interview with The St. Petersburg Times.
"She forbade us from getting lice, telling us to wash our hair even when there was no warm water and it was 40 degrees below zero outside."
"I think Olga meant for us not only to fight against lice, but for the whole idea [of surviving]," Maria continued. "As long as you were strong enough to wash your hair, even if you were starving, you would survive."
But before the war, Olga had problems with the Communist Party, her sister said. Originally an idealistic activist, she was ousted from the party in the 1930s and even jailed by the NKVD, forerunner to the KGB, for a year for "unreliability to the party." Olga was bereft without the party, said Maria, alone and shunned.
Olga was pregnant with her third child when the NKVD swooped down in 1937 and arrested her. She was questioned and tortured, her sister said, and eventually gave birth to a stillborn child. It would have been her third after Irina, from her first short marriage to the poet Boris Kornilov, and Maya, from her second marriage to literary scholar Mikhail Molchanov.
Both daughters died before the war, Irina at 8 and Maya at just 11 months. Other blows that Olga endured included Kornilov's exile to Siberia for the supposedly dissident leanings in his writing. Olga managed restore his reputation and even publish a volume of his works in 1956.
During that same year, she was the first public figure to stand up in support of the writers Mikhail Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova who were singled out for harrassment by Andrei Zhdanov, head of the City Soviet of Leningrad. As part of his post-war campaign to restore party control over culture, Zhdanov shut down the local literary journals Leningrad and Zvezda, two places where Zoshchenko and Akhmatova regularly published.
Olga was released from prison in 1939 and reinstated as a Communist Party member. By that time, however, the country was less than two years from war.
Despite the meat grinder of the NKVD, Maria said her sister still believed strongly in the ideals and values of communism.
"My sister did not change her ideals even after a year in prison," said Maria, saying that Olga concluded that "there was something wrong with the people, not with the idea of communism.
In 1942, the NKVD exiled their father, a medical doctor, to Siberia for refusing to spy on his colleges and patients.
"During the war we had two enemies: German fascists outside and Russian fascists within the country," Maria added.
Maria, too, remains a devout communist to this day. "[The NKVD], which originally had the executive power of the government, slipped out from under the government's control and acted alone."
Other members of their family - three aunts and a grandmother - starved to death during the 900-day blockade of Leningrad.
The war also took Olga's husband Nikolai, who, Maria said, had been the center of the poet's life. Toward the end of the siege, her husband dead, Maria convinced Olga to flee Leningrad for Moscow.
"She was very brave, my sister," Maria said.
"She used to say 'there are only two sorts of people: those who trust and don't trust, those who drink and don't drink.' And Olga trusted and drank."
She died in 1975.
"Once, after Olga's death, a friend and I went to the cemetery to Olga's grave. It was very cold, and we had a drink in Olga's memory to warm ourselves up," Maria said.
Then she said she noticed a worker nearing them. As he approached, Maria and her friends offered him some their wine. He finished his glass and then noticed Olga's name on the grave.
"Berggolts!" he exclaimed, according to Maria. "Leningrad's Madonna! It was she who helped me to survive the blockade, just hearing her voice on radio."
In all, Olga composed hundreds of poems, many of which she read over the air during the siege. However, no complete volume of her poetry has yet been published. Last year, Maria organized a two-volume set of Olga's previously unpublished prose and poetry, but the print run was minuscule.
Even her most famous works from the blockade period - "Leningrad Notebook," "Leningrad Poems" and a collection of her radio commentaries "Leningrad Speaking" - were only recently republished.
However, there is one solemn place where hundreds of thousands read Olga Berggolts' words every year: the Memorial Wall at Piskaryevskoye Cemetery. Berggolts is the author of the immoral words there carved in stone:
"Nikto ne zabyt - Nichto ne zabyto." "Nobody is forgotten. Nothing is forgotten."
TITLE: This Chechen Warlord
Fights Against the Rebels
AUTHOR: By Patrick E. Tyler
PUBLISHER: new york times serivce
TEXT: UPPER VEDENO, Chechnya - Raybek Tovzayev is a Chechen warlord who fights on the side of Mother Russia against the rebels of his homeland whom he calls bandits.
He was born in a red-brick house perched on a mountaintop where three ancestral villages of his clan look out over the Vedeno Gorge, a narrow slash of valley cut since prehistory by the retreating snowmelt from the high Caucasus further south.
It is a recent Sunday, and Tovzayev has just returned from a memorial service for one of his bodyguards who was killed on June 28 during the seventh attempt by Chechen rebel leaders to assassinate Tovzayev because, as he says, he is the only thing standing between order and chaos in Vedeno.
Tovzayev is therefore a key link in the Russian strategy to pacify Chechnya after two cycles of war in the last decade. He stands here muscle-bound with his Kalashnikov automatic rifle on his shoulder like a latter-day Hajji Murat.
The Vedeno Gorge and the Argun Gorge are the main strategic pathways between the plains of Chechnya and the mountains that lead to Dagestan and Georgia. To control the gorges is to control supply lines and infiltration corridors.
Tovzayev never intended to become a fighter on either side of this war. But on Aug. 18, 1995, a band of rebels led by Allauddin Khamzatov came to this hamlet and told the residents that they were setting up camp. "My father told them to leave, because not a single person in this village has fought against the federals." But instead of heeding the old man, "they killed him" in front of his family.
When word reached Tovzayev, he was in Europe trying to make money in trade. He immediately returned home to carry out the Chechen tradition of blood revenge.
He and the band of fighters he raised from his clan set out to find Khamzatov, and they found him in the town of Mairtup in October.
They waited patiently, studying his habits. Then, on Oct. 17, they laid an ambush on a road and blew apart the car that Khamzatov was riding in with his senior aides.
Nothing has been the same for him since. "This is how this kind of life started fighting bandits," he said.
After half a year in prison, "On Feb. 19, 1997, I managed to escape to Dagestan," he said. Then he slipped backto Vedeno, where he assembled more than 130 fighters and waited for Russia to act.
The federal Army is trying to keep Tovzayev alive. Recently, Colonel General Gennady Troshev, commander of Russian forces in the Northern Caucasus, gave Tovzayev a jeep with bulletproof windows and doors.
Tovzayev is working with the local residents to persuade them to stop aiding the rebels.
"Not all rebels are bandits," he said. "There are some decent people among them, but they are afraid to come out of the forests." Eventually they will, he believes.
TITLE: Payments Are on the Way for Nazi Slaves
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalyev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Russian Foundation for Mutual Understanding and Reconciliation will begin distributing 835 million German marks ($376 million) this month, as compensation to former Nazi-era slave laborers in the former Soviet Union.
According to Lyudmila Narusova, head of the foundation's oversight council and widow of former mayor Anatoly Sobchak, the first 2,000 payments should be received by the end of July after an agreement was signed with Sberbank earlier this month.
"[The first payments will go to] people of declining years who were held in ghettoes or prison camps, and they will receive the largest amounts, 15,000 marks each," Narusova said at a press conference on Monday. She said the fund has registered 10,000 such people.
"They will get half of it first. They will get the other half transferred to their accounts after we finish accepting [all the] applications," she said.
Narusova said the money is not taxable and will not be considered income.
In all, Narusova said that 300,000 people have applied to the foundation for compensation from the fund, although she expects that total to reach 400,000 by the December deadline. She said that relatives of those who died after Germany adopted the compensation law in July 2000 also are eligible to apply for money.
"The level of compensation will range from 1,500 to 10,000 marks, depending on the category of work performed. The largest amount will go to those who worked in mines, and less will be paid to those who worked in agriculture and for private companies," Narusova said.
The foundation has rejected about 2,000 applications because, according to Narusova, many people "hear what they wish to hear, but don't see the real conditions." She said many people who call to the fund were forced to do work such as washing clothes or digging trenches in occupied territory. The compensation law applies only to those who were deported to work in Germany.
Earlier this year, Russian and German funds signed an agreement to distribute the payments, which is part of the 10 billion marks ($4.4 billion) that Germany agreed to give survivors of Nazi slavery from the former Soviet Union, Poland and the Czech Republic. The payments were authorized after U.S. courts agreed to dismiss class-action suits brought against German firms on behalf of Nazi slave-labor victims. The compensation payments are being funded by German corporations and taxpayers.
Last October, Austria adopted a similar law, setting aside 6 billion schillings ($379 million) for Russian victims.
Narusova complained that under the German law, Russia will get far less money than Ukraine.
"According to the law, Ukraine will get 1.7 billion marks, more than twice as much as Russia," she said.
"But we can't change anything, since the law has already been passed. But never look a gift horse in the mouth. The fund's previous management should have argued more strongly, but it didn't," Narusova said.
The German Consulate in St. Petersburg could not be reached for comment on Monday.
Narusova said that Sberbank was chosen in order to tranfser the money securely. According to an agreement between the foundation and Sberbank, the money will be transferred into a transit account where it will wait until it is transferred to an individual's private account.
"This way we will avoid the possibility that banks could use the money to earn some additional income from interest. Sberbank offered the lowest interest for the service, 0.75 percent, and it has branches across Russia," Narusova said.
Making sure that those who deserve the compensation actually get and keep it will be difficult. Narusova speculated that unscrupulous or misinformed local officials may try to force recipients to pay taxes on money recieved. She also fears that many elderly recipients will withdraw the money as cash, making them vulnerable to robbery.
Officials in regional offices of the Ministry of Social Affairs have also often forced people to fill out numerous forms in order to receive compensation, despite a ministry instruction saying that only one application is necessary.
"I can't stand the number of papers I have to gather to get that money," said Alexander Yerofimov, 75, a local resident who was a prisoner at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and who is in the process of collecting the necessary documents.
"They ask for money everywhere. Twenty rubles for an application form, 100 rubles for something else and tomorrow I have to pay another 50," Yerofimov said in an interview on Monday.
TITLE: 'Solar Sail' Project Fails First Test Flight
AUTHOR: By Natalia Yefimova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A pioneer test flight of a U.S.-funded "solar sail " - which could allow spacecraft to travel great distances using virtually no fuel - ended in failure this weekend, launch organizers said.
The Cosmos-1, which was launched on top of a Russian ballistic missile early Friday, consists of a small hub with control equipment and two giant wing-like blades made of ultralight material. When open, the blades are designed to harness the pressure generated by the sun's light and use it to propel an attached spacecraft in much the same way that a sailboat is propelled by the wind.
The 40-kilogram craft took off as planned from a submerged nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea north of Murmansk. But the craft did not separate from the uppermost part of the Volna rocket on which it was mounted, and its two 15-meter-long blades, or sails, did not unfold, scientists said.
"The separation command was terminated by an onboard fail-safe program," The Planetary Society, the California-based group that organized funding, said in a statement Saturday.
A team is looking for Cosmos-1 and the capsule, which landed on the far eastern Kamchatka Peninsula, to determine the causes behind the failure.
If future tests prove successful, the Cosmos solar sail could use the sun's pressure - called solar wind - to push spacecraft as far as Jupiter.
"The movement might be very slow, but it's movement nonetheless," said Igor Shevalyov, spokesperson for the Lavochkin Scientific Production Center, whose subsidiary designed the Cosmos-1.
Learning to navigate the craft could make it possible to fly interplanetary missions by eliminating the need for huge fuel supplies, Shevalyov said in a telephone interview Friday after the launch.
Friday's test was intended as a suborbital flight, and Kamchatka was the planned landing site. Had the trial been successful, Shevalyov said, scientists would have gone on to the next stage of the project - an orbital launch of the eight-bladed Cosmos-2.
Shevalyov said The Planetary Society had channeled $2.5 million into the construction of Cosmos-1 and Cosmos-2. The project, which has an estimated overall cost of $4 million, is sponsored by Cosmos Studios and the A&E Network, according to The Planetary Society.
Although scientists were clearly disappointed by the setback, the Russian Navy - which owns the submarine used for the launch - seemed satisfied.
Using converted missiles such as the Volna helps the navy assess its missiles' suitability for service, Navy spokesperson Alexander Smirnov said by telephone.
Shevalyov said the flight had been intended to test the opening of the solar sail's blades and the work of its soft-landing mechanism, neither of which occurred.
TITLE: Aeroflot Calls for Laws To Combat Air Rage
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW - Aeroflot called on the government to crack down on abusive passengers Friday, saying current lax penalties did little to fight air rage.
Meanwhile, the airline's general director, Valery Okulov, said Aeroflot intends to enforce stricter limitations on smoking on its flights.
On the issue of unruly passengers, an Aeroflot spokesperson said the airline has already put security staff on flights, but the government must act to stop violent behavior that threatens lives.
"If laws in some countries dictate stiff fines or even imprisonment for offenders, penalties imposed by Russian law are so minor that they are almost laughable," the spokesperson said.
Abusive and drunk passengers are routinely found guilty of hooliganism, an offense punished with a $1 fine, she said.
"That is not much of a deterrent for someone who paid several hundred dollars for a ticket," the spokesperson said.
In addition to drunkenness and anger over delayed or overbooked flights, rude airline workers have also been blamed for a number of air-rage incidents.
Aeroflot reported 79 air-rage incidents last year and 26 in the first half of this year.
Airlines in the United States estimate there are as many as 4,000 incidents each year in which passengers are verbally abusive toward their staff.
Most are too minor to report but there have been more than 600 serious incidents over the past two years, according to official figures.
Passengers in the United States can be fined $25,000 for air rage and jailed for up to 20 years.
Also Friday, Okulov said the airline intends to tighten restrictions on smoking on its flights, Interfax reported.
"Passenger surveys have shown that they insist on such measures," Interfax quoted Okulov as saying at a teleconference.
The stricter rules would be introduced gradually, Okulov said without elaborating.
Aeroflot has been cracking down on smokers for the past year and has banned smoking on short flights.
- Reuters, SPT
TITLE: Putin, Bush Agree To Link Missile Talks
AUTHOR: By Sandra Sobieraj
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: GENOA, Italy - President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President George W. Bush agreed Sunday to tie U.S. plans for building a missile-defense shield to talks on reducing both nations' nuclear stockpiles.
