SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #695 (62), Tuesday, August 14, 2001
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TITLE: City Seeks Sponsors for Restorations
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: One million dollars in donations has been raised since January for the restoration of the Konstantinovsky Palace in Strelna, south of St. Petersburg, according to representatives of the fund set up to carry out the restoration work.
The 18th-century palace, which is listed as a UNESCO world heritage site, is slated to become President Vla di mir Putin's presidential residence. The renovation work is expected to cost at least $170 million, and most of it is scheduled to be completed by May 2003, according to Viktor Khrekov, a spokesperson for the presidential administration.
Khrekov says that Russian business has responded energetically to Putin's request for donations.
"So far, all the work - the research and the initial conservation - has been financed entirely from private donations raised by the fund," Khrekov said.
"Many [businesspeople] have responded very enthusiastically [to the request], and the presidential administration is hoping that the fund will receive tens of millions of dollars more during the renovation period," he added.
The money raised for the Konstantinovsky Palace has sparked hope that domestic and international businesses are slowly opening up to the idea of making donations to restore St. Petersburg's historical landmarks.
Olga Taratynova, deputy head of the St. Petersburg Committee for the State Control and Protection of Architectural Monuments, said that the Konstantinovsky Palace had long been considered virtually a hopeless case, as all the city's efforts to find sponsors had failed.
The committee has drawn up more than 130 proposals for other restoration projects in hopes of attracting further sponsorship from business and foreign governments. The total estimated cost of the projects on the committee's wish list is about $16.4 million.
The projects range from highly visible works such as the renovation of the City Duma clock tower on Nevsky Prospect at a cost of about $378,000 to smaller jobs such as the restoration of the turn-of-the-century street lamps at 15 Solyanoi Pereulok for $83,000. If completed, the entire package of projects would return the lion's share of the city's architectural details to their original appearance.
A few of the committee's projects have already found sponsors. The Turkish firm Hazer International, which has interests in the construction and entertainment industries, donated $400,000 for the restoration of the Alexander Column on Palace Square. Hazer representatives described the donation as an effort to use St. Petersburg's 300th anniversary to introduce the company to the city.
Other ongoing projects include the restoration of the cast-iron railing around the Mikhailovsky Garden, which is being sponsored by RJ Reynolds Tobacco International, and the Amber Room in the Catherine Palace in Pushkin, which is being sponsored by the German natural-gas giant Ruhrgas.
Several years ago, the Coca-Cola Foundation, at the request of Coca-Cola St. Petersburg Bottlers, donated $300,000 for the Laboratory for the Restoration of Tempera Paintings at the State Hermitage Museum.
According to Yelena Lavina, a Coca-Cola St. Petersburg public-relations specialist, more Western companies would sponsor such projects if the city did a better job of promoting them.
"Any company with serious intentions that wants to launch long-term projects in St. Petersburg will surely participate in such charitable efforts," Lavina said. "Experience has already shown that this is exactly what most influential companies do."
Taratynova agrees that the city must do more to raise its international profile.
"The city isn't getting the attention it deserves. The authorities should concentrate on promoting the city abroad. We can't rely entirely on Russian businesses, although some of them have begun expressing interest in these issues," Taratynova said.
Yelena Kononenko, a representative of the St. Petersburg Historical Museum, which administers the Peter and Paul Fortress, said that the city had not attracted any foreign funding for the restoration projects there.
"The Belgian government and private sponsors are helping to restore the belfry of the Peter and Paul Cathedral, but this is happening as a result of personal connections and has involved no efforts on the part of the city administration," Kononenko said.
The restoration work on the Konstantinovsky Palace is being overseen by a separate fund, which has created an oversight group of prominent figures such as Nobel Prize-winning Duma Deputy Zhores Alfyorov and Mariinsky Theater Artistic Director Valery Gergiev to monitor spending and prevent malfeasance.
Specialists from the State Hermitage Museum and the Russian Academy of Sciences are drawing up a detailed plan for the restoration. The plan should be completed by Oct. 1.
"After the restoration, [the Hermitage] will remain as the curator of the palace," Hermitage Director Mikhail Piotrovsky, who is also a member of the restoration fund's financial oversight group, told Interfax last week.
The Konstantinovsky Palace was designed by the Italian architects Bartolomeo Rastrelli and Niccolo Michetty, and was completed in 1720. It was severely damaged during World War II and has not been completely renovated since.
TITLE: A Coup That Shook the World
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: At about 1 a.m. on Aug. 19, 1991, Sergei Yevdokimov, a major in the Soviet Army's elite Tamanskaya division, was roused from his bed by a messenger who told him to report immediately to the division's grounds.
When Yevdokimov arrived, other officers who also had been called in were hanging around, chatting and smoking while waiting for further commands. "Maneuvers were to start in a day, so we figured it was just part of that," he said in a recent interview.
They were wrong.
At 4 a.m. they were told to get the vehicles ready to march, and at about 7:40 a.m. the battalion commander arrived to give them their orders: Start moving toward Moscow.
"He said something about the president being replaced and about a of committee being formed," Yevdokimov said.
Yevdokimov didn't know what to make of it, but he did as ordered and joined the column following Minskoye Shosse to Moscow, 50 kilometers away.
Even people who heard the state news reports that morning had trouble making sense of the stunning announcement that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who was on vacation on the Crimea, had been replaced because of ill health. Power was transferred to Vice President Gennady Yanayev and the State Committee for the Emergency Situation, or GKChP, whose members included the heads of the KGB, the military and police.
Outside people's windows, hundreds of tanks and armored personnel carriers were passing by, sent by the GKChP to occupy the city.
Was this what many had feared would happen? That Gorbachev's experiment with glasnost and perestroika would eventually be brought to an end and the country would sink back into the old-style Soviet ways?
Boris Yeltsin, the new president of the Russian republic, also was jolted from his sleep that morning. He wrote in his memoirs that his daughter Tanya came running into his room screaming, "Papa, get up! There's a coup!"
"She began to tell me about the GKChP, Yanayev and [KGB chief Vla di mir] Kryuchkov. It was all so stupid. I said to Tanya, 'Are you kidding me?'" Yelt sin wrote in "The Struggle for Russia," published in 1994.
Although Yeltsin knew the conservative Communists around Gorbachev were itching to take power, he seemed as surprised as anyone by their coup. But Yeltsin immediately went into action to lead the resistance. He counted on the Russian people, who only two months before had elected him president in an unprecedented democratic election, to stand by him and defend their dreams of an independent, democratic Russia.
The White House, which then housed the Russian republic's parliament, quickly became the headquarters of the resistance.
NEMTSOV GETS THE CALL
"By some coincidence I was in Moscow, stopping over on my way to Sochi," recalled Boris Nemtsov, the head of the Union of Right Forces, who at the time was a deputy in the Russian parliament and lived in Nizhny Novgorod.
"I arrived in the city on the morning of Aug. 19 at about 5:30 a.m. The city looked pretty normal, except for a greater number of police on the street than usual. It was still early, so my wife and I checked into a hotel and fell asleep," he said in a recent interview.
Their sleep was soon disturbed. Nemtsov said one of his colleagues from parliament banged on the door at about 7 a.m. and shouted: "There is a coup. Tanks are in the city. We need to go and save democracy at the White House."
Nemtsov said he was dumbfounded, and his wife accused him of purposely spoiling her Black Sea vacation.
He went straight to the White House, where remarkably no measures had been taken to prevent deputies from going in and out. Even the telephones were never cut off.
State Duma Deputy Sergei Kovalyov, also a deputy at the time, said the telephones were crucial for communicating with journalists, and thus the outside world. "Somebody just had to be by the phone at any given moment," he said.
When Nemtsov arrived at the White House, everyone was still waiting for Yeltsin, who had been staying with his family at the Arkhangelskoye state dacha outside of Moscow.
"We were at a loss over what to do," Nemtsov said.
But shortly before 10 a.m., wearing a bulletproof vest under his suit, Yeltsin charged in. "We were standing in the stairwell smoking. I noticed Yeltsin coming coming up the stairs, flying over every second step, looking determined.
"As he passed by me he said, 'Nemtsov, what are you doing hanging around doing nothing as usual? Go and get yourself a gun.'"
Nemtsov said he was a little shocked but nevertheless asked where. "In the corridor," Yeltsin answered.
The weapons were shortened versions of the Kalashnikov and most likely were from the White House's own reserves, said independent defense analyst Pavel Felgenhauer, who was among those in the White House.
Yeltsin drafted an appeal denouncing the putsch. "Storm clouds of terror and dictatorship are gathering over the whole country," he said. "They [the GKChP] can't be allowed to bring eternal night."
He addressed his appeal to the "citizens of Russia," giving people a new identity to cling to: "citizens," with its associations with a civil society, "of Russia," as distinct from the Soviet masses.
Yeltsin made an appeal to the military: "I believe in this tragic hour you can make the right choice. The honor and glory of Russian men of arms shall not be stained with the blood of the people."
The White House sent out armies of volunteers to spread Yeltsin's appeal. Copies were handed out on the street and in the metro. They were posted on walls and lampposts.
YELTSIN ON THE TANK
As the armored column of the Tamanskaya division made its way into the city along Kutuzovsky Prospect, the tanks, designed for rougher terrain, slid around on the road, occasionally knocking down lampposts.
By late morning, the column was approaching the White House. Yevdokimov's company of 10 tanks and an APC was ordered to stop and take up position just across from the Parliament building on the embankment near where the new British Embassy building now stands. Their task was to be in place to block Kalininsky Pros pect, now Novy Arbat.
The rest of the division was told to proceed and seize control of the mass media. The tanks set off for the TASS building on Tverskoi Bulvar, the Izvestia building on Pushkin Square and Ulitsa Prav dy, where leading newspapers Prav da, Komsomolskaya Pravda and Sovietskaya Rossia had their offices.
The convoy turned left after the bridge and continued onto the embankment that runs directly in front of the White House. There, the tanks were stopped by the Yeltsin supporters outside the White House. There were only a few hundred people there at that time.
Yeltsin was watching from the window. "People were not afraid to approach the tanks; in fact, they were even throwing themselves under them," he later wrote. "They weren't afraid, although they were Soviet people.
"Suddenly, I felt a jolt inside. I had to be out there right away, standing with those people."
In what became the enduring image of those history-making days, Yeltsin walked down the front steps of the White House and climbed up onto one of the Tamanskaya division's T-72 tanks. He shook hands with the driver.
With the battalion commander standing silently by, Yeltsin, flanked by his chief bodyguard Alexander Korzhakov and other trusted guards, made a short but impassioned appeal to the "citizens of Russia."
He accused the GKChP of staging a "right-wing, reactionary, anti-constitutional coup" and declared the committee illegal. He urged citizens to "demand the return of the country to normal, constitutional development" and appealed to the military not to participate in the coup.
He demanded that Gorbachev, who was under house arrest in Crimea, be allowed to speak to the country.
Yeltsin slipped back inside to safety, and the tank convoy continued on its way. The White House defenders then turned their attention to Yevdokimov's tanks, parked on the other side of the road, and began talking to the soldiers.
"I still believe that our great luck was that we ended up at this very location - by the White House. We were literally at the very source of information," said Yevdokimov.
All over town, people were approaching the soldiers in the tanks. They gave them leaflets with Yeltsin's appeal and stuck flowers in the guns. Some just wanted to get a look at the tanks.
For the defenders of the White House, the main thing was to ensure the soldiers didn't fire on their own people.
One man, Sergei Bratchikov, went a step further and asked Yevdokimov to change sides and join Yeltsin.
"I just listened to all this talk. After all, how could I know whether this guy was sincere and honest or whether he was a KGB spy or provocateur," Yevdokimov said.
Eventually Yevdokimov told the defenders that such a discussion must take place only between officers. Scrambling to find an officer, the defenders found Parliament Deputy Sergei Yushenkov, who taught at a military academy and had the rank of lieutenant colonel.
"I had come to the White House that day in a new uniform. I think I was wearing it for the first time," Yushenkov, now a Duma deputy, recalled.
Yushenkov agreed to negotiate with Yevdokimov. "I went up to him and said something emotional along the lines of, 'Officer, it is your chance to choose between eternal glory and eternal shame,'" Yushenkov said, smiling at the memory.
YEVDOKIMOV SWITCHES SIDES
By that time, however, Yevdokimov had already made his choice and all he wanted was to make it official. Yevdokimov had decided to disobey orders and defy the defense minister and rest of the GKChP. He now says that it seemed an obvious thing to do, but at the time, he was risking his epaulets and his life.
He was taken to the White House to meet with Russian Vice President Alexander Rutskoi, and they were joined by Konstantin Kobets, the head of parliament's defense and security committee. "We sat and talked for a while figuring out what to do," Yevdo ki mov said.
After agreeing on the basics, the officers used a model of the White House to work out where to place the tanks.
Yevdokimov knew it would be tricky to maneuver the tanks through the crowd of worried and potentially aggressive people. Throughout the day, the numbers of defenders had grown to several thousand, and they had blocked the approaches to the White House with barricades made from whatever they could get hold of: trolley buses, cars, pieces of metal and stones ripped from the road.
Another complication was that it was dark. "It was pretty scary. People were standing just 30 to 40 centimeters from moving tanks. One push from the crowd and it could all end in a tragedy," he said.
Finally, six tanks were moved to key points around the White House and the crowd cheered as they turned the barrels of their guns away from the parliament. Soviet soldiers were now ready to defend Yeltsin, and for the defenders the tanks were a clear sign of hope.
Inside the White House, there were hundreds of people - parliament deputies and other Yeltsin supporters - waiting anxiously for news and unsure what would happen next.
A couple dozen military officers headed by Kobets were working the telephones, calling the home numbers of every officer they knew, Felgenhauer said. They were trying to determine which units had been deployed and persuade commanders not to fight for the GKChP.
TIME FOR A DRINK
Yeltsin, according to Nemtsov, "behaved bravely, but as usual was a bit flighty."
Fearing that the White House would be attacked, Yeltsin worked hard to ready the building for a siege.
"He wrote appeals to the nation and signed a bunch of decrees. But by the time evening arrived, he got tired and said: 'O.K., it's time to have a drink,'" Nemtsov recalled.
"He called the U.S. Embassy [located nearby] and told them: 'We have no wine, no food, so we are not going to last long this way,'" Nemtsov said.
According to Nemtsov, American diplomats responded promptly by shipping supplies across the road in a trailer.
A U.S. diplomat who was in Moscow at the time said the embassy itself did not send over food, although some people in the embassy community, acting independently, took over their own food parcels.
The next day, men carrying stacks of pizzas from Pizza Hut were seen going into the White House. "Pizzas were lying around all of the offices," Felgenhauer said. "People just kept picking at them, sometimes eating just certain ingredients from the toppings."
TITLE: Centarian Is Last Veteran Of Only U.S.-Russia War
AUTHOR: By Andrew Kramer
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: EUGENE, Oregon - Like thousands of other young men at the time, Harold Gunnes left high school early in 1917 to join the navy and fight in World War I. But instead of sailing to France, Gunnes was sent on an obscure and hazardous mission to northern Russia.
Today, he is even more unusual.
At 102, he is believed to be the last American alive who fought in the North Russian Expeditionary Force - sent by the allies to fight Russian communists in that country's civil war. It marked the only direct warfare between Russia and the United States.
Most of the other soldiers and sailors on the expedition were older than Gunnes, and all other known survivors have died, according to a navy historian and others knowledgeable about the military history of the World War I era.
In the 1918-1919 conflict, Gunnes marched through swamps and birch forests in the Russian Arctic near the port of Arkhangelsk on the White Sea to storm a village before being forced to retreat to the sea.
"I was way up the line fighting the Red Russians," says Gunnes, whose memories of that oft-overlooked mission are intact even after more than 80 years.
