SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #701 (68), Tuesday, September 4, 2001
**************************************************************************
TITLE: Putin Slams NATO on Finnish Visit
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: HELSINKI - President Vladimir Putin lashed out Monday at plans to expand NATO eastwards and said only a "sick mind" could believe Moscow poses an aggressive threat to European security.
"I underline that we don't see any objective reason for the Baltic states to become members of NATO,'' Putin, on his first state visit to Finland, told a news conference with Finnish counterpart Tarja Halonen.
"We are not happy about this. We think it is a mistake,'' he stressed.
Putin said that expanding the Western alliance would not solve a single problem in Europe's current security environment.
"Only in a sick imagination could one think that some aggressive elements could ... emerge from Russia,'' he said.
Putin's remarks came on the second day of his two-day visit to non-aligned Finland, which is not seeking to join NATO, but insists the door to the Western alliance must remain open and that states have the right to decide whether to join.
The former Soviet Baltic republics, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, all hope to join the transatlantic alliance but Russia vehemently opposes enlargement of NATO to its doorstep and into the area of the former Soviet Union.
Halonen said she believed the Baltic states would eventually become full members of NATO.
Putin praised Finland's example to its Baltic neighbors. "Finland has in a magnificent way shown the benefits of neutrality over the decades,'' he said.
Finland is the only European Union member bordering Russia.
Earlier in the day, a handful of demonstrators held placards outside the Presidential Palace demanding "Russia out of Finland'' and "Return our territory.''
They referred to the area of Karelia, a part of pre-war Finland, annexed by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II.
No major bilateral agreement was signed Monday, partly because a key investment treaty was not yet ready.
Putin also held talks with Finnish Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen and Finnish business leaders Monday.
Putin and his wife, Lyudmila, arrived at Turku Airport, 160 kilometers west of Helsinki, on Sunday and were whisked off to Kultaranta - President Halonen's summer residence - for talks.
Putin's visit is mainly a courtesy call at the invitation of Halonen, who visited Moscow in June 2000, a few months after she became president.
However, Putin highlighted the changed relationship between Russia and Finland on Monday by placing a wreath at the tomb of Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, the field marshal who led Finland's vastly outnumbered forces against the Red Army from 1939 to 1944.
The Finns, remembered for the Winter War and their white-clad "ghost army'' on skis, put up unexpectedly tough resistance.
However, they were finally defeated and were forced to cede 11 percent of their territory - mainly parts of Karelia and a southeastern region near St. Petersburg - from which 400,000 people were evacuated.
But the country was never occupied nor subjugated to communism like most of Eastern Europe. During the Cold War, Helsinki walked a tightrope between the hostile East and West blocs in uneasy friendship with Moscow.
While Finns may no longer fear an attack, they still eye the joint 1,260-kilometer border with some trepidation - concerned primarily about illegal immigration and pollution.
Within the EU, Helsinki has spearheaded a so-called Northern Dimension, aiming to draw northern Russian regions into energy, infrastructure and other projects to bridge the gap in living standards between Russia and the West.
Trade between Finland and Russia has developed in recent years, and Finnish exports are recovering from the collapse caused by Russia's 1998 economic crisis.
Among the main economic issues in Putin's visit were plans for a $3 billion pipeline to pump up to 20 billion cubic meters per year of Russian natural gas under the Baltic Sea to Western Europe.
Sources said that Norilsk Nickel would also sign a deal with Finnish metals firm Outokumpu on building a $130 million to $140 million ore concentrator plant for Norilsk.
Two other agreements were signed, one on health cooperation and one on competition and anti-monopoly policy.
In the health area, Finland is concerned about control of contagious diseases, including AIDS.
But talks on an investment-protection agreement, underway for two years, were not completed in time for the visit, Finnish officials said. Finland says the agreement is overdue, but was not satisfied with a draft Russia drew up last spring.
The draft treaty produced by Russia offered insufficient investor protection, Finnish officials said. The Finns have also said that the draft treaty lacked some of the main principles of the World Trade Organization. In July, Russia asked Finland for support for its bid to join the WTO.
Earlier this week, Putin - a frequent visitor to Finland before becoming president - told Finnish YLE television in Moscow that he had fond memories of the country.
The Putins returned to Moscow on Monday night.
- AP, Reuters
TITLE: Poll: Many See Baltics as 'Enemies'
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: About 20 percent of St. Petersburg residents perceive Estonia and Lithuania as Russia's "enemies," according to a poll by the locally based Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Center for Sociological and Scientific Research. Twenty-five percent of local residents feel this way about Latvia.
In the Leningrad Oblast, the figures are even higher, with roughly one-third of respondents viewing the Baltic countries as enemies of Russia. By comparison, the figures were only slightly higher for NATO, with 32 percent of St. Petersburg residents and 39 percent of oblast residents viewing that organization as "an enemy."
The survey, which was carried out in June and July, asked 2,000 St. Petersburg and oblast residents to describe the three Baltic states, the European Union, NATO and the United States as either "a trading partner," "an enemy" or "neutral."
Legislative Assembly Deputy Va ta ny ar Yagya, who is also the head of the World Politics Department of the International Relations Faculty of St. Petersburg State University, considers the results regarding the Baltic states alarming. "This percentage is high enough to be of concern for local and national politicians," he said. "They should be weighing their words more carefully when making statements concerning the Baltic states. Too many careless statements have been made, and it shows."
Vladimir Churov, deputy head of the city administration's External Affairs Committee, shared this point of view.
"We have a 2,000-year common history on the Baltic coast and, of course, we have a lot to tell each other," he said. "But a good future cannot be built on mutual recriminations."
However, both Yagya and Churov stated that negative attitudes toward the Baltic states are inflamed by real issues, one of the most sensitive of which is the history of World War II.
"Russia cannot be satisfied with a situation where the soldiers who fought on the Nazi side are given the same rights as veterans who fought on the side of the Allies," Churov said.
"People get angry when they read about war veterans being treated disrespectfully," Yagya commented.
"But there are multiple problems with Russian-speaking communities in these countries, and these problems need solutions," he added.
Julius Kraujelis, consul general of Lithuania in St. Petersburg, thinks that the results may have been skewed by the formulation of the question. "[The researchers] could have offered a milder description of a negative attitude," Kraujelis said.
He also attributed some of the negative attitudes to the Baltic states' desire to join NATO.
"We have been open about our intention to join NATO and do not see this step as a move against Russia," Kraujelis said. "Maintaining good relations with Russia is just as high on our list of priorities. It is very important."
Forty percent of respondents, both in the city and in the oblast, labeled the European Union as "a business partner," while less than 10 percent saw that organization as an enemy.
The United States was labeled an enemy by 25 percent of St. Petersburg residents and 30 percent of oblast residents, while 28 percent in the city and 22 percent in the oblast said that country was a business partner.
Overall, the survey revealed that St. Petersburg residents are somewhat more tolerant than oblast residents, with Churnov explaining the difference largely in economic terms.
"Living standards in most areas of the oblast are markedly lower than those in, for example, neighboring Estonia," he said. Poverty, he argued, leads people to look for external enemies.
"It has been only 10 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union," he added. "That is too short a historical period completely to get over all that turbulence."
TITLE: Palace Restorer To Be Named
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: On Sept. 10, the presidential administration will announce the results of a tender to carry out the restoration of the Konstantinovsky Palace in Strelna, according to Vladimir Kozhin, head of presidential administration.
Five companies have submitted bids in the tender, including the local firms 16th Trust, Vozrozhdeniye and Len stroi rekonstruktsiya. The other two bidders are the Czech company Gema Art and the Yugoslav company Om ni Strukture.
The total cost of the project, which will include the complete restoration of the palace and the surrounding park , will cost from $150 million to $170 million, according to Viktor Khrekov, a presidential administration spokesperson.
Olga Taratynova, deputy head of the St. Petersburg State Committee for the Control and Protection of Architectural Monuments, said that a detailed plan for the project and for the use of the space after renovation is nearing completion.
"The west wing of the palace will be a federal residential complex, while the east wing will be a museum," Tara ty nova said.
"It has already been decided that the museum will be given more space than the governmental residence," Taraty nova added.
Specialists from the State Hermitage Museum and the St. Petersburg Central Planning Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences are responsible for developing the plan.
"We will be ready to present the plan by Oct. 1," said Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the Hermitage.
"Our analysis of the current state of the palace has determined that an enormous amount of work will have to be done, both at the palace and in the neighboring park," Kozhin said. "Initially it was feared that we would have to remove the grottoes, which are nearly in ruins now, but an engineering solution has been found and the grottoes can be restored."
According to Kozhin, the reconstruction of the palace will be completed by May 2003, but it will take another two years to construct the planned commercial structures on the territory of the park ensemble. The plan calls for construction of a five-star hotel, a yacht club and a golf course.
Neither Khrekov nor Kozhin would estimate how much federal funding would be spent on the project, saying that the figures were still being analyzed. When a figure is determined, it will have to be approved by the State Duma.
"All the preliminary works so far have been funded from money coming from private donations," Khrekov said.
Kozhin said that the presidential administration has also discussed investment possibilities with the construction companies participating in the tender, trying to interest them in investing in the commercial projects around the palace.
The dedicated charitable fund created to finance the restoration has already collected over 26 million rubles ($867,000). Most of the contributors are based in St. Petersburg and Moscow, Kozhin said.
Governor Vladimir Yakovlev's guests would also be able to make use of the federal residence, Kozhin said.
TITLE: Chechen Head Enraged By Actions of Military
AUTHOR: By Yevgenia Borisova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Akhmad Kadyrov, the head of the Chechen administration, accused federal troops of not making his job any easier last week, saying that he personally knows the difficulties of trying to restore peaceful life to Chechnya.
Kadyrov said he had been unable to persuade even his nephew, who was killed on Aug. 16., to give up arms.
"Yes, my nephew - the son of my cousin - was killed in Alleroi," Kadyrov said at a news conference in Mos cow. "He fought. We insisted he leave the rebels. He was 22, but he refused and he perished in a street shoot-out."
His nephew was killed during an 11-day sweep of Alleroi, where federal troops were hunting for separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov. Maskhadov managed to escape the village.
During the operation, more than 50 villagers were subjected to military filtration, and nine of them were killed, the Committee of Chechen Refugees, which is based in Ingu shetia, said Wed nesday in a statement.
Kadyrov, who was appointed by Moscow to help restore federal control over the republic, expressed his frustration with the military.