The leaders expressed a shared desire to discuss offense and defense as a package.
"The two go hand in hand," Bush said at a news conference after their meeting on the sidelines of the Group of Seven economic summit. He also said he wants a new accord to replace the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
Bush described himself and Putin as "young leaders who are interested in forging a more peaceful world."
Putin, speaking through an interpreter, said the announcement on linking offensive and defensive weapons was "unexpected," and cautioned that neither country was ready to discuss details.
"We're not ready at this time to talk about threshold limits or the numbers themselves. But a joint desire exists," Putin said.
Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, will travel to Moscow from Kosovo on Tuesday to begin discussing what the Bush administration has described as a new security framework.
"We expect to move quickly," she told reporters. "We clearly want an aggressive schedule to see how quickly we may be able to sketch out an agreement."
Bush's stepped-up moves to build a missile-defense shield - which U.S. officials have said could violate the ABM Treaty within months - have divided U.S. allies in Europe and infuriated Russia.
Putin had said the United States did not adequately explain why it wants to scuttle the ABM Treaty, which was meant to curtail the arms race through built-in vulnerability to nuclear attack.
Soon after he became president, Bush directed the Defense Department to consider further cuts in nuclear stockpiles, and has suggested he would be willing to go ahead with reductions without comparable cuts by Russia.
Moscow fears a U.S. missile defense system would prompt an arms race it could not afford and disrupt international stability. Putin has sought to rally European opposition to the U.S. plan.
The United States has about 7,000 strategic nuclear weapons. Under the START II agreement with Russia, that number will fall to between 3,000 and 3,500. In 1997, President Bill Clinton and President Boris Yeltsin agreed in principle that a follow-on treaty should drop the numbers to 2,000 to 2,500. Putin has suggested 1,500 warheads each would be adequate.
Putin said Bush shares with him a desire to "have large cuts in offensive arms."
Putin has said that if the United States dumps the ABM, Russia will tear up all other arms-control agreements. He also has suggested that Moscow could respond to U.S. moves by fitting multiple warheads to its single-warhead missiles.
Asked about that threat on Sunday, Putin said that if the new talks go well, "We might not ever need to look at that option, but it's one of our options."
Bush expressed hope that the United States and Russia would reach agreement. "We have agreed to find common ground if possible," Bush said. In a joint statement, Bush and Putin said "major changes in the world" compelled them to link offensive and defensive measures. They said they had already found "strong and tangible" areas of agreement.
. Putin pledged on Friday about $20 million to a $1 billion international fund to fight AIDS.
. Putin took part in meetings Saturday morning with the other seven heads-of-state on aiding poor nations. The Russian delegation called their participation a sign that Russia is becoming a fuller member of the group. Still, Putin did not attend the main economic meetings withthe other seven leaders.
. Putin sought on Saturday to soothe Japanese concerns over South Korean fishing vessels in waters at the heart of a territorial dispute between Moscow and Tokyo. At issue is Tokyo's worry that the Korean vessels could complicate the decades-long diplomatic deadlock over four islands that Japan calls the Northern Territories and Russia calls the Kuril Islands.
"Mr. Putin said he did not want this to become a political issue and that he wanted to pursue cooperation with Japan in these waters," a Japanese official told reporters after a meeting between Putin and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.
TITLE: G-8 Leaders Pledge To Continue Annual Summits
AUTHOR: By Robert H. Reid
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: GENOA, ITALY - Closing a protest-marred summit, world leaders failed to resolve sharp differences over global warming Sunday, but reached accord on strategies to alleviate global poverty.
The summit leaders vowed to go forward with their annual meetings, which started nearly three decades ago, despite the violent clashes at this year's session between police and protesters that left one demonstrator dead.
The leaders of the Group of Eight nations - the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Canada and Russia - papered over their differences on the Kyoto global-warming treaty, which the United States opposes, and left out any mention of another contentious issue, the Bush administration's plan to build a national missile-defense system.
Speaking at a news conference, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, the host for next year's summit, said it would be held in Kananaskis, a remote Canadian mountain resort about 100 kilometers from Calgary, Alberta.
In addition to moving the next summit to an out-of-the-way place, the leaders pledged to reduce the size of their delegations to about 30 to 35 people from each country -f ar less than the hundreds who showed up in Genoa - and returning the summits to their original format of leaders getting together for freewheeling discussions on global problems.
"It is necessary to return to the initial spirit of these summits," said French President Jacques Chirac.
The leaders insisted that their annual get-togethers served a useful purpose in coordinating economic policies and seeking solutions to global poverty.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair said it would be "a very dangerous thing if the leaders, democratically elected leaders, felt unable to come together to discuss issues that are of vital importance to our people."
The group statement addressed the overall summit theme of attacking poverty, with the leaders pledging initiatives from lowering trade barriers for poor countries to studying ways to deal with poverty throughout sub-Saharan Africa.
There was intensive behind-the-scenes lobbying over the global-warming issue, led by Chirac, who urged Canada and Japan not to give in to American pressure to abandon the Kyoto treaty. The other countries have insisted they will push forward with the effort to implement the treaty, while the United States said it will present an alternative U.S. plan before a September UN conference on the issue.
The leaders reached out to developing countries, promising to do more to open up markets to their products. The issue is to be tackled at a World Trade Organization meeting in Qatar in November.
The leaders also agreed to intensify efforts to promote food safety, a major issue in Europe after disputes with the United States over genetically modified food and the spread of mad cow disease. The statement highlighted a major achievement at the summit: the creation of a new global health fund to combat AIDS and other infectious diseases in poor countries, with an initial $1.3 billion in contributions.
"An effective response to HIV/AIDS and other diseases will require society-wide action beyond the health sector," the leaders said. To that end, they endorsed moves by drug manufacturers to make medicines more affordable.
The leaders also endorsed universal primary education by 2015, pledging additional resources for training teachers in poor nations. They put special attention on providing girls with equal access at all levels of schooling.
The leaders also promised to try to broaden debt relief for the world's poorest countries.
TITLE: Sir Elton John Rocks Pushkin
AUTHOR: By Thomas Rymer
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: British pop legend Sir Elton John transformed an 18th-century ballroom into a modern music hall on Thursday, playing a benefit concert for an elite audience of about 500 people at the Catherine Palace in Pushkin to raise money for the restoration and construction of local architectural monuments.
The concert, which was organized by Alfa-Bank, was an invitation-only event with a minimum donation of $1,500 to the Regional Architectural and Artistic Fund required to gain admittance.
The fund is a joint project between Alfa-Bank and the municipal Construction Committee.
Decked out in a red satin suit with "Elton" written across the back in rhinestones, John played a nearly two-hour set for an audience that included Union of Right Forces leader Boris Nemtsov, Chukotka Governor and aluminum magnate Roman Abramovich, and popular Russian actor Oleg Yankovsky.
John played songs ranging from early pieces like "Daniel" and an energetic version of "Crocodile Rock" to new material from a soon-to-be-released album. He played the set in the mirrored and gilded ballroom without a backup band, accompanying himself solo on the piano.
The concert was followed by a mini-auction, at which the piano stool John had used during the concert was sold for $20,000. A silver Versace concert costume and matching shoes from another performance went for $7,000.
The audience at the concert was then ushered to a reception in the Cameron Gallery adjacent to the main palace building. The evening culminated with a fireworks display over the park.
Pushkin was formerly known as Tsarskoe Selo, or "the Tsar's Village" and the Catherine Palace served as the summer residence of Russia's autocrats from its construction in 1756.
Five hundred invitations to the concert were sent out, with 300 going to those who made donations to the regional fund. Larisa Konashenok, press officer at Alfa-Bank, said that the total amount raised by the event would not be known until later this week when donations received through the Moscow and St. Petersburg branches of the bank could be tabulated.
Projects to be undertaken using the proceeds form the concert include the commissioning of a monument to Soviet émigré poet and Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky, as well as the restoration of existing monuments ahead of the city's tricentennial celebration in 2003. Representatives of the fund also mentioned the possibility of monuments to the poet Anna Akhmatova and the émigré writer Sergei Dovlatov.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Mirilashvili Release?
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) -The St. Petersburg City Court board has ruled the extension of the imprisonment term for Mikhail Mirilashvili to be unlawful, Interfax reported Friday.
The City Court Board asked the Oktyabrsky District Court to reconsider its ruling. Mirilashvili was arrested in January on kidnapping charges.
On Friday, the Prosecutor General's Office extended the period that Mirilashvili could be held to October 23 because the bodies of the two people that had allegedly been kidnapped had been found and prosecutors were now considering murder charges.
But on Monday, a spokesperson for the prosecutor's office said that unless the Oktyabrsky District Court changes its ruling, Mirilashvili will be released.
Nemtsov on Nukes
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Boris Nemtsov, leader of the Union of Right Forces political party said that the State Duma's passage of a law to import nuclear waste is a "big mistake."
"Russia will never get anything for this import apart from expenses," Nemtsov said at a press conference in St. Petersburg on Thursday.
Nemtsov said it would cost $1 billion to build a special railway just for the importation of nuclear waste, Interfax reported.
Nemtsov said that the railway between Krasnoyarsk and Chelyabinsk - one of the primary routes the waste will travel - was not ready to transport such material.
Nemtsov said his party would participate in a drive to gather signatures and force a national referendum on the plan, said the agency.
Belarus Death Squad
MINSK (Reuters) - A top Belarussian official on Thursday condemned U.S. allegations that a death squad is operating in Belarus against critics and opponents of President Alexander Lukashenko.
The United States on Wednesday repeated its statement that "credible reports" from two former Belarussian investigators and documents published this week in Minsk implicated the country's leadership in the disappearance of opposition figures.
On Thursday, Mikhail Myasnikovich, head of the presidential administration, said the documents were fakes.
"All these documents that have surfaced are simply forgeries. There is no death squad," he said.
The documents were released by Vladimir Goncharik, a trade unionist and a candidate in Belarus' Sept. 9 presidential election, which Lukashenko says he is confident of winning.
Barracks Fire
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - A four-alarm fire broke out at the Northwest Barracks of the Interior Ministry on Ulitsa Yakubovicha in south-central St. Petersburg on Sunday. The blaze raged for three hours until fire fighters could bring it under control, Interfax reported.
There were no injuries reported and military personnel evacuated ammunition from the premises before it could present a danger. The fire started in the attic of a three-story building located on the base and destroyed 200 square meters of roofing, the agency said.
Officials are investigating the cause.
Queen of Spain Visits
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Queen Sophia of Spain visited the Peter and Paul Fortress and the Rostropovich Children's Music School on Sunday, Interfax reported.
Queen Sophia and her daughter, Christina, were escorted by cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, Galina Vishnevskaya, on a guided tour of the fortress conducted by its director, Boris Arakcheyev.
The guests then visited a music school that is under Rostropovich's patronage. Pupils gave a concert for the royal visitors that included works by Spanish composers.
The school was founded 80 years ago and survives on Rostropovich's largesse.
Queen Sophia departed for Spain on Sunday evening, the news agency said.
Widows Speak Out
MINSK (AP) - The wives of four men who disappeared, died or have been jailed in Belarus spoke to journalists by video link from Washington late last week in an attempt to rally support and press for the truth about their husbands' fates.
The women believe their husbands were targeted because they opposed President Alexander Lukashenko.
Lyudmila Karpenko said the four were making the appearance together "because in our country nothing can be done alone. We decided that world opinion must pay attention to the political repression that exists in our country."
Karpenko said her husband, opposition leader Gennady Karpenko, was trailed, poisoned and shot at before he died in the hospital. His death was attributed to a stroke, though she and opposition members are skeptical.
Svetlana Zavadskaya, wife of Dmitry Zavadsky, a cameraman for ORT television who went to meet a friend at the airport and has not been seen since, joined in the appearance. The video conference, shown in Minsk, was set up with the assistance of the U.S. Embassy in Belarus.
Space Tourist Hunt
ST. HUBERT, Quebec (AP) - The head of the Russian Space and Aviation Agency said that more tourists will visit the International Space Station to help finance Russia's space program.
Yury Koptev said his agency has received requests from several people interested in becoming amateur cosmonauts. California millionaire Dennis Tito visited the space station in April aboard a Russian rocket, paying a reported $20 million for the trip.
Koptev said the money from space visitors would be crucial for the Russian program, but that future visits would happen only after construction of the space station is completed in 2006.
TITLE: City Hotel Market Gets 4th Major Player
AUTHOR: By Sam Charap
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Leaving his tuxedo behind in Moscow and donning a typical tourist outfit, complete with a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses, Nikita Mikhalkov , the Academy Award-winning Russian director of "Burnt by the Sun," arrived in St. Petersburg on Monday.
But unlike his previous visits to the city, this time Mikhalkov is not staying at the Grand Hotel Europe, but as the ceremonial first guest at the newest entry into the city's hotel market, the Radisson SAS Royal Hotel at 49 Nevsky Prospect.
After over two years of construction, the hotel finally opened its doors to guests on Monday, and the opening is spurring city hoteliers to take a more serious approach to drawing tourists to Russia's northern capital.
Mikhalkov entered his name in the yet-untouched guest book, received his keys from the beaming receptionist and addressed the assembled crowd of reporters.
"As the president of the Russian Fund for Culture, I am very happy to see this building restored and I am honored to be its first guest," he said, referring to the site's history. The building, which dates back to 1765, was converted into a hotel in 1879 and the writer Anton Chekov stayed there during his first visit to St. Petersburg.
During the late Soviet period, the first floor was occupied by the cafe Saigon, a mecca for the city's dissidents and rock-and-rollers.
Mikhalkov joked that he doesn't know where he'll stay the next time he comes to St. Petersburg.
"I propose a tender [between the hotels]," he jested.
In fact, Mikhalkov doesn't really have much of a choice, as St. Petersburg's tourist industry suffers from a distinct lack of hotel space in all classes, including luxury. The Radisson SAS Royal joins the Astoria Hotel, the Grand Hotel Europe and Sheraton Nevskij Palace in the high-end category. Although the Radisson's rating has yet to be determined, Sandra Dimitrovich, Radisson SAS' district public relations manager for the Baltic states and Russia, said the hotel's management is "shooting for five stars." A certification commission is currently in the process of examining the facilities, she said.