The American expedition was never well known. In his 1984 state-of-the-union address, President Ronald Reagan said Russians and Americans - while having their differences - "have never fought each other in war."
Someone should have asked Gunnes.
"It wasn't a big war by any means, but the fighting was just as bad" as the fighting in Europe during World War I, Gunnes said during an interview at his home in Eugene, his 94-year-old wife, Evelyn, always near at hand.
Because of the great span of his life, Gunnes has a panoramic view of 20th- century history.
The warship that took him to Russia had cannonball dents in the bow from action in Manila harbor in the Philippines in the Spanish American War of 1898. Born in 1899, he has witnessed the birth of the automobile, the vinyl record and the Internet.
Gunnes now moves in slow motion. Even with a powerful hearing aid, he is forced to interrupt the conversation to point one of his long fingers at his ear, telling a reporter to speak louder.
But his speech is perfectly lucid.
"Why am I so important?" he said. "Thousands of others did what I have, only I've lived longer."
He is likely the last of the 5,500 or so Americans who fought in Russia with the Army's 339th Division, the so-called "Polar Bears," and about 50 sailors who joined the landing party from the USS Olympia. A related mission of Americans who entered the Pacific port of Vladivostok encountered bandits but did not directly engage Bolshevik troops.
Most of the soldiers and sailors of that mission to northern Russia joined the service in their mid-20s, according to Stan Bozich, co-founder of the Polar Bear Memorial Association in Frankenmuth, Michigan, a group established to honor veterans of the conflict. The last known "Polar Bear" died nine years ago, according to Bozich.
Dennis Gordon, author of "Quartered in Hell," a book about the expeditionary force, interviewed many of its navy veterans in the late 1970s.
He said it is unlikely any is still living.
U.S. Navy historian Raymond Mann concurred, but said he could not be certain.
Gunnes left Barnesville, Minnesota, to sail on the Olympia in 1917. Bristling with broadside guns, the ship was used to ferry American troops to England past German submarines in World War I. In the mid-Atlantic in 1918, the Olympia was ordered to steam to Russia.
The assignment of the expeditionary force of Americans, English, French and others was to help the "White" Russian forces depose Vladimir Lenin, Russia's new communist leader of the "Red" Russians.
On Aug. 2, 1918, on the orders of President Woodrow Wilson, the ship arrived in Arkhangelsk, a city then made of log houses and magnificent multiple-storied log churches, many built without nails by skilled Russian woodworkers.
But covered in mud and impoverished by civil war, Gunnes said it "looked like junk" to him.
His group traveled on barges up the Dvina River, a cold stream of muddy water looping through low hills, peat bogs and birch forests east of the White Sea, to a village where one of the first engagements between Russian and American troops took place.
Gunnes recalls trudging through a birch forest toward the town of Seletsko, a fishing and logging village about 350 kilometers from the White Sea.
That's when the Bolsheviks opened fire.
Gunnes dropp ed onto what he recalled was wet and cold ground on the forest floor and began squeezing off rounds from his Mosin-Nagants rifle toward the Russian lines. The allies forced the Bolsheviks from their trenches in that firefight.
Gunnes recalls that as he walked into the village on Sept. 23, 1918, he noticed a frayed rip in the sleeve of his friend George Perschke's jacket.
"Hey, look at your arm," Gunnes told Perschke.
"We didn't know he was hit until we took his coat off. There was a gash in his arm," and blood dripped out of his sleeve onto the muddy street, Gunnes recalled.
A navy report on the skirmish describes Perschke's wound as "the first American blood to be shed on Russian soil for the cause of democracy."
The Bolsheviks, meanwhile, had flanked the allied force.
"We ran out of ammunition and food. I was young and didn't have the sense to be scared," Gunnes said.
The cold, mosquitoes and lack of sleep were deleterious for the troops, and they were outnumbered. They slipped through the Red lines at night.
In November, the force from the Olympia sailed for England.
That was it for Gunnes, but the little war in the north continued.
U.S. soldiers fought on until summer, when they, too, left. The Bolsheviks solidified their power and ruled until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
And Gunnes? He returned to Minnesota and opened a hardware store, worked through the Great Depression and World War II, and moved to Hillsboro, Oregon, in 1951. He fathered, and outlived, his two sons but still has three stepchildren and 17 grandchildren.
These days, he spends his time walking in the backyard of his home, drinking coffee in the afternoon and driving his Buick Park Avenue.
Perschke, Gunnes' friend and the first American wounded in Russia, visited the Gunneses in Hillsboro about 15 years ago. But Gunnes hasn't heard from him lately.
"All of those that I corresponded with, they're all gone," he said.
The United States and Russia fought as allies in World War II. Their armies never engaged directly during the Cold War.
TITLE: Rumsfeld Talks Security on Visit
AUTHOR: By Robert Burns
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov reiterated Russia's opposition to scrapping the treaty that is in the way of U.S. President George Bush's plan for a national missile defense on Monday.
After a meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Ivanov was asked whether Rumsfeld persuaded him that the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty had outlived its usefulness.
"I'm afraid not," he replied, speaking in English.
Then, speaking in Russian through a translator, he added, "We still think the ABM Treaty is one of the major important elements of the complex of international treaties."
Rumsfeld and Ivanov met one-on-one for nearly two hours, and afterward Ivanov told reporters, "We took a very energetic step forward." He said they had discussed a wide range of issues, but he was not specific about progress.
Rumsfeld then went to the Kremlin to meet with President Vladimir Putin.
Over meals and in meetings, Rumsfeld is pressing Bush's campaign to win Russian acceptance of missile defense.
Rumsfeld, on his first visit to Moscow since taking office in January, started a 14-hour day of diplomacy Monday by fielding questions from Russian journalists. One asked him what minimum number of offensive nuclear weapons the Bush administration believed it needed to maintain.
Rumsfeld said he planned to recommend a specific number to Bush within a month or two. But first, he said, he needed more information about longer-term issues such as maintaining the reliability and safety of the existing nuclear stockpile and how long it might take to replace weapons that go bad.
Rumsfeld made clear, however, that Bush would make major reductions from the current level of about 7,200 weapons.
"We're going to do it regardless of what Russia does," he said.
Although missile defense is a key issue on Rumsfeld's agenda in Moscow, he said the administration's main aim is to establish a new, broader relationship with Russia - one that brings it closer to the Western community of democracies and further from communist countries like North Korea and Cuba.
"For [Russia] to be seen as an environment that is hospitable for investment by Russians and investment by everyone else in the world, we have to refashion the political and economic, as well as the security, relationship," Rumsfeld told reporters flying with him to Moscow.
He said it is unrealistic to expect Russia to retreat anytime soon from its position opposing a U.S. plan to deploy defenses against long-range missiles.
Monday's talks grew out of Bush's meeting in Italy last month with Putin in which they agreed to pursue parallel discussions on missile defense and nuclear-force reductions. At the time, it appeared the Russians might be warming to Bush's view that missile-defense testing and deployment should not be limited by Cold War-era arms-control treaties.
Since then, however, there has been little indication of movement toward the president's goal of getting Russia to agree on a mutual withdrawal from the ABM Treaty. That pact prohibits the kind of broad missile defense Bush says the United States must have as soon as the technology is ready.
TITLE: Interior Minister Disbands RUBOP
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov has disbanded the ministry's regional organized-crime directorates, a network of law enforcement bodies set up by his predecessor that answered directly to the interior minister.
The order gets rid of a powerful network, known as RUBOP by its Russian acronym, whose officers have been repeatedly accused in the press of acting on behalf of the highest bidder in political and business disputes.
The disbanding of what was once considered the elite of the police is seen by analysts as part of an ongoing overhaul of the Interior Ministry that aims to streamline its operations and tighten its grip on regional departments.
"We don't see any real payback from this agency," Gryzlov said in announcing the move Wednesday.
RUBOP's duties - fighting organized and economic crime - are to be handed over to commando teams and investigators in so-called operative investigative bureaus in recently created police departments for the seven federal districts, Gryzlov said. Gryzlov appointed police chiefs to each of the federal districts during the past week.
The size of the bureaus' budgets and how they would be funded was unclear Thursday.
The vertical chain of command is now to go from the Interior Ministry in Moscow to the ministry's federal police departments in the seven federal districts to the regional police departments.
This way, there will be no agency such as RUBOP that answers directly to Moscow from remote regions, Gryzlov said. Law enforcement agencies will be more efficient and much less susceptible to regional influences, he said.
RUBOP was the brainchild of former interior minister Vladimir Rushailo. Ninety-seven regional RUBOP directorates were eventually set up.
The fate of top RUBOP officials was unclear.
Some media reports suggested Thursday that Gryzlov would use the RUBOP disbanding to sack the officials who were picked by Rushailo.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Putin to Germany
BERLIN (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin will make a state visit to Germany from Sept. 25 to 27, a German government spokesperson said Saturday.
The spokesperson could give no further details of the trip, although the German government had previously said Putin and Chancellor Gerhard Schrö der and their wives might visit Dresden.
Rostotsky Dead at 79
MOSCOW (AP) - Stanislav Rostotsky, a director whose films depicted Soviet life from World War II to the reforms of perestroika, has died at age 79, the day before the opening of a film festival in northwest Russia that he helped organize.
Rostotsky died of heart failure late Friday night, Interfax and Itar-Tass reported Saturday. He was in Vyborg for the Saturday opening of the Window on Europe annual film festival, where he was to serve as a judge, the reports said.
Rostotsky was wounded in western Russia while fighting in the Red Army against the Nazis in World War II. After the war he studied at the State Cinematography Institute in Moscow under renowned director Sergei Eisenstein.
One of his most enduring films was the 1972 "Dawns Here are Quiet," about an all-female regiment in World War II caught in a much larger operation than the one they were meant to take part in.
He is survived by wife Nina Menshikova, an actress who starred in several of his films, and son Andrei, also an actor.
Belarus Search
MINSK, Belarus (AP) - Police have seized computers from the offices of an opposition candidate in this fall's presidential election, in what his aides called a government attempt to derail the campaign.
Officers in the city of Grodno searched the offices of Semyon Domash's local campaign headquarters and of a public association that he heads on Friday, said the politician's spokesperson Alexei Shein.
No explanation was provided.
Domash is a former parliament speaker who now heads a centrist political party, and is one of only three remaining challengers in the Sept. 9 presidential election.
Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department on Friday criticized Belarus for not inviting European observers to monitor the presidential election.
Soldiers Punished
TALLINN, Estonia (AP) - The Estonian defense force has discharged six soldiers and punished 21 others for violating public order in a largely Russian-speaking community, the Baltic News Service reported.
Several local residents in the town of Paldiski, a former Soviet naval base with a predominantly Russian-speaking population, reportedly were intimidated and roughed up by a group of drunken soldiers on July 24.
The soldiers were seeking revenge after some of their colleagues had allegedly been robbed and beaten up in the town, BNS said Friday.
Suspects Charged
TALLINN, Estonia (AP) - Police have charged two suspects in the shooting death earlier this year of publisher Vitaly Haitov, who was the owner of Estonia's largest Russian-language daily newspaper, police said.
One suspect was charged with murder Thursday and the other as an accessory to murder Friday, police spokes person Indrek Raudjalg said. He declined to give their names, but said both were 33-year-old Lithuanian citizens who had recently lived in Moscow.
If convicted, they both face a maximum of life in prison.
Haitov, 57, was shot twice in the head from close range while sitting in his jeep outside his Tallinn home on March 10. Haitov's 9-year-old grandson and namesake, who had witnessed a similar fatal shooting of his father, was sitting beside him.
Putin to Finland
MOSCOW (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin will pay a two-day official visit to Helsinki in early September, his press service said.
A spokesperson for the presidential press service said Friday that Putin would hold talks with President Tarja Halonen during the Sept. 2-3 visit. He is also due to meet Finnish Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen.
Tobin Back Home
RIDGEFIELD, Connecticut (AP) - John Tobin, the Fulbright scholar held in a Voronezh jail for six months, was honored by his hometown Monday, town officials said.
Tobin, 24, took part in a ribbon-cutting ceremony Monday afternoon at the Ridgefield Town Hall. Town Council Chairman Rudolph Marconi said Sunday that Tobin will snip a yellow ribbon off a tree in front of town hall. The ribbon was among the dozens the town had put up while awaiting his release.
TITLE: North Korean 'Serfs' Working for Russia
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Some 10,000 North Koreans are working in Russia under the supervision of their country's security forces and without legal protection, making them essentially serfs, various state and regional officials from across the country admitted this week.
"I am afraid they are treated completely arbitrarily," a Labor and Social Development Ministry official said Thursday. "Nobody is monitoring the situation."
Last week an Economic Development and Trade Ministry official told The St. Petersburg Times that Pyongyang is continuing its Soviet-era practice of servicing its debt to Russia by sending indentured servants to work unpaid in lumber camps across Siberia. The official, who asked not to be named, said last year North Korea serviced some $50 million of its $3.8 billion debt in this way.
Later, however, the ministry refused to elaborate on the debt-for-labor scheme or how it calculates the value of the workers, who are classified as "goods."
In fact, none of the 15 or so officials from seven regions and five ministries interviewed by The St. Petersburg Times could say how much these laborers earn - if anything - or what kind of labor agreements they have while working in Russia without legal protection under the supervision of North Korean agents.
Local economic and migration officials in the Far East and Siberia said they were powerless to do anything about the conditions under which hundreds if not thousands of North Koreans were working.
"I feel sorry for them. They all look brainwashed," said Taisia Rozhanskaya, deputy head of the regional migration services in the Primorye Region. "They wear pins with the portrait of [Kim Jong Il] and have to attend political gatherings twice a week."
Rozhanskaya said the 2,000 or so North Koreans currently working in Primorye are involved mainly in construction projects, but she said the working and living conditions were similar to those of the logging camps.
The construction workers are managed by a state-owned North Korean company, which is tasked by Pyongyang with finding contracts in Russia and supplying the labor force to carry them out.
In the Far East region of Amur, Tynda Les, a private Russian joint-stock company, has 1,500 North Koreans working for it in a kind of camp many thought was a thing of the past.
Ivan Gayev, an aide to Tynda Les' general director, said by telephone that North Koreans had been working at the camp for 26 years and that his company inherited it during the course of privatization.
Gayev refused to say whether the workers were paid or treated well, but he did say that his company gets 66 percent of all the trees the North Koreans cut, with the North Korean government getting the rest. He said North Koreans produced 200,000 cubic meters of timber last year. Assuming sales at the going rate for wood, North Korean workers made Tynda Les about $8 million in 2000.
At the federal level, the Science and Technology Ministry is technically in charge of supervising the North Korean logging camps, which were established in the Far East more than 30 years ago. By the early 1990s human rights activists had gathered enough evidence on what actually went on in the camps to paint a convincing portrait of a modern-day gulag system.
Amnesty International, for example, reported in 1996 that the camps were run by North Korea's notoriously ruthless Public Security Service and were equipped with their own prisons. Amnesty also reported eyewitness accounts of workers being tortured and even executed by the PSS.
Yury Zhilkinsky, an official in the Science and Technology Ministry's forestry department, said North Korean agents still keep a watchful eye over the discipline of the workers and rule violators are sent home. "But because there are no regular trains, the hooligans are kept in a special intermediary point until a train is available," he said, declining to elaborate on the nature of the "special intermediary point."
TITLE: Reports: Pristavkin Will Be Dismissed
AUTHOR: By Ana Uzelac
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A presidential decree dismissing writer Anatoly Pristavkin from his post as head of the presidential pardons commission has been drawn up and could be signed within the next few days, news agencies reported last Thursday, citing anonymous government sources.
If the reports prove correct, the dismissal would end a months-long battle between the commission members and their critics in the Justice Ministry and the presidential administration, who believe the commission is too generous with its pardons.