"I wonder why it has taken so long, with the 80,000 or 90,000 troops they have and all their hardware, including satellites that can see everything from space," he said.
The troops should not be having so much trouble finding the rebel leaders, he said Wednesday.
"Ask any Chechen and he could show you the homes where the bandits live," Kadyrov was quoted by Interfax as saying.
"For a little cash they will take you to [Shamil] Basayev or Khattab. But the special services are not in a hurry to exterminate them."
Kadyrov said Thursday that he is supposed to tell his citizens that the federal troops are bringing law and order, but the troops undermine his authority by violating the law themselves.
"They surround whole villages and take anything they like and beat people. People then turn against the troops, they go to [Ali] Barayev or Khattab," he said. "I think the troops must be withdrawn and an interior ministry must be created here to work on specific cases. If they have information, they should go at night, knock on the door and make the arrest."
One of Kadyrov's responsibilities is to bring refugees back to Chechnya from Ingushetia and Georgia, but he said he cannot guarantee them jobs or safety.
The refugee camps in Ingushetia were becoming "resting places for the rebels," he said, and 20 fighters were recently arrested there.
He complained that none of the 1.08 billion rubles ($37 million) included in the federal budget for restoring housing and the economy has been allocated.
Kadyrov said the situation in Chechnya is like the weather.
"Today the sun shines, tomorrow it is foggy and the day after tomorrow it rains. Sometimes it looks good, then it changes completely. Soldiers perish, and peaceful civilians are also killed. But there is still hope."
******************
At least one woman died when a powerful explosion hit the heavily guarded regional government compound in Grozny, capital of Russia's rebel Chechnya region, on Monday, Interfax news agency reported.
Interfax quoted the head of Chechnya's Russian military administration, Sergei Kizyun, saying a bomb appeared to have been planted on the second floor of the main government building.
The Russian-installed Chechen government of Akhmad Kadyrov was holding its weekly meeting on the floor above. Interfax said at least one woman was killed. Nobody at the government meeting was hurt, but it was not yet clear if there were other casualties in the compound.
- Reuters
TITLE: City Introduces Paid Parking
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalyev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: City Hall has once again introduced paid municipal parking lots to the city, in apparent defiance of a Russian Supreme Court decision last fall banning paid parking in cities that had introduced a sales tax.
Earlier this month, Governor Vla di mir Yakovlev approved the creation of four downtown, paid parking zones. The first of the parking zones, a 15-car lot located on Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa and a 30-car lot on Italianskaya Ulitsa, have already begun working, charging drivers 20 rubles per hour. An additional lot opened on Konyushennaya Ploshchad on Aug. 30, while a third lot on Ploshchad Vosstaniya will open sometime later this month.
The city first introduced paid parking throughout the city center in 1996 in what city officials called an effort to reduce traffic congestion.
However, in the fall of 2000, the Supreme Court ruled that such parking lots violated a federal law that forbids a number of local taxes and surcharges - including parking fees - in cities that have introduced a sales tax. St. Petersburg introduced a 5 percent sales tax in January 1999.
St. Petersburg was the only major city in Russia to end its paid-parking program after the Supreme Court decision. Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Rostov-na-Donu, Ryazan and other cities with sales taxes continued the practice despite the ruling.
Now City Hall has devised a new tactic to get around the court's ruling. The City Property Committee has signed an agreement with a municipally owned commercial structure called City Parking Center, which will administer the parking lots.
In accordance with the agreement, the city will rent out the spaces to the City Parking Center, which in turn will staff the lots and accept limited responsibility for cars that are stolen or damaged while under its care. According to the agreement, City Parking Center will reimburse 3,000 rubles (about $100) for a stolen radio and 30,000 rubles (about $1,000) for a stolen car.
"This had to be done in order to find additional funding to repair city streets," said Vladimir Kuznetsov, a spokesperson for the City Hall Maintenance Committee, last week
City Parking Center will pay $7 per square meter to the City Property Committee for each of two 3,000-square-meter parking lots, according to Andrei Podobed, the head of City Parking Center.
But Alexander Ulyanov, a member of the St. Petersburg Lawyers' Association, said the new system could also be contested in court.
"I doubt that they can rent out a piece of a road. Roads are an object of public use [according to federal law]," Ulyanov said.
Last week, the City Prosecutor's Office sent a letter to the administration of the Central District demanding that the paid lots be shut down.
Although drivers were in general unhappy with the lots, Podobed stressed that there were still plenty of free parking options in the center of St. Petersburg.
On Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa, for instance, only 15 of 424 parking spots must be paid for. Podobed said that plans to set up additional parking lots, covering 500 of downtown's nearly 10,000 parking spots, are currently being finalized.
TITLE: President Congratulates Moscow and Students
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - As downtown Moscow turned into a giant pedestrian party zone over the weekend, President Vladimir Putin congratulated Muscovites on the "double holiday" of the capital city's 854th birthday and the traditionally festive beginning of the school year.
"It is a truly lucky coincidence that Sept. 1 [the traditional first day of classes, now dubbed the Day of Knowledge] and City Day are being celebrated on the same day," Putin said in televised remarks on Saturday, as he helped kick off Moscow's weekend-long celebration.
The president applauded the capital and its leadership, and used the occasion to reiterate his support for market reforms.
"Moscow proves in the best possible way that a market economy must and can work effectively in the interests of the people," Interfax quoted Putin as saying during the afternoon ceremony that took place on Tverskaya Ploshchad.
The president openly praised Mayor Yury Luzh kov, thanking him and saying that Mos cow "has been lucky with Yurys" - referring both to Luzhkov, the city's mayor of the past 10 years, and his namesake, Yury Dolgoruky, the medieval prince credited with founding Moscow in 1147.
Putin, himself a native of St. Petersburg, acknowledged in his speech that Moscow - disproportionately privileged throughout the Soviet era, and still a magnet for the country's money and resources - elicits "a diverse spectrum of emotion in the country's other cities."
Nonetheless, Putin said that Russians should be proud of their capital, since, "the best and most talented people have always converged on Moscow."
Prior to the the ceremony, which was attended by Luzhkov and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II and featured a theatrical show involving about 1,500 performers, Putin addressed Moscow students on the occasion of Sept. 1, the start of a new school year.
Although the start of classes was postponed until Monday morning, all schools and most colleges held special ceremonies to welcome new first-year students.
In a welcoming speech to students at Moscow State Pedagogical University, Putin hailed the federal government's draft budget for the upcoming year 2002, in which funding for education will exceed military spending. Last week, Putin identified education as a state priority.
"Nothing is possible - not building a democratic society, not creating a market economy - nothing is possible without educated people," he said in televised excerpts of the welcoming speech.
"We have to be honest: The state has not been paying enough attention to education in recent years," Putin said, repeating plans that were announced last week to double teachers' salaries by the end of the year. The president left Sunday for an official visit to Finland.
Both Saturday and Sunday, as students enjoyed their last days of summer freedom, the city was celebrating its birthday with parades, outdoor concerts and athletic competitions, including a relay race along the outer ring road.
According to police statistics, more than 800,000 people showed up Saturday in downtown Moscow alone, flooding major squares like Tverskaya, Pushkin, Teatralnaya and Lubyanka, where the main festivities were held. Traffic was closed off at the major event sites.
To ensure that there would be fine weather during Luzh kov's trademark extravaganza, the city arranged for cloud seeding over the weekend, Interfax reported.
Police reported that some 120 people were detained on the first day of celebrations for petty hooliganism and public drunkenness, as 7,500 police officers were deployed to ensure public order, Interfax said Sunday. The sale of alcoholic beverages in glass containers was banned downtown during the festivities.
The busiest man in Moscow this weekend certainly seemed to be Luzh kov. Running around the city from event to event, the mayor managed to unveil a renovated footbridge near the Kiev Station, a new city square, a sculptural ensemble and a major highway interchange.
Saturday's celebrations culminated with a 25-minute fireworks-and-laser show over the Moscow River. The display lit up the sky from aboard a tugboat that was docked in front of the Rossia Hotel, while a specialized firefighting boat operated jets of green laser-lit water.
There were various concert performances on Pushkin, Teatralnaya, Lubyanskaya and Tverskaya squares with music for most of Saturday and Sunday.
The centerpiece of Sunday's celebrations, however, was the unveiling of a 15-piece sculptural composition that was created by émigré artist Mik hail Shemyakin on Bolotnaya Ploshchad.
The monument - called "Children, the Victims of Adults' Sins" - which is the artist's first work to appear in Moscow, depicts the figures of two blindfolded children - a boy and a girl - who are surrounded by 13 statues symbolizing dangerous vices such as ignorance, indifference and drunkenness.
TITLE: Visa Winners Facing A Long Legal Battle
AUTHOR: By Elizabeth Wolfe
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Tatyana Leshchinskaya and her husband Ernest assumed they would get their visas last November when they went to the U.S. Embassy for an interview.
Leshchinskaya was one of thousands of applicants worldwide who had won the "green-card lottery," or the diversity immigrant visa program that gives citizens of designated countries and their immediate family members under 21 the chance for permanent U.S. residency.
According to Leshchinskaya, the consular officer asked her to sign her name on a piece of paper 15 or 20 times. After comparing the signatures to her original application, mailed in October 1999 from her sister's home in New Jersey, the officer said he wasn't convinced that Le shchin skaya had signed the original application and suggested that her sister had forged it.
He stamped her passport to note that her request for immigration had been rejected.
"When I signed the application, it never occurred to me that the matter of a signature would be so crucial," said Leshchinskaya, 55, who has a secretarial job lined up in New Jersey that she's not sure will still be waiting for her, if she ever gets there. "My signature is inconsistent," she said, "I can't help it."
"She did sign it. I witnessed it," said Yelena Fridman, Leshchinskaya's sister who is in Moscow on a visit. "We need to win [this case] because she is like an outcast and a liar now. And she is not."
All rejected winners like Leshchinskaya have until Sept. 30, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service deadline for the 2001 lottery, to appeal.
But Leshchinskaya isn't battling alone. She and six other Russian lottery winners who claim to have been wrongly rejected on signature grounds are now being represented by a small Moscow law firm, White and Associates.
"The crux of our argument is that there are objective ways to prove that these people signed their applications: the size of the paper, fingerprints and, the most important, forensics," said Kenneth White, an American who set up his own practice here in 1993 and concentrates partly on business immigration to the United States and Canada.