Besides its prime location, the hotel features 164 rooms, with a standard price of $290 per night, seventeen luxury suites, five conference rooms, two private dining rooms, a bar-cafe, a restaurant and a health club. According to Dimitrovich, 7,000 bookings have already been registered for the remainder of 2001.
While Radisson SAS will oversee the management of the hotel, it is owned by the Russian company Hotel Corporation and was built at a cost of $30 million. It is the city's first privately financed hotel project, with The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development providing half of the funds, and the remainder coming from the U.S.-Russian Investment Fund and Moscow-America, a Russian company.
This is the first such management project in Russia for Radisson SAS, a Belgium-based corporation that runs 107 hotels worldwide. There are two other hotels bearing the Radisson name in Russia, but the Slovjanskaja in Moscow is managed by the Radisson Corporation, which is a separate entity from Radisson SAS, and the Zhemchuzhina in Sochi is connected with Radisson SAS through a franchising agreement.
The Radisson will boost the city's current total of 25,536 rooms, 2,518 of which are in 5-star hotels. But officials at Radisson plan to bring more than just new rooms to the city's tourism industry.
Despite a 20 percent increase in tourism this year, bringing the total number of visitors to around 3 million, Erich Bänziger, the Radisson's general manager, thinks that the city hasn't reached its potential.
"That's far too few. This city has the potential to draw 10 to 15 million tourists per year," he said in an interview on Monday. "It is the task of the hotels, together with the city, the airlines and the tourist agencies to market the destination and make it easy for people to come to St. Petersburg."
Bänziger, who arrived in April after managing Radisson SAS' operation in Beijing, told the St. Petersburg Times that the city's four high-end hotels have begun meetings with the city administration to find ways to increase the international promotion of the city as a tourist destination.
"In this city there is no tourism bureau promoting it abroad and that's really been missing. ... There are a lot of things that are inter-linked in promoting a destination. If I as a hotel [manager] advertise in America or Africa or Europe, for example, there is a limited amount I can do as a single hotel. But if we have all the hotels , the city administration itself, the airlines and the authorities working together, we will be off to a great start," he said.
The group has already drawn up a set of preliminary proposals and has scheduled another meeting for next month. One item already discussed is related to a yet-to-be-approved plan by the city to issue three-day visas to tourists at Pulkovo airport.
"The hotels believe that three days is too short. We would like, as a friendly suggestion [from a tourist-friendly or travel-friendly perspective], to have a five-day visa, the reason being that if you arrive on the first day, then you have one day to stay and then the next day you have to fly out," Bänziger said. "One full day to spend in St. Petersburg is not enough. St. Petersburg has so much more to offer - so many palaces, museums, ballets and theaters."
TITLE: LUKoil Joins Itera In $750M Gas Deal
AUTHOR: By Anna Raff
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Partnering up with Itera, LUKoil expanded its natural gas operations abroad Monday when it signed a production-sharing agreement with the government of Uzbekistan.
Under the agreement, LUKoil, Itera and Uzbekistan's national oil company Uzbekneftegaz are to funnel $750 million into the development of Bukharo-Khivinskoye and Gissarskoye oil and gas fields in the south of the country.
Exploratory work is scheduled to be completed by the end of this year, and if successful, a new production-sharing agreement, or PSA, covering commercial production could be signed by the first quarter of next year, said LUKoil president Vagit Alekperov.
LUKoil, Russia's No. 1 oil company, and Itera both have a 45-percent stake in the project; Uzbekneftegaz has 10 percent.
"These proportions will likely change in the next agreement, once real extractable resources are found," said Uzbekneftegaz vice chairman Asror Abidov.
The fields are estimated to hold 250 billion cubic meters of natural gas reserves and 10 million tons (73 million barrels) of crude. Peak gas production is expected to reach 8-10 billion cubic meters or gas a year, worth about $1 billion at current international prices.
"We will get access to gas markets that Itera has already developed," Alekperov said. Founded in Turkmenistan, Itera began as a gas transit company that took on the responsibility of supplying former Soviet states. Gazprom gave up this sphere of business after a long, unsuccessful battle for payments. In the past couple of years, Itera has been accused of being the beneficiary of valuable Gazprom assets sold on the cheap.
Uzbekistan itself is the third-largest producer of natural gas in the Commonwealth of Independent States and the eighth largest in the world, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. But like many other countries in Central Asia, it has difficulties getting its gas to the market. Uzbekistan is one of only two landlocked countries in the world that is surrounded by countries with no ocean access.
This is where Itera steps in, said one LUKoil official, who wished to remain anonymous. Itera has so many customers in the region that it can "swap" gas instead of having to transport it thousands of kilometers. In a "swap," the title to gas in one location is transferred to gas of equivalent value elsewhere.
Since last year, Uzbek president Islam Karimov has been aggressively courting foreign capital in the country's energy sector. Uzbekneftegaz and its subsidiaries are up for privatization this year, and an international consortium headed by French bank BNP Paribas has already expressed interest.
TITLE: Illarionov Stresses Change in Russia's Status After G-8 Summit
AUTHOR: By Torrey Clark
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Top presidential adviser Andrei Illarionov said Monday that the weekend economic summit of leading industrial democracies was a watershed event that made Russia a full participant in the elite G-8.
Illarianov, who joined President Vladimir Putin at the meeting in Genoa, Italy, said Russia has moved from asking for help to suggesting solutions, and from talking to taking action.
"Russia today comes to the G-8 summit not with its hands out to beg, but with its hands out to give," Illarionov said. "The well-known formula [G-7 plus Russia] is no longer applicable. Russia, on equal footing with other countries, discusses global problems, offers solutions, and makes as much of a contribution as we can relative to our economic potential," he said.
Russia scored political points at the summit by agreeing to contribute $20 million to a fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. And it took a step toward opening its borders by agreeing to lower import barriers on goods, except arms, from nations on the United Nation's list of least developed countries, said Illarionov.
In the past year the five main stumbling blocks to the country's ascension to full membership have been, or are being addressed, Illarionov said. Russia has stopped borrowing from the International Monetary Fund and is making good on its $48 billion debt to the Paris Club of creditor nations. And progress is being made on three other fronts - money laundering, the country's nuclear arsenal, and ascension to the World Trade Organization.
The upper house of parliament last week passed anti-money laundering legislation in answer to threats by the Financial Action Task Force, a G-7 subgroup, to enforce financial restrictions if measures weren't taken by September. And Putin and U.S. President George Bush seemed to have struck a deal on reducing nuclear stockpiles.
The final barrier is that Russia would be the only G-8 nation that is not a WTO member, said Illarionov.
Recent negotiations over Russia's eight-year bid to enter the WTO have stalled over customs policies, agricultural and industrial subsidies, insufficient protection of intellectual property rights and other issues.
"Russia has done more in the past year to enter the WTO than in the past seven years of negotiations," Illarionov said. Under pressure from the president, the State Duma passed a laundry list of bills in June and July to spur economic growth and bring the country into line with WTO demands. Nonetheless, the government has asked for a transition period to bring the country into full compliance.
Putin announced Monday that the other G-8 leaders backed Russia's entry "on conditions that are acceptable to us," news agencies reported.
However, the political backing of the other G-8 countries - the U.S., U.K, Germany, France, Italy, Japan and Canada - is not enough to join the WTO, said one top official at the European Commission, the European Union's policy-making body.
"If anyone in Russia believes that political support alone is going to get [the country] in through a shortcut, that would be a total misperception. This is a commercial issue," said the official, who asked that his name be withheld.
A meeting between WTO head Michael Moore and Putin scheduled during the summit was canceled for unclear, "technical reasons," said Illarionov, but talks would be held at a WTO conference in Qatar in November.
TITLE: Sibir Seeks Support for Leasing
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - National No. 2 airline Sibir and global accounting giant Ernst & Young say they will begin wooing foreign investors this week in an effort to get the first Western-style aircraft leasing program in Russia off the ground.
Both companies are keeping the list of targeted investors quiet, but not the details of the project - they plan to raise $40 million by the end of the year to refit up to 20 Sibir Tupolev-154Ms and lease them to domestic carriers, including Sibir itself. The plan is to have the planes ready for next year's summer season.
"If this project is realized it will be a phenomenon and will mark the advancement of aviation leasing in Russia," said Alexei Komarov, editor of the Moscow-based magazine Air Transport Observer. "It will also show that foreigners have confidence in the Russian market and Russian companies."
The U.K. firm Phoenix Project Management Ltd., Sibir's financial adviser and originator of the project, along with Tacos, the European Union's technical -assistance program, has already prepared a feasibility study of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
"The project is the first opportunity for international [long-term] investors to invest in the first western style non-governmental aircraft leasing company in Russia," Ernst & Young said in a statement.
Sibir would own no more than 50 percent of the yet-to-be named company in exchange for putting up the 20 Tu-154Ms - the workhorse of the industry - while foreign investors would own the rest.
"What we are trying to do is get involved in easing some debts, acquiring aircraft and leasing them back into the market to try and support the regional airlines and develop a leasing philosophy in Russia," Ernst & Young managing director for corporate finance Mark Jarvis said in a recent interview. "[This project] will give the aviation industry another 10 years to come up with new planes and not let regional airlines fail," he said.
"We are listening to the investors, seeing what they want and what they don't want and re-writing the concept. We believe it will be the first true international type of leasing structure," Jarvis said, adding that the names of potential investors would be announced at the Moscow Aerospace Show next month.
Industry observers said the move couldn't have come at a better time: Only 4 new passenger planes were delivered domestically last year and only 22 in the last decade. And with passenger traffic growing at about 12 percent a year and hundreds of existing craft scheduled for decommissioning, a supply crisis is looming.
"After an overhaul the aircraft should be in excellent condition for seven years. This will allow Russian airlines to begin to grow just as the market is developing - so the project is coming at the right time," said Moscow-based aviation analyst Paul Duffy.
"I would hope it would give Russian industry a respite to provide airlines with new aircraft. But the industry needs strong leadership and finance to do it," Duffy said.
"In three to five years there will be a shortage of aircraft on the Russian market and the new company can lease to any domestic airline," said Sibir spokesman Mikhail Koshman.
One potential sticking point with investors is safety - a Vladivosktokavia Tu-154M crashed in Irkutsk earlier this month, killing all 145 people on board. But the crash was blamed on pilot error and analysts said the plane is still one of the safest in the industry.
"All serious professionals on the market understand that catastrophes can happen anywhere and any time," said Air Transport Observer's Komarov.
"We believe that the Tu-154M will be the backbone of domestic aviation for the next decade," Phoenix Project Managemenet CEO Peter Smith said in an interview last week.
"The qualities of the Tu-154M are often disguised in general prejudice against Russian aircraft. In fact it's younger, more economic and has a longer range than any other Soviet-built aircraft ... by our calculations, by 2003 42 percent of all domestic passengers will fly on Tu-154Ms," Smith said.
TITLE: Soros Foundation Mulling Plan for Prison Payphones
AUTHOR: By Andrey Musatov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Open Society Institute, an organization that works within the framework of the Soros Foundation, is undertaking a project to finance the installation of payphones in Russia's prisons.
As part of a program called "Payphones in Prisons" announced by National Payphone Network (NTS) in April, the Soros Fund is considering an investment in the neighborhood of $1 million.
NTS has already installed three payphones, one in each of the two prisons located in Chov in the Komi Republic and another at corrective labor camp No. 3 in the village of Fornosovo in the Leningrad Oblast's Tosnensky region. The phones are produced by Ascom Nordic of Denmark.
According to Vladimir Korsakov, the head of NTS' sales department, the idea to launch the prison project came from the Soros Fund. The fund's managing council evaluated proposals for the project presented by NTS, along with a number of other unnamed firms on Monday and fund officials said that an announcement of the results of the meeting would come later in the week.
While prison concessions for the operation of vending machines or payphones have proven lucrative in the United States, Korsakov says that profit is not the main focus of NTS' program."
"Most of all, this is a social project, not a commercial one, so we're not expecting to reap any great returns," Korsakov said on Monday. "We don't know yet if the project will get the foundation's support, but we've already started installation and plan to install payphones in at least 10 to 15 prisons."
According to Internet information sites such as Netoscope.ru and ComNews.ru, each phone will cost about $900, but delivery and installation will bump the bill to about $2000. Netoscope.ru also reported that prisoners made more than 300 long-distance calls in the first week after the payphone was installed at Labor Camp No. 3. In total there are about 700 prisons and 192 pre-trial detention centers in Russia, 17 of which are located in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast.
"We'll consider what kind of commercial benefits the plan will bring to our company," Korsakov said. "If we don't receive support from the Soros Foundation, then we'll look for another charitable organization to help us continue."
Olga Nikulina, program coordinator for civil society programs at the foundation's Moscow office said Monday that the managing council had received 80 proposals from companies hoping to install the phones in the prisons. The list was whittled down to 12 for the council to consider in funding the program.
According to Vladimir Kalinichenko, the press officer for the St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast Corrections Department, part of the federal Justice Ministry, prisoners are entitled to telephone calls according to Russia's Criminal Code.
The code stipulates that each prisoner has the right to make four telephone calls per year of a duration of not more than 15 minutes each, but that the calls must be paid for by the prisoners themselves. Kalinichenko added that additional phone privileges can be used to reward prisoners for good behavior.
"If a prisoner really shows that he has made steps toward his rehabilitation, then we can give him the right to make extra calls," he said in a telephone interview on Monday. "But, on the other hand, this is not a children's summer camp and some of the prisoners also break the rules."
"In these cases we can also take away their phone privileges as extra punishment."
According to Kalinichenko, the prisoners work in the corrective labor camp's machine shop and woodworking facilities and receive credit for the amount of work done in a type of account. The prisoners are forbidden to have money.
Prisoners must submit written requests in order to make phone calls, and then they are charged a certain number of credits from their accounts to pay for the call. They are issued payphone cards like the ones used in regular payphones, and then guards monitor the prisoner's allotted telephone time.