Pristavkin, who has headed the commission since its creation in 1992, could be dismissed at any moment, RIA Novosti reported, quoting unnamed sources in the presidential administration. Among possible replacements the agency named prominent film director Ni kita Mikhalkov and actor Yury Solomin.
In a telephone interview Thursday, Pristavkin said that he believed the reports and that his dismissal would be a "logical move" to overcome the impasse in relations with the presidential administration, which he says has been obstructing the commission's work for the past year.
"Everything is ready for it [the dismissal]," he said. "For all practical purposes, the commission stopped working long ago."
According to Pristavkin, in the past year President Vladimir Putin has pardoned only eight people - a dramatic drop from the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, who used to sign thousands of pardons a year.
The commission members have repeatedly accused groups in the presidential administration and the Justice Ministry of trying to gain control of the pardons system and "sovietizing" it by allowing the ministry's representatives to have the last word in deciding which prisoners get pardoned.
Ministry representatives have repeatedly criticized the commission for freeing too many people, among them those accused of serious crimes.
The president himself criticized the commission's work at last month's meeting with the heads of State Duma factions. According to the leader of the People's Deputy faction, Gennady Raikov, Putin said many of the prisoners the commission recommended were unworthy of pardons, and pledged to "sort it out."
Now, Pristavkin says, the battle seems to be over and lost.
"The president has the right to choose any pardons system he wants, to name any commission he wants, including one made up of Justice Ministry bureaucrats," he said.
He added that such a system would be similar to the Soviet one, where pardons were handed out by state bureaucrats within the secrecy of their offices, rather than by representatives of a broader segment of society whose work was open to the public.
For the past eight years, the commission - which has included well-known writers, human rights activists, a priest and a former judge - has been meeting every Tuesday to review and discuss pardons applications. Around 57,000 people have been set free on its recommendation, Pristavkin said.
"If the president keeps closing one representative body of society after another, and giving all their functions to bureaucrats, we will soon be ruled by robots," he said.
TITLE: Cabinet Pays Up To Keep Country Warm in Winter
AUTHOR: By Alla Startseva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - With repeated warnings from President Vladimir Putin in mind, the cabinet on Thursday agreed to disburse about $700 million to prepare for winter and to keep residents warm during the cold months.
Hundreds of thousands of people in the Far East were left without heat and electricity last winter during the coldest months the region had seen in decades. Putin was furious. He has throughout the year reminded the cabinet to make sure that the problem does not happen again.
Deputy Prime Mi nister Viktor Khris tenko said Thursday that preparations this time around are looking better than last year.
"As a whole, preparations are proceeding better - significantly better - than last year, although, unfortunately, there remains a fairly large number of critical regions where the situation so far can't even be deemed satisfactory," said Khristenko, who chaired the meeting in the absence of Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, who is on vacation.
The so-called critical areas that remain insufficiently prepared are the Far East, Kamchatka, the Arkhangelsk Region, the Chita Region and the Khabarovsk Territory, according to the Energy Ministry.
Unified Energy Systems, the national power giant, has more fuel reserves than it has had in four years, CEO Anatoly Chubais said at the meeting, according to Prime-Tass. He said coal reserves exceed the target by 12 percent, while fuel oil reserves are only 1 percent below target.
With time quickly running out, especially for the Far East and North where the cold will set in next month, the cabinet decided it had little choice but to start spending money.
"For the time being, the government will have to rely on Soviet-style administrative methods to insure nobody freezes to death this winter," the NIKoil investment bank said in a research note Thursday.
The cabinet agreed to hand 10 billion rubles to federal energy consumers - the largest UES debtors - so that they could, in turn, have the means to pay UES for power.
The cabinet also gave the green light for a 5 billion ruble loan to UES for its stockpiles and infrastructure.
Khristenko said the 5 billion rubles would come from a budget surplus and that 500 million rubles would be earmarked in the 2002 budget to subsidize interest on the loan, Interfax reported.
In addition, the cabinet decided to set aside 4.85 billion rubles for the regions to prepare for the winter.
Khristenko stressed that the state of the country's housing infrastructure was not helping matters any.
"The level of equipment breakdowns in such areas has already gone beyond the critical mark," he said.
According to Gosstroi, the state construction committee, there were about 300,000 breaks in heating pipes last year, a 500 percent increase from 10 years ago. The number of breaks averages out to two for every kilometer of pipe.
Gosstroi estimates that more than 60 percent of the 136,000 kilometers of housing heating pipes in Russia need to be replaced.
The country is losing about 30 percent of piped heat due to bad pipes. The losses reach 65 percent in regions such as Primorye, Kamchatka, Yakutiya, Buryatiya and Altai.
Khristenko met with Putin after the cabinet meeting to present the ministers' decisions. Interfax reported that Putin gave a "rather harsh" assessment of winter preparations in the critical regions.
TITLE: Private Pilots Back On the Job at Port
AUTHOR: By Andrey Musatov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A six-day strike involving privately operating harbor pilots in the city's port officially came to an end on Saturday, with the port and cargo companies still unsure of the total losses incurred as a result and the two sides disagreeing over the nature of the settlement.
According to Andrei Markelov, the press secretary for the sea port administration, losses incurred by the port were in the neighborhood of 7 million rubles (about $240,000) per day during the peak of the strike-induced slowdown. Earlier in the week, Interfax had cited unnamed sources with the port authority who placed the losses at 60 million rubles (about $2 million) per day.
Markelov said that at one point on Tuesday more than 70 vessels, about one-third of which were foreign-flagged, including 47 oil tankers, were stuck in the sea approaches to St. Petersburg, about 13 kilometers west of Kotlin island.
Five vessels were allowed to move into the port on Wednesday, including two passenger liners that were guided into port from the Gulf of Finland after negotiations between pilots and Inflot Management, the company responsible for all foreign cruise ships coming to St. Petersburg.
The port managed to restore a full volume of traffic on Thursday, with the help of federally employed pilots, including five pilots from Novorossiisk.
The strike of about 100 of St. Petersburg's pilots and pilots in Kaliningrad and Murmansk was touched off by a July 17 federal-government decision to ban private operators from working in the seaports of St. Petersburg, Kaliningrad, Murmansk and Novorossiisk, which together handle 80 percent of all ship cargo moving in and out of the country. The government decree named ports where commercial pilots are allowed to work, leaving these four off the list.
After two hours of negotiations with Vyacheslav Ruksha, first deputy transport minister, the pilots announced an end to the strike.
"The government's decree remains unchanged despite the negotiations," Markelov said on Monday afternoon. "But Ruksha offered pilots the opportunity to join the state pilot services with monthly salaries of about 40,000 rubles [about $1,400] per month - roughly what they earn on average working privately. Those who choose not to join the state pilot service will not be allowed to work in the port after Jan. 1."
But Mikhail Nikolayev, the deputy chief of the harbor's pilot service, says that the government's offer was not nearly so lucrative.
"The offer of 40,000 rubles is not true at all," Nikolayev said Monday. "The government had to do something to try to solve the situation because the inexperienced pilots working during our strike were causing a dangerous situation."
"Those private pilots who opted to join the state service were offered 10,000-ruble [about $340] salaries."
Nikolayev also said that the figures for losses caused by the strike were not accurate.
"According to the agreements that are signed between transport companies and their clients, all losses incurred due to delays are covered by insurance," he said. "This includes delays as a result of strikes by transport-company personnel."
But Markelov said that the losses would be significant and that the greatest losses would be incurred by major transport companies like Sea Port Cargo, Oktyabr skiye Railroads, Pervaya Stividornaya and Volgotanker.
According to a report carried in the daily newspaper Vedomosti, the shipping company Volgotanker suffered the greatest financial losses due to the strike, quoting a company spokesperson as saying that Volgotanker was losing $12 million per day.
And Serik Zhusupov, deputy head of the Sea Port Cargo Company, said that companies that work with his firm have lost an estimated 30 million rubles ($1 million) over the four peak days of the strike.
According to Andrei Guriyev, the head of the press service at Oktyabrskiye Railroads, the most severe effect of the strike was the resulting disruptance in the railway's timetable.
"We haven't computed our losses yet, but they will be in the tens of millions of rubles," Guriyev said. "Throughout this time, our trains were just sitting full in the yard, since they had nowhere to offload their cargoes."
"But I can't really call it a financial catastrophe," he added. "All of our clients are big companies working with long-term orders, so the wait didn't harm them too severely."
And Markelov said that the work action would probably not hurt the port's reputation significantly in the long run.
"Captains understand that anything can happen and, furthermore, a couple of days are not enough to upset anybody," he said. "We're just lucky that no passenger ships were involved and that there were no accidents."
TITLE: Aeroflot Makes Deal To Buy New Jets
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Aeroflot tentatively agreed Monday to order up to 30 regional jets built by Sukhoi and Ilyushin in cooperation with Boeing Co., a deal that aircraft makers no doubt hope casts a good omen on their chances to clinch contracts at this week's Moscow Air Show.
The so-called Russian Regional Jet will consist of a family of planes seating 50 to 95 passengers and flying a range of up to 6,000 kilometers, officials from Sukhoi, Ilyushin and Boeing said at a joint news conference Monday.
The three companies first announced plans to build the plane at the Paris Air Show in June, saying they would jointly design, produce, certify, market, sell and service the plane, which is targeted at airlines in Russia and throughout the world.
They said Monday that they hoped to finish feasibility studies by the end of this year and have a prototype built for test flights in 2004 or 2005. Deliveries are to start in 2006.
Sukhoi, producer of military jet fighters, will spearhead the design and production of the new plane under its recently formed Sukhoi Civil Aircraft unit, while Ilyushin will deal with the domestic and international certification of the aircraft. Boeing is to help market the plane.
Aeroflot Deputy General Director Alexander Zurabov said at the same news conference that the airline was prepared to become the first customer to place a solid order for the plane.
"We are ready to buy at least 30 of these aircraft," Zurabov said.
He said each jet would cost not more than $10 million.
The plane will cost 20 percent less than similar jets already on the market, said Sukhoi General Director Mikhail Pogosyan.
He estimated demand in Russia alone at 350 planes, as airlines phase out aging An-24s and Tu-134s. He added that demand from abroad should also be near 350.
Overseas, the plane would have to compete with popular regional aircraft produced by Canada's Bombardier, U.S. Fairchild Corp. and Embraer of Brazil.
Boeing stressed Monday that the plane would be homegrown.
"It's a Russian jet proposed by our Russian partners," said Sergei Kravchenko, Boeing's vice president in charge of international projects in Russia. "We have been invited to share our experience and unique technologies in work with the airlines to help define the design requirements ... help with certification when aircraft is made."
While the plans for the new aircraft are taking shape, it remains unclear who will finance its development.
"It will cost several hundred million dollars," Pogosyan said, adding that no financing from the state was expected.
The Aton brokerage estimated that development costs would run from $300 million to $500 million.
The Troika Dialog brokerage has been appointed as the financial consultant to Sukhoi in assisting with developing the business plan. A Troika representative said funding could come from an international lending organization like the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
Also unclear Monday was which Russian facility would build the aircraft and which engines would power it. Preliminary plans call for the engines to be produced in Russia in either a joint venture or under a license.
Pogosyan said talks would be carried out with Perm Motors and Rybinsk Motors in Russia and General Electric, Pratt & Whitney and Snecma abroad.
Pogosyan said that in addition to marketing the plane at home, the partners would focus on Third World countries.
"We believe that together with Ilyushin and experience of Boeing we will make a product that will be able to compete on the international market," he said.
TITLE: Mustcom To Retain Stake in Svyavinvest
AUTHOR: By Elizabeth Wolfe
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - George Soros has held onto his blocking stake in state telecoms monopoly Svyazinvest after fellow investors voted Friday to extend the life of Mustcom for four more years, according to sources close to Mustcom.
Mustcom has a 25-plus-one stake in government-controlled Svyazinvest and, under the previous trust agreement, the notes were to convert back into shares in the telecoms holding on Aug. 11.
Soros Fund Management, which has at least 53 percent of Mustcom, had been pushing a plan to extend that deadline to keep the consortium together until 2005, with the intention of maintaining its influence with the government, which owns the rest of Svyazinvest. In the end, SFM received the necessary 90 percent of votes cast, sources said.
Passing the proposal meant winning over Interros head Vladimir Potanin. Interros-owned ICFI (Cyprus) Ltd. has about 7 percent of Mustcom and with Brice Management, another minority noteholder, initially rejected SFM's proposals at a June meeting. To put off dissolution requires 90 percent noteholder approval, but in that vote only 89.2 percent supported an extension, with ICFI and Brice Management in opposition.
An Interros source said ICFI was in part appeased Friday by a vote in favor of increasing the percentage of votes required to pass most decisions. Before, SFM could push its proposals through, since only 50 percent plus one was necessary, the source said.
"The only matter where minority shareholders could make their position meaningful was the matter of the dissolution of Mustcom."
SFM declined to confirm or comment on the vote.
But there are indications that Potanin is receiving more than just an amendment to the way votes are counted.
Potanin has reportedly been gearing to sell his stake to SFM. Vedomosti newspaper reported Friday that one agreement of the sale has already been signed or would be signed in the near future.
TITLE: Court Backs Freeze of Norilsk Share Trades
AUTHOR: By Torrey Clark
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The courts in Kemerovo have again sided with an individual shareholder over a major Russian company.
A court in the Kemerovo Region last week ordered RTS and MICEX to cease trading in shares of No rilsk Nickel and MMC Norilsk Nickel. Because of mistakes in the order, RTS did not suspend trading in either company and MICEX suspended trading in MMC shares only.
The court also forbade Norilsk Nickel from using the company name for advertising its products and from listing shares of Mining and Metals Co. Norilsk Nickel on Russian or foreign stock markets.
The company plans to take legal action, but as of Friday, it had not received any legal documents explaining the case and would not comment on its strategy.
The suit had been brought by an individual who owned three shares in Norilsk, said Yelena Kovaleva, spokes person for Norilsk. The shareholder, identified by Kommersant newspaper as Andrei Richter, was unlisted in the registers of either company.
Richter sued over "illegal actions by the administration of the Taimyr Region in registering a new version of Norilsk Mining Co.'s charter, renaming the company MMC Norilsk Nickel" and "MMC's actions in using the brand name of Norilsk Nickel," according to Kommersant.
The holding is in the midst of a restructuring, swapping shares of Norilsk Nickel for MMC Norilsk Nickel shares. MMC will replace Norilsk Nickel as the umbrella company in the holding.
Neither company has yet been affected by the order to stop trading. "The liquidity of their shares dropped sharply about a week ago," said Mikhail Seleznyov, metals analyst at United Financial Group.
The company still plans to finish the Norilsk share swap by the end of August. "This situation will not affect the pace of restructuring," said Alexei Zhdanov, deputy general director of MMC Norilsk Nickel, in a statement Friday.
MMC Norilsk shares will be actively traded only after the restructuring, planned for the fall, and after the Federal Securities Commission registers the additional share issue under which the swap is being carried out, Kovaleva said.
"If the issue with listing shares is not resolved by the beginning of October, it could be a major problem," said Kakha Kiknavelidze, metals analyst at Troika Dialog.
Analysts were stumped for an explanation of the plaintiff's motives. "I don't see how anyone could gain from this," Seleznyov said.
They agreed, however, that a rival company was most likely behind the lawsuit.
Norilsk condemned the suit in a statement: "Once again, it shows the strong need in Russia for judicial reform that would preclude even the possibility of using the law for immoral goals."
Kemerovo courts have been active on behalf of small shareholders over the past year. Another local court arrested part of a 28 percent blocking share held by jailed Krasnoyarsk entrepreneur Anatoly Bykov in the Krasnoyarsk Aluminum plant, or KrAZ, at the end of July. Minority shareholders of Si dan ko, Konversbank and Mosenergo have also won cases this year.