White found his first client in April when, on a visit to the immigration section of the embassy to check up on another case, he overheard a man complaining to officials. After not getting very far on the case, but suspecting that the problem could be more widespread, White gave an interview to Inostranets, a Moscow newspaper tailored to immigrants and travelers. Since that interview was published Aug. 14, White's firm has received two or three calls a day from people making similar claims.
The consular section of the U.S. Embassy said last Wednesday that it does not comment on individual cases, but defended its actions by saying that its officers are trained, some more than others, to recognize forged signatures.
"In every case where we suspected [signature fraud] and initially denied someone on the basis solely of signature fraud, we have asked that person to come back," said James Warlick, the new consular general who arrived this month. "Everyone last year got a second hearing. And not from the officer that did the initial interview, but from a fresh perspective."
Leshchinskaya, for one, says that she was never invited back for another look.
Warlick said the lottery program, started in 1996 by the INS to diversify the immigrant pool, has been "enormously successful" in giving that opportunity to people who would otherwise not be eligible for immigration. In this year's lottery, millions of people worldwide are vying for 50,000 spaces, selected randomly by computer.
White has recommended that his clients hire an independent forensics expert, which costs $600 or more in the United States, to examine copies of the original signatures - provided by the Moscow consulate - with signatures on other official documents, like passports. If necessary, the opinions will be presented to the embassy and would be used if the cases ever go to court.
Warlick said that the consulate would look at the expert opinions, but that they were no guarantee of overturning a decision.
TITLE: Nazi Slaves Receive First Reparations
AUTHOR: By Robin Munro
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russian survivors of World War II Nazi concentration camps on Friday received their first compensation payments from a fund created by German government and industry, as leaders hailed the closure of a black period between the two countries.
At a formal presentation ceremony in Moscow's House of Peoples' Friendship, 10 former slave laborers received payouts of 7,500 deutsche marks ($3,505), half of their 15,000-mark entitlement from the fund.
Germany is paying some 10 billion marks to almost 2 million survivors of Nazi slavery and forced labor in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Russian claimants are to share 835 million marks.
"This is serious material support, because I am really in need now," The Associated Press quoted Yevdokia Dyomina, a childless 77-year-old widow, as saying. Leaning on a cane, tears in her eyes, Dyomina said she had suffered leg trouble ever since she was seized by the Nazis and sent to Germany at age 19. "[Now] I will be able to go somewhere to fix my health a bit," she said.
Michael Jansen, head of the German Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future Foundation, said the payments were in recognition of the suffering of prisoners and deportees under the Nazis, and of Germany's acknowledgment of its responsibility for crimes committed by Hitler's regime.
"I know that this cannot be the final word on the past, but we can open a new page in our relationship," he said at the ceremony, also attended by Deputy Prime Minister Valentina Matviyenko, Labor Minister Alexander Pochinok, former concentration-camp inmates and officials of the German foundation's Russian partner, the Mutual Understanding and Reconciliation Foundation.
Pochinok assured recipients that the payouts would not be taxed.
Matviyenko said the money could not compensate for the suffering of former inmates, "but can be seen as a token of the new relationship between Germany and Russia."
Irina Kharina, head of the Society of Former Concentration Camp Inmates, said she was glad that prisoners of war who had been in concentration camps would now also be entitled to payouts.
She and other former concentration-camp inmates spoke of their sadness that the payments had come so long after the war and that many fellow inmates had not lived long enough to receive them. She pleaded for the payouts to be made in one tranche, rather than the planned two, because the survivors were so old that many would not live long enough to receive the second tranche.
The German foundation has allocated $5.2 million for the first list of 2,300 claimants approved by Berlin, said Kai Hennig, spokesperson for the foundation.
While the 10 people who received payouts at Friday's ceremony got half of their total entitlement, claimants in other categories are to receive only 35 percent of their entitlement in the first round of payouts. To this group, estimated to number slightly more than 7,000 people, will be added the previously ineligible former prisoners of war.
A second round of payouts will begin only after all those who have claimed payment by Dec. 31 are verified as eligible and receive their first payments. The process is expected to take four years.
About 30,000 people who were in captivity in Austria are entitled to similar payments from a 750-million Austrian shilling ($50 million) fund.
TITLE: Regional TV Station Falls Victim to Takeover
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - An NTV-style takeover has occurred at TVK, the oldest privately owned television station in Lipetsk, and a regular critic of the region's governor.
Security police last Wednesday locked out the 100 staff members and helped to install a new general director, Dmitry Kolbasko.
"We always offered our audience a point of view different from that of our governor's office," ousted TVK news editor Ilya Sakharov said Thursday by telephone. "Thus, local official agencies, like the Tax Police or fire departments, have been very persistent in their attempts to close us down in the past two years."
Lipetsk regional administration spokesperson Alexander Sarik did not conceal his satisfaction. "The company now belongs to predictable people whom the governor's office has known for a long time," Sarik said.
Kolbasko appointed his brother, Alexei, as TVK editor, Kommersant reported.
Kolbasko, who once worked for TVK as a computer programmer, went on the air on Wednesday and announced that he would not change the station's policy. But the station did not broadcast Thursday, and only one journalist and four technicians opted to stay with the new management, Sakharov said.
The dispute over TVK began in 1999 when Mikhail Trufanov, who founded the station in 1990 and owned 70 percent of it, sold a 51 percent stake to the Moscow-based bank Zenit. The sale irritated the regional administration, and it encouraged other shareholders to file a lawsuit, said ousted general director Alexander Lykov.
Sarik denied the administration was involved in the suit, but expressed his negative feelings toward Zenit bank. "We know that Zenit is closely affiliated with people who desperately strive for power in the region," he said. Zenit's major shareholders are the property committee of Tatarstan, with 31 percent, and Tatneft, with 25 percent.
The Kuntsevsky Municipal Court in Moscow ruled in December that TVK's deal with Zenit was legal, TVK lawyer Lyudmila Mironova said.
Nonetheless, she said, the administration-controlled joint-stock company Energia, which holds 30 percent of TVK, called a shareholders meeting for August to elect its new management.
The Kuntsevsky court in Moscow and the Lipetsk District Court ruled against the meeting.
But the meeting was held Tuesday and attended only by Energia lawyer Oleg Turin, who elected Kolbasko the new TVK head, Mironova said.
Neither Turin nor Kolbasko was available for comment Thursday. All eight telephone lines at TVK were dead.
TITLE: CIS Conducts Air-Defense Tests
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: ASHULUK, Astrakhan Region - An increasingly aggressive NATO is demanding that Russia place its nuclear arsenal under international supervision. Poland is insisting that its border with Belarus be redrawn. And Islamic extremists in Central Asia have received support for carrying out terrorist attacks in the Russian heartland.
Suddenly, at 10:08 a.m., Moscow air- command radars register a violation of Russian air space by a flying object. The commander puts air-defense units on high alert and orders the destruction of the incoming object, which is located and targeted. An anti-ballistic missile pierces the sky and obliterates the projectile in a ball of fire. But two more are detected ....
Welcome to Combat Commonwealth 2001, the fourth annual joint military exercise for the Commonwealth of Independent States' Unified Air Defense forces at the Ashuluk firing range in the Astrakhan Region, more than 1,000 kilometers southeast of Moscow.
The main goal of the exercise, completed Thursday by delegates from Russia, Belarus, Armenia and Tajikistan, is to increase battle readiness and improve coordination among CIS member states. But it also serves to boost morale, allowing fellow soldiers from former Soviet republics a chance to rub shoulders and get a taste of combat situations that cannot be taught in a classroom.
Just as last year, the simulated battle was coordinated by Russian Air Force Commander Anatoly Kornukov and supervised by CIS defense ministers. But unlike previous years, Russia's first civilian military chief, Sergei Ivanov, opted to sport denim jeans and a plain white shirt, putting him in stark contrast to his camouflaged, shoulder-strapped colleagues.
As air-defense units of the four participating countries took turns launching missiles from S-125, S-300PS and S-300PM Favorit systems that blew out of the sky simulated incoming enemy aerial targets nicknamed strizh (swift), bekas (snipe) and kaban (boar), Lieutenant General Arkady Barsukov, head of combat training for the Russian Air Force, stood atop the command tower under a camouflaged net barking out commentary. Two hours and more than a dozen explosions later, the exercise was over.
"Combat Commonwealth is no show-off .... The combat units - and I would emphasize that - didn't know the time their targets would be launched," Ivanov said.
CIS members are moving from a unified to a single air-defense system, Ivanov said. "The single system of air defense is not a fiction but already a reality," he said.
Kornukov said the exercises would continue but, given the expense, would be held only every other year, and with more participants. Few, however, doubted that the 2.5 million rubles ($85,000) spent on the event was worth it.
"These [units] know the equipment very well, understand how it works and can draw schemes with their eyes closed," said Russian air-defense systems test engineer Lieutenant Colonel Valery Dolgopoltsev. "But some have never been in a combat environment. The moment of pressing the button that fires the missile puts them under a lot of stress. They need to experience that so they are calm when they do it for real."
The once-mighty shield that covered the entire Soviet Union ceased to exist practically overnight with the collapse of communism a decade ago, forcing Russia to change its defensive strategy. What was once an all-encompassing protective umbrella became a selective system that covered just a few major cities, strategic industrial centers and nuclear arsenals.
Of the former republics, only Belarus and Kazakhstan managed to keep some sort of similar system intact, with the others seeing their systems fall into total disarray. The S-75 and S-125 systems they inherited became useless scraps of metal while the specialists trained to operate and maintain them fled.
Participants said that if it wasn't for the efforts of Russia and Belarus to undertake joint training exercises like Combat Commonwealth, the whole region's security would be threatened.
"In the past few years we brought the air-defense forces of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan off their knees. [What they had] was scrap metal ... but with the help of Russia and Belarus their systems were improved to functioning condition and their units were trained," Kornukov said.
This unified system was created in 1995 by the heads of 10 CIS nations: Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Ukraine.
Seven countries participated in last year's exercise, but this year was larger geographically, with the expansion onto five firing ranges.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Nikitin Honored
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has awarded environmental activist Alexander Nikitin a five-month research fellowship in Washington, the State Department said Friday.
Nikitin, the former navy officer who exposed environmental problems connected with Russia's Northern Fleet, will do research on nongovernmental organizations and their relations with authorities, it said in a statement.