The Criminal Code also stipulates that calls be monitored by the guards and that calls may be blocked out for violations such as the use of prison slang, revealing security arrangements at the prison or discussing criminal activities with those outside.
"Although it's taken until now to start installing payphones in Russian prisons, this is a natural right for the people being held there," Kalinichenko said. "All we're doing is providing the technical support to allow this to happen."
The Soros Foundation is a charity organization which was founded by and named for international financier George Soros. It sets up and supports programs operating in the fields of education, culture, art, health care and social welfare with representative branches in more than 30 countries worldwide.
NTS was founded as the national arm of St. Petersburg Payphones, which owns 51 percent of the company's stock, while national telecoms holding Svyazinvest owns 40 percent and the LV Finance investment group holds nine percent. NTS already operates 70 payphones in the Leningrad Oblast and 80 more in the Komi Republic and holds contracts to install phones in Arkhangelsk, Vologda and Nizhny Novgorod.
TITLE: New Numbers Point to Drop in Inflation
AUTHOR: By Alla Startseva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The economy grew by about 5 percent in the first half of the year and the rate of inflation is slowing dramatically, the State Statistics Committee said Friday.
Committee chief Vladimir Sokolin said that, although official figures would not be ready until Wednesday, preliminary data showed July inflation at about a third of June's 1.6 percent and May's 1.8 percent.
"Inflation is dropping quickly," Sokolin said. "Based on my feeling and on data from the first half of this month, July's [consumer price index] will be 0.6 percent."
The new numbers confirm President Vladimir Putin's prediction last week that this year's unexpectedly high inflation rate of about 14 percent would drop below 1 percent for the month.
"We cannot forget this, and must look closely and do everything to ensure that we fall within established parameters or, in any event, close to the parameters set in the budget," Putin told a Cabinet meeting Tuesday.
The 2001 budget originally forecast an inflation rate of 12 percent to 14 percent for the year, but that figure has already been amended to between 16 percent and 18 percent.
But while the inflation rate has been a surprise, so too has the rate of economic growth, which the government predicted - some said too optimistically - would be between 4 percent and 5 percent.
The International Monetary Fund, for example, said in its latest report on Russia that it expected 4 percent growth this year.
"The index of key sectors was 5.3 percent in the first half of this year. This lets us predict confidently that GDP growth in the first six months of this year will be about 5 percent," Sokolin said.
He said that producer price inflation dropped in the first half to 8.8 percent from 17 percent in the first half of 2000 and that investments in fixed assets were up 4.2 percent over the same period last year.
Just two of the key indices - retail revenues and imports - grew faster from 2000 to 2001 than from 1999 to 2000.
Retail revenues increased 10 percent in January-June over the same period in 2000, while imports jumped 18.2 percent. Exports grew just 4.9 percent in the first half, Sokolin said.
Real incomes grew 4.4 percent in the period, but the average salary for the first half of 2001 was still a miniscule 2,942 rubles ($100) a month.
The average salary in June was 8.2 percent higher than in May and reached 3,304 rubles.
Unemployment fell 0.8 percent month on month to 6.6 million in June, 10 percent lower than in June 2000.
Vladimir Tikhomirov, an economist at the NIKoil brokerage, said there are still some worrying signs and that the government would be lucky if it could keep inflation under 20 percent for the year.
"The money base is growing and the ruble rate is falling. Prices usually rise in the September-October period; state workers are scheduled for a pay rise in November; and December is the time for annual bonus payments," he said.
Alexander Zhukov, head of the budget committee in the State Duma, aggreed, stating last week that inflation would be "no less than 20 percent" for the year.
TITLE: Baltika Brand Slipping as Market Changes
AUTHOR: By Sergei Rybak
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: Russia's most popular brand of beer, Baltika, has begun to slip as its share of the market has been falling steadily, but the success of other brands within the Baltika family has helped the company itself maintain its position.
A number of industry analysts think that the brand has grown boring and that the company must alter its advertising policies or be faced with a continued decline in consumer interest.
According to data provided by United Financial Group (UFG), in the first half of 2001, the market share for the Baltika brand has fallen to 11.9 percent - a 2 percent drop. More significant has been the 3 percent drop in market share garnered by its St. Petersburg plant, the largest in Russia.
The factory was opened in 1992 and, with all-new equipment, the brewery was able to turn out a product surpassing most of its competitors from the standpoint of quality. The factory's biggest competitor - Sun Interbrew - entered the market in 1998. According to UFG numbers, the St. Petersburg Baltika brewery turns out 13.2 percent of all beer produced in Russia - only a little less than the output of Sun Interbrew's eight breweries combined.
Over the last five years the Russian beer market has grown at a rapid pace, somewhere around 30 percent per year. One of the main objectives of the major beer companies over that time has been the development of sales and distribution networks to match those of Baltika. Even today Baltika's distribution system remains the strongest of the beer majors.
Baltika beer is available in about 85 percent of Russia's stores where beer is sold according to information provided by the marketing firm Business-Analitika. Sun Interbrew was in second spot, with its products available in 63 percent of all stores.
But since midway through last year, when Russia's beer market started to exhibit signs of saturation, a number of beer companies - including Sun Interbrew and Krasny Vostok - have been paying more attention not only to questions of distribution, but also to advertising their brands. Baltika seems to have failed to keep up.
By simple measure of marketing outlays, Baltika (at $5.5 million over the first six months of this year) is in 9th place, behind firms like Klinskoye, Botchkarov, Krasny Vostok, and even Tinkoff, which, despite its relatively small size, spent $8.8 million over the same period. Klinskoye in the first six months of this year spent a total of $23 million on marketing. For the industry as a whole, according to figures from Gallup AdFact, marketing expenditures for the first half of 2001 topped $140 million.
The numbers point to a shift in emphasis among the market's players, with the newer entrants pressuring the market leaders on the advertising front. UFG reports that Krasny Vostok almost doubled its share in the market from 4.6 percent in the first half of last year to 8.3 percent for the same period in 2001. Baltika saw a corresponding drop in market share from 14.1 percent to 11.9 percent.
"It seems to me that the Baltika brand has stagnated somewhat," said Andrei Strelin, general director of Business-Analitika, which specializes in following Russia's beer market. "They're not running many advertisements and are losing ground to most of the competitors' brands."
Alexander Krivoshapko, an analyst with UFG, also links Baltika's difficulties to ineffectual advertising and the inability of the company to generate an emotional identification with the brand.
Television ads for the brand portray people from different regions of Russia - the Caucasus, Karelia and the Urals included - talking about beer in their native languages. Krivoshapko says that, should Baltika's advertising approach remain basically the same, the brand's share of the market will continue to fall and by the end of the year could be as low as 10 percent.
But company officials say this is unlikely to happen. Maxim Dozmarov, Baltika's director for marketing, says that an advertising campaign designed by one of Russia's leading and most creative agencies will be unveiled.
And even though the Baltika label seems to itself be stagnating, the Baltika group as a whole is maintaining market share through the performance of some of its other labels. The market share for the group has remained virtually stable at around 21 percent on the strength of brands such as Myodovoye and Arsenalnoye. For example, following the refurbishing and reopening of one of Baltika's properties, T ulskoye Pivo, that brewery's market share has jumped to 5.3 percent, compared with 2 percent for the same period in 2000.
TITLE: Railways Ministry Bemoans Rate Cuts
AUTHOR: By Alla Startseva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Railways Minister Nikolai Aksyonenko last week called on the government to cough up $785 million - the amount he says his ministry will lose this year as a result of a new unified tariff policy.
A newly created federal railways tariff commission decided to abolish the controversial dual-tariff policy that put the Antimonopoly Ministry in charge of domestic rates and the Railways Ministry in charge of export rates, which are several times higher.
During a train ride from Tomsk to Omsk on the Trans-Siberian Railroad in February, President Vladimir Putin told Aksyonenko, a group of regional governors and executives from Unified Energy Systems that he wanted rail tariffs gradually unified, and he put Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Khristenko in charge of the new commission, which now controls the tariffs.
Antimonopoly Minister Ilya Yuzhanov said the old system was crazy and something had to be done to level the playing field. "Say you are sending a potato from Moscow to St. Petersburg. If you plan to eat it, the tariff will be 1 ruble. But if you plan to export the potato from there, the tariff will be 3 rubles," he said.
But while exporters are rejoicing, the Railways Ministry is in a panic. It will no longer get revenue on goods exported from sea ports, where most of its cargo ends up. The special tariff the ministry charged on exports from sea terminals will be abolished Aug. 1, and the dual-tariff for overland exports will be abolished six months from now. These two tariffs accounted for 60 percent of the ministry's annual revenues and subsidized its money-losing passenger service for years.
"There is something no one wants to talk about," Aksyonenko said. "The move will leave a gap of 22.9 billion rubles, or almost 10 percent of the annual revenues of the Railways Ministry," he said.
"I don't see any other answer but aid from the budget," he said, adding that the ministry serves an important social role by financing an unprofitable passenger service that the governments of many countries subsidize.
The ministry can save 6.5 billion rubles ($222 million) this year by increasing efficiency, "but the rest the ministry is not able to take upon itself," he said.
"The revenues the ministry loses will be gained by shippers - more exactly, shippers of oil, oil products, ferrous metals, wood and other 'poor' industries in need of government support," Aksyonenko said with a smile.
Even though Khristenko's commission set the rate of the new unified tariff at an average of 18 percent above the current domestic rate average, it is still far lower than what Aksyonenko wants.
The greatest increase, 200 percent, will be for shippers of ferrous metals.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: $320M Bond Payment
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia transferred to international creditors $320.53 million in interest on sovereign Eurobonds maturing in 2005 and 2018, a Finance Ministry spokesperson said Monday.
"The funds are reserved. [Russia's foreign debt agent] Vneshekonombank is instructed to transfer them to Citibank today," he said.
The payment day for the two semiannual coupons is July 24.
Iran Caspian Warning
TEHRAN, Iran (Reuters) - The Iranian Oil Ministry has warned foreign energy firms about working with other states in areas of the Caspian Sea, which Iran considers its territory, the official IRNA news agency reported Sunday.
The agency said Iran had earlier summoned Azerbaijan's chargé d'affaires in Tehran "to protest plans by Azerbaijan and unidentified foreign companies to explore oil deposits in Iran's sector of the Caspian."
The division of the Caspian between the five littoral states remains unresolved despite protracted talks. Iran has said the states should decide jointly on the Caspian's resources, but has also demanded a 20 percent block, which some analysts say is an overly ambitious claim.
Blue Stream Sacking
ANKARA, Turkey (Reuters) - The general manager of Turkish state oil and gas pipeline company Botas, Gokhan Yardim, has been sacked, Energy Ministry officials said Monday.
They gave no reason for the move.
Botas is under investigation for alleged irregularities in connection with the Blue Stream gas pipeline project, which envisages a 1,200-kilometer pipeline from southern Russia across the Black Sea to Turkey, ending in Ankara.
A state security court started an investigation into the Blue Stream project in May after allegations that the project had incurred losses to the state by making a $52 million down payment to a consortium building the Turkish section of the pipeline.
Ruhrgas-Gazprom Deal
FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Germany's biggest gas supplier, Ruhrgas AG, is expected to take part in a planned several-billion-dollar gas pipeline project in China with Gazprom, Handelsblatt reported Sunday.
The German business daily said in a preview of the article that Ruhrgas had until Monday to tell Beijing whether it would commit financially to the deal.
The newspaper cited sources in the companies involved, saying heavily indebted Gazprom was turning to European partners - such as Ruhrgas, Gaz de France and the gas subsidiary of Italian energy group Eni, Snam - for help.
Tupolev Freighters
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's AirRep Group is planning to operate up to five 27-ton-capacity Tupolev Tu-204-100C freighters by 2003, the company said Monday.
AirRep has been using one Tu-204 freighter for about a year, which is used mainly by TNT operating dual rotations five nights per week between its Liege, Belgium, hub and Scandinavia, a statement added. The TNT contract for the aircraft, which is based at Hahn and has a range of up to 4,300 kilometers, has been renewed until 2001, after an initial three-month trial.
The aircraft now in use was the second off the Aviastar production line in Ulyanovsk.
TITLE: Poor Corporate Outlook Sends Markets Tumbling
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TOKYO - Tokyo stocks closed at a 16-year low Monday due to concern about the outlook for corporate earnings and banks' efforts to write off bad loans.
The benchmark 225-issue Nikkei Stock Average fell 298.76 points, or 2.51 percent, to close at 11,609.63 on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. On Thursday, the average closed up 15.81 points, or 0.13 percent.
Japanese financial markets were closed Friday for a national holiday.
The Nikkei index - prompted also by declines on Wall Street on Friday - dropped to its lowest level since Jan. 7, 1985, when it closed at 11,575.52.
Japan's Finance Minister Masajuro Shiokawa said he asked financial companies to take action to bolster the stock market, urging banks to lend more to manufacturers to spur investment, according to Kyodo News agency.
"I am very worried about the current trend of the stock market," Kyodo cited Shiokawa as saying.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi told reporters that the government will continue with his reform agenda regardless of "the fluctuation of the market indicators."
Koizumi was named prime minister in April amid popular support for reforms that include helping banks to write off hundreds of billions of dollars in bad debts.
The broader Tokyo Stock Price Index of all issues listed on the first section fell 31.49 points, or 2.63 percent, to 1,195.25. The TOPIX lost 4.42 points, or 0.37 percent, on Thursday.
On the first section, 1,107 issues fell, 262 issues rose, and 91 closed unchanged from Thursday.
Volume on the first section was estimated at 637.54 million shares, up from 596.60 million shares Thursday.
In currency dealings, the dollar was unchanged against the yen amid a lack of comments on exchange rates from the weekend meeting in Genoa, Italy, of the Group of Eight nations.
TITLE: Sides Line Up Over Whaling Moratorium
AUTHOR: By Beth Gardiner
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON - A conference that could end a 15-year-old ban on commercial whaling opened Monday with delegates ready for a fight that pits environmental concerns against an appetite for lucrative whale meat.