TITLE: New Customs Warehouse To Give Car Importers a Break
AUTHOR: By Alla Startseva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - In an initiative expected to reduce car importers' headaches and boost state coffers at the same time, the State Customs Committee on Monday opened the country's first customs warehouse for automobiles.
The 3,500-square-meter warehouse, located on the 34th kilometer of the MKAD in southern Moscow, has space for 1,700 cars. It is to function as a non-commercial company owned by the State Customs Committee - so payments received for storage and services will go to the federal budget, committee spokesperson Irina Skibinskaya said.
According to Skibinskaya, the dedicated automobile customs warehouse will speed up the clearance process.
"The clearance now will take no more than three hours if a dealer or importer presents the whole package of documents needed," she said.
Car dealers and importers will be able to store vehicles in the warehouse for up to three years prior to customs clearance. Until now, dealers have stored vehicles in warehouses near Russia's borders in Finland or the Baltic states, only bringing the vehicles into the country for customs clearance upon purchase. Cars that had not cleared customs could not be kept at any such warehouse within Russia, and clearance had to be completed within 10 days of the vehicle's arrival at customs.
Skibinskaya said that one of the reasons for opening the warehouse was so that payments for storage would go to Russia instead of its neighbors.
She refused to reveal the storage price, but said it is "rather competitive" compared to other bonded warehouses. The closest ones are in Finland and the Baltic states, because bonded warehouses for imported cars were not legal in Russia before now. The Customs Committee had to change customs legislation in order to open this bonded warehouse, Skibinskaya said.
But while the warehouse's opening might seem like good news for car importers, those contacted for this article expressed mixed opinions.
Dmitry Kolesnichenko, a senior manager at the Nezavisimost car dealership, said that those who work with the same foreign warehouse can complete a customs clearance in six hours without any problems - and never face problems about having enough free space for cars.
"Car importers will think twice about using a state-bonded warehouse," said Kolesnichenko. "Giving something to the state for storage can end up like savings in Russian banks. You may never see your cars again."
Sergei Alexeichuk, board member for the automobile dealer Avtomir, said the warehouse was a good idea in general, "but at the moment it seems doubtful." He added that 1,700 car spaces is far from enough. For example, in three months Russia imports over 1,000 Skoda cars and even more Volkswagens, he said.
Russia should have many bonded warehouses, so that prices would be competitive, which would allow importers to reduce prices in turn, said Alexeichuk.
******************
The government has proposed that import duties on used foreign cars more than seven years old should be equal to those for new imported cars.
Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov said last week that the government commission on customs and tariff policy has been asked to draft an appropriate resolution so that it could become effective on Jan. 1, 2002.
This measure is intended to protect the Russian automobile market and stop from it turning into "a dump site for very old cars," Prime-Tass quoted Klebanov as saying last week.
TITLE: Inkombank Chief Mounts Defense Fight
AUTHOR: By Torrey Clark
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCCOW - An Inkombank external manager accused of approving 14 suspect transactions involving more than $100 million defended his record Monday, saying he has submitted over 300 kilograms of documents on hundreds of transactions to law enforcement authorities.
"We have submitted 47 letters to the Audit Chamber and law enforcement agencies ... [referring to] hundreds of suspicious transactions," he said. The bank has recovered about 9 billion rubles ($300 million) from suspect deals for disbursal to creditors, he added.
The Inkombank creditors' committee filed a petition last week with the Moscow Arbitration Court to remove external manager Vladimir Alexeyev. The committee also asked the court to bar him from carrying out his duties as manager for receivables and operations until it came to a decision.
The Moscow Arbitration Court is to review the petition on Sept. 4, Alexeyev said.
Maxim Finsky, head of the creditors' committee, said they voted to request that the court oust Alexeyev because he had not given the committee the documents they requested concerning certain transactions. The Central Bank, also represented on the committee, abstained from the vote, Vedomosti reported.
Alexeyev said he would step down if ordered to do so but criticized the committee's shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later method. "Suspicions are no reason to accuse someone of embezzlement. ... Where's the fire? Give me a chance to meet and explain. ... Give me enough time to collect and hand over the documents in accordance with procedure," he said. The creditors' committee is to meet Tuesday to review his work, he said.
The suspect transactions include several he signed on the committee's authority, he said. Under one such deal, Mezhregionalny Investitsionny Bank agreed to transfer a 16.4 percent stake in the Baltiisky factory that MIB had purchased using Inkombank funds. MIB owed Inkombank $7 million, but valued the stake at only $1.5 million, he said.
Finsky, who is also deputy head of MFK Bank, said last week that Inkombank's 26 percent stake, including the shares transferred from MIB, in Baltiisky Verfy, a St. Petersburg shipyard, would be sold as a blocking share to get a higher price of up to $30 million.
TITLE: Anti-Smoking Spending Low
AUTHOR: By Natalie Gott
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SAN ANTONIO, Texas - Billions of dollars from the United States' landmark tobacco settlement are being put to use across the country, but only about 5 percent is going to smoking prevention, a report released Saturday shows.
The 1998 settlement signed by the giants of the tobacco industry was meant to compensate the states for years of smoking-related health expenses. Forty-six states signed it, and four other states settled separately for an additional $40 billion.
The state attorneys general who negotiated the settlement expected it to be used to fight the spread of smoking and prevent tobacco addiction, but the documents left it to the states to decide how their shares would be spent.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that at least 20 percent of the $206 billion settlement will have to go into prevention programs for the states to effectively cut future tobacco-related health expenses.
In a new report, the National Conference of State Legislatures analyzed the states' plans for their shares of the tobacco money during the fiscal years 2000 through 2002.
Of the $21 billion being doled out during that period, it found:
36.1 percent had been set aside for health care.
26.0 percent went to bolster endowments or state budget reserves.
9.5 percent was to be spent on schools or youth programs.
5.0 percent was to go into tobacco prevention.
4.5 percent was for research.
3.2 percent was to be used to assist tobacco growers and communities affected by the reduced quotas from tobacco companies, in most cases by offering education and training in other fields.
More than half of the money is being used in ways unrelated to smoking, the study found. Several states are tapping their tobacco settlement payments to make up shortfalls in their state budgets and bolster programs that have nothing to do with tobacco.
Tennessee will use its $557 million to meet 2002 budget shortfalls. North Dakota is using 45 percent of its tobacco funds to pay debt service on financing for a water-allocation and flood project.
"It's moral treason to me," Mississippi Attorney General Michael Moore said in Saturday's editions of The New York Times. "We got all this money, then legislatures and governors who were not even in this fight act like the money fell out of heaven and spend it on the political whim of the day."
Lee Dixon, director of the NCSL health-policy tracking service, said several states held public hearings to solicit opinions on how the funds should be used. He said about 45 percent of the money is being used for some type of health care, including long-term care, health care for the poor, biomedical research or tobacco prevention.
Washington state chose to set aside all but $32 million of its $408 million for a state-funded program for workers who don't qualify for Medicaid and can't afford health insurance.
Michigan over the past two years has put $90 million into a trust fund for biomedical research and research on illnesses affecting the elderly, and Colorado passed legislation directing 10 percent of its tobacco funds to a pharmaceutical assistance program for the elderly and the disabled.
Peter Fisher, assistant director of advocacy for Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, said states should be spending more money stopping tobacco-related illnesses before they happen. Rather than 5 percent, 20 to 25 percent of the settlement should be used to keep people off tobacco, he said.
"There is enough money for each state to do a comprehensive tobacco program and address other needs they feel need addressing," Fisher said.
Dixon said some states are concerned that the infrastructure is not in place in some communities for more money to be allocated for prevention. For instance, he said in Indiana lawmakers cut back on the amount earmarked for prevention in 2002 because not all the money was used the previous year.
According to the CDC, smoking causes more than 400,000 deaths each year and results in more than $50 billion in direct medical costs annually. The center estimates that nearly 3,000 children under 18 become regular smokers every day.
TITLE: Bayer Shares Lose 20%
After Baycol Is Recalled
AUTHOR: By Stephen Graham
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BERLIN - Bayer AG acknowledged Monday that two rival pharmaceutical companies have expressed interest in forming some kind of partnership since the German chemical and drug giant recalled its Baycol anti-cholesterol drug, which has been linked to 52 deaths.
Bayer also said the chances of the drug returning to the market are "slim."
"If the use of this medicine has resulted in damage to health, that is something we deeply regret," Bayer chief executive Manfred Schneider said at a news conference. "We do everything we can to eliminate such risks," stressing that there is still no proof that the drug caused the deaths.
The German Health Ministry, meanwhile, said it ordered a report from regulators into whether the drug should have been recalled earlier. The findings are to be released Thursday.
Bayer's stock dropped 20 percent in three days after pulling Baycol last Wednesday because of possible links with patient deaths, including 31 in the United States. Schneider pledged to overhaul his pharmaceutical's strategy, sparking speculation it will seek a joint venture or sell the unit.
"We will now examine what strategy we adopt, what new targets we set ourselves, and how we achieve them-on our own or in partnerships," he said.
He didn't identify the two companies that approached Bayer, or indicate what they proposed. But the news helped Bayer's stock recover Monday. They were up 0.4 percent at 36.40 euros ($32.03) in afternoon trading in Frankfurt.
Baycol, known as Lipobay outside the United States, is one of a popular family of drugs called statins that have been linked to rare reports of a side effect called rhabdomyolysis, a life-threatening condition in which muscle cells are destroyed and released into the bloodstream.
Analysts say U.S. rivals such as Merck and Bristol-Myers Squibb, or European firms such as GlaxoSmithKline or Sanofi-Synthelabo, may be interested in Bayer's drug unit. Bayer said it would drop a previous condition that it retain management control in any joint venture.
Bayer plans to cut 5,000 jobs across the company and close 15 polymers plants by 2005, under a plan to save $1.3 billion to offset mounting problems at the drug unit and the impact of the slowing world economy. The job cuts are unrelated to the withdrawal of Baycol.
Last Thursday, it announced a 45-percent drop in second-quarter operating profit and warned full-year operating profit before one-time items would fall "significantly" below its already lowered target of 3 billion euros ($2.7 billion).
Schneider ruled out selling either Bayer's polymers or crop-science businesses, despite urging from some analysts that the company should concentrate management attentions and investments on fewer areas.
"Bayer is not a company in need of rescue," he said. "A major reason for this is that we are so broadly diversified."
TITLE: Market Continuing Post-Crisis Recovery
AUTHOR: By Andrey Musatov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Despite adverse legislation and regulation, as well as the lingering effects of the 1998 financial crisis, the local advertising industry has been following a national trend of impressive growth.
According to the St. Petersburg branch of the Gallup AdFact research agency, advertising outlays by firms have jumped by 20 to 30 percent since this time last year. Alexander Dedyuk, marketing director for Gortis, a market-research firm, says that 15 to 20 percent growth is probably more accurate and that local advertising companies will have total revenues in 2001 of from $115 million to $120 million.
"The year 1999 was largely a case of the industry stabilizing itself," Dedyuk said. "But 2000 brought real growth, and the current trend suggests that advertising revenues will reach their pre-crisis level by the end of this year."
The national figures are even more impressive. At the end of July, Gallup AdFact, the advertising monitoring arm of Gallup Media, released the results of a survey of the national advertising market, reporting that advertising outlays in the first half of 2001 had grown by 76 percent over the same period in 2000, growing to $3.2 billion compared to a figure of $1.8 billion for the year before.
The stronger national numbers are misleading, and the weaker local growth hides the fact that regional advertising has grown stronger since the crash. According to industry analysts, the regional market simply doesn't have as far to come.
"The 1998 economic crisis didn't hit St. Petersburg advertising agencies, just as it didn't [hit] those in other regions, nearly as hard as it hit firms operating nationally," Igor Gulin, head of Gallup Media's St. Petersburg office said. "The regional markets, including the market here, managed to hold on to more of their clients."
"National advertisers like Coca-Cola or Nestle were forced to cut their huge advertising budgets. Given the drop in purchasing power that the crisis caused, that kind of advertising was just a waste of money."
National campaigns often focus on television advertising, and Gallup AdFact's numbers show that television has led the way in the recovery on the national level. Television advertising revenues have grown by 85 percent over the first half of this year, with print-media revenues up by 44 percent, street advertising by 28 percent, and radio ad revenues up by 9 percent.
Gulin says that the lower prices for national television ads has altered the character of the national market, with ads becoming more affordable for regional firms and national channels changing the nature of their operations to take advantage of the related increase in regional demand.
Since 1998, national media outlets have tended to develop a regional character. Major television networks ORT, RTR and NTV have added more local segments, while papers like Kommersant, Izvestia and Sport-Express carry regional inserts.
"We now see a lot of what were regional brands like Baltika, Stepan Razin, Baltimor, Nevskaya Kosmetika and others jumping onto the national level," Gulin said.
Television tends to be the most structured segment of the advertising market as a result of the relatively small number of channels and of companies who sell spots on those channels.
Six television stations broadcasting in St. Petersburg account for 90 percent of all advertising revenues, with RTR, ORT and NTV the clear leaders in ratings. But, aside from St. Petersburg television, which handles its own advertising sales, the sale of television spots in the city is largely monopolized by three large Moscow-based advertising firms, which also maintain local offices: Trend-SPb, Media International and Smart Media.
Trend, through its local affiliate Trend-SPb, is the main retailer of advertising on ORT, although it also sells for other major stations.
"Trend was created by ORT to sell advertising for the channel at the regional level," Gulin said. "But each of the agencies on the local market can sell for any of the channels. They each just tend to work with one or two channels in particular."
Media International, the local representative of Moscow-based Video International, handles local sales for RTR and STS. The firm also holds the exclusive rights to sell advertising for the Radio Russia and Petrograd Russky Chanson radio stations, daily newspaper Nevs koye Vremya and weekly publications, including Chas Pik and a number of TV guides that have large circulations.
Smart Media, which Gazprom Media took over along with other Media-Most holdings, handles sales for two of those holdings; NTV and TNT.
"Basically, there is no difference whether the channel sells its advertising spots through a retailer or not," Nikolai Grishkov, the director of Smart Media's St. Petersburg office, said. "Working through a media seller just allows advertisers to place their commercials on multiple channels while only needing to contact one source."
Demand for television advertising has been on the rise, and stations have approached the point where all of the open slots are purchased. But while it would be reasonable to expect the competition for time on television channels to bring a rise in prices, this seems to be happening slowly.
Nikolai Ryzhov, deputy director of Nord Line, which owns the radio station Petrogradsky Russky Chanson, says that prices for radio spots have risen more quickly.
"This year prices have risen by about 50 percent," he says. "With regard to our fees, 30 seconds go for about $45, while a year ago it cost about $20."
Despite the fact that a small number of firms take care of most of the sales for television and are moving toward being responsible for a larger proportion of radio spots, there are still more than 400 firms listed in the local yellow pages that are involved in advertising. The majority of these work in print and outdoor advertising, which, according to Gallup AdFact numbers, account for 25 and 35 percent of the market, respectively. A large number are also involved in graphic design and other services the advertising firms themselves often purchase.
Part of the reason here is that in the print-media and outdoor-advertising segments it is easier for competitors to enter the market, so it is tough for a small number of firms to monopolize the sector. But the rise in better-organized, cross-media campaigns may winnow out some of these players.
"Advertising managers in companies have become much more professional over the last few months," Nord Line's Ryzhov said. "I think that companies have really begun to map out strategies for their advertising and that more and more are running organized campaigns."
TITLE: Agencies Spurn TV for an Active Tack
AUTHOR: By James Schofield
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Russian advertising has come a long way since the days when snappy slogans like "Drink Tomato Juice: It's Good" were commonplace.
Before 1998, Western multinationals, which dominate advertising spending in Russia, had fought a saturation advertising war almost exclusively focused on establishing brand loyalty through television and posters.
Three years later, however, the industry is back on its feet, thanks to new techniques like sponsored concerts and sampling - collectively known as below-the-line advertising, or BTL.