Nikitin was charged with treason in 1996 and jailed for 10 months. In December 1999, he was acquitted of all charges. He is one of two recipients of the annual Galina Starovoitova fellowships. The other recipient is William Smirnov, a political scientist based in Moscow. They will be based at the Woodrow Wilson International Center.
Summit Questioned
MOSCOW (WP) - The Kremlin hinted Friday that President Vladimir Putin might not meet President George W. Bush at his Texas ranch for a planned November summit on missile defense and other issues.
A high-ranking Kremlin aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, told RIA-Novosti the meeting was "not an end in itself'' and depends on what happens when the leaders get together in Shanghai at an economic summit in October.
Interfax quoted a Kremlin aide as saying a November meeting is "absolutely unnecessary'' if its purpose is solely to nurture the friendly spirit of the leaders' June meeting in Slovenia.
In Washington, asked how confident the administration is that the Texas meeting will take place, White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer said, "I think there's no question that [it] will occur."
Renewed Censorship?
MOSCOW (AP) - President Vla di mir Putin's spokesperson on Chechnya has called for a law banning the publication or broadcast of Chechen-rebel statements in Russian media, suggesting too many such statements were creeping into print and the airwaves despite government pressure.
"This is the internal choice of an editor, a journalist, and we must admit that not everybody manages to make that internal choice properly," Sergei Yastrzhembsky said Friday in an interview with Interfax. "Therefore, the law must regulate this question."
He repeated the official stance ruling out a peace agreement with rebel leaders such as Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov. A peace deal signed Aug. 31, 1996, in Khasavyurt to end the first war, he said, "can well be characterized as treason, and this is exactly how the army views these documents."
Census Campaign
MOSCOW (SPT) - As the State Statistics Committee gears up for the October 2002 census, it is planning a multimillion-dollar campaign to convince citizens to cooperate when "counters" come knocking at the door.
At a news conference Friday, committee head Vladimir Sokolin said $8 million is to be spent on "explanatory" work with the population, because people need to be convinced to reveal information about themselves.
He said about half a million counters will be sent out door-knocking to gather information for the census. They are to ask citizens about a dozen questions on topics including the sources of their income and the real estate they own.
Sokolin tried to assure reporters that all personal information the counters obtain will forever remain behind the walls of the statistics committee. Even the Federal Security Service, the Interior Ministry and the Tax Police won't have access to it, he said. The counters themselves will carry identification documents so good they would be "too expensive to forge," he added.
The federal budget is to allocate 4 billion rubles ($136.2 million) for the census, and another 1.5 billion rubles is to come from local budgets, according to the State Statistics Committee.
Sokolin said he expected the census would put Russia's population at 145 million to 147 million. The population is currently estimated at 144 million and the trend for it to decline seems be continuing, but Sokolin said illegal aliens would also be counted in the census and could be expected to boost the total.
Belarus Riot Drill
OBUZ-LESNOVSKY, Belarus (Reuters) - Belarussian troops staged anti-riot exercises Friday, a week before the country holds presidential elections.
Watched at a military training ground by President Alexander Lukashenko, dressed in full military uniform, special forces rehearsed tactics to quell riots and seal off Minsk in case of an uprising.
Witnesses said troops practiced with dogs while snatch squads rehearsed dragging away violent protesters as officers showed Lukashenko contingency plans on a large-scale map. The event was part of general military exercises that also involved troops from Russia.
Two Capitals
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - During a visit to St. Petersburg over the weekend, Duma Speaker Gennady Seleznyov stated that the idea of creating a joint parliamentary center for the Russian-Belarussian union to be located in St. Petersburg "had not died," Interfax reported Sunday.
Seleznyov noted that "many states have two officially recognized capital cities" and that such a practice was "useful" because it facilitated the development of the necessary infrastructure, Seleznyov said.
The speaker also commented on the recent wave of allegations against Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko claiming that he had organized a death squad to eliminate his polictical opponents. Seleznyov said that "these publications were a planned campaign of provocation aimed against President Lukashenko." Seleznyov also expressed confidence that Lukashenko would win the Sept. 9 poll, Interfax reported.
Kursk Setbacks?
MOSCOW (AP) - Technical plans for raising the mangled bow of the Kursk submarine should be ready by October or November, Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov said Saturday, according to Interfax.
The announcement came a day after Klebanov announced that the raising of the rest of the vessel, set for Sept. 15, may be postponed for a week because rough weather in the Barents Sea has delayed preparatory work.
The statement by Klebanov, who is in charge of the salvage operation, was the first official signal that the lifting could be pushed back.
Klebanov said officials were still sticking to the Sept. 15 target date and they expected to wrap up the operation by Sept. 20 to 21, when the submarine is to be put in dry dock near Murmansk. However, he said the date for ending the operation could "theoretically" be pushed back to Sept. 25 to 27, news agencies reported.
TITLE: Duma Set To Fight Kremlin's Budget 'Bluff'
AUTHOR: By Torrey Clark
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The State Duma's top budget official accused the government of underestimating next year's budget surplus in order to spend up to $6 billion without any parliamentary oversight.
Alexander Zhukov, chairman of the Duma's budget and tax committee, vowed on Friday to fight what he called intentional deception on the part of Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov's government, which submitted its 2002 draft budget Aug. 26. Zhukov's comments also appeared to challenge President Vla dimir Putin, who called every line item in the draft "justified."
Zhukov said the 2002 budget is a mixed bag: Unlike the initial 2001 budget, it figures in debt payments and sets clearer priorities for social spending. But it takes tax revenues from the regions' coffers, and its biggest flaw is that it underestimates inflation and gross domestic product and, thus, revenues.
"I believe the government has done it on purpose, leaving itself total freedom" to spend excess revenues as it sees fit before showing the Duma the tab at the end of the year, Zhukov said at a news conference Friday to greet a new political season.
The government forecasts 2002 revenues to be 1.998 trillion rubles ($63.4 billion) and spending to be 1.872 trillion rubles ($62.4 billion). Although the Unity party has supported the budget, the government is in for a fight when the budget comes up for first reading Sept. 28 unless changes are made, Zhukov said.
"We will try to find all of the funds the government is trying to hide," Duma Speaker Gennady Seleznyov said Friday, Itar-Tass reported.
The government plays down the amount of likely excess revenues, and Putin threw his support behind the budget plan last week. "It should be clear to everyone that all budget figures are justified," Putin said in a televised cabinet meeting.
Analysts expect that Putin will be able to ram through the budget as he did last year, and even Zhukov predicted it would be passed in all four readings by Jan. 1, but he said much of the bargaining could be avoided if revenues were revised.
"We need to leave behind the traditional budget horse trading, which everyone is sick of and which in the past several years has concerned the fight for so-called 'additional' budget revenues. Transferring additional revenues in full to a financial reserve or a stabilization fund is correct, but only when revenues and expenditures are realistic," Zhukov said.
Since 1999, actual revenues have exceeded budget revenues by up to almost $11 billion. In the first half of 2001, excess revenues reached 225 billion rubles ($7.7 billion). At a meeting Thursday, the government estimated excess revenues will be about 300 billion rubles ($10.2 billion) for the year. Zhukov said 350 billion rubles (about $12 billion) is more likely.
"Unfortunately, the tendency we've seen for the past three years is continuing : Government revenues are significantly underestimated. And it is undoubtedly a negative characteristic of the 2002 budget," Zhukov said.
Even under the most conservative scenario, excess revenues in 2002 could reach 150 billion ($5.1 billion) to 200 billion rubles ($6.8 billion), Zhukov said. Estimated VAT revenue itself is 70 billion ($2.4 billion) to 100 billion rubles ($3.4 billion) too low, he said.
Tax revenues have been underestimated mainly because GDP and inflation are underestimated, analysts say. If inflation exceeds the budget estimates of 10 to 13 percent, tax and other revenues will increase accordingly, while expenditures remain stable. Inflation will be hard to control because of tariff hikes and budgeted salary increases, Zhukov said. Analysts foresee inflation of 15 to 18 percent.
The budget assumes nominal GDP of 10.6 trillion rubles ($362 billion), but 11 trillion ($375 billion) is more realistic, said Zhukov.
Some analysts say oil prices are likely to be lower than the government's estimate of $22 per barrel, and this could narrow the gap between the budget estimates and the Duma's expectations.
The government has committed to setting up a financial reserve using 7.9 billion rubles ($270 million) of the budgeted 126.5-billion-ruble surplus as well as any excess revenues, privatization proceeds and foreign borrowing. The reserve is intended to provide a cushion if oil prices, and the economy, take a nosedive.
"Forming a financial reserve is an important and positive endeavor on the part of the government," Zhukov said. The country faces a debt hump in 2003 of up to $19.5 billion. The reserve has already been seeded with undistributed 2001 budget funds, he said.
A well-planned reserve is an effective debt-management technique, and as such, it could also lower Russia's cost of borrowing as early as 2002, said Niclas Sundstrom, a senior analyst at Salomon Smith Barney. Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Kolotukhin said earlier this month that Russia may borrow up to $2 billion in 2002. The government should be able to pay off its 2003 debt without issuing Eurobonds by using surplus and excess revenues, said Zhukov.
However, Zhukov said, no laws regulate how the government spends excess revenues.
"We need to define by law exactly how the reserve is formed and where the money is directed. If external debt payments are the issue, we need to state it. Otherwise, we are creating a parallel budget that is formed and distributed at the executive's discretion rather than by law," he said.
The government may have been using existing excess revenues over the past 12 to 18 months to buy back debt quietly before it matures in 2003. State officials have proposed open auctions for buy-backs next year, which would improve transparency, say analysts. "I think they are already doing it but don't want it broadcast," Zhukov said.
The country does not have a clear mechanism for buying back debt ahead of maturity, so it is most likely buying through local banks, said Al Breach of Goldman Sachs.
The budget has a clearer set of priorities this year than in previous years, said Zhukov, praising salary increases for state employees such as judges and teachers and for the military. Another positive change is a drastic cut in the number of social programs and an increase in the amount of funds allocated. However, the budget allocates less money to the real sector, including industry, agriculture, road-building and investment, he said.
"The most painful issue" is the federal government's increased control over the regions by shifting the division of tax revenues to 60-40 in its favor, Zhukov said. The budget code gives the regions the right to 50 percent. "The government has increased expenditures to other levels of power. That is, there is a concentration of funds at the federal level in order to redistribute them from the center."