Japan and Norway are leading an effort to force an end to the moratorium on whaling, approved by the International Whaling Commission in 1986.
They may have collected enough support to win a vote at the commission's week-long meeting, but some moratorium supporters accuse Japan of buying the votes of poorer countries with foreign aid and say any victory would be tainted.
Advocates of the hunting ban say it is necessary to protect international whale populations, depleted from decades of widespread hunting, against possible extinction. Opponents say whale stocks are strong enough to withstand limited hunts.
"There are still so many threats to whales," Elliot Morley, Britain's fisheries minister, said in a speech welcoming delegates to the commission's annual meeting. "The world is watching closely to ensure that past mistakes are not repeated. The vast majority of whale stocks have not recovered" sufficiently since the ban was enacted.
Iceland's whaling commissioner, Stefan Asmundsson, responded defiantly, accusing the international body of being "a non-whaling commission rather than a whaling commission."
The island nation, which has a tradition of whale hunts, left the commission in protest in 1992, but rejoined last month hoping to influence the group's direction as a member.
He said Iceland fully supported whale conservation, but believes hunts can go ahead without depleting populations too much.
Asmundsson announced last week that Iceland intends to resume commercial hunting despite the ban. Norway angered conservationists by resuming its commercial hunts in 1993.
Japan, where whale meat is widely enjoyed, currently kills about 500 whales a year as part of a scientific whaling program allowed by the commission. Many conservationists say the animals are secretly sold and eaten.
Opponents accuse Japan of using foreign aid to bribe poorer countries into supporting its stance.
Japan's fisheries chief Masayuki Komatsu said last week in an interview with Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio that his country had to use the "tools" of diplomacy and promises of development aid to "get appreciation of Japan's position."
Another fisheries official said later that Japan does not give aid in exchange for votes, but critics are skeptical.
Six Caribbean countries voted with Japan on nearly every motion at last year's International Whaling Commission meeting, and new members Morocco and Panama are expected to be supportive this time.
Also under discussion are proposals for whale "sanctuaries" in the south Pacific and the south Atlantic, intended to protect the animals there if the global ban is eventually lifted. Japan strenuously opposes both sanctuaries.
TITLE: Emergency Meeting To Consider OPEC Cuts
AUTHOR: By Bruce Stanley
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON - Less than a month after agreeing to hold oil output steady, OPEC countries are mulling an emergency meeting as early as next week to forge a consensus on cutting production to buoy crude prices.
Faltering economic growth in much of the world has led to an abrupt deterioration in the outlook for demand for crude, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries said Monday, and the group's top official now supports the idea of a cut in output.
"There are many uncertainties in the market right now, including the present world economic performance, as well as supply and demand projections," OPEC Secretary General Ali Rodriguez said in a statement.
"OPEC is taking a much more proactive role in monitoring market developments, and we feel there might be a need ahead of our ordinary meeting, scheduled for late September."
OPEC, with an official target of 24.2 million barrels a day, pumps about 40 percent of the world's oil. Its ministers last met July 3 at their headquarters in Vienna, Austria. An OPEC spokesperson, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the proposed meeting could take place as early as next Tuesday.
This year, amid signs of an economic slowdown, the group has trimmed its official production twice already by a total of 2.5 million barrels a day.
Rodriguez said several OPEC ministers recognize the need to curtail output, though they haven't agreed yet on a specific figure for a cut. He spoke upon returning from the UN conference on climate change in Bonn, Germany, where he met with several OPEC ministers who also attended the meeting.
Lawrence Eagles, head of commodity research at London brokerage GNI Ltd., said he expected OPEC to reduce its official daily output target by 1 million barrels to a new level of 23.2 million barrels a day.
Because some cartel members would probably continue pumping above their individual quotas, a nominal cut of 1 million barrels would probably mean an actual decrease of around 700,000 barrels a day, Eagles said.
Ali Naimi, oil minister of OPEC's No. 1 producer, Saudi Arabia, said Friday in Bonn that indications of growing oil inventories and sluggish demand raise the need for "drastic action to cut production." Oil prices surged on Naimi's comments.
September contracts of North Sea Brent crude were trading 46 cents higher Monday at $25.10 a barrel on the International Petroleum Exchange. September futures for light sweet crude were up 25 cents to $26.41 a barrel in trading Monday on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
OPEC said the price for its benchmark crude - an average of seven different crudes - fell last week by more than $1 to $23.07 a barrel. Saudi Arabia has said repeatedly that it wants to keep this price at $25 a barrel.
Eagles of GNI argues that $25 is now effectively OPEC's minimum acceptable price, even though the group has long said it aims to keep its average "basket" price within a range of $22 to $28 a barrel.
By cutting production, OPEC might force prices as high as $30 a barrel, but that would discourage consumption in the long run. The group's 11 members would be "shooting themselves in the foot," Eagles said.
OPEC members are haunted by the consequences of their decision in late 1997 to boost production by 10 percent. The increase came just ahead of a recession in East Asia that caused demand for crude to plummet, and by December 1998, oil prices had dropped to around $10 a barrel. The cartel's members slashed production to try to revive the price.
They succeeded, so much so that an outcry by the United States and other major importers led OPEC to reverse course and boost output four times in 2000 alone in an effort to keep prices below $28 a barrel. This year, with the world economy slowing, OPEC has focused on trimming production.
"Global oil demand is beginning to show signs of collapsing, as it did in 1998, under the combined pressures of a weakening global economy, a strengthening U.S. dollar and high oil prices," the Center for Global Energy Studies said in a report issued Monday.
Even so, a cut in OPEC production wouldn't be justified, the London-based center said.
"Oil prices could still spike to uncomfortable levels over the winter," it said, "if the weather is cold or if there is an unexpected interruption to supply."
TITLE: Latest Disney Buy Increases Stake in U.S. Cable Market
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LOS ANGELES - The Walt Disney Co. is buying the children's cable network Fox Family Worldwide Inc. for $3 billion in cash plus the assumption of $2.3 billion in debt.
The deal announced Monday adds another major cable outlet to Disney's portfolio, which already includes ESPN, the Disney Channel and stakes in A&E and Lifetime. The Fox Family Channel, which Disney plans to rename ABC Family, reaches about 81 million subscribers in the United States.
Disney bought Fox Family from News Corp. and Saban Entertainment Inc., which each owned 49.5 percent of the company. The sale came about after Saban, a major children's programmer, which created the "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers," exercised its right to have News Corp. buy out its share.
"This is a perfect fit for our company," Disney chief executive officer Michael Eisner said in a conference call. "We paid appropriately for a great asset, which drives us to the No. 1 position in basic cable subscribers and gives us a greater presence and growth opportunity internationally."
For News Corp., the deal provides a welcome dose of cash just as the company is hoping to reach an agreement with General Motors Corp. over a purchase of the DirecTV satellite broadcaster, a division of GM's Hughes Electronics unit.
The deal expands Disney's programming reach worldwide with a 76 percent ownership in Fox Kids Europe, a children's programming channel that reaches 24 million homes, and a 10-million subscriber channel in Latin America called Fox Kids.
Disney is also getting Saban's programming library, which contains more than 6,500 episodes of shows.
It is the first major acquisition by Disney since it bought Capital Cities/ABC in 1996.
TITLE: Great Things Come From Small Beginnings
TEXT: Editor,
I have just visited St. Petersburg during a cruise-ship stop and wish to relate the strong impression that the city and its culture made on me. Of course, the architecture and layout of the city are magnificent, and as has been said before, it is perhaps the grandest city conceived in the last millennium. It is grand and sad at the same time, contrasting the fantastic wealth of the ruling class with the unimaginable burden of the vast majority of "citizens" - serfs - who built it for them.
The work that has been done to restore the palaces, churches and other monuments in the city and its suburbs also made a tremendous impression. I realized that the devastation of World War II had left a monumental challenge to restore the intricate and ornate architecture, furnishings and decorations of so many buildings, and the results to date are truly impressive.
There is another side to my impressions of St. Petersburg, however, and this one is not as uplifting, yet I know that others in my group had similar impressions. As we drove around the city, we saw thousands of buildings in a terrible state of repair, roads with potholes and a decaying infrastructure. This didn't bother us too much. We understand the difficulty that Russia is in today, rebuilding after 70 years of a failed experiment with communism. Rebuilding takes time.
What bothered us, though, were the little things. Hardly anyone in the city washes their windows. Few lawns were mowed. I saw hardly any flower boxes decorating people's windows. These may seem like trivial incidentals compared to the other problems your city faces, but the smallest matters can begin powerful trends.
My hometown, New York City, experienced just such a trend recently. Ten years ago, visiting New York was an unpleasant experience. Visitors were murdered by muggers looking for $20 for their next fix. The murder rate reached over 2,000 per year. Times Square was dirty, and it was dangerous even for residents. Now the murder rate has been cut by two-thirds, the city is clean, and it is fun and safe to go there. What happened?
The answer is in the details. Small "quality-of-life" issues were attacked first. For example, riders on the city's subway were regularly hopping over tollgates to ride for free. It started with the drug addicts, kids who didn't attend school and others on the margin of society, but then spread to well-dressed office workers with briefcases on their way downtown. The city administration decided to start there. One day the police just started arresting fare-beaters. It might seem to be like an overreaction to a petty crime, but it had a big effect in a short time.
The effort to stop fare-beating led to other efforts at cleaning up the appearance of the city and the attitudes of city residents.
Could something like that happen in St. Petersburg? I think so. Suppose there was a movement for everyone to wash their apartment windows on, say, Sunday, Aug. 12. Wouldn't that have a sudden and subtle effect on everyone? What would it cost? A little soap and water and a few rags? It could be done.
How about planting one little flower box under one window in each apartment? A box could be made from some scrap materials, filled with a few scoops of soil, add water and throw in a few seeds. You don't have seeds? Well, I'll send you some seeds and you can have your flower boxes ready for next spring. I'm serious. If I get too many requests, I'll get some kind of funding to get it started.
Why am I offering this and how could a two-day visitor understand or propose anything significant? I believe that the only obstacles are the ones we create ourselves. Sometimes he who is ignorant has no burden of preconception. Not knowing your experiences, I see that with a little effort one small nice thing will lead to better ones. And the city of St. Petersburg ,with all its potential, deserves it.
If I'm wrong and no great change comes about in 2002, the worst that can happen is St. Petersburgers will have some clean windows to look out onto their neighbors flowers. What is so bad about that?
Richard Shaper
New York City
RichardShaper2@Symphony.CUatSea.com
Nice Editorials
Editor,
I am writing to you from Canada where I now live. Three years ago, I married a woman from Tver and have a strong interest in Russia and what happens there. I am very pleased to be able to read your newspaper on the Internet and am even more delighted to read your editorials. You seem to be very perceptive in showing that the "king is not wearing any clothes," and at uncovering the cynicism and hypocrisy behind so many political decisions. Pragmatism in government becomes mere expediency when it is not based on sound underlying principles and vision.
Your questions - "Where is the government heading?" and "Who set the course and when?" - are pertinent to almost every national and local government. A clear vision and a plan to achieve it seem to be in very short supply these days. My compliments to you on your excellent editorial comments.
Steve Rison
Dawson Creek, Canada
Us vs. Them
In response to "Catholic vs. Orthodox," a comment by Sergei Chapnin, June 25.
Editor,
Reading this article was really amusing. If this article reflects the state of mind of an average well-educated Russian, my conclusion is that Russia will not open itself to the rest of the world during this generation as fast as I thought. It will most likely be much easier for a new generation of Russians, without the authoritarian education of their parents.
All arguments in this article seem to be arguments of national security, us vs. them, invasion from the West, oppression, friend or foe and so on. It is really funny to read about arguments of this nature when talking about religion in the 21st century. To some extent it reminds me of the fears of Falun Gong by the Chinese hierarchy. Fears of what?
Does anyone believe that the pope would be able to use organized force against anyone or that any Western government would rally in favor of what the pope proposes?
Most probably this argument reflects the fears of Russians who are afraid of the rest of the world. "We need protection," this article seems to propose. And the best way to give protection is to provide from the state-monopoly status. Monopoly for information, for religion, for gas distribution, for electricity, for railways and so on. It seems that without protection the West would invade Russia and destroy it. Obviously there is still a lot of room for improvement in Russia's perception of the outside world.
It is very interesting to see that Russia has still not gone through the stage of looking at a mirror with objective eyes. Russia has been for most of its history an oppressor rather than an oppressed country. Yet, there is almost no self-criticism in Russia's public opinion.
I am an optimist about the Russian people, and I think Russia has the opportunity to go through a golden era. When I read articles like this one with such an arcane reasoning it just reminds me that the path to the inclusion of Russia into the rest of the world is going to be uneven and bumpy.
Pablo Eizayaga
London, England
That's Slander!
In response to "Global Eye," a column by Chris Floyd, July 6.
Editor,
This is the most subjective, factually flawed article on the current state of affairs in the United States I ever read in my life!
Floyd says in the United States one can be "barred from voting for one's skin color being too dark" and jailed for "not wearing a seat belt." Both are absolutely ridiculous, not to mention the rest of his preposterous claims!
Does The St. Petersburg Times wish to perpetuate such reactionary, radical, leftist thinking? Its mirror image in the United States would be an editorial opinion that claims Putin is a dictator and "those damn commies can't be trusted."
Surely both opinions should be left to the obscure radical Web sites where they belong.
Jan Doernte
Berlin, Germany
Politically Correct
Editor,
I was most intrigued by the letter from Karen Fox you printed on July 17. Fox was displeased and offended because your newspaper described Mikhail Mirilashvili (whoever he is) as a "Jewish native of Georgia." This use of the "J word" caused her to slam The St. Petersburg Times as unenlightened and prejudiced.
This strikes me as a huge overreaction. I have visions of the Fox household being in the vice-like grip of extreme political correctness. Whether or not the use of the J word was necessary is a matter for discussion, but one seriously doubts whether any ill intent was intended.