Following the crash, cash-strapped advertisers quickly turned to below-the-line advertising's relatively cheap and highly targeted promotions to recapture the few remaining consumers who still had money to spend. "Post-crisis was the golden age of BTL in Russia," said Sergei Koptev, president and CEO of D'Arcy advertising agency.
To recapture consumers, agencies and clients decided to invest in the intimate and highly consumer-specific world of events and promotions. "Many clients now understand that there is a need to be closer to the consumer. Image building is not everything," Stephan Belaiche of Moscow-based TBWA/Russia, said.
Though many promotions in Russia are adapted from success stories in the West, such as prize draws and in-store sampling, others are initiating campaigns in new directions.
Cigarette companies have aggressively pushed their products this way, stationing groups of young women around metro stations and in busier areas of the city dressed in outfits matching the product label's colors and giving free cigarettes to passing smokers.
A more unusual example comes from Moscow, where Swiss-based Nestle recently took its promotional campaign to the State Registry Office, or ZAGS - also known as the Wedding Palace. As parents and friends gathered around a young couple just married, there among the tears, the confetti and the congratulations was a willowy girl handing around trays of Nestle milk chocolates.
"The promotion has been very well-received," said Steve Watson, confectionery marketing manager at Nestle Food. Far from being angry at the commercialization, the family welcomed the products as symbols of goodwill.
Though a headache for many brand managers, the lack of brand loyalty is a godsend for promotion and PR organizers who specialize in direct interaction with consumers. Without the inherited loyalty to products that is so common in the West, the impact of a well-coordinated campaign can be dramatic.
A number of obstacles stand in the way of indirect advertising in Russia. First of all, advertisements on television, still preferred by some large ad agencies and their clients, are inexpensive by Western standards. "It is just too easy for them to get a budget approved by presenting cost-per-1,000 figures for nationwide TV exposure," said Belaiche.
Another drawback is that for many players, below-the-line advertising is just not profitable enough. As agencies fight to land the biggest advertising accounts, multinationals are able to cut back commissions. As profit margins fall, the incentive to develop innovative, time-consuming campaigns diminishes.
Still, the prospects for indirect advertising are strong. The market was estimated at $1.4 billion in 2000, according to Gallup AdFact, and though most companies' figures are guarded secrets, many multinationals claim that below-the-line advertising now accounts for upward of 40 percent of their marketing budget. The traditional above-the-line advertising sector is saturated with hundreds of agencies, but the below-the-line niche has room to grow some 500 percent, according to one executive.
TITLE: City's Waterways Perfect Fit To Build Profile
AUTHOR: By Dina Vishnya
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: With the start of each navigation season on the Neva River, the city's tourist boats and piers are transformed into a lucrative platform for advertising. The river is the center of city life, and mobile advertising platforms have the advantage of coming within sight of a large percentage of city residents and visitors. This seasonal market is currently worth about $1 million a year and is considered several times as effective as other outdoor advertising.
"Our marketing campaign uses only nine boats and two piers, but they create the impression that there are a lot of advertisements out there," said German Klimovsky, vice president of the marketing firm RVVK. "And this is simply because the boats are constantly moving."
Klimovsky added that this costs only a fraction of what similar campaigns using other advertising platforms cost.
"In Moscow, in order to have a visible campaign, you need not fewer than 220 billboards," Klimovsky said. "In Petersburg, the cost per impression is about one-fifth as much as in Moscow."
RVVK has been using St. Petersburg's waterways now for the last three years. The company has virtually come to monopolize this advertising vehicle.
Incidentally, water-based advertising is practically the only way for companies advertising alchohol to market their products without violating the law on advertising.
"Under the law on advertising, it is not necessary to get municipal approval for advertisements carried on board boats. It is considered a business arrangement between the owner of the boat and the advertising agency," said Andrei Shmakov, the directer of the city administration's advertising center.
This segment of the market is limited to just 20 tourist boats and nine piers, so not all advertisers are able to acquire the space that they are seeking.
Water-based advertising is the heart of the "summer project" of the 062 agency, which sells advertising on boats and piers throughout the navigation period between May and September.
Vadim Bogdanov, deputy general director of 062, declined to quote prices for placing such advertisements, saying that fees are negotiated individually with each client. Analysts, however, estimated that on-pier advertising costs from $3,000 to $5,000 per month, and on-boat advertising costs about the same.
Bogdanov also noted that the advantage of water-based advertising is its enormous reach. "The White Nights, the bridges. There isn't a tourist in this city this summer who has not stood on the embankment," he said.
Moreover, there are relatively few remaining advertising sites in the historic center of the city. There are simply no large billboards in that part of town. On a pier, however, an advertisement could be as large as 90 square meters.
According to 062's research, 3 million people are exposed to water-based advertising during the three peak summer months.
Nonetheless, not all advertisers are rushing to the water. "We have enough street advertising," said Dmitry Sitnikov, marketing director for Bravo, which is conducting a massive street campaign this summer. "We decided that additional advertising on the waterways would not bring any extra results."
TITLE: Research Firms Arm Agencies With Facts
AUTHOR: By Andrey Musatov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: As the level of competition in the local advertising market rises, firms are increasingly searching for advantages in the marketplace and are turning to market-research to help.
The result has been a growth in the number of market-research firms here and in the amount that advertising firms set aside in their budgets for this work.
"Up to the end of 2000, we didn't even have an office in St. Petersburg," Igor Gulin, the head of St. Petersburg office of Gallup Media said. "Gallup only operated a technical branch here that only collected information and then transferred it to Moscow."
And Gallup Media is not the only major Mos cow firm to set up operations here. Comcon followed Gal lup Media north and set up its own local firm, Comcon SPb, to capitalize on local growth, and both are now competing against home-grown firms like Gortis and Ecro Research.
Yevgeniya Gromova, general director of Comcon SPb, says that this list is hardly exhaustive and that there is a large number of firms here going after a rapidly growing market.
"There are 54 companies that I know are involved in market research here," Gromova said. "And they are all working in a market that created more than $2 million in revenues in 2000."
Research companies are not only faced with greater demand for their services, but also with demands for a wider and more varied supply of information.
"Among the most popular types of market research are concept testing, market segmentation/product positioning, pricing, brand evaluation and loyalty, pre-and post-campaign ad effectiveness evaluation," Gromova says. "They are especially important when a firm wants to launch a new service or product on the market."
Gromova says that larger firms also order studies of the lifestyles of particular demographic or class segments of the popultation in order determine the preferences of their target consumers.
One industry executive, Tatyana Pankova, deputy director of the Illan advertising agency, says that, while some firms still attempt to carry out this research on their own, most lack the resources or knowledge to do it well.
"Through working with and listening to our cliients, I realize that the most important question for firms is the effective development of a new brand," Pankova said. "But my knowledge in this field is based largely on my own experience, and when we opened the business we relied almost entirely on our experience."
"At first we were involved almost exclusively in the placement of ads in the media for our clients, but now everyone is doing this," she added. "Today we are working on a new niche and developing complete advertising campaigns for companies, and to do this we are willing to pay for information."
Pankova says that Illan, which receives its information from Comcon, pays anywhere from $500 to $5,000 per project, depending on the size and nature of the research.
Alexander Dedyuk, marketing director at Gortis, quoted lower prices at his firm, running from $75 to $500.
"The prices for research fell drastically in 1998, and they haven't really rebounded much," Dedyuk said. "But we have been switching to more technically advanced research methods, which cut the volume of paperwork involved and, subsequently, lower our costs. In this way we've been able to boost revenues."
While revenues and sophistication are on the rise, Gromova says there is still a way to go before firms are completely familiar with the work of research firms.
"An excellent example of the misunderstandings of market research companies'activity that can arise is a strange request we recived not so long ago: 'We are a very big cvompany with millions of dollars in revenues. We just sent two ships to the United States and now we'd like to know, preferably today, what kind of fish we should buy there."
"Companies sometimes just don't realize what exactly market-research firms are here to do. [They] sometimes get confused by a certain question and just figure that we might have the answers."
TITLE: What's in a Name Is Hit-and-Miss Game
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Tyomkin and Dina Vishnya
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: One of the biggest questions faced by marketing departments is what to call a product in the first place. In naming their products, many Western firms operating in the Russian market have chosen to "go native," or at least to try to give consumers that impression.
At the beginning of the 1990s, Western brands gained considerable popularity, based largely on the perception of higher quality. But the second half of the decade brought something of a shift in tastes, when consumers turned again to domestically produced brands as perceptions of their quality improved.
Foreign brands continue to sell in Russia, but a large number of foreign firms have supplemented the production of their international brands with products packaged in such a way as to give them a local image. Naming new products for foreign firms has become something of an art, as reaching targeted segments of the market depends heavily on the image they are able to present, and unsuccessful choices can sink a marketing campaign.
One of the most competitive sectors in Russia has been the tobacco market.
In 1995 Rothmans, now owned by British-American Tobacco, already held a good portion of the market with its international brands. But the company tried to up its share of the market through a new brand: "Hermitage." The company ended up in court, as the management of the State Hermitage Museum wanted royalties for the use of the name. The second difficulty the brand faced was that, despite the Russian name, it didn't come with a Russian price. The cost of a package of Hermitage was about the same as the company's foreign-named brands, and the new brand lasted just more than a year on the market.
But there are success stories as well.
According to Irina Galiyeva, press secretary for Petro Tobacco, which is owned by Japan Tobacco International, the firm launched its own local brand, Pyotr I, in 1995. Petro, which was owned by RJ Reynolds, was looking for a way to place a brand with a domestic image on the market, and the choice of name and marketing turned out to be successful. According to the company's statistics, the brand holds 5 percent of the Russian cigarette market, including an impressive 30 percent share in its price segment.
Creating a new brand is not the only way to solve the problem.
British-American Tobacco, which sells such international brands as Lucky Strike, Kent and Vogue, was looking for a way to reach another segment of the market, and found the answer in Moscow.
"We bought the Moscow Java factory, which already had an established and well-known brand on the market," said Vladimir Aksyonov, vice president, British-American Tobacco Russia. "We continued production of the existing brand, and then launched a new brand using the same name, but targeted at the middle sector of consumers."
The Java brand was very popular in Soviet times in Moscow, sharing the low-price market with cigarettes imported from Bulgaria.
A pack of Java's standard brand sells for about 5 rubles, while the new mid-market brand, Java Zolotaya, sells for about 12 rubles.
In attempting to develop a presence on the market with a Russian flavor, Britain's Imperial Tobacco has opted to follow the strategy of launching a new brand, but a number of market experts say that the company's choice of name - "Muzhik" - points up the inherent dangers in such a strategy.
While muzhik historically was the word for a male peasant, in contemporary usage it has the meaning of a "man's man" or "tough guy," and implies a simplicity and roughness of character.
"The philosophy of the muzhik is simple: It has to do with character, not belonging to some segment of society. He's not a prince and not a worker," said Maria Kazakova, creative director at ASM advertising agency, which created the brand. "He's used to standing up to the hits, believes in himself and is accustomed to making his own choices. The definition is based on personality and not on being part of any class."
According to Stewart Mallinson, general director for Imperial Tobacco Russia, the company is pinning its hopes for increasing its place in the market on the brand, and has already started producing the cigarettes at the Red Tabak factory in Vladikavkaz. The company is expecting sales of 2.5 million packs of the cigarettes per year.
But marketing specialists hear a foreign ring to the project all the same, and question its chances of success, saying the market is probably not ready for products like "Muzhik Light" or "Muzhik Menthol," and they are unsure at whom the brand is aimed.
"Most rural workers don't have that kind of money. Perhaps bandits have that kind of money," said a manager at another major tobacco firm, who asked not to be named. "On the other hand, perhaps the unusual name will draw attention to the brand."
"The brand suggests identification of consumers with the idea of a "real man," says Natalya Malinovskaya, the general director of Prime-Enterprise, a local advertising agency that specializes in brand consultation. "The question is: Are there people here who want to be seen in public with a pack of cigarettes with Muzhik written on it?
"Personally, I don't see there being a great number of people interested in this. How is someone going to feel, going to a kiosk and saying 'Give me two Muzhiks.' And how do you like the sound of 'Muzhik Light?'"
Malinovskaya says that, though a Russian name was chosen for the product, the specific word chosen suggests a Western influence all the same.
"It's one of those words that still carries a strong foreign accent: Vodka, balalaika, matryoshka, muzhik," she said.
One manager at a Russian tobacco company, who asked not to be named, said that the choice of name for the product suggests that Imperial Tobacco simply hasn't studied the Russian market carefully enough.
Imperial appears to be prepared to go all-out in launching the new brand. "The budget for launching the project is in seven figures," Mallinson says.
There are already three variations of posters advertising the new brand hanging in the city with the words "Real Muzhik," "Robust Muzhik" and "Exceptional Muzhik."
TITLE: Executive Stresses Broader Approach in Market
TEXT: While the advertising market in St. Petersburg may not be awash in the kind of money available in Moscow, according to Ilya Shamin, the general director of the Business Territory advertising firm, dealing with less money is not necessarily a bad thing. Shamin, who founded the company in 1999 says that it has done well over its relatively short life, having handled about 30 advertising and public-relations campaigns for a number of different clients in that time. While he says that customers in the local market are not yet accustomed to and do not demand the kind of slick advertising campaigns that are the standard in Europe and elsewhere, he told Anna Shcherbakova that the situation is improving.
Q: Western advertising agencies tend to charge a set price for placing ads in the media, and then keep 10 to 15 percent of that amount as profit. It seems that the situation here is different, as companies already know how much ads cost in a paper and often come to advertising agencies looking for lower rates.
A: A lot of this depends on whether the company is looking to develop a well-rounded media campaign. The number of instances when companies come looking for a well-developed strategy or for a campaign backed by market analyses is still relatively small, except for those firms that run operations that are on a national or international scale. Media plans at present are generally made up as the companies go. But I think that attitudes are already changing.
Not so long ago, companies looked at advertising as an unpleasant expense. Now, many of them have better-developed marketing plans with advertising expenditures figured in. They now hire specialists to manage their advertising programs, not just relatives of the general director as was the case in the past. They're trying not only to get their ads placed, but to assess the impact that their ads have as well. Although it's still rather uncommon, there are many more medium-sized Russian companies that are using focus groups to test their advertising strategies.
There are, however, also new dangers associated with this. Results from focus groups are not always honest. The focus-group industry has really taken off in Moscow, and the situation has led to a lot of the participants in these groups being prepared to do and to give whatever feedback an ad agency asks them to provide. I think that this is happening in Moscow because with the huge advertising budgets of a lot of international companies, the ad agencies have something to fight for. If what's at stake for the agency is the sale of a $300,000 television spot, then there is a lot that the agency will do to try to win the client. So the ad company is often willing to pay someone the $1,000 it might take to make sure that the results of a focus-group study come out in its favor.
Q: What are the most important factors for the further development of the advertising market, and what are the chances that they will be realized?
A: The State Duma is presently discussing a number of changes to Russia's advertising laws. If advertising costs were to be considered as business expenses, and not treated as profits as they currently are, I think that you would see an explosion of new newspapers and a number of other advertising possibilities. Such changes will increase above-board spending on advertising. Being realistic, I don't think these proposals will be approved. If they are, I think that it will have the result of moving many transactions out into the open economy.
Q: What about the creative side of the equation?
A: Here everything essentially comes down to a question of money.
No designer will create a logo or other kind of graphic for a firm for less than $50. I've heard of cases where designers have charged as much as $2,000, but the process usually involves a lot of haggling. In one case, there was a Moscow company that initially offered to design a label for a company for $10,000, but ended up being bargained down to $500, so the prices can vary and drop dramatically. For instance, you can get a leaflet designed for as little as $30 or as much as $500.