TITLE: Ministries Feud Over Control of E-Russia
AUTHOR: By Elizabeth Wolfe
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Just months before the federal government's much-hyped "Electronic Russia" program swings into action, its main initiators, the Communications Ministry and the Economic Development and Trade Ministry, still haven't decided who's in charge.
Communications Minister Leonid Reiman sent a letter to the Economic Development and Trade Ministry on Aug. 24 requesting his ministry chair the interagency commission that will oversee the realization of E-Russia, a $2.6 billion program to boost e-commerce and the Internet that is set to start in January and run through 2010.
This would give Reiman's ministry more control over the purse strings, starting with the 350 million rubles ($11.9 million) allotted the program in the budget plan submitted to the State Duma last week.
But the Economic Development and Trade Ministry thinks it is better suited to head the commission with day-to-day operational control left to the Communications Ministry.
"There was an agreement between the ministries that [Economic Development and Trade Minister German] Gref would be in charge of the coordinating commission, but now the Communications Ministry thinks otherwise," said Tseren Tserenov, in charge of E-Russia for the Economic Development and Trade Ministry, the program's author.
"It's not a fight," said Tserenov. "We just think we could do a better job overseeing this project because the new economy doesn't just mean getting the Internet to people, but a change in lifestyle and the way government works."
Communications Ministry spokes person Sergei Grigorenko said the Aug. 24 letter was simply a single step along an ongoing compromise process between the ministries. "All matters of disagreement have been decided," he said Friday. "The program will be realized by several agencies. The Communications Ministry will coordinate them."
Tserenov said Sunday they had received only one notice and that Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov would likely make a final decision on who would end up in charge of the commission in a few days.
At a cabinet meeting on July 5, ministers approved the program, appointing the Communications Ministry as "coordinator" at Gref's request, Tserenov said. In E-Russia documents, the Economic Development and Trade Ministry still appears as the government body responsible for developing and commissioning the program.
Half of E-Russia's financing will come from the federal budget and a third will be provided by regional administrations. The amount allocated in the 2002 draft budget is only about one-tenth the amount originally proposed, though Tserenov said they could expect larger tranches in the future if E-Russia proves successful.
TITLE: Russian Programmers Angered by U.S. Case
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia warned its computer experts Friday of the dangers of visiting the United States after a Russian software designer was arrested there for violating a controversial new law.
In July, Dmitry Sklyarov became the first person to be arrested on charges of selling technology designed to circumvent a 1998 U.S. copyright-protection law. Formally arraigned on Thursday, he faces up to 25 years in jail if convicted.
"We want to point out to all Russian specialists cooperating with U.S. firms in computer programming and software design that whatever the outcome of Sklyarov's case they may fall under the jurisdiction of the 1998 act on the territory of the United States," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which upholds copyright protection in computer and electronic programs, has sparked controversy among legal experts, although many U.S. businesses favor it.
Sklyarov's arrest and arraignment have provoked outrage in this country's programming industry.
Programmers from St. Petersburg to Novosibirsk are talking about the charges brought against Sklyarov, a 26-year-old Muscovite arrested in Las Vegas after he spoke about his program, which lets readers disable encryption software for electronic books. His employer, Moscow-based ElcomSoft, also faces charges.
In Moscow on Thursday, the day Sklyarov was arraigned in San Jose, California, a group of protestors tried to march in front of the U.S. Embassy but were stopped by the police.
"It's rubbish," said Gregory Nickonov, the chief technical officer for Actis Systems, an e-business services concern that provides technical help to companies. "Most people in the IT and software industries in Russia have begun to think U.S. law is crazy. It's the same as buying a loaf of bread and when you find the middle isn't baked, you come back to show the baker and get put in jail."
People here say they are angry, mainly because they think Sklyarov was singled out unjustly.
"The image of Russian programmers now has a new negative side," said Natalya Kaspersky, chief executive of Kaspersky Lab, Russia's leading anti-virus software company.
Even before the Sklyarov case, Russia was battling an image as a center of software pirating. After the Soviet Union collapsed and wages fell, Russia plunged into an economic free fall and pirating flourished. Today, street-side shops are packed with a wide array of pirated software.
ElcomSoft is one of the few Russian companies that creates commercial software products for marketing outside the country.
Created in 1990, ElcomSoft began writing software on order from companies like Hyundai and Visa International. By 1996, the company's two founding brothers, Alexander and Vladimir Katalov, started working on their own software. Now they sell products like software that bypasses lost passwords.
"We decided it's better to try to create our own programs - that's more interesting, more alive," Alexander Katalov said by phone from California, where he is participating in the legal proceedings with Sklyarov.
The company employs about 20 programmers, who work from their homes in different cities in Russia.
- NYT, Reuters
TITLE: Miller Cleans House, Taps St. Pete Natives
AUTHOR: By Torrey Clark
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Alexei Miller added to the numbers of hometown products grabbing top spots in Moscow on his 100th day as CEO of Gazprom, sacking the right-hand man of his predecessor and installing a fellow St. Petersburger to run the company's "treasury," Gaz prombank. At an operational meeting Monday, Mil ler replaced Deputy CEO Vyacheslav Sheremet, who together with Mil ler's predecessor, Rem Vyakhirev, presided over what even President Vla dimir Putin acknowledged as massive asset-stripping that made Gazprom synonymous with bad corporate governance. On the same day, Gazprom, which controls 97 percent of its pocket bank Gaz prombank, voted to replace Vyak hi rev ally Viktor Tarasov as the bank's CEO. Tarasov was replaced by Deputy Finance Minister Yury Lvov, former head of Bank St. Petersburg and Putin's pointman on anti-money-laundering legislation. Analysts said the two-pronged move - Miller's first major step since he ousted Vyakhirev in a boardroom coup orchestrated by Putin in May - further tightened his, and the government's, control over the company's cash flows. "Sheremet used to control the bank accounts. Who controls them going forward is the key to whether this is a sign of more reform at Gazprom," said William Browder, managing director of Hermitage Capital Management and an an outspoken defender of minority shareholders in Gazprom and other natural monopolies. "It is a tradition that people are judged by their first 100 days. On the last day, Miller got rid of Sheremet, Vyakhirev's heir," said Ivan Mazalov, oil-and-gas analyst at Troika Dialog. Miller transferred Sheremet's duties to Pyotr Rodionov, a deputy CEO and "one of the least controversial figures under Vyakhirev," according to Mazalov. Miller also swept away three other Vyak hirev associates at Gazprom: Alexan der Pushkin, Nikolai Guslisty and Yury Goryainov, the former deputy CEOs in charge of, respectively, exports to the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Baltics, procurement, and capital expenditures and construction. Yury Komarov, the head of exports to Europe, takes over the CIS and Baltics briefs, while Sergei Lukash replaces Guslisty, and Mikhail Axelrod replaces Goryainov. Gazprom said in a statement that the move was aimed at better coordinating its export policy to Europe, the CIS and the Baltics, as well as potential Asian markets, especially China, Reuters reported. The changes have to be officially approved by the Gazprom board, but analysts said it was essentially a done deal. Analysts also praised the developments as the first step in the right direction but cautioned that the company had a long way to go to reach corporate respectability. "It is a small step on a very, very long journey. But you have to cheer every step," said Steve Dashevsky, oil- and-gas analyst at Aton. "Gazprom is too big for its own good. Before it was run in the interests of the managers, then the government, then the shareholders. Now it is run in the interests of the government. It will be a while before it is run for the shareholders," he said. "The easiest way to stop misuse of assets is to take firm control over all of the financial flows. The way you do thatis to take control of the bank, which is Gaz prom bank, and you also replace the guy in charge of the financial unit, which used to be Sheremet," Dashevsky said. Gazprombank had capital of $570 million and assets of $3.2 billion as of July 1, according to Interfax Rating Agency. Although Gazprom itself is not a major borrower, eight Gazprom business partners account for about 68 percent of the bank's 48.7 billion ruble ($1.7 billion) loan portfolio. "This risk concentration is enormous," said Interfax Rating Agency deputy chief Mik ha il Matovnikov.