Moreover, describing someone as Jewish within the context of the former Soviet Union probably does have relevance. I don't need to describe the historical reasons for this, as they are glaringly obvious. However, one could argue that the "Jewish" tag does add something to this story.
One should not rush to the opinion that the Jewish tag is by definition a negative thing. Fox draws this naive conclusion, otherwise she would not describe your newspaper as "prejudiced." But others would argue the opposite view. There are Jewish organizations that closely monitor stories such as this one and that are delighted when the religious affiliation of subjects are disclosed in this manner.
In my view Fox is guilty of overreacting to the "Jewish" tag and of stating some rather odd and simplistic views. She states at one point that, "It is clear from the names of those mentioned in the article that most are of Georgian background." Should the newspaper go one step further and disguise the names of the individuals, and perhaps even make no mention of Georgia? Or perhaps the article should not be run at all, for fear of offending the politically correct?
I hope that you will excuse me, for these are simply the ramblings of a part-Jewish, Russian Orthodox Englishman.
Stephen Ogden
Saint Petersburg
Let's Do Business
Editor,
I would like to give special thanks to The St. Petersburg Times for publishing my letter relating the difficulties I have encountered trying to do business in Russia. I have received more than 150 replies to my letter published on May 25.
Many of those respondents have asked me to keep them updated on the results of my efforts in Russia. For this reason, I have written some notes that may give others insight into what they might face in the Russian market. They may also give some guidance to the Russian enterprises with which I have tried to work. If anyone would like to receive a copy of these notes, they should write to me at the e-mail address below, and I will be happy to send them a copy.
Patrick Fleming
p.a.fleming@worldnet.att.net
Houston, Texas
NMD? No Thanks
In response to a letter to the editor from John Rieder, July 17.
Editor,
It is true that there are a handful of countries that might become targets of extremists wishing to cause terror or disruption. The United States and Russia are leading candidates for such extremists. However, let's look at Rieder's solution, which he rolled up into one sentence, "So why don't we become better friends, reduce our nuclear arsenals, commit our resources to other projects and build a system that allows us to defend ourselves against nuclear attack?"
Incredibly simplistic, and yet a good idea - if undertaken in the right order. Have the United States and Russia become better friends? Well, President George Bush's cowboy attitude toward Russia and the rest of the world ("We're the USA! We can do what we want, and you can't stop us!"), has not been conducive to improved Russian-American relations. In fact, Bush's foreign-policy moves have not furthered any improvement in relations with any country.
Have we reduced our nuclear arsenals? Russia has. However, the U.S. still has at least 7,500 nuclear warheads, a number that Bush has been urged to reduce by his own advisers. Has he? Nope. I guess it is better to let your own people starve than to feel impotent because you don't have nuclear weapons (where have I heard that before? Hmmm ...).
And, as far as committing our resources to other projects and building a missile-defense system, Bush has already committed our resources to other projects - namely, building a missile-defense system! If Bush had undertaken this project in the order that Rieder had suggested, it would have been far more acceptable to both the American taxpayer and the rest of the world.
The fact is that he did not. We probably don't have the "resources" to reduce our ridiculously high number of nuclear warheads, because Bush has decided to commit the money to building a missile-defense system at a price tag of billions of dollars. You may not mind paying for this system, Mr. Rieder, but I certainly do. I'd rather spend the money helping our people in need and our friends abroad, and reducing our nuclear stockpile.
Rick Pettit
Rutland, Vermont
Editor,
Now that the presidents of the United States and Russia have met again, I feel the need to say that George W. Bush and his missile-defense plan do not represent the views of all Americans. Some may recall how close the U.S. election was and that more people voted against Bush than for him.
As an American citizen, I must say that I absolutely disagree with Bush's plan to destroy a treaty that is a cornerstone in world peace today. President Bush would completely disregard the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that was such an achievement for both our countries. So I ask for all Russians and Americans alike to think about what Bush is proposing and to inform their lawmakers how they feel about dissolving one of the greatest agreements made between two powerful countries.
Eric Halleman
Grafton, Wisconsin
Media Polarization
In response to "U.S. Media: Don't Believe Everything You Hear," a comment by Michael McFaul, July 13.
Editor,
This is a very good article and I must say that a big problem that I see in the United States is that the media are owned by big conglomerates. This is causing a polarization of the people of this country because there is no way for others to get their voices heard.
Thank you for such a great article.
Galae Plowman
Sioux City, Iowa
TITLE: The World Press Reacts to Group of 8 Summit
PUBLISHER: the new york times
TEXT: U. S. President George Bush spent a busy weekend meeting with seven other world leaders in Genoa, Italy, with mixed results. His session with Russian President Vladimir Putin brought a promising agreement to coordinate discussions both on reducing offensive nuclear weapons and on building a limited missile defense. But Bush's stubborn resistance to international plans to reduce global warming further isolated the United States from most of its leading allies.
The plan for broad arms talks with Russia, to be fleshed out this week in Moscow by the White House National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, is consistent with Bush's idea of shifting nuclear thinking to a new, post-Cold-War framework. But it marks a welcome step away from his administration's earlier view that Washington might simply proceed with its own plans on offensive and defensive weapons and let Moscow react as it wished.
Linking discussions on offensive and defensive weapons makes sense. Russia, with its economy strained and its existing missile force increasingly difficult to maintain, has long favored deep offensive cuts. Bush also wants sharp reductions in America's nuclear arsenal. Agreement on cutting warheads might win Russian assent to modify the ABM Treaty to permit development of a limited missile shield.
Genoa also produced new commitments to address the economic and health problems of poorer nations. The attention to environmental issues and poverty reflected the concerns of many of those who demonstrated peacefully in Genoa. Most protesters were nonviolent. But the deliberate provocations of a small number of anarchists and the harsh reaction of Italian security forces brought tragedy, leaving more than 100 seriously injured and one demonstrator shot dead.
In planning future meetings, Bush and his fellow leaders need to steer a course between isolated, bunkerlike gatherings in remote areas and meetings in congested cities like Genoa that lend themselves to violent street demonstrations.
KOMMERSANT (MOSCOW)
THE U.S. president can feel like a victor. In essence, he needed nothing more than the hint of a sign of approval from his Russian counterpart. Now he need fear neither a schism among European allies, nor a Russian counter-game on some other front - say, in Asia.
As the victor, Bush can afford to be generous. He agreed to create a bilateral forum of business leaders, promised to help the development of economic reforms and to work to speed Russia's integration into the WTO. Such pledges would not have happened without Russia's consent to reconsider the ABM treaty.
Now Moscow, as the losing side, will soon be expecting the victors as guests. U.S. President's National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice plans to visit Russia shortly to discuss the concrete details of "surrendering" the ABM treaty. Also, the U.S. Treasury and Commerce secretaries and a large group of American businessmen are coming - to sweeten the pill, no doubt.
THE TIMES (LONDON)
INTERNATIONAL summitry was pushed to the sidelines in Genoa this weekend. Vandals smashed shops, banks and cars in the combat zone.
This is football hooliganism with a different name, skinhead thuggery under the guise of political protest. There is now a martyr for those intent on revenge - Carlo Giuliani, a local trade unionist who was shot as he tried to smash his way into a police Land Rover. Any death during a protest is regrettable; this one is hardly surprising.
The G8 leaders have not ignored the mood. They made their best symbolic attempt to reach out to Africa at Genoa, putting AIDS and malaria high on the agenda. None - apart from the opportunistic President Chirac - tried to condone the disruption at Genoa. They rightly insisted that summitry cannot simply be abandoned.
But they all need to do more to show the political relevance of these meetings, and less to underline the banqueting and bonhomie, the ceremonial and the opulence. The spectacle of annual lavish gatherings by thousands of officials and swarms of journalists is unnecessary, unseemly and of relatively recent origin. Next year Canada will move the summit into a secluded building at the relatively remote town of Banff in the Rocky Mountains. Something of the original 1975 fireside atmosphere at Rambouillet might return; much of the present razzmatazz would usefully disappear.
Summits do have a purpose. They set a framework, commit leaders to joint initiatives, impose deadlines and give statesmen a chance to measure their ambitions against the limits of the practical and the views of others. Personal chemistry matters, and collective chemistry can produce a powerful reaction. Summits are particularly useful when big issues - missile defense or climate change - divide nations. But they serve no purpose if millions of pounds and man-hours are spent on the kind of confrontation that disgraced Genoa.
DIE WELT (BERLIN)
WHEN Winston Churchill first spoke in 1950 of "parley at the summit," his meaning was almost literal. Two statesmen - in this case Churchill and Stalin - would meet to discuss affairs of state at an isolated place as if they were on the summit of a mountain. A picture full of poetry. The Englishman saw it as chance for reason to triumph and he believed in the power of the dialog.
Above all, however, Churchill's vision was based on the conviction of sovereign creativity: that only a statesman who is led by his education, experience, instinct and character can direct the fate of a nation in certain situations. Roosevelt, Adenauer, and de Gaulle were politicians of this kind.
That people died at Genoa shows that the summit's megalomania has gone out of control.
The consequences can only mean one thing: that the Genoa summit must be the last of its type. Paradoxically the way forward is to go back: back to Churchill's idea of personal conversations, face to face. However, the question remains whether the current leaders have sufficient stature for this - as Britain's great prime minister once had.
FRANKFUTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG
THE Group of Eight should not succumb to the misapprehension that it is a kind of informal world government. It is not, and it never will be. But it brings together countries that - with the exception of Russia - are of paramount significance in the global economy, the majority of which are prepared not only to face their global responsibilities, but also to back up that commitment with action. The added value of these summit conferences can be measured by the degree to which they tackle broad global issues - which is why those who caution against expanding this circle are right. Size does not always mean the capacity to act. Those who advocate admitting China or India, for instance, can cite population figures and growth rates (and nuclear capability). But it remains questionable whether those countries are ready and able to shoulder responsibility. For them, size would more likely be the tendency to put their newly won prestige on parade. The seven countries are not homogeneous. But they are sufficiently similar to each other culturally, politically and economically, and Russia is on its way to living up to the "Western" model. Until a country like China is prepared to follow that path, a consensus will remain that eight is enough.
VESTI.RU
THE essence of the decisions made at the Genoa summit can be boiled down to the recognition among the heads of the world's leading nations, the first for a long period of time, albeit an indirect one, that there is a direct connection between solving your own, and global problems. Strangely enough, the leaders came closer to the position of some "antiglobalists" who care so zealously about the welfare of the planet.
Washington de facto recognized that it is impossible to withdraw unilaterally from the security system, which has preserved a certain balance of power in the world during the past 30 years. And Moscow may avoid the necessity to come up with an adequate response to U.S. unilateral withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, if the negotiations succeed.
GRANI.RU
VLADIMIR Putin preferred a war of nerves to the Cold War. It is both less expensive and more secure. A maximum amount of smiles and well-wishing with a total absence of concrete obligations would work as tactics only for people with tough nerves. The president did not sell out the 1972 treaty at all in Genoa. The bargaining is just beginning. Its conclusion is not as obvious as it could seem in the view of Putin and Bush hugging. After all, opposing the threats of a known enemy is easier than the exhausting embraces of an unknown friend.
TITLE: $340M Worth of Official Reprimands
TEXT: LATELY the St. Petersburg Prosecutor's Office has been trying to capture a big fish while ignoring all the small ones with a surprising stubbornness.
The prosecutor's office tends to keep track of people who are fairly influential and, as it usually turns out, the results of those efforts can sometimes be scandalous.
Compare, for instance, the cases of Yabloko Duma Deputy Igor Artemyev and Anatoly Alekhasin, the former head of City Hall's Economics Committee, both of which made headlines in the last year. The only thing these two cases really have in common is that they involve big names, well-known in local political circles.
Artemyev was questioned last November by investigators about loans that, as it turned out, had been perfectly legally extended to City Hall employees. Alekhashin, for his part, was queried in May about the millions of budgetary rubles that his committee had spent to commission some pretty strange research projects. To take just one example, Alekhashin paid $20,000 to the mineral-water company Naftusya for suggestions on improving the health of city residents.
Artemiev was released because no evidence of a crime was uncovered. In Alekhashin's case, prosecutors asked Governor Vladimir Yakovlev to issue an official reprimand in connection with the committee's activities. Meanwhile, however, nothing has been done to block the mechanism through which the Economics Committee commissioned its studies, the "Municipal Contract." According to Legislative Assembly lawmakers, the Municipal Contract is not much more than a huge hole into which an enormous amount of budgetary funding disappears each year.
The way it works is through otkat, or kickbacks. An official signs a contract with a company for the purchase of some goods or services that the city needs for a price that is somewhat higher than the market rate. A percentage of the deal then finds its way into the pocket of the official who signed the contract.
Earlier this year, a deputy told me that as much as 40 percent of the money transferred through the Municipal Contract mechanism disappears in this way. According to the latest reports, City Hall intends to spend 25 billion rubles ($850 million) in this way under the current budget. In fact, that amount is more than half of the entire budget. Forty percent of that, by the way, is $340 million.
To deal with this problem, the Legislative Assembly set up a special commission earlier this year to oversee the Municipal Contract jointly with City Hall. This commission has its work cut out for it.
Just this month, another interesting case was made public. Gorelectrotrans, a state-owned company, spent 31 million rubles (about $1 million) to purchase 10 trolley buses through a dealer. That price is about one and one-half times what the factory in Samara charges.
According to prosecutors, the city lost 9 million rubles (about $300,000) on this deal. Again, they recommended that the governor officially reprimand the guilty parties. They also recommended that Aleksei Chumak, head of the municipal Transportation Committee, be punished, even though he had nothing to do with this deal. Responsibility for this spending was transferred to Gorelectrotrans in February.
Gennady Ryabov of the prosecutor's office told me that nothing suspicious had been found in this case. He just figures that the officials at Gorelectrotrans are too inexperienced to know the way the world works.
Yeah, right. When I asked Ryabov to explain the word otkat to me, he said that he didn't know that it had the meaning of "kickbacks." Could it be that the Prosecutor's Office is just too inexperienced to know how the world works?