The goal of advertising companies is to persuade the client that they can provide all of the necessary creative and technical services. Ad agents will talk fast and a lot, and show prospective clients portfolios that may not even belong to them. The bottom line is that everyone is looking for clients. If the ad company is busy it might turn down some clients, but when it has nothing to do at the moment then it is ready to work for a lot less.
Q: What's the most difficult part of working in the industry?
A: Advertising people are always saying that their clients don't really know what they want. I always tell my employees 'guys, we are paid to explain to our clients exactly what they want.'
I don't think an advertising agency can survive without an aggressive sales department. Salespeople are the ones going around showing your portfolios and promoting your services.
Q: What about the choice of media for advertising? It seems that television is the first choice for most clients.
A: No. Clients have different goals and they can be attained by different methods. In bringing a new product onto the market, effective television ads are necessary. But to maintain the attention of consumers on an already established brand, or to increase the established brand's share in the market, sometimes well-placed outdoor ads are effective. Studies have shown that to achieve sufficient visibility, an outdoor campaign should include at least 20 billboards in St. Petersburg (while the corresponding number in Moscow is about 50). Spending the kind of money required for television ads isn't always necessary.
The local television market is also limited by the relative weakness of St. Petersburg's television channels. Both the size of their audiences as well as the quality of programming are limited. As a result, most television ads produced locally are not really filmed, but just sets of slides accompanied by a voice-over. If they are filmed, they are usually very basic presentations done with the available lighting in a normal interior.
Q: Why is this? Is it because of a lack of creativity or does it depend more on a lack of finances?
A: Most of all, it's a question of finances. The first question any client who wants a television commercial will ask is 'What channels will it be aired on?' You can't show lower-quality productions like these on national channels but you can get away with it locally.
If the company has enough money to pay for a bigger production, then it is usually promoting its products on a national scale and doesn't have any reson to limit itself to local channels. The companies that are advertising on local channels are usually doing this because they see this as a way to optimize their advertising expenses while expanding in the St. Petersburg market. They're not spending their money on the national advertising market and get by with simpler productions targeted at local channels.
TITLE: Three Days in August That I Will Not Forget
AUTHOR: By Yevgenia Albats
TEXT: AUG. 19, 1991. So it's happened, after all. My husband woke me this morning with the words, "Get up, Cassandra, there's a coup." The State Committee for the Emergency Situation, GKChP, announced that Gorbachev has taken ill and therefore cannot perform his presidential duties. They really are idiots - they couldn't even come up with something more original than the 1964 formula they used when they kicked Khrushchev out.
It's easy enough to see what the Trinity - representing the KGB, the Interior Ministry, and the army - are doing on the state committee. Yanayev is there to give everything an appearance of legality: The president is unexpectedly and inexplicably incapacitated; naturally, the vice president takes over. It's happened on the eve of the very day the union treaty was supposed to be signed - what could be more natural? Pavlov's presence is no mystery, either; hadn't he requested emergency powers back in June? Baklanov and Tizyakov represent the defense people, the MIC. As for Starodubtsev, well, the old Soviet-style mentality demands that there be a "representative of the people" on the committee, and how fine to have a country boy and firm defender of the collective-farm system. But where's Lukyanov? Is he sticking with Gorbachev? Or is he doing the usual, running things behind the scenes?
The putschists explain that the country's chaotic conditions demanded a restitution of order. A state of emergency is to be in effect for six months; activities of political parties and movements have been suspended, and censorship of the press is imminent. "Taking advantage of the freedoms granted, trampling upon the fresh shoots of democracy, extremist forces have arisen that intend to liquidate the Soviet Union." That's their explanation.
There's quite a crowd here at the newspaper: members of the staff, writers, some strangers, too. Our editor-in-chief is in the thick of things: Yegor Yakovlev is over at the parliament building, the "White House." It's clear the paper won't be coming out today; men with machine guns are stationed at the printing presses. CNN shows columns of tanks moving along Kutuzovsky Prospect and the Garden Ring. The word from the soldiers is that they were roused at 5 a.m. and told they were being sent to pacify draft evaders in Moscow.
News from the White House: Yeltsin has issued a decree declaring the GKChP an unconstitutional body and calling on people not to obey it. He managed to get through to Gorbachev's summer residence at Foros, but was told that Gorbachev was resting and couldn't come to the phone. He tried getting Yanayev, and was told that he couldn't come to the phone, either, "He's resting after a difficult night and asked not to be disturbed." All of Yeltsin's government telephone lines have been cut off.
2 p.m. Yakovlev's back. Yeltsin's holding steadfast. The situation is grave. Since we can't publish, we'll put out photocopied leaflets. Each one of us will have to decide whether or not to remain at the editorial offices. There is no guarantee we won't see armed guards here as well, no guarantee of ... anything. Grim smiles; but nobody leaves.
2:30 p.m. Well, it's about time. The gekachepisty are finally getting on the ball; a TASS wire reports that independent democratic newspapers, including MN, have been shut down. The right-wing papers - Pravda, Sovietskaya Rossia, Rossia, Krasnaya Zvezda - will appear as usual. The rest must "re-register" at GKChP's new media-control office.
An anonymous voice just attacked Yegor over the vertushka, saying, "You tried to do me in; now listen to the radio, you son of a bitch."
Some Izvestia reporters have come over (to their great embarrassment, their paper wasn't shut down). There was a scuffle at their printing presses; the printers refused to set the newspaper unless they could run Yeltsin's decree. Izvestia editor in chief Yefimov, back from vacation, burst into the print-shop floor, yelling - and that's where the story ends, for now. The outcome's still in doubt. We add what we've got to our leaflet, which begins with an apology to our readers: You won't be seeing the next issue of our paper. Unfortunately, there's a coup going on here.
More news comes in: The Moscow KGB has shut down the independent radio station Ekho Moskvy and taken Radio Rossia off the air. There are Chekists at every elevator and studio at Central Television; tanks surround the building, journalists are being searched at the entrance. The guys from "Vesti," the Russian Television news program, thought fast - they lowered their equipment out the window on ropes and then slid down after it. But then how come our telephones are still working? People are calling in from all over the country: In fact, the international lines are still open.
7 p.m. Great news: An acquaintance from the KGB called one of our colleagues to say that 7,000 people are going to be arrested in Moscow, including 11 Moscow News journalists - I'm on the list, as is Natalya Gevorkyan, with whom I've often worked. Thanks for the honor, guys. It's nice to know our work hasn't gone unnoticed.
Aug. 20. We're churning out leaflets on an assembly line; we can't keep up with the demand. There's a line outside MN, as though it were a store with some rare commodity. Our schoolboy couriers can't get past the waiting crowd to distribute the leaflets. People snatch them right out of their hands, then grumble when they're told it's one to a customer. Our Xerox machines are already smoking, even though the Soros Foundation brought over two more. Now, we're running out of paper.
Editors from 11 of the shut-down newspapers met with Yegor - we're going to pool our efforts in an underground newspaper. Arrangements have already been made with a printing press in Tallinn. We've been sending news out by fax to Paris, New York, Rome: It's coming out in Libération, The New York Times and Repubblica, with a Moscow News byline. But why are the faxes working? Why are the airports letting flights land? Why are the trains running on their regular schedules throughout the country? Why are they letting us put out our leaflets, even letting our boys plaster them to the sides of tanks? What kind of a coup is this, anyway?
4 p.m. The square around the White House is packed with people. Announcements are made over megaphones: "The seventh chain is forming; fifth chain, meet by entrance No. 8." It's anticipated that the building will be stormed within the next hour. A chain of people, with arms linked, blocks our passage, saying, "No women allowed here." Andrei Makarov, a well-known attorney, shouts: "They're not women, they're journalists." There's no time or energy to retaliate in kind. People grab our leaflets, and any others they can find.
Aug. 21. 2:10 a.m. Tatyana has gotten through to Burbulis [then state secretary of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic] on the vertushka. "Sound the alarm, girls," he says. "Spread the good news: The putschists are getting mean. We're surrounded by tanks and APCs. There are about 200 deputies in the building, plus a ton of reporters. Everyone's been issued a machine gun."
"Where is Yeltsin?" we ask.
"Yeltsin is here."
It's a disaster. It's all over. We open up a bottle of cognac and toast all the wonderful things that were; including MN. I feel a twinge of regret for our editorial faxes and computers. Whatever the OMON doesn't smash, it'll carry away. I try to fax some friends in the States: "If something should happen to me, please take care of my little girl." The fax doesn't go through.
2:47 a.m. We call Burbulis again. "I spoke to Yazov and Yanayev," he tells us. "They say they weren't responsible. It's the Russians at the White House who are causing all the trouble."
Three of us are trying to reach the coup leaders - Yazov, Pugo, Kryuchkov. No luck.
3:45 a.m. Called Burbulis again. "We just heard that the Vitebsk KGB Paratroopers Division is moving toward Moscow. I called Kryuchkov. At first he denied it, then he said, "I'll look into it."
Where is Yeltsin? "Yeltsin's still here."
5:25 a.m. Burbulis: "The troops stopped advancing. Things seem to be turning around. They'll pay for this."
At dawn, our "underground" crew is back. We're ready to go, with a leaflet entitled "Chronicle of a Bloody Night." And it was bloody. Three people died in the clash near the U.S. Embassy.
9 a.m. Our typist, Anya Oreshechkina, and our technical editor, Natasha Senina, were arrested while pasting up leaflets near Lubyanka. At 9 a.m., the GKChP issued an order prohibiting the distribution of "provocative leaflets." The decree calls for up to 30 days' detention, or a fine of 1,000 rubles, but Anya and Natasha were released anyway. They asked for a copy of the leaflet as a "memento."
Evening. Well, it's over. The putschists are under arrest. Gorbachev has been brought from Foros. He looks terrible, with black circles under his eyes. Everyone at the office is kissing and congratulating each other in euphoria.
I went home during the day for a few hours to sleep. My 3-year-old daughter Lyolka met me, asking, "Mama, did you beat the junta already?" I almost cried. What kind of country is it where 3-year-old children can so easily add the word "junta" to their vocabulary?
These are excerpts from a diary kept by Yevgenia Albats. She included part of the diary in her book "The State Within a State."
TITLE: How To Lie to the President
AUTHOR: Vladimir Kovalyev
TEXT: HOW hard is it to lie to President Vladimir Putin? Not very, judging from a letter sent to the Kremlin on July 26 by acting Justice Minister Alexander Karlin.
In this letter, Karlin describes the situation regarding tuberculosis in Russian prisons and the gist of it is that, although the situation isn't very good, it is not really that bad either, and is definitely going to improve soon.
"There are a number of medical clinics working in all the regions of the Russian Federation, and they are available for both the routine and emergency treatment of prisoners. Health Ministry clinics can be used if necessary," Karlin wrote.
It is really hard, however, to believe such things. A recent report from the Vologda Region - a fairly typical report from a typical region - seems to show that Karlin is misleading the president with his letter.
In the Vologda report, the deputy head of the local prison hospital, Anatoly Ayabin, claimed that he has no money to purchase cotton balls, bandages, syringes or medicine. Ayabin has asked that prisoners' relatives provide such supplies themselves.
Otherwise, he noted, all 400 patients currently diagnosed with tuberculosis and HIV will go practically without treatment.
I have no doubt that Karlin has heard these stories endlessly, including from St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast. Nonetheless, in his letter he writes that "medical facilities [in St. Petersburg] have all the necessary medicine to treat their patients."
But the local civic organization Citizens Watch has reported that local authorities recently issued an order to St. Petersburg prison clinics saying that they are to use medicines only in case of emergency - which practically means "only when a patient is dying."
"When they tell me to find funding [for medicine] from nonbudgetary sources, all I can think is that I should take a gun and go out into the streets. This is the only nonbudgetary source that I can think of," said a manager at one St. Petersburg prison clinic who preferred to remain anonymous, according to Citizens Watch.
According to the professional journal Consilium Medicum, Russia sends over 300,000 people to prison annually, and about the same number are released. The magazine estimates that, since there are presently about 100,000 prisoners diagnosed with an active form of tuberculosis, virtually every prisoner released is a likely carrier of TB bacteria. Incidentally, the magazine also reports that about 2,000 prisoners die each year before they are even convicted of a crime.
"It is possible to predict that at least 2.5 million people infected with TB will be walking around the streets of Russia by 2010," the journal concluded.
None of this information is to be found in Karlin's letter to the Kremlin. In fact, there are only two sentences in the text that cast a negative light on the situation. "Owing to a lack of budget funding and the number of tuberculosis sufferers and HIV-infected prisoners coming into the system each year, the general epidemiological environment remains difficult," Karlin confesses.
Elsewhere, Karlin alludes to the insufficient number of hospital beds, but - apparently not wanting to lay it on too thick - he emphasizes that a few new clinics have been opened recently. This is something like the early perestroika rhetorical style, before officials found the courage to hint at the overwhelming problems surrounding them.
And that is too bad. I'm sure that Karlin's letter is just one of thousands of similar documents that cross the president's desk each month. Most of them are probably couched in similarly muted terms in order not to upset the digestion of the head of state.
I certainly hope, though, that Putin knows how to read between the lines.
TITLE: Readers Say 'No' to Glorification of the KGB
TEXT: In response to "The 'KGB Files' Heading for TV," Aug. 3.
Editor,
All this does is assure the American people that Hollywood people are nothing but a bunch of low-life leftists. To make a television series praising an organization that murdered and imprisoned millions of innocent people is outright despicable.
Maybe Ronkel should talk to some of the victims of the KGB before he goes ahead with his insane project instead of listening to KGB spinmeisters. Until then he should stay where he seems most at home - in Moscow, not America.
Brandon Parsons
Nazareth, Pennsylvania
Editor,
The KGB figured prominently in the enslavement of millions of eastern Europeans who, when given the option, immediately threw off the Soviet yoke. The KBG was the agent of fear and repression in Soviet Russia, and was the mechanism of the murder of in excess of 20 million Soviet citizens during the 20th century.
In all of human history only Nazi Germany approaches this level of monstrous barbarity. If Ronkel's family were executed, I wonder if he would be interested in making a series about how wonderful their executioners are.
Perhaps when he is finished putting a "human" face on the KGB, he will consider putting some Hollywood humanity onto the face of the Cambodian villain Pol Pot, and will explain how the Cambodian killing fields were, after all, just richly fertilized gardens.
Mike Lesko
Plano, Texas
Editor,
Having just read your recent article on Ronkel's hope of bringing the KGB to American television, I can honestly say it does not surprise me in the least. After all, Hollywood is always willing to twist the truth in order to make money.
Only in Hollywood would you find someone making a movie that glorifies two cold-blooded killers such as Bonnie and Clyde. How many times has Hollywood taken evil people, killers and worse, and turned them into misunderstood folk heroes just so the moviemaker could make a buck? I have yet to see a movie depicting Billy the Kid as the cold-blooded murderer he was. Or how about Jesse James and the almost saint-like depiction of him in most movies dealing with his so-called life story.
If there were enough profit to be made in the deal, someone in Hollywood would make a movie showing Hitler as a misunderstood artistic genius. Thank God, so far no one has done so.
The only question I have about this matter is whether or not Ronkel intends to tell the entire truth about the KGB or just some Hollywood hype to make them look good? Knowing how Hollywood people allow movies to governor all their decisions, I am sure that he will not. He will leave out the horror stories of torturing people to death, killing innocent people just because they might have seen or done something, and the attempted genocide of entire peoples. What will be his next project: Stories of the Good Deeds of the Nazi Gestapo?
Truly, is there no limit to what someone in Hollywood will do for money?
Trudy Ann McGalliard
Mesa, Arizona
Editor,
There really is "nothing new under the sun." Hollywood has been "pinko" since its inception. Creating a denial of the Russian holocaust is just the latest campaign in an unceasing barrage of Marxist propaganda.