TITLE: Mosenergo Chief Saves Job in Hospital
AUTHOR: By Alla Startseva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Mosenergo chief Alexander Remezov checked into the hospital with a heart condition ahead of a hotly contested shareholders meeting Friday, temporarily trumping efforts by parent company Unified Energy Systems (UES) to sack him. UES, owner of 51 percent of the Moscow power monopoly, had vowed to sack Remezov, but after his sudden illness opted instead to use its majority on the Mosenergo board to "send him on vacation" indefinitely and postponed counting Friday's vote by shareholders. "The decision to send Remezov on vacation was made by the board of directors due to his sickness," UES said in a statement. Under Russian labor law, employees cannot be dismissed while on sick leave or on vacation. It was unclear whether the board meeting was legal or exactly who is now in charge of the company, which supplies heat and electricity to 16 million people in Moscow and the surrounding region. Mosenergo board member Anatoly Chabak said the meeting had formally taken place, meaning that more than 50 percent of shareholders voted, Reuters reported. But UES said mailed-in votes wouldn't be tallied until Sept. 10, and Igor Goryunov, Mosenergo's chief engineer, was appointed acting chief executive officer in the meantime. But Remezov's first deputy, Vla di slav Chyorny, said the meeting was invalid and he planned to contest in court the decision to send Remezov on vacation. "[A person] on sick leave cannot be sent on vacation," Prime-Tass quoted him as saying. Dmitry Spirkin, chief bailiff for Mos cow's Central District, said the meeting had not taken place officially as voting papers were absent and no minutes were recorded, Prime-Tass reported. Chabak, who UES claims is in control of the company, seemed as confused as everyone else about the flurry of activity. "The dead-end situation between UES and the company management backed by the Moscow government ... has moved into the level of negotiations, I assume," Reuters quoted Cha bak as saying.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: State To Buy Euros MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Central Bank will convert a small part of its foreign-currency reserves into euros following Europe's transition to its new currency, bank chairperson Viktor Gerashchenko said Monday. "We have placed a small part, about 5 percent, in marks. The mark is going, so something may be in euros, but a small part," Gerashchenko told reporters. He gave no indication about when the conversion would occur. As of Aug. 24, the Central Bank's gold and foreign-currency reserves stood at $37 billion. Gerashchenko said almost all Russia's foreign trade was dollar-denominated. Also, the Central Bank uses the dollar to support the ruble on the foreign exchange market of a country heavily dependent on the dollar. "All these frightening remarks about the dollar's fall are not for experienced, knowledgeable bankers. The U.S. and European economies are so intertwined a slowdown in economic growth in the U.S. could slow down Europe's economy," he said. "But for our country's economy, there can only be one minus: If the slowdown is long, energy demand may decline and OPEC countries may cut oil prices." Gerashchenko on CPI MOSCOW (Reuters) - Central Bank Chairperson Viktor Ge ra shchen ko said Monday that consumer prices were likely to stay flat in August month-on-month, agreeing with forecasts by other officials. "If the government says so, I agree with the government. There will be zero [inflation in August]," Gerashchenko told reporters on the sidelines of a banking conference. State Statistics Committee head Vla di mir Sokolin had also said Friday that consumer prices would be flat, or may even slip 0.1 percent in August month-on-month. Norilsk Dividends MOSCOW (Reuters) - Metals giant Norilsk Nickel said Monday it would pay a 1.72 ruble ($0.058) interim dividend for the first half of 2001 on ordinary and preferred shares. Norilsk's 2000 payout on the shares was 1.55 rubles. Both classes of stock have a nominal value of 0.25 rubles. All Norilsk Nickel shareholders registered on March 23, 2001, before the company started swapping its shares into the stock of its main production unit, Norilsk Nickel Metals and Mining Company, will receive dividends, it said. "Therefore, all Norilsk Nickel shareholders, including those who have exchanged their shares for MMC shares, will be able to receive dividends," the company said in a statement. Norilsk Nickel holding, the world's biggest producer of nickel and palladium, is undergoing a complex restructuring that includes a share swap and that will eventually see Norilsk Nickel shares delisted and only MMC shares traded. Foreign Debt Shrinks MOSCOW (SPT) - Foreign debt shrank some $2.5 billion in the first half of the year to $136.8 billion, Deputy Finance Minister Tatyana Nesterenko was quoted by Interfax as saying Monday. That figure equaled 49.9 percent of the country's gross domestic product, down from 58.3 percent at the start of the year, she said. Domestic debt, meanwhile, rose 4.9 billion rubles ($166.6 million) to 566.2 billion rubles in the first six months, compared with 561.3 billion rubles at the end of December. UES: Hike Tariffs MOSCOW (Reuters) - National power grid Unified Energy Systems said Monday it will ask the government to increase fuel-oil export tariffs and assign oil companies domestic supply quotas in an effort to head off winter shortages. Energy Minister Igor Yusupov said last month that export tariffs for fuel oil were unnecessary and referred to quotas as nonmarket measures. But the UES board, which ordered the company to step up efforts to stock up fuel for winter to avoid a repeat of heat shortages that left thousands freezing last winter, said its fuel-oil supplies were 8 percent behind the seasonal norm.
TITLE: What's Worse: Thief or Traitor?
TEXT: ON Friday, an extraordinary shareholders meeting was or was not held at Moscow's power monopoly, Mosenergo. The reason was that its parent company, Unified Energy Systems, wants to sack Mosenergo's General Director Alexander Remezov. Since UES holds a controlling stake in Mosenergo, it is well within its rights to do so.
But Remezov avoided being sacked when he was admitted to the hospital because of a heart condition. UES said that the decision of the board at Mosenergo, on which it holds a majority of the seats, was to send Remezov on vacation. Those on Remezov's side question the decison and whether the meeting even garnered the neccessary 50 percent of votes of all shares to be considered official.
These questions, along with those related to Remezov's health, are yet to be ironed out, but what's really interesting here is the reason for removing someone who, up until two years ago, was considered a loyal lieutenant of Anatoly Chubais. At UES, Remezov's guilt is explained succinctly: He was caught "with his hands in the till."
Of course, there probably were instances of wrongdoing. For example, Remezov's pocket Transinvestbank took a commission of 1 percent for servicing deals using promissory notes. The promissory notes of an unknown company, Transinvestfinans, were used instead of cash. Just to remind you, non-monetary schemes were used in only 1.8 percent of payments, which is substantially less than the volume of offsets conducted by UES subsi di aries such as InterRAO.
Overall, things at Mosenergo look respectable. In the first quarter of 2001, electricity production was 305 million kilowatt hours above target; the cost of producing one kilowatt hour was 5 percent cheaper than planned; and net profit was 1.2 billion rubles above projections.
To answer the question of whether stealing went on at Mosenergo, I would contend that no promissory-note scheme in Russia takes place without some form of kickback. And as to whether a lot of stealing went on, foreign investors have provided the most eloquent answer: The Mosenergo bonds that they purchased increased from 70 percent to 97 percent of face value in one year.
It is no secret that promissory-note schemes provide income for managers. Illegal it may be, but it is commonplace nonetheless.
Moreover, it is no secret that in a number of state-controlled holding companies there is a tacit agreement between the central management and management of the subsidiaries that managers are free to pocket the above-mentioned income, so long as a share of it is delivered in suitcases to the big bosses' offices.
That's not to say that such a system operates at UES, but if this is how things are done, then Remezov would have had little option but to dabble in dubious promissory-note schemes. And disagreements over how much was stolen and how much was handed over could serve as grounds for his removal.
In fact, Remezov's guilt is probably much greater. It is said that several months ago, the Mosenergo general director's personal file landed on the desk of then-Security Council Secretary Sergei Ivanov as a potential candidate for fuel and energy minister. Chubais may have taken this as blatant evidence of betrayal by his subordinate.
I am neither denying Remezov's guilt nor the legality of the shareholders meeting. I simply don't understand what sort of labor disputes can arise in a feudal state, and why terms such as "shareholders meeting" and audit commission are used when much more appropriate would be betrayal, non-payment of tribute, and out-of-favor vassal.
Yulia Latynina is a journalist with ORT.
TITLE: The Registration Beauty Of a Single, Simpler List
AUTHOR: By James T. Hitch and Igor Gorchakov
TEXT: ON Aug. 10, the new federal law "On the State Registration of Legal Entities" was officially published, and the law is to enter into effect on July 1, 2002, providing a waiting period intended to allow the Russian government to bring all relevant normative acts into accordance with the new law.
Under current legislation, the system of registration authorities is rather complicated. For example, with regard to legal entities with foreign investment, there is a two-level system: federal and regional. Companies with investment by a foreign shareholder/participant in the charter capital exceeding 100,000 rubles ($3,400) must be registered with the State Registration Chamber, while companies with lesser investment by a foreign shareholder/participant may be registered with the regional chambers. Before July 1, 2002, the government will designate a single body, - a federal governmental authority - to perform all state registrations.
With regard to procedure, the new law requires that registration must be performed within five days of filing the required documents with the competent registration body. This period, however, does not apply to companies with foreign investment, the registration of which is subject to a special procedure established in the federal law "On Foreign Investment." Article 20 of this law provides that such companies be registered within one month of the moment of filing the necessary documents with the competent body.
The law also establishes an exhaustive list of documents required for registration, and the registering authority may not request any documents other than those listed in Article 14 of the new law. For example, in the case where a company's charter capital is paid in kind, the registration bodies used to request an act of independent monetary valuation of the property to be contributed. They are no longer empowered to make such a request.
However, this does not mean that joint-stock and limited liability companies are exempted from having such independent monetary appraisals as internal documents of the company, as required by the federal laws "On Joint-Stock Companies" and "On Limited Liability Companies."
Further, according to the law, the state register of legal entities will now contain, in addition to general information, information concerning the names and positions of individuals who are empowered to act on behalf of the company without a power-of-attorney agreement, as well as information about the licenses obtained by the company. This information will be publicly available and will be provided to any interested person upon request.
Another interesting provision is contained in Article 23, providing that a registration authority can reject an application for registration on the grounds of either the failure to file any of the documents required or the filing of an application with an improper authority. The registration body cannot deny registration on any other basis.
James T. Hitch is managing partner and Igor Gorchakov an associate at Baker & McKenzie law firm's St. Petersburg office.
TITLE: Laying the World on One Man's Shoulders
AUTHOR: By Paul Krugman
PUBLISHER: New York Times Service
TEXT: THERE are three great economic powers in today's world: the United States, Europe and Japan. In principle, each of these has two potent recession-fighting tools at its disposal. One is monetary policy: The Central Bank can print money and drive down interest rates. The other is fiscal policy: The government can try to support a flagging economy by cutting taxes and increasing spending.
In practice, however, almost the entire burden of fighting what has become a global slowdown is being borne by U.S. monetary policy. And you have to wonder whether the U.S. Federal Reserve, acting on its own, can really do the job.
Why does the Fed stand alone?
The institutions of Europe's Economic and Monetary Union were designed to fight the last war, protecting the Continent from inflation, but making it almost impossible to respond to economic threats that come from a different direction. The charter of the European Central Bank requires it to defend price stability - end of sentence. And bank officials have disavowed any responsibility for growth and employment.
What about fiscal policy? Europe doesn't have much room for maneuver, given large public debts and the burdens of an aging population. And whatever room for maneuver they might have had was taken away by Europe's Economic Stability and Growth Pact, which prevents even temporary deficit spending.
Then there's Japan. After years of immense spending on public works, Japan has a debt of 130 percent of GDP - and it, too, has an aging population. So it can do no more by way of fiscal policy; in fact, retrenchment is the order of the day.
At the same time, conventional monetary policy has reached its limit in Japan, since short-term interest rates are already zero. The Bank of Japan could do more, if it was willing to adopt unconventional measures, like targeting a positive rate of inflation - a course of action supported by some of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's advisers. But Japan's Central Bank has refused to make any significant moves in that direction.
America does, of course, have its tax cut. But the peculiar "back-loaded" timing of that cut makes it a very poor recession-fighting measure. The rebate checks are not much more than pocket change: $40 billion, or 0.4 percent of GDP. The big tax cuts, which will eventually rise to almost 2 percent of GDP, won't come until the middle of the decade.
Can the United States pump up the economy with additional tax cuts or temporary public spending? Not safely. Of course, George W. Bush's administration might do the responsible thing, making room for additional tax cuts now by canceling some big tax cuts scheduled for 2004 and later. And pigs might fly.
It's a dismal picture: A combination of intellectual confusion, narrow-minded officials and sheer fiscal folly has removed most of the tools that the world's major economies might be able to use to help us get through these troubled times. The only institution that isn't paralyzed is the Fed, which keeps on cutting rates, hoping that it will finally accomplish something. Or to change metaphors a bit, the whole burden of avoiding a global recession now rests on Alan Greenspan's shoulders.
Presumably Atlas won't shrug. But what if the task is beyond his powers?