TITLE: Pact Aimed at New World Order
AUTHOR: By Pavel Felgenhauer
TEXT: PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Jiang Zemin recently signed the first post-Soviet friendship treaty between the two countries. "The treaty will bring friendship from generation to generation," Jiang said after the signing ceremony. "This is a milestone in the development of Chinese-Russian relations."
In a joint statement, Putin and Jiang said they were hoping for a "just and rational new international order" to reflect their concept of a "multipolar" world led by the United Nations, rather than Washington.
The treaty made it clear that the two countries had no immediate plans to form an alliance. Article 7 of the treaty specifies that Russia and China will promote military cooperation, arms trade and military technology transfers, but this is "not aimed against third countries."
The U.S. State Department was quick to announce that the Chinese-Russian pact is no threat. But behind the scenes the new closeness between Moscow and Beijing is causing serious headaches in Washington.
Two months ago, The Washington Times published a story that alleged that a February 2001 Russian strategic exercise was in fact a preparation to attack U.S. bases in the Far East in support of China. The exercises involved Russian Tu-22 Backfire bombers that flew close to Japanese airspace.
"The Russians were practicing nuclear intervention against U.S. troops on Taiwan," said an unidentified American intelligence official, familiar with classified reports.
High-ranking Russian generals and diplomats I interviewed on the subject said that these allegations are crazy, and that if the United States and China were to clash over Taiwan, Moscow would do its best to remain neutral.
A Chinese-U.S. confrontation over Taiwan is perceived in Moscow as a distinct possibility in the coming decade. The repeated emphasis that the new pact with Beijing is not a military alliance is a clear indication of Moscow's desire to keep out of the fray. But Russia's neutral stance will most probably be tilted strongly in favor of China.
In the last several months, Washington has been regularly probing Russian officials on the possibility of forming a closer alliance based in part on a coordinated effort to contain China - a possible threat to both countries in the future. But these advances have been rejected.
The new pact specifically mentions that China and Russia will not enter any alliances that can threaten each other's territorial integrity. From both Beijing's and Moscow's points of view the problem of Taiwan is first and foremost a problem of China's territorial integrity, of a renegade province attempting to break away.
Russia is today supplying China with modern weapons and will most probably continue to supply arms if a conflict erupts over Taiwan. In 2000, according to industry sources, Chinese military procurement in Russia doubled to nearly $2 billion (more than 60 percent of all Russian arms exports). China is now negotiating the purchase of Russia's newest anti-ship missile, the Granit, which is deployed on Oscar II (Kursk-type) nuclear attack submarines.
There are two almost completed Oscar II subs that have been stranded since the collapse of the Soviet Union at the Sevmash shipyard in Severodvinsk. Finishing the subs, using Soviet-made equipment and parts, would not cost Russian industry much, but China could be pressed to pay up to $2 billion for them. The consequences of such a deal already influence Russian defense and foreign policies.
The Granit cruise missiles are designed to carry nuclear warheads to knock out U.S. aircraft carriers. China could equip Russian Granits with its own nuclear warheads and alter the strategic balance in the Eastern Pacific.
Russian military sources say that Granit cruise missiles have a sophisticated guidance system that uses on-board radar and can take in data from Russian spy and navigation satellites. According to reports, a package deal is currently being negotiated with Beijing that will involve Chinese investment to help prop up Russia's ailing military satellite constellation in exchange for data.
Russia and China are forming a relationship that is an alliance in everything but name. We will not fight for China, but we hope our weapons and military technologies will help diminish U.S. influence in Asia and the Pacific. We hope to promote a "multipolar world" while using the proceeds of the arms trade to keep our defense industry ticking.
Of course such a policy may end in disaster, but the Kremlin seems ready to take strategic risks.
Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent Moscow-based defense analyst.
TITLE: U.S. Support Gives Putin Free Hand in Chechnya
TEXT: TO warm up for his summit meeting with Western leaders in Genoa, Italy, on Saturday, and for his separate conference with U.S. President George Bush, on Sunday, President Vladimir Putin hosted his first full news conference at the Kremlin. In it, he portrayed himself as the kind of leader the rest of the G-8 is hoping he will be: politically moderate and committed to opening Russia's economy. On one subject, however, Putin offered no concessions whatsoever: Of Chechnya, he said, "I have no intention of changing ... my approach."
That approach is a scorched-earth military campaign by some 80,000 troops that has included the systematic torture, robbery and murder of civilians. Not only has Putin not toned down his bellicose and mendacious rhetoric about Chechnya in the five weeks since he last met Bush, but his forces have stepped up "cleansing operations" in the republic.
You can hardly blame him: After all, no Western government has had anything significant to say as reports about the bloody cleansing operations have poured in. In fact, even as news of two particularly grisly sweeps in the villages of Sernovodsk and Assinovskaya was breaking two weeks ago, Bush issued an extraordinary - we would say shocking - public endorsement of Putin. The Russian president "is deeply concerned about extremism and what extremism can mean to Russia," Bush told reporters, parroting the terms that Putin often uses to describe the Chechen war.
Bush's public support has had the effect of virtually silencing almost all other criticism by Western governments, and it has emboldened Putin to deliver ever-more-inflated falsehoods about the situation there. At his press conference Wednesday he said that Russian cleansing operations "boil down to passport checks and measures to identify people who are on the federal wanted list." In fact, what happens is that hundreds or thousands of boys and men are rounded up in fields or placed in pits, where many are tortured and some are summarily executed.
In the weeks since Bush held his first meeting with Putin, it has become quited clear that the administration is in a great hurry to win Moscow's acquiescence to a modification or abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty within the coming months. One price of this hasty diplomatic campaign is that Bush has abdicated the U.S. authority to speak out about human rights in Russia, and he has given Putin a free pass to pursue the most bloody and criminal campaign of military repression now in the world.
This comment originally appeared as an editorial in The Washington Post.
TITLE: Frisbee: The 'Ultimate' Pastime
AUTHOR: By Sam Charap
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: With a look of frustration, Georgy Fyodorov yelled "Time out!" as a bewildered elderly couple, heading home from a day of sunbathing at Laskovy beach in Solnechnoye on Sunday, tried to make sense of the group of half-naked bodies diving after a strange-looking disc.
The couple had inadvertently walked into the middle of a pick-up game of ultimate frisbee attended by some members of St. Petersburg's own team, Jupiter (named both for the Roman god and the city, as Jupiter in Russian sounds something like yu-PITER).
The rules of Ultimate, as it is known by its practitioners, somewhat resemble American football. Players on offense pass the frisbee to one another, attempting to reach the end zone, while the defense tries to intercept the frisbee or knock it down.
Ultimate has caught on quickly in the West, especially on American college campuses, since it was created in 1968. But, as Fyodorov explains, the sport is not yet very well known in Russia.
"Not many people know about [Ultimate]. The development of the sport depends on the availability of frisbees, and it's pretty tough to find a good one in Russia," he explained, adding that there are currently no stores in St. Petersburg that sell ultimate-regulation discs. The sport demands discs that are heavier and larger - to increase distance - than those used for pure recreation.
But Fyodorov, who presented himself as "the unofficial president of an unofficial organization - the Russian Flying Disc Federation," has been leading the charge to promote the sport in Russia. He first learned of Ultimate when a group of Canadian students visited his high school in 1990 and demonstrated the wonders of the frisbee or, in Russian, letayushchaya tarelka (flying plate).
Ultimate in Russia has come a long way since then. Besides St. Petersburg - where there are three active teams - Ultimate is alive in Novgorod, Nizhny Novgorod and Moscow. There are two tournaments as well - an invitational in Novgorod and the national championship scheduled this year for mid-September in St. Petersburg.
A team of Russian players, composed mostly of local residents, even made it to the European championships this year, which were held in Prague earlier this month. Considering that the sport is just getting off the ground here, the locals did pretty well, finishing 24th of 27 teams.
But, according to John Roseman, an American expatriate who has been living here and playing Ultimate since 1992, the sport locally is characterized by the informal get-togethers that take place every Sunday.
"The more common games are not one team against another. They're usually informal, just pick-up," said Roseman, who is chairman of the board of a software company called Linux Ink.
Roseman was among the enthusiasts who gathered on the beach at Solnechnoye, a suburb about approximately 45 kilometers northwest of the city, this Sunday. "I have been playing since college, but I'd never played seriously until I got here," he said.
The group gets together every week, regardless of weather conditions. In the winter, they play both indoors and - believe it or not - in the snow. Roseman said that with good gloves, outdoors play in the winter is rather enjoyable. "After 15 minutes, you warm up," he said, commenting that the snow here "is like sand" at minus 15 degrees Celsius.
Fyodorov invites anyone who is interested to participate in the pick-up games. For non-Russian speakers, there is no new vocabulary to learn, as all the terms used in the game are spoken in English, following international regulations.
Even novices are welcome.
"You wanna play?" Fyodorov asked this reluctant reporter. "Don't be nervous ... I have taught a lot of people already," he said.
Those interested in playing should contact Georgy Fyodorov at 552-4037 or by e-mail disc@spb.cityline.ru. Exact meeting times and places vary based on the seasons, so do call in advance.
TITLE: Reflections of Yesteryear Masquerading at Laima
AUTHOR: By Robert Coalson
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Somehow this dull and dented coin is a perfect symbol. Bearing the date 1739, it hangs in the opulently restored second-floor of the Laima fast-food restaurant at 12 Nab. Kanala Griboyedova, where it was found during restoration work in 1999.
Now just a diner where commoners eat bliny off plastic trays, the room was once a center of a social life for the empire's beau monde. The palace was built between 1753 and 1761 to the design of St. Petersburg's greatest architect, Bartolomeo Rastrelli, on the corner of what was then Rechka Krivushi (now, Kanal Griboyedova) and Bolshoi Prospect (now, Nevsky). In 1828, the palace passed to the Engelgardt family and has been known since as "Dom Engelgardta."
The restored Laima dining resurrects the spirit of Baroque excess that suffused the house, a spirit that dominates other Rastrelli buildings such as the Winter Palace and the Stroganov Palace. The moldings and faux Corinthian columns seem as close to exploding off the walls as mere plaster can come. The glittering mirrors, facing one another across the hall in narcissistic splendor, complete the impression of a society with unlimited resources and an unlimited desire to create a beautiful impression.
After the Engelgardts took over the palace, it became a hub of social life. Alexander Pushkin was a regular, as were many of the capital's highly placed citizens. The house was famous for its concerts, at which many 19th-century chamber works received their Russian premieres.
But the house was best known for its masquerades and costume balls. Sitting in the hall today, it is easy to imagine the empire's elite dressed to dazzle, gazing at one another and at themselves in an atmosphere of shameless superficiality.
It was this superficiality that captured the imagination of the young poet Mikhail Lermontov. His 1836 play, "Masquerade," which is still a fixture of the Russian dramatic repertoire, recreates the ambience of those evenings in Dom Engelgardta.
Although the play is not really about anything, it was rejected by the state censors for its "excessively sharp passions." In fact, the play pierces through the mask of respectability and purposefulness that the upper class sought to maintain for itself and exposes the emptiness behind it.
Now the restored hall, the clicking of plastic tableware, the ringing of cell phones and the gaze of this tarnished coin create a combination that provides food for thought as a side dish for your chicken Kiev and fries.
TITLE: 'Dr. Death' Has Day in Court
AUTHOR: By Susanna Loof
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - Witnesses have talked of creating poisoned chocolates and clothes, lacing a letter with anthrax and releasing cholera in the water supply at a refugee camp.
Wouter Basson, the so-called "Dr. Death," took the stand on Monday to face questions about the chemical- and biological-warfare program he headed under South Africa's apartheid regime.
It was to be the first testimony by Basson, whose 21-month-old trial on charges of murder, fraud and drug trafficking has reminded South Africans of the horrors of apartheid.
Testimony has included accounts of salmonella sugar and an experiment where naked blacks were smeared with a gel to test whether it could kill, and allegedly injected with fatal doses of muscle relaxants and dumped in the ocean when it didn't.
As the head of the secret program that allegedly searched for ways to kill black enemies of the state during apartheid, Basson, a cardiologist, traveled the world under false identities to gather information, funds and materials. Prosecutors say he supported a luxurious lifestyle by siphoning state money from companies set up to hide the operations.
Basson angered many South Africans when he refused to apply for amnesty from the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which would have required him to tell all in public hearings. His trial now is seen as a symbol of what happens to those who ignored the commission's effort to find out the truth about apartheid-era crimes.
"The Basson case demonstrates very clearly what the nature of the apartheid state was ... a criminal state that was involved in really major schemes of mass and serious violations of human rights," said Shadrack Gutto, a lawyer at the Center for Applied Legal Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
Basson, who has pleaded innocent to all charges, will not talk to the media, his attorney Jaap Cillier said.
The presiding judge dropped 15 of 61 charges last month without explanation, including allegations Basson tried to kill Reverend Frank Chikane by poisoning his clothes. Chikane is now President Thabo Mbeki's chief of staff.
Basson was also cleared of the gel-smearing killings, but he still faces 13 murder charges.
The Pretoria High Court was evacuated several times during the trial after anonymous callers threatened to blow up the court if the case was not adjourned.
Journalists beset the trial as it opened in October 1999, but public interest quickly faded as lawyers began arguing about the complex web of front companies and international links that hid Basson's alleged fraud.
The trial attracts only occasional attention, such as when bacteriologist Mike Odendaal testified last year he had freeze-dried HIV-infected blood for use against enemies as part of Basson's program.
Basson has remained calm throughout the trial, said Marlene Burger, who is observing the trial for the Center for Conflict Resolution.
"He shows no emotion of any kind. He and his legal team are very arrogantly confident that he will be acquitted," she said.
That Basson, who rose quickly in military ranks, became such a key figure demonstrates how the apartheid system was run by normal people persuaded by a perverted idea, Gutto said.
"The apartheid state really used very normal ordinary professionals with otherwise good standing from an academic-intellectual level," Gutto said. "It was not a system that was really run by sick people. These were normal people."