Anyone who thinks about American television knows that it is all socialist garbage, designed to provoke, propagandize, pacify and convert. I am much more informed as a result of my curiosity, world travels and the Internet. I don't want my MTV, never have and never will.
Michael Oden
Columbia, South Carolina
Editor,
I am not surprised by this new television program depicting the KGB as good guys. To the communists in control of programming at American networks, the KBG are good guys.
Their plan of attack in making America more socialist and then a communist state is by stealth. First you have to reinvent history to make it more friendly to your cause.
Plain and simple, they want a United Socialist States of America. I won't watch the show, for I know the real bloody truth about the KGB.
In fact, I may begin a boycott of the products of the sponsors who will advertise with this lie. Listen to the voices of the 40 million to 60 million Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs, and Hungarian martyrs who were slaughtered by this arm of the communist gangsters who seized power in Russia.
The silence of the media on this holocaust is deafening and hypocritical, and when they in the entertainment industry want to paper over these murders, it is really disgusting.
Will the new television program show the prisons in Moscow where people were tortured since 1920? Will the program show the thousands of camps where people were sent to be re-educated and were used as slave laborers?
The KGB was instrumental in supporting, maintaining, running this network of enslavement. I doubt the producers of this program will be truthful. So why on Earth would I watch it?
Byron Bullock
Austin, Texas
Editor,
What next? How about a TV series about the heroic activities of the SS during World War II showing the positive and very human side of the "nice guys" who obliterated whole towns and enslaved millions? Or, how about a series depicting mass murders like John Wayne Gacy as compassionate and loveable? Sort of a cross between "Father Knows Best" and "Schindler's List."
Seriously, it is time for Hollywood to get real. Fantasy has its rightful place. But a series depicting the KGB as anything besides an organization of evil agents of a despotic dictatorship is just plain wrong.
Lloyd Van Schoyck
Palm Harbor, Florida
Editor,
The KGB as heroes? Beautiful idea. That will help finish the job of indoctrinating American children into thinking that communism is a good thing, which is, of course, the intent of all these Hollywood cretins. I can't wait for the sequel - heroic tales of brave Gestapo agents.
But wait. It's only left wing totalitarians that are approved by Hollywood. As long the red star shines, the murder machine will keep on churning. Why am I not surprised that Hollywood would consider them heroes?
Michael Peirce
Atlanta, Georgia
Editor,
It shames me that some of my fellow Americans are delusional leftist Marxists who make excuses for crimes against humanity. As many as 62 million people murdered in Russia. A similar death toll in China. Pol Pot and his Cambodian killing fields, murdering a third of his population. And North Korea's Kim Jong Il driving a luxury Mercedes while his own people are starving.
Thank goodness Russia can now have a future and eventually become a world economic power as its people build their way to prosperity out of the ashes of the economic cannibalism and socialistic parasitism of the old socialist state. Freedom is an engine of prosperity that has no equal.
Who better to denounce these American idiots that still wax romantic about the bloodstained leftist Marxist ideology than the very people who have had the misfortune of living it and who now are tasked with rebuilding so that their children might have a better future.
Raymond Moyers
New Caney, Texas
Editor,
I am dumbfounded! How can anyone in his right mind do this?! I am a Russian interpreter working with religious refugees, Pentecostal Christians, mostly. Many of the people I have met had been exiled to a small outpost near Vladivostok. Many had been taken from their parents as children and placed in Soviet orphanages, and we have seen the horrors of the orphanages in Russia and the rest of the former communist bloc, haven't we?
The harrowing stories these folks tell are heartbreaking to say the least. Persecution for them began in school, when teachers would organize the young pioneers and Komsomol members into gangs who would then single out Christians or Jews for harassment in the classrooms. Many people had children who were forcibly removed by the KGB, others were forced into psychiatric institutions and put on mind-destroying drugs.
In one account, a former KGB agent named Ivan Kuznetsov describes organizing rape gangs who would terrorize Christian female prisoners. These stories barely scrape the surface!
The network that chooses to air this monstrous bit of agitprop will get more than a letter or boycott from me.
Jewel Atkins
East Petersburg, Pennsylvania
Editor,
I have conducted research on a relative who ended up in Russia and in the gulag at Solovetsky concentration camp. And he probably died there.
I have receive records from the Estonian archives, the U.S. archive, the KGB archive in Leningrad, and the KGB archive in Tula. I would like to receive the file from Moscow.
Now, I have read a lot about the operation of the OGPU in the 1920s. There seems to be a lot of Americans who went to Russia during these times. Will you be reporting on these people? I know that a lot of American expertise went to Russia under the New Economic Policy in the late 1920s. A lot of these people disappeared in the gulag or were shot. Will you report on these persons by name? Will you detail the archives, locations, what is available from each?
These are only a few of the questions that I have. Hopefully, you will be able to get a good amount of information.
Edward Perdue
Westboro, Massachusetts
Bravo for Renewal
In response to "Column Facing 2 Years of Repairs," Aug. 7.
Editor,
I think it is wonderful. Russia is such a beautiful country. It has so much to offer the world. Not just in art, but science, medicine and so much more. I am going to try to be present for the 300th-anniversary celebration. It should be spectacular.
I have visited St. Petersburg and I was amazed at all the beautiful architecture and the art. As long as Russia does not become too greedy, tourism will flourish. Beautiful country!
Daniel Stone
San Ramon, California
A Waste of Time
Editor,
I had the good fortune to be a tourist in your great city for five days this August. Unfortunately, I had my wallet taken as I was boarding the No. 1 bus after visiting the Hermitage. One young man kept me from making my way up the bus steps while another pushed me from behind and took my wallet and ran into the nearby park. I immediately canceled my Visa card, I will get a duplicate driver's license, and the $17 in rubles was not a great loss. The helplessness I felt at being pushed and robbed was the worst of the experience.
I thought I would be a good citizen and report the theft to the police. That was a mistake. I advise your readers not to report similar incidents to the police.
First, the police wanted me to come to their office and to bring my own interpreter at a time convenient to them. Starting at 3:00 p.m. on the day after the theft, my companion and I were interviewed for two hours in the hotel security office with the assistance of an interpreter from the hotel. Then we were taken to the district police office where we sat for another three hours in a dark hallway and in the office of a plain-clothes police officer who didn't speak English.
Then we were taken by World War II-era jeep by a uniformed police officer with our original signed statements to the district police station responsible for the area where the crime had been committed. There we stood in front of a counter while a police officer read and reread our statements. No English speakers there either.
Finally, at 7:30 p.m., we showed the officer our ballet tickets for 8:00. He seemed to show some concern. At 7:50, a senior police official - I could tell by his air of authority, gray hair, insignia and the deference shown him - came into the room and read our statements. We showed him our ballet tickets and at five minutes to eight he signed a receipt for the report and waved us out without a thank you and without a ride. We did find a taxi several blocks from the police station and arrived at the ballet 20 minutes late. It was a frustrating and frightening experience that was a waste of my time and effort.
Richard Manning
San Diego, California
Sympathy
In response to "Kursk Families Haven't Forgotten," Aug. 10.
Editor,
Here in England we have just watched a television program explaining the loss of the Kursk. Initially, a torpedo exploded, which caused a fire which rapidly got out of control. Two minutes later the remaining torpedoes exploded causing the forward compartments of the Kursk to flood. The evidence of these explosions is captured on seismograph and is irrefutable. Although two minutes apart, the seismograph readings are almost identical. A similar explosion occurred on a British submarine 50 years ago. The torpedo used the same chemical as that used on the Kursk's torpedoes. The British have not used the chemical since. I will be studying a video of the program in more detail.
The program was very poignant and our thoughts go out to all those families who lost loved ones.
Mike Hewitt
Sheffield, England
A Tiny Minority
In response to "The New Populists," a comment by Tatyana Filippova, Aug. 3.
Editor,
Today I read the following on your pages: "A new breed of radical has emerged with a call to arms as old as European modernity itself - the struggle against capital and capitalists, against the bourgeois leveling of culture and the savage vulgarity of the market." These people are simply not representative of the countries involved, especially the United States and Canada.
Perhaps the author of the above recognizes this by calling them "a new breed of radical." Their numbers are so few that except for their bad behavior, they would be largely unnoticed. Believing that they have a higher knowledge of what is right and also feeling powerless because their message is not accepted in these democratic countries they resort to lawlessness. Some of them have proven to be simply common criminals. What we really have is a problem of maintaining public order and safety while also maintaining our cherished rights of peaceful assembly and free speech.
If this continues, democratic societies will need to recognize that this is not peaceful assembly and begin to protect the rights of the law-abiding citizens. The author ends by writing: "A pogrom is a pogrom even if it begins beneath the banners of resistance to debt slavery, media pressure and the global policies of multinational corporations." If I correctly understand this, I must say that it demonstrates a beautiful insight.
James Crowder
Loveland, Colorado
TITLE: Germany Marks Berlin Wall Anniversary
AUTHOR: By Burt Herman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BERLIN - As Germany marks the 40th anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall, the country is focusing less on history and more on present concerns over whether the successor party to the former East German communists has properly reconciled with its brutal past and the dreaded barrier.
Trying to upstage a scheduled Monday ceremony where Chancellor Gerhard Schröder is to lay a wreath at the main wall memorial, opposition conservatives held their own event Sunday - reviving Cold War-style rhetoric to castigate Schröder's Social Democrats for pondering a local government coalition in Berlin with the ex-communist Party of Democratic Socialism, or PDS.
"Whoever makes a coalition with the PDS is making a pact with the socialism" of the East German communist party, Edmund Stoiber, governor of Bavaria and head of the Christian Social Union, told hundreds of invited guests gathered at the former Checkpoint Charlie border crossing.
"Berlin must stay free. That's our message on this day," said Christian Democratic party Chairwoman Angela Merkel.
The PDS has been called to task by major German parties for refusing to apologize to the victims of the country's division. Some sources estimate that nearly 1,000 people died trying to flee, including 250 of those at the wall itself.
Instead, the party has said killings of people trying to leave were "inhuman" and expressed regret for "injustice" carried out by former East German rulers, who closed the border between East and West Berlin on Aug. 13, 1961, to stop people leaving the communist country.
The apology debate has taken on greater weight with the upcoming Oct. 21 city elections.
The PDS won 40 percent of the vote in eastern Berlin in the last election in 1999, and 17.7 percent overall. However, it is expected to do better this time with the charismatic Gregor Gysi as its leading candidate.
Interim Mayor Klaus Wowereit, a Social Democrat who took office after a coalition with the Christian Democrats collapsed in June, governs now in a minority government with the Greens party - maintaining power with the consent of the PDS. But he hasn't ruled out a possible coalition with PDS after the election.
Wowereit himself has spared no harsh words against the PDS, calling Sunday on Gysi to make an apology for the wall "from conviction, not paying lip service as a campaign tactic," according to an interview in the Tages spiegel daily.
Gysi has said today's PDS members don't bear the individual guilt of the officials who decided to build the wall, and that an apology would be "too cheap, too self-righteous and not credible."
Schröder has repeatedly ruled out cooperating with the PDS at the national level, where the party of ex-communists won 5.1 percent of parliament seats in the 1998 elections.
To try and preserve the wall's history, the Berlin city government said Sunday it would pass a resolution this week declaring the few remaining sections of the former barrier as protected memorials.
For the first time on the anniversary, the government also ordered flags on federal buildings to be flown Monday at half-staff.
TITLE: Macedonia Agrees To Reinstate Cease-Fire
AUTHOR: By Konstantin Testorides
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SKOPJE, Macedonia - Macedonia's government agreed Sunday to reinstate a cease-fire to pave the way for a peace accord, after troops backed by tanks and warplanes fought ethnic Albanian rebels on the outskirts of the capital and several other fronts.
President Boris Trajkovski ordered government forces to stop shooting at 7:30 p.m. "to show good will and to give a chance" to the tentative peace deal scheduled to be signed Monday, state television reported.
A NATO official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the government "has agreed to reinstate the cease-fire" brokered on July 5. He said NATO is "talking to the appropriate people" in the National Liberation Movement to make sure that the rebels also respect the cease-fire.
A government offensive came to a halt late Sunday, but it was not immediately clear if there were still scattered skirmishes and if the rebels would accept the cease-fire.
During the day, government troops pounded the ethnic Albanian village of Ljuboten, just 5 kilometers north of the capital, with a barrage of mortar and tank firethat lasted until the late afternoon. The government said the strike was prompted by an earlier rebel attack.
Army helicopter gunships and Sukhoi SU-25 ground attack jets also struck rebel targets in the village of Radusa near the Kosovo border to retain control of a water supply system vital for Skopje. There were reports of civilian casualties from the assaults, but no confirmation.
Government troops and insurgents also fought for control of villages and roads leading from Skopje to Kosovo and Albania. The road between the capital and the country's second-largest city, Tetovo, was closed by fighting.
Each side accused the other of escalating the fighting.
Interior Minister Ljube Boskovski said earlier that "the most realistic thing ... is to undertake a very strong offensive to destroy the terrorists" to prevent them from seizing areas close to Skopje or even from entering the capital.
Speaking from Tetovo, Arben Xhaferi, an ethnic Albanian leader who participated in the peace talks, said, "We are willing to sign a deal, but physically we cannot go to Skopje now" because of the fighting.
Xhaferi said government "helicopters and fighter jets are indiscriminately bombing ethnic Albanian villages." Not even ousted Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic "used fighter jets during the war in Kosovo," he said.
A rebel spokesperson, who goes by the name of Besniku, said around 50 ethnic Albanian civilians died over the last three days alone, but could not estimate rebel casualties.
A resident of Ljuboten said a few thousand people in the village were cowering in basements while several were "injured or possibly killed" in the streets. State television said street fights between government forces and the rebels prompted rebels and some 1,000 residents to flee.
A rebel commander warned in a telephone call to that unless attacks cease, his fighters would retaliate by targeting the nearby Macedonian-populated Skopje suburb of Radisani. The government action against Ljuboten was apparently in response to a land-mine explosion that killed eight government soldiers nearby on Friday.
Macedonian leaders bitterly protested that the insurgents were getting armed support from ethnic Albanian-dominated Kosovo, a neighboring NATO-controlled Serbian province.
Howard Rhodes, a NATO spokesperson in Kosovo, denied the claims, saying the alliance has "location radars ... [that] prove that no weapons fired yesterday originated from within Kosovo."
In a message to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski said it was a "crying shame" that United Nations and NATO officials in Kosovo "allowed armed aggression" against Macedonia, asserting the "international community has failed in its declared goals" of ensuring peace in the region.
Macedonia's ethnic Albanian militants took up arms in February, saying they want more rights for their community that accounts for up to a third of the country's population of 2 million. The Macedonians say the rebels simply want to seize a chunk of territory and call it their own.
TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: Crash Kills 23
BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) - A bus lost its brakes and plunged into a ravine in western Colombia on Sunday, killing 23 passengers, officials said.
Fourteen other people were injured and rushed to hospitals in Valle de Cauca state with serious injuries. Police said the bus was part of a caravan carrying workers from a sugar mill home after a weekend trip to a lake.
Television images showed the bus lying upside down at the bottom of a ravine in a spot along a Valle de Cauca highway known as Plan la Vaca. Bodies were strewn alongside it.
The victims included nine women, eight men including the driver, and six children.
Radicals Raided
TOKYO (AP) - Police on Monday raided the headquarters of a Japanese ultra-leftist group suspected of bombing the office of a nationalist textbook's authors.
The group, the Revolutionary Army, claimed responsibility in a letter sent to several Japanese media outlets last week. It said it planted a bomb to protest a middle-school history text that has been criticized for whitewashing Japanese atrocities before and during World War II.
The group, a faction of the ultra-leftist Revolutionary Workers Association, was being investigated on charges of alleged arson in relation to Tuesday's attack, Tokyo police said.