TITLE: World Bank and IMF Should Chip In
AUTHOR: By Matt Bivens
TEXT: WASHINGTON - The U.S. capital has hosted some monster protests over the decades. But to hear Washington's city fathers tell it, all will pale in comparison to the day the IMF/World Bank protesters came back.
The IMF and the World Bank are headquartered in Washington D.C., and this year they have opted to hold their annual meeting at home on Sept. 29 and 30.
Washington has been through this before, in April 2000. The city had to spend millions on cleanup and police overtime after about 20,000 protested an IMF meeting.
This time, the city is expecting 100,000 protesters, and the authorities are putting up a staggering $29 million to prepare. The Secret Service is even building a 3.5-kilometer, $2 million chain-link fence around the downtown - a step never taken in the history of Washington protest movements.
But D.C. - unlike Moscow - is a poor and over-extended municipality. Wealthy people work in Washington, but tend to board the D.C.-subsidized metro system every afternoon and ride back to their homes in Maryland or Virginia, where they pay income taxes and property taxes, where they do their shopping.
As the city becomes more of a business district, it also handles more and more institutions not required to pay any taxes, such as embassies, universities and, yes, the IMF and the World Bank.
Washington just this week had to close D.C. General, a hospital filled with low-income people seeking help, because it could no longer afford to subsidize it. So it's not surprising that Mayor Anthony Williams has asked the White House, the fund and the bank to ante up.
The Bush administration has offered $16 million. But the IMF and the World Bank have balked at the remaining $13 million (it's going to cost $11 million just to pay the additional 3,000 police officers the city is bringing in from out of town).
"The fund and the bank take the traditional view that host countries are responsible for providing a secure working environment," said IMF spokesperson William Murray.
The bank and the fund are tax-exempt. They own prime properties just off Pennsylvania Avenue and make hundreds of millions annually in profits. The U.S. Network for Global Economic Justice - a bank/fund-bashing coalition - calculates that if they paid just property and profit taxes, that would mean an annual $57.3 million for Washington.
Global Justice also notes that many tax-free institutions in America, recognizing they are a strain on the budgets of their host cities, make voluntary "payments in lieu of taxes," or PILOTs. Harvard, MIT and Yale all offer PILOTs to their home towns. The IMF and the World Bank, however, "take the traditional view."
Matt Bivens, a former editor of The St. Petersburg Times, is a Washington-based fellow of The Nation Institute [www.thenation.com].
TITLE: Racism in Russia
AUTHOR: By Peter Rutland
TEXT: AS international delegates are gathered for the United Nations-sponsored conference on racism in South Africa, it is worth asking what place racism has in Russian society. Russians do not see themselves as racist and intolerant. On the contrary, they tend to have a vaguely inclusive notion of their own ethnic identity. "Scratch a Russian, find a Tatar" as the saying goes. The heritage of 70 years of Soviet socialism, when state propaganda insisted that the Soviet people were a happy family of nations, also played its part in blurring racial categories in the minds of Russians. It is still Russian state policy, for example, to give Russian citizenship to any former citizen of the Soviet Union, irrespective of ethnicity or place of birth. But in the West, Russia is typically seen as a deeply racist society and one that has grown more racist since 1991 - as evidenced by incidents of anti-Semitism, public support for the war in Chechnya and widespread hostility towards "persons of Caucasian nationality." Public-opinion surveys do reveal explicit hostility towards some ethnic groups (blacks, Arabs, gypsies and Caucasians). Although Russians tend to express tolerance toward Jews in such polls, there is some evidence that such questions do not elicit genuine responses. One survey by the Moscow-based polling agency VTsIOM in October 1999 found that 34 percent of respondents agreed with the suggestion to compile lists of Jews in leading positions in Russia. While the delegates in Durban debate whether Zionism is racism, in Russia the relevant question is: Should anti-Semitism be seen as racism? In reality, the picture regarding racism in Russia is rather complex. One problem is the term "racism" itself. Like "privacy," the concept of racism never quite made it into the Russian language. The terms rasa and rasizm were lifted directly from English and still carry foreign connotations. Thus, if a Russian talks about "racism" he has in mind black/white struggles in the United States or South Africa. There is no exact Russian equivalent to the term "race." The human race is rod lyudskoi, where rod means family or kin. Traditionally, Russian analysis of "ethnicity" focused more on cultural, historical and linguistic ties, than racial origins per se. Boris Lanin, a professor at the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences in Moscow, remarks that "Russians know the word 'racist' but they never use the word 'rasa,' or, to be precise, they use 'rasa' incorrectly." Which is not to say that the Russians don't divide humanity into "races." They do, into three: black, white and yellow. The main target of racial anxiety for Russians seems to have been the perceived threat from Asia. Hence aziaty is a derogatory term, and the Russian equivalent to the English phrase "don't judge a man by the color of his skin" is "don't judge a man by the shape of his eye." But these three racial categories don't coincide with the main targets of Russian xenophobia today. Jews and people of Caucasian background are classified as "white" or "European" rather than "black" or "Asian." As explained by Igor Zevelev, a professor at the Marshall Center in Germany, calling Caucasians chyorniye, or blacks, "deprives them of honor to be white. That is why it is derogative!" Back in the late Stalin period, a huge team of ethnographers was assembled to map the peoples of the world on a "scientific" basis. In 1964, after years of labor, they published an "Atlas of Peoples of the World," which included some racist categories in its classification of nations. For example, it distinguished between some of the Central Asia peoples on the basis of presence or absence of the "Mongolian fold" eyelid. Ironically, data from this atlas was put into a "Political Indicators Handbook," and to this day it is still being used by U.S. political scientists as a source for basic information about the ethnic structure of countries around the world. So, Russian attitudes toward race are rather confusing. Intolerant Russians are more accurately described as xenophobic rather than racist. Some Russians undoubtedly have strong negative feelings about certain ethnic groups, which they see as having a common descent. But this descent is primarily understood in cultural and historical terms, and Russians do not have a developed and coherent theory about races within which these various ethnic groups are located. This all serves to raise doubts about the wisdom of having an international conference on "racism" alone, since many forms of interethnic hostility do not fall along racial lines. One only has to look at the conflicts in the Balkans to find a graphic illustration of this point. Many Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims have fought viciously at various points over the past decade, yet racially the three groups are indistinguishable. Peter Rutland is a professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and an associate of the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University. He contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.
TITLE: Finland Visit Gives Hope For Future
TEXT: PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin's two-day state visit to Finland is a welcome development, one in which the Russian side managed to get all its signals right. As for the big symbolic issues, Putin's solemn appearance at the tomb of Finnish war hero Field Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim was an impressively statesmanly gesture. Not only was it warmly appreciated by the Finns, but it also gave credence to Putin's anti-NATO-expansion remarks, in which he emphasized that Russia is no longer a threat to Europe. His comments on NATO were generally measured but firm, although the president's gratuitous comments comparing Russian-speakers in Latvia with ethnic Albanians in Macedonia needlessly inflamed tensions at a moment when it seems reasonable to hope that regional cooperation could be increased. Despite the Latvia remarks, we wonder whether it might not be a propitious moment - in the wake of this constructive Hel sinki trip - to propose holding a regional summit with all of the Baltic states, Russia, Finland and, perhaps, Sweden as well. There is certainly a wide range of economic, social and environmental issues that could be productively addressed through direct, multilateral contacts on the regional level. Moreover, the inclusion of Finland and Sweden would likely reduce the tensions that have characterized Russia's bilateral relations with the three Baltic states. What is even more encouraging about the president's trip to Helsinki is that the smaller pieces also seem to be coming together nicely. Finland is a major trading partner for St. Petersburg, the Leningrad Oblast and Karelia, and Putin made impressive efforts to solidify and cultivate these ties. The regional political and business leaders who accompanied the president should be able to follow up on this visit with concrete projects. While the long-awaited investment-protection treaty was not signed and is still not finished, it is obvious that both countries view it as a priority and are taking it seriously. Although Finnish investment in northwest Russia is already high, inking this deal should take it to a whole new level. The only issue that got short shrift on this trip, it seems, is the environment, and this is particularly unfortunate because St. Petersburg has as much as anyone to gain from finally tackling this critical problem. Russia has every reason to be ashamed of what it has done and continues to do to despoil the Baltic Sea and, therefore, should be at the forefront of efforts to clean it up. If such arguments are not convincing, perhaps Moscow will be moved by the fact that the lion's share of any international cleanup funding for the project would most likely come to Russia.
TITLE: Is the FSB Too Secretive For Its Own Good?
TEXT: EVERYONE knows that the Federal Security Service, or FSB, is an extremely secretive organization. That's their business, after all, and I'm not going to argue with that. But sometimes the level of secrecy makes me suspect that those who labor behind the massive FSB walls on Lubyanka Ploshchad in Moscow or on Liteiny Prospect here in St. Petersburg would even hide from themselves if they could only figure out how. I remember one day trying to get a comment on a story from the local FSB "spokesperson" (and I use that term loosely) Alexei Vostretsov. One of his colleagues kindly gave me a telephone number and told me that I should listen to the message on the answering machine and then leave a message saying who I am and what I want. Only then would there be any chance that I'd get to speak with the "spokesperson." "He's there," my contact said. "Just say who you are and he'll pick up the phone." I had a hard time believing at first that a spokesperson screens his calls, but after going through this procedure a few times, I now know that this is, indeed, how it works. This is how the FSB spokespeople, whose job presumably is to pick up the phone and answer questions, differ from people like Alexander Afanasiev and Svetlana Ivanova who do the same job in Governor Vladimir Yakovlev's office. I really wonder what Vostretsov is hiding from. Last week I again called Vostretsov's office to try to get a comment on a scandalous special edition of Novaya Gazeta that ran excerpts from a book called "The FSB Blows Up Russia." The telephone rang and no one picked it up. Then the answering machine came on line. I left my message and waited. Nothing. Disconnected. Maybe he wasn't there. Maybe he didn't like my question. Or maybe he was just acting under orders from headquarters in Moscow, which said last week that the FSB would not be commenting on the book. He didn't pick up the phone, so I don't know. Is it really such a big deal? I think it is. I think this reveals in a small way a dangerous quality of the entire FSB mindset, its way of looking at its own mission and reason for being. Take a look, for instance, in the general telephone directory of Russian state agencies. All the ministries, committees, agencies, oversight bodies, etc, are listed. Except the FSB. And the Foreign Counterintelligence Service. To go by this book, one might think that FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev and his minions have no telephones at all. I started imagining that these are the kind of people who loved playing hide-and-seek as kids and haven't been able to make themselves stop. A few months ago, I needed to talk to Alexander Zhdanovich, the FSB spokesperson in Moscow. I didn't have his number handy, so I rang the federal telephone information service, which promptly informed me that Zhdanovich's telephone number is classified. This is, most likely, just one of the ways in which the FSB is following in the traditions of its predecessor, the KGB, which took a perversely obsessive pleasure in recording every bit of information that comes across their desks and hiding everything they hoard away from prying eyes. Well, I also hang on to information that I find. Zhdanovich's telephone number is (095) 224-4689. But I can't guarantee that he'll answer the phone.