Seeing democracy approaching, F.W. de Klerk - the last apartheid president - forced Basson to retire in 1992, but Basson was rehired during Nelson Mandela's presidency. The new government said it had to rehire Basson to prevent his knowledge from ending up in the wrong hands.
But his comfortable life began to crumble when he was arrested in 1997 for allegedly selling Ecstasy to a police informant. Basson's program allegedly manufactured large quantities of street drugs, supposedly for crowd-control purposes.
Investigators found documents in Basson's home detailing the chemical- and biological-warfare project known as Project Coast.
The find led to Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings on the project and many of the charges against Basson.
Basson, who is free on bail, continued to practice medicine at a government hospital until May, when he was forced to retire.
Prosecuting and defending Basson is likely to cost South Africa more than the $5.6 million he is accused of pilfering, Burger said, adding that the trial is worth any price.
"[The state] has done the right thing because of what he's been accused of doing," Burger said.
TITLE: Irish Peace Hostage to Murphy's Law
AUTHOR: By Shawn Pogatchnik
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: HACKBALLSCROSS, Ireland - Peace in Northern Ireland may well depend on whether the British Army stops snooping on Thomas "Slab" Murphy, reputed chief of the Irish Republican Army.
The struggle to save the Good Friday peace accord of 1998 has many complex dimensions. Two of them - IRA disarmament and British military withdrawals - are being played out in the rolling bog lands of South Armagh.
Each side wants the other to make the next move: the IRA to start turning in its weapons, the British Army to dismantle more of the vast apparatus it has built up during a 30-year conflict that has left more than 3,600 dead.
In the border region dubbed "bandit country" because of its staunch IRA sympathies, Britain's hilltop forts on the Northern Ireland side bristle with infrared cameras and microphones. One watchtower, at Glasdrumman, was built in 1986 to keep tabs on Murphy's turf.
Across the frontier in the Irish Republic, the IRA's guns, explosives, rockets, mortars and grenades lie in scattered underground bunkers. Weapons finds have been common for decades in the sheep-flecked pastures of Hackballscross near Murphy's farm.
Britain has suggested that it might knock down the watchtowers, including the Glasdrumman one, if the IRA starts to disarm as the Good Friday pact intended.
Border people, however, stand by their neighbor and insist the IRA should stick to its guns until well after the British withdraw.
"The real terrorist base is over there," said Henry McElroy, a neighbor of Murphy, standing on a haystack at his farm and pointing to the Glasdrumman watchtower. "Everybody talks about decommissioning IRA weapons, but the only weapons that we want decommissioned are held by the British in those monstrosities."
Residents in the overwhelmingly Catholic border area backed the IRA's 1997 cease-fire and the Good Friday pact chiefly in the belief that Britain would respond by dismantling its security machinery, including large bases in the towns of Crossmaglen and Forkhill.
While the army has closed almost all its bases on other stretches of the meandering 320-kilometer border, South Armagh remains a fortress.
Lynx helicopters hop rooftop-high from base to base. A platoon of troops crouches, rifles at the ready, guarding a lone police officer on foot patrol in Crossmaglen's central square.
The army still doesn't use the roads for fear of attacks from IRA dissidents who oppose the cease-fire. Army and police commanders cite this as the main reason why they must retain their watchtowers, to watch cars and eavesdrop on conversations.
A worker standing outside Murphy's front door said nobody was there to answer questions, and claimed that it wasn't Murphy's place anyway. He refused to give his name.
Murphy, 52, has never granted an interview.
In 1998, he sued The Sunday Times of London for naming him as one of the IRA's seven-member Army Council. A Dublin jury, which heard testimony from several former IRA men identifying Murphy as a senior IRA figure, found for the newspaper and ordered Murphy to pay more than $1.5 million in legal costs.
The Good Friday pact produced a Catholic-Protestant government for Northern Ireland that includes Sinn Fein, the IRA-linked party. But the Protestants now say that unless the IRA starts scrapping weapons, the power-sharing deal will end by Aug. 11.
Paddy Short, an 81-year-old pub owner in Crossmaglen and the town's unofficial spokesperson, said people in South Armagh weren't too worried about it.
"Northern Ireland has always been an artificial state and a failure, and its artificial Protestant majority will never treat us as equals," he said.
Although he insisted that Murphy was not an IRA commander, Short said locals felt reassured to have him living in their midst.
"The British know the IRA's strong and supported here, that's the important thing," he said. "They must know we'd never allow the IRA to disarm and leave us naked to attacks from outside. Isn't that why America keeps its nuclear bombs - deterrence?"
The British and Irish governments are drafting a document designed to break the impasse. The army installations in South Armagh are perhaps Britain's most potent bargaining chip.
Arthur Morgan, a Sinn Fein representative in the border country, said the watchtowers were designed "to dominate people psychologically."
"You can be sure of one thing," he said. "There will be no IRA decommissioning if Britain doesn't pull all its troops out of South Armagh."
TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: Pope, Bush Meet
CASTELGANDOLFO, Italy (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush began a meeting with Pope John Paul II on Monday, with the two - who agree on most moral issues except for the death penalty - expected to discuss a range of issues.
Bush was greeted by an honor guard of Swiss guards and was received by the Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano who took the U.S. leader to meet the pontiff. Bush's wife Laura and daughter Barbara, dressed in black and wearing mantillas, also went into the room to greet the pope.
The private talks between Bush and the pope were expected to last about 15 to 20 minutes.
Jamaicans Buried
KINGSTON, Jamaica (AP) - The bodies of 13 people killed during recent political violence were lowered into a mass grave Sunday as thousands of mourners sang and danced to the strains of a marching band.
At least 28 people died in three days of unrest that erupted on July 7, when police moved in to search for guns in a home for the elderly near Tivoli Gardens - a stronghold of the opposition Jamaica Labor Party. The other 15 victims have already been buried, or will be in the coming weeks.
Police say that snipers fired on the officers, but residents and opposition leaders said that the police fired first. Calm returned only after Prime Minister P.J. Patterson ordered the full deployment of the army on July 9, and opposition leaders urged supporters to back off.
Moving Prayers
CATANIA, Sicily (AP) - Residents flocked to church on Sunday to pray for Mount Etna to be still, even though natural valleys on the volcano appear to have slowed molten lava flowing toward a small Sicilian town, as experts had predicted.
With lava flows only 4 kilometers away, Nicolosi's faithful also scheduled an evening prayer vigil Sunday.
The volcano came to life last week after a series of several hundred temblors in the region. Its stunning displays of spewing orange lava and clouds of black ash have forced the evacuation of some resorts and restaurants situated on the volcano. So far, however, the towns nearby have remained occupied.
Mount Etna is Europe's largest active volcano and springs to life every few months. Its slopes are closely monitored. The volcano's last major eruption was in 1992.
Uranium Smugglers
PARIS (AP) - Police arrested three men in Paris following the discovery of a tiny quantity of enriched uranium, which can be used to make nuclear weapons, according to a news report on Sunday.
Police told Le Journal du Dimanche that they had been tracking Serge Salfati, who had recently been released from prison after serving time for fraud. He led them last week to a van that French nuclear authorities determined was emanating radioactivity. Inside, police found 5 grams of enriched uranium-235 encased in a glass bulb stored in a lead container, Le Journal reported.
Salfati, who is French, was taken into custody with Yves Ekwella and Raymond Lobe, both from Cameroon. Police said the men were holding the uranium as a sample for a potential buyer.
France's Atomic Energy Commission is studying the sample to find out where it originated. About 10 kilograms of the radioactive substance - about 2,000 times what was found - would be needed to build a nuclear bomb, according to an engineer with the agency who was quoted in the article.
Extremist Cell
JERUSALEM (AP) - Israeli police said Sunday they were searching for Jewish extremists believed responsible for several shooting attacks on Palestinian civilians, including a deadly roadside ambush last week in the West Bank.
Israeli authorities said that they wanted to break up the extremist Jewish cell quickly, because further attacks, such as the shooting in Hebron that left three Palestinians dead, could lead to an escalation in violence that began 10 months ago. So far, no one has been arrested.
Diamond Deal
BO, Sierra Leone (AP) - Rebels and government leaders agreed Tuesday to resume disarmament in a fiercely contested diamond district, trying to overcome a dangerous stall on the way to peace in Sierra Leone.
Significantly, the two also agreed to a full moratorium on mining in the Kono diamond district, depriving both sides of an important source of revenue during disarmament.
Now in rebel hands, the Kono District has been one of the key aims of rebels in Sierra Leone's 10-year-old war. Fighting for control of the West African country's government and diamond fields, the Revolutionary United Front rebels have waged a terror campaign of killing, maiming, raping, burning and kidnapping tens of thousands of civilians.
Major Hangover
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Twenty-five men were publicly flogged in Iran after a court convicted them of consuming and selling alcohol, a judicial official said on Saturday.
Sixteen men were found guilty of consuming alcohol, which is forbidden under Islam, and given 80 lashes each, the Tehran judicial official said on condition of anonymity.
Nine others were given 70 lashes each for selling and transporting alcohol. The official said the public flogging was meant to discourage the breaking of Islamic rules.
Severe punishments have rarely been carried out in public for several years, but in recent weeks the hardline judiciary has ordered a number of hangings and floggings in public places.
Journalist Legend Dies
ROME (Reuters) - Indro Montanelli, the doyen of Italian journalism, who made his name as a war correspondent in Finland during World War II, and who started his own newspaper, died on Sunday after a short illness. He was 92.
As a roving correspondent for Corriere della Sera, Italy's leading broadsheet newspaper, Montanelli covered wars and political unrest for nearly 40 years, gaining a following at home for his insightful reporting and rich prose. In 1973 he decided to start his own newspaper, setting up Il Giornale Nuovo, now known as Il Giornale.
An all-round man of letters, Montanelli wrote plays, articles, novels, political essays and in-depth works on the state of the republic, either alone or with co-authors.
TITLE: Duval Ends Drought With First Major Victo ry
AUTHOR: By Tim Dahlberg
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ROYAL LYTHAM ST. ANNES, England - The wraparound sunglasses came off, and the most emotion David Duval perhaps will ever show spilled out.
It was nothing more than a smile of relief and eyes brimming with contentment. Together, though, they revealed a lot about Duval and what his first major championship meant.
A final-round 67 Sunday did more than just get Duval's name engraved on the claret jug right beneath that of Tiger Woods. It also took away forever the hated label of the best player never to win a major.
Duval knew all that. Yet he struggled more to put it into words than he did with his clubs on a brilliant, sunny day on the links of Royal Lytham St. Annes to win the British Open.
The look on his face would have to suffice.
"You know, I beat them all this week and I feel really good," Duval said. "It feels wonderful."
The world's No. 1 player before Woods, Duval was No. 1 at Royal Lytham because he was able to fashion weekend rounds of 65 and 67 on a golf course that wasn't meant to give up two rounds that low in a row.
In the final round, he navigated his way out of knee-high rough five different times in the final round, but made only one bogey.
After that bogey on the par-3 12th, he promptly came back to birdie the next hole. Then Duval parred his way home to beat Sweden's Niclas Fasth by three shots and hard-luck Ian Woosnam and five others by four.
Last year, he flew home with close friend Woods on Woods' jet after his buddy had won. This time he had the same claret jug Woods carried in his arms. Only now it had his name on it, too.
"I like the position of my name right below his," Duval said. "It looks like it is in the right spot."
Whether it stays there remains to be seen. Woods has six major titles, and Duval has a long way to go to catch up.
Still, winning the second is always easier than the first. Duval knows, after four years of coming close in the Masters.
"It's kind of a big relief," he said. "It's so pressure-packed in the major championships, and then you put it on a golf course like this where any minor mistake is magnified, and that makes the pressure even greater. You just can't let up and I didn't let up today."
He couldn't because Fasth had already posted his 67 and was at 7-under when Duval was playing the front side at the same number. But birdies on the sixth and seventh holes gave him the margin he would never surrender.
By then, the three players Duval shared the lead with to start the day had faded. He needed only to play steady golf on the treacherous back nine to win.
"You get four chances each year and you have to have a lot of things to go right those weeks to get into a position to win the golf tournament," Duval said. "Then you have to kind of - you have to do it. I mean there's no way around it, you have to do it."
Stoic behind his sunglasses, Duval certainly wasn't the favorite of the massive crowds that packed grandstands and fairways on Royal Lytham. That role belonged to long-suffering Colin Montgomerie and a suddenly sympathetic figure in Woosnam.
Montgomerie started a stroke behind, bogeyed the third hole and was never a factor. Woosnam became one, but because his caddie didn't count, it wasn't enough.
After nearly making a hole-in-one on the par-3 first hole to take a share of the lead, Woosnam put a tee in the ground and turned to his caddie for a club on the second tee.
What he got instead was a jolt. Caddie Miles Byrne had left a second driver in the bag and Woosnam would get a two-stroke penalty for having more than the 14-club limit.
"I felt like I had been kicked in the teeth," Woosnam said.
Woosnam would bogey two of the next three holes before making an aborted charge that got him to 7-under and within two strokes of the lead on the back nine. He ended up losing by four, and wondering what might have been.
"I did not really get it out of my head all the way around," Woosnam said. "I kept thinking if I hadn't had a two-shot penalty I could have been leading or been joint leader. I never shook it off."
Fasth had finished well ahead of Duval, and after Miguel Angel Jimenez bogeyed the 14th hole to fall back to 7-under, the lead was three.
Duval didn't know it, because he wasn't looking at the old-fashioned yellow leaderboards through his wraparound shades as he played his way down the back nine.
"It never entered my mind that I hadn't won a major today," Duval said. "I did not know exactly where I stood until I got to the 18th green and saw I was three shots ahead. I thought I was probably two, but I never looked."
Duval's father, senior tour player Bob Duval, was watching from his Ponte Vedra, Florida, home. The night before he and his son had talked about drinking cognac out of the claret jug if he brought the trophy home.
"He's never talked to me about the frustration of not winning a major," Bob Duval said. "All he's ever said is that he should have won two or three Masters. Today was a look of fun to watch."