The blast at the Tokyo office of the textbook authors occurred hours after Tokyo's Board of Education endorsed the book for use at middle schools for disabled students beginning next April.
Nobody was injured in the attack, but a first-floor window frame was scorched.
The textbook has been criticized at home and abroad for omitting Japanese wartime atrocities, such as germ warfare in China and the 200,000 women forced to work as sex slaves for the Japanese military.
Break a Leg
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Hollywood actors have voted overwhelmingly in favor of a new contract that includes a 9.5 percent pay increase over the next three years for television actors.
The contract was approved by 96.7 percent of the members of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists who voted on the deal negotiated with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.
"The estimated value of this package is at least $123 million, but with any improvement in the economy at all, it will be worth well beyond that," said Greg Krizman, a spokesperson for the Screen Actors Guild.
Key improvements in the contract include financial increases in basic cable residuals, better pay for major role performers, increases for stunt coordinators and increases in foreign residuals.
Canal Still Closed
TORONTO (Reuters) - A major marine trade link between Canada and the United States remained closed on Sunday after a ship collided with a lift bridge in Canada's Welland Canal.
The canal, which was constructed to link Lake Erie with Lake Ontario and offers a safe detour around Niagara Falls, 16 kilometers away, has been shut down indefinitely, disrupting traffic on the entire Great Lakes-St. Lawrence system.
Constable Larry Regnier of the Niagara Regional Police said a freighter was traveling north through the canal at about 9 p.m. on Saturday when the lift bridge started lowering and smashed into the vessel, triggering a blaze.
The 17-person crew was able to escape with minor injuries. Authorities said the damage is expected to cost millions of dollars to repair.
TITLE: U.S. Almost Makes Clean Sweep of Relays
AUTHOR: By Bert Rosenthal
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: EDMONTON, Canada - Even without Maurice Greene, Jon Drummond and Michael Johnson, the U.S. men's relay teams swept the gold medals at the World Athletic Championship on Sunday.
Powered by Dennis Mitchell and Tim Montgomery, who ran the final two legs, the Americans capped the 10-day championship by winning the 400-meter relay in 37.93 seconds, showing they didn't need the injured Greene and Drummond, provided they could get the baton around without mishap.
In the 1,600 relay, Olympic 400-meter-hurdles champion Angelo Taylor anchored the Americans to a 5-meter victory in 2:57.54, the fastest time in the world this year. Johnson, who had anchored U.S. teams to three world titles, was ineligible to compete because he did not participate in the national championship.
However, the Americans could not get through all of Sunday's relays without a mishap. Only this time, it was the women who had the problem.
The women's 1,600-meter-relay team appeared on its way to victory, holding a comfortable lead, before anchor runner Suziann Reid dropped the baton, and wound up fourth.
Had the 1,600-meter-relay team won, it would have given the Americans a sweep of the relays, since the women's 400-meter-relay team won Saturday.
"It was a clean pass," said Michelle Collins, who handed the stick to Reid. "I think she was trying to switch hands and her body was moving faster than anything else. It was unfortunate.
"It was devastating ... because we were in the lead. We should have gotten a gold medal, but those things happen."
Reid refused comment after the race, won by Jamaica in a world-best 3:20.65.
"She had the baton in her hand," U.S. women's coach J.J. Clark said. "That was on the crossover. That's not something you practice, it's something you just do.
"I think she was a little anxious and wanted to get running before she had the baton."
In Sunday's other finals, Morocco's Hicham El Guerrouj won his third-straight men's 1,500-meter title in 3:30.68; Mozambique's Maria Mutola completed a 10-month sweep of the Olympic, world indoor and world outdoor titles by taking the women's 800 in 1:57.17; the Czech Republic's Jan Zelezny won his third javelin title with a championship-record 91.33 meters; Hestrie Cloete became South Africa's first women's medalist, winning the high jump at 1.97 meters; and Romania's Lidia Simon won the women's marathon in 2:26:01.
In the men's 400 relay, the Americans were forced to use inexperienced Mickey Grimes on the leadoff leg. He didn't get a very good start, but Bernard Williams put the Americans back into contention, and Mitchell and Montgomery finished the job.
The Americans wound up 6 meters ahead of runner-up South Africa.
"These last 24 hours have been up and down for us," Mitchell said, "but it made us a stronger team."
Montgomery called the victory the sweetest of his career.
In the men's 1,600 relay, the Americans trailed the Bahamas by 0.5 meters after Leonard Byrd's opening leg. Antonio Pettigrew then gave the Americans a 1-meter lead over the Bahamas, Derrick Brew increased the margin to 3 and Taylor wound up winning by 5.
"We heard about how Michael [Johnson] wasn't here and could we hold up," Pettigrew said. "I think we answered all those questions."
Pettigrew, who is retiring, has been a part of four gold-medal-winning teams at the championships.
"I'll let the young ones carry on," he said. "They'll do well."
In the women's 1,600 relay, Jearl Miles-Clark, Monique Hennagan and Collins had the U.S. in front until Reid bobbled the baton.
El Guerrouj took command with 600 meters remaining and went on to his 47th victory in his last 49 1,500 finals. His only two losses were at the 1996 Atlanta Games and 2000 Sydney Olympics.
The world-record holder had such a big lead coming down the stretch that he started blowing kisses to the crowd of 54,920 - the biggest of the championship - with about 50 meters left.
"It's unbelievable, it's incredible," he said. "I ran for Morocco, for the king. I wanted the best race of my career because it was my last 1,500."
In the women's 800, Mutola was in third place with about 40 meters remaining, before starting her final charge. With about 4 meters to go, she finally seized the lead from Austria's Stephanie Graf and beat her by .03 seconds for her second world title.
Zelezny's long throw was the seventh-best in javelin history and made a runner-up of Finland's Aki Parviainen, who finished with the longest losing throw ever, 89.90 meters.
In the high jump, Cloete and Ukraine's Inga Babakova both cleared 1.97 meters, but the South African won on fewer misses.
Simon ended a series of frustrating finishes at major international events by winning the marathon.
Simon, the bronze medalist at the past two worlds and the runner-up at the Sydney Olympics, used a devastating kick in the final 500 meters to beat Japan's Reiko Tosa by five seconds.
"I was thinking all the time about Sydney," said Simon, who finished behind Japan's Naoka Takahashi at last year's Olympics. "I prepared for this race all the time with that in my head. I wanted to get revenge."
The United States and Russia tied for most medals with 19 each, but the Americans had more golds, nine to six.
The championship ended without a world or American record, but with eight meet records, none in a running event.
TITLE: Seles' Giant-Killing Ways Come to an End
AUTHOR: By By Beth Harris
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MANHATTAN BEACH, California - Lindsay Davenport ended Monica Seles' run of upsets over top-10 players with a 6-3, 7-5 victory in the estyle.com Classic on Sunday.
Struggling with her serve throughout the 67-minute match, Seles double-faulted on Davenport's second match point.
"I'll take the double fault," Davenport said. "I lost to her here one year and had match point in the finals, so I'll surely take that."
Davenport's title completed a three-week swing through her home state during which she lost in the final at Stanford and lost in the semifinals at Carlsbad last week.
"My California trip has definitely been a success," said Davenport, who lives down the freeway in Laguna Beach.
Although she doesn't have a title to show for it, Seles' trip through the same three California tournaments was impressive. She notched wins over No. 1 Martina Hingis (twice), No. 2 Jennifer Capriati and No. 8 Serena Williams, who blew six match points.
"Since coming back, it's been really great to play such a high level of tennis," said Seles, who has missed most of the year with a foot injury that kept her out of the French Open and Wimbledon.
Would she have predicted her success over Hingis, Capriati and Williams, whom Seles had never beaten before?
"I probably would've said no way," she said.
Seles' defeat was her second to Davenport in two weeks, having lost in straight sets in the Stanford semifinals. Her last win over Davenport came in the 1997 final here, and since then Seles has lost nine in a row.
Seles had a grueling route to the final, including winning three-consecutive three-set matches over Sandrine Testud, Williams and Hingis. Seles returned to play Davenport just 14 hours after beating Hingis.
"I really do think fatigue played a factor," Davenport said. "I was hoping Monica would be a little worn out from three tough matches."
Seles committed 21 unforced errors in the match and won just 64 percent of the points on her first serve to Davenport's 89 percent.
"It was a little tough in the beginning because I played all my matches at night," Seles said. "It's been tiring, but it's irrelevant in today's match. She was just a better player out there."
Davenport's power from the backcourt was evident from the first game, when she broke Seles with a backhand winner. Seles couldn't wrangle a break point on Davenport's serve until the eighth game, which Seles won to trail 5-3.
But Davenport, who had eight aces in the match, broke back for the third time in the set and won 6-3.
"I wanted to start off well and get a good lead," Davenport said. "I really think that she did not serve well. It gave me some opportunities to break her."
Seles' game picked up in the second set, when she served two love games, but Davenport continually found the lines and sharp angles with her groundstrokes.
"My game plan was to try [to] hit some balls going off the court and move her around," Davenport said. "I'm sure she was definitely a little bit sore or tired."
Davenport will move up to No. 2 in the world rankings behind Hingis on Monday, while Seles rises two spots to eighth.
Davenport withdrew from the To ron to tournament that begins Monday because of left wrist tendinitis, although she said her wrist felt good in the final.
Seles, meanwhile, plans to play for the fourth week in a row.
"My draw in Toronto is pretty crazy, but not as crazy as here," she said.
Davenport earned $90,000 for her third title in Manhattan Beach.
TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: Driver's Ed.
BEREA, Ohio (AP) - Cleveland Browns cornerback Corey Fuller was arrested Sunday following a preseason game against Green Bay for refusing to move his car from an intersection. Cleveland police told Fuller to move his car, which was blocking an intersection near the city's Flats entertainment district, and when he refused to do so he was arrested about 12:22 a.m., police spokesperson Lieutenant Sharon MacKay said.
MacKay said Fuller missed a turn, pulled up to an officer directing traffic and asked if he could turn into the Flats, MacKay said. The officer told him to keep moving.
After about eight minutes, the officer gave him a warning. When Fuller still did not move, the officer arrested him, she said.
Fuller was charged with obstructing official business, a misdemeanor, and received a traffic citation for impeding the flow of traffic, MacKay said.
Lightning Kills 2
GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala (AP) - Two players were killed and 10 others severely burned when a bolt of lightning struck a soccer stadium during a professional match.
Deportivo Chiquimulilla and Pueblo Nuevo Vinas were into the second half of their game in Guatemala's Third Professional Division Saturday night when a storm blew over the municipal stadium in Chiquimulilla, 120 kilometers east of the capital, Guatemala City.
Shortly after officials elected to continue the game, a bolt of lightning crashed into a metal guard rail surrounding the field, knocking everyone on the field off their feet.
Emilio Najera, a spokesperson for Chiquimulilla's volunteer fire fighters, said the bolt spread through the rail, creating a ring of electric charge on the field and burning dozens of players, coaches and referees for several seconds. No one in the stands was injured.
Electric burns killed 16-year-old Rosbin Yuman and Lester Marrioquin, 24, instantly, Najera said.
More Teams
LONDON (Reuters) - The number of teams due to take part in the 2003 World Club Championship is likely to be increased to 16, FIFA said on Friday.
The World Championship Organizing Committee put forward the proposal at a meeting in Zurich on Friday. It will be ratified at a FIFA Executive Committee meeting in Korea on Dec. 1.
Last year's inaugural World Club Championship in Brazil featured eight teams. The number was increased to 12 for the 2001 tournament before it was cancelled due to the collapse of FIFA's marketing partners ISMM/ISL.
The December meeting will also decide the host country, with Spain the current favorite, the format and the dates.
Rijo Return
CINCINNATI, Ohio (Reuters) - Jose Rijo's comeback will culminate in a return to the major leagues on Friday.
The Cincinnati Reds announced Sunday that they will purchase Rijo's contract on Thursday night and that he will be available in relief on Friday.
The 36-year-old righthander, who has not pitched in the major leagues since July 18, 1995, has been pitching in the Reds' minor-league system. In eight appearances, including six starts, Rijo had no record with a 4.05 ERA.
The 1990 World Series Most Valuable Player, Rijo had his career cut short by elbow problems that resulted in five surgeries, including a "Tommy John" procedure in August 1995.
Rijo led the National League with 227 strikeouts in 1993 and was named to the All-Star team in 1994. A veteran of 12 major league seasons, Rijo is 111-87 with a 3.11 ERA and 1,556 strikeouts.
TITLE: Gordon Shows He's the 'King of the Road'
AUTHOR: By Dick Brinster
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WATKINS GLEN, New York - The first time Jeff Gordon saw Watkins Glen International, setting a record here never entered his mind.
"I thought this was one place I'd never win at," he said.
Now, after making history, it seems like he can't lose.
Gordon became NASCAR's King of the Road, setting a record Sunday for road-course victories by winning the thrill-packed and attrition-filled Global Crossing.
"You start working on shifting and braking, and pretty soon you're in victory lane," he said after his fourth trip there in the last five years at Watkins Glen.
The three-time Winston Cup champion won for the seventh time on a road course, breaking a tie with Rusty Wallace, Richard Petty and Bobby Allison for the most in history.
Gordon's victory also extended his lead in the points race to 194 over fourth-place finisher Ricky Rudd.
But it wasn't easy - right to the end. Jeff Burton, with whom Gordon waged a magnificent battle over the final laps, hit him coming to the final turn.
"If he wanted to, he could have taken me out," Gordon said. "I like racing him with because he's hard, aggressive and clean."
Patience had much to do with Gordon's victory, and he had said he would not try to press for the lead at the outset.
And, some early problems convinced him that was a good strategy.
"The brakes were running a little hot and the pedal was going down to the floor," he said. "We had to pump them for the rest of the day."
Gordon had the lead for only one lap before passing Burton in the first of 11 turns on the 78th of 90 laps. Burton got the lead back on the next turn, but Gordon beat him through the chicane, making a great save as the cars nearly touched and almost spun.
There were two more cautions, but each time Gordon got a good jump on the restart.
Gordon said Burton was going very slowly hoping to get a run at him each time the green flag came out.
"He was hanging back so far I finally took off," Gordon said. "I thought NASCAR was going to say I was jumping the restarts."
Still, he had a close call that enabled Burton to close in on the final lap.
Elliott Sadler had hit the wall, and his badly bent car was still running - in the path of the leaders - as they neared the final turns.
"Elliott Sadler was all over the place, and I was just trying to be cautious," Gordon said. "But Jeff wasn't because he wanted to win the race."
It was a record-setting fourth victory for Gordon on the 3.95-kilometer course. He also has won three times on NASCAR's only other serpentine layout, in Sonoma, California.
Gordon benefited more from staying out of trouble than fast racing. Rusty Wallace had mechanical problems and was out after 14 laps, polesitter Dale Jarrett spun out on the 18th of 90 laps, road-racing ace Ron Fellows stalled on lap 36 and a fire in a telemetry box caused Robby Gordon to quit on lap 59.
That left only Jeff Gordon, Rudd and Burton as serious contenders.
But Rudd lost his chance when Boris Said, one of several road-racing aces in the field, made a mad dash toward the front after the race went green on the 84th lap. He passed three cars, then banged Rudd out of the way to take third place.
"Boris just went in there and drove right over the top of us," Rudd said. "We're lucky he didn't wipe out the whole field.
"Everybody was slipping and sliding, and it looked like a Saturday-night short-track race."
It was the second-straight victory for Gordon, who also put his car in the winner's circle seven days earlier in the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis. The 30-year-old Gordon has 57 victories, the most among active drivers.
Gordon's Chevrolet started 13th in a field of 43 and officially beat the Ford of Burton by two car-lengths. The victory was his fifth this year, breaking his tie with Jarrett.
The winner led 14 laps. He averaged 144.58 kilometers per hour in a race slowed six times by 14 laps under caution.