TITLE: Global eye
AUTHOR: By Chris Floyd
TEXT: Barrels of Fun The Republican Party dodged a bullet this week, when a Solomonic compromise averted a deep philosophical crisis at the heart of the party's arch-conservative core. The vexing problem was this: Vice President Dick "Bang-Bang" Cheney was scheduled as the keynote speaker at the Utah Republican convention. No problem there: Out in rock-ribbed Mormon country, they love the big Veep and that little guy who hangs around his office sometimes. But it seems the Secret Service wanted delegates to leave their concealed weapons at home on the day of Cheney's visit: standard security procedure, they said. This request left Utah's heat-packing party faithful up in, well, arms: No one was going to deny his God-given right to keep steel-hard metal rubbing secretly against his thighs. Led by the local chapter of the Gun Owners of America - a group operating on that miniscule sliver of political territory to the right of the National Rifle Association - the barrel huggers threatened to "disrupt" the convention. And an angry mob with shooters in their shorts can cause plenty of serious "disruption." Cheney was perplexed. Hadn't he made his pro-gun bones years ago in Congress, when he fought against a ban on armor-piercing bullets used chiefly to kill police officers and other law enforcement officers like, say, Secret Service agents? Hadn't he opposed a ban on plastic guns - a.k.a. "The Terrorist's Friend," since they can't be picked up by security machines? Hadn't he and the little guy who hangs around his office sometimes promised to suckle gun groups with loving care and protect them from all harm? How could his own turn on him now? But the brave and manly gun owners would not back down. "People traveling to and from the center or walking to their cars in the parking lot will be left defenseless," said a Republican Party spokesperson. "There is no excuse for disarming these people!" Finally, after lengthy negotiations between party leaders, the General Accounting Office and the White House, a historic compromise was achieved: All those who were too scared to walk 20 meters from the parking lot to the convention center unarmed would be allowed to bring their secreted rods inside - but they would have to park them with a concierge while Bang-Bang was in the building. And so Cheney made his triumphant appearance, garnering ovations as he lauded the "patriotism" of the Utah Republicans - who then went on to debate (patriotically, no doubt) a proposal to secede from the Union in order to avoid paying federal taxes. Only in America, eh? Or rather, only in the ersatz America that's being erected on the smoldering, Florida-fueled ashes of the constitution. Idiot Wind It's one of the toughest questions a national leader must face, a crunch-time, bottom-line, buck-stops-here decision that tests the moral character of all those who seek the power and glory of higher office: Do I admit I'm a liar, or do I let myself look stupid? Yes, it's the old "Reagan Conundrum," named in honor of that great U.S. president who refused to admit any knowledge of the wide-ranging Iran-Contra conspiracy operating out of his White House and opted to play the idiot card instead: "Errr, nope, never seen them fellers doin' nothin', nope." This week, aspiring Tory leader Iain Duncan-Smith followed in these illustrious footsteps, claiming complete ignorance after a newspaper revealed that one of his top campaign aides was linked to the British National Party. Edgar Griffin was serving as vice president of Duncan-Smith's campaign in Wales, but it seems he was also moonlighting for the BNP, a nasty little neo-fascist outfit in the Haidar-Le Pen-Utah Republican mode. The BNP has been busy whipping up race riots on Britain's streets this summer, while getting plenty of press for its young, telegenic, Cambridge-educated leader, one Nick Griffin, son of the vice president of Iain Duncan-Smith's campaign in Wales. IDS, as his followers call him, was red-faced when the elder Griffin's work for the BNP was revealed by the Daily Mirror. He immediately sacked Griffin from the campaign and swore he had no idea at all that his Welsh vice president had any ties whatsoever to the race-baiting BNP. Of course, we must give Idie - as we prefer to call him - the benefit of the doubt: If he says he's an idiot, then who are we to argue? However, it does seem a bit odd that Idie-Doody had not twigged to Griffin's BNP connection: Not only was his son the leader of the party, but Edgar Griffin's wife, Jean, ran as a BNP candidate in parliamentary elections just a few weeks ago. Her opponent? The Honorable Iain Duncan-Smith. A liar, or just stupid? You make the call. Love Boat Hey, remember that wacky joyride the U.S. Navy gave last February to a bunch of Texas oil men and big contributors to a foundation chaired by former president George H.W. Bush? Remember how the submarine, with the fat cats playing around at the controls, surfaced into a Japanese fishing boat and killed nine people, including four teenagers? Well, little George was really sorry about his and Daddy's pals killing those Japanese kids and all, so he promised to salvage the boat from the bottom of the sea and send the bodies home to Japan at last. Little George was so sorry, in fact, he put aside $40 million for the project, Reuters reports. So guess which private company got the big contract to haul the boat away? The Halliburton Corporation! You remember, that's where little George's bestest buddy, Bang-Bang Cheney, used to work - the place that paid Cheney $36 million last year as a going-away present for manipulating his old contacts from Daddy's administration to land great big government contracts for the company. Now guess what? The salvage project has hit a few glitches, so it looks like it will cost even more than $40 million now - and that means lots more federal money in Halliburton's coffers! Ah yes, friends and family - that's all that really matters, isn't it?
TITLE: Forum Labels Zionism as Racist
AUTHOR: By Chris Tomlinson
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: DURBAN, South Africa - Pro-Palestinian groups scored a victory Sunday when a human-rights forum coinciding with the World Conference Against Racism equated Zionism with racism and called for international sanctions against Israel. But Jewish, Christian and international human-rights groups rejected the forum's final resolution, which was presented to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson to be included in a final declaration by the UN conference. Pro-Palestinian groups lobbied a majority of groups attending the forum to equate Zionism - the movement that founded Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people - with racism. Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories was also decried as colonialism, a potent political label in much of the world. The forum ran parallel to the global racism conference, which started Friday and runs through Sept. 7. It brought together 166 nongovernmental rights groups from around the world and was meeting in Durban. The U.S. government, which has called parts of a draft conference declaration anti-Semitic, has said American diplomats would leave the eight-day UN summit if the provisions condemning Israel weren't removed. Israeli leaders criticized the international conference, saying it was filled with anti-Semitism. The gathering "is an outburst of hate and of anti-Semitism," Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said Sunday in Tel Aviv. The forum's document brands "Israel as a racist apartheid state" and calls for an end to the "ongoing, Israeli systematic perpetration of racist crimes, including war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing." The forum also recommended that the United Nations reinstate a resolution equating Zionism with racism, the establishment of a UN committee to prosecute Israeli war crimes and the complete isolation of Israel as an apartheid state. The document was approved in a rancorous meeting of the forum that began Saturday evening and ran into early Sunday morning. Shawqi Issa, spokesperson for the Arab caucus at the forum, said he thought the document was "a very good one." "It's just facts. The Israeli government is a racist government ... and the Israeli government is an apartheid government. These are facts, and we can prove it," he said. Robinson, who has worked to allay the controversy over the condemnation of Israel at the world racism conference, criticized the document, saying she regretted the language equating Zionism with racism. Palestinians have the right to protest what they believe to be their victimization, but "it is not appropriate that text emerged that revictimizes and is hurtful in itself," said Robinson, who is also secretary general of the UN conference. Human Rights Watch condemned the resolution. "Israel has committed serious crimes against the Palestinian people, but it is simply not accurate to use the word genocide and wrong to equate Zionism with racism," said Reed Brody, the New York-based group's advocacy director. Brody said most of the forum's document was a condemnation of racist practices in many other countries around the world, "it's just unfortunate that the use of inaccurate and intemperate language may overshadow all of that." Israeli President Moshe Katsav, who was touring southern Israel on Sunday, rejected the criticism as "a palpable expression of racism and anti-Semitism." "Many of those shouting at the Durban conference in South Africa ought to bow their heads before the state of Israel because of the punctilious manner in which all its institutions respect human rights," Katsav said in the town of Yerucham. Black U.S. lawmakers attending the conference expressed disappointment Sunday that criticism of Israel has overshadowed efforts to raise the question of reparations to Africa and African-Americans for slavery and colonialism. They also said the Bush administration has made a historic mistake by keeping Secretary of State Colin Powell away from the UN meeting because of the criticism of Israel in the conference's draft final declaration, but acknowledged the language was problematic. The head of the Israeli delegation to the UN conference said despite attempts by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and Robinson to ensure similar language does not end up in the official conference's final document, the Palestinian delegation is working to keep it in. "It's an attempt to hijack the conference, to focus on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis rather than focus on the goal of the conference," said Mordechai Yadid, head of the Israeli delegation.
TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: Refugees Transferred
CHRISTMAS ISLAND, Australia (Reuters) - An Australian naval ship with hospital facilities pulled up alongside a Norwegian freighter on Monday ready to transfer hundreds of unwanted asylum seekers for the next leg of their journey.
The HMAS Manoora was given the all clear to transfer the 433 mostly Afghans after an Australian court lifted an injunction on moving the boat people out of Australian territorial waters around remote Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean.
The boat people will now sail to Papua New Guinea, Australia's nearest northern neighbor, where they will be transferred to aircraft and flown to New Zealand and the tiny South Pacific island of Nauru to have their refugee claims assessed.
Death Toll Rises
JAKARTA, Indonesia (Reuters) - The death toll from a collision between two trains on the Indonesian island of Java has risen to 40, police and hospital officials said on Monday.
The two trains collided in the early hours of Sunday in the port city of Cirebon. Dozens were injured in one of the worst Indonesian train accidents in recent years.
The crash occurred when a passenger train and a locomotive collided in Cirebon's main railway station.
Local media reports have quoted officials as saying human error was the likely cause of the accident. No further details were immediately available.
Basque Explosion
VITORIA, Spain (AP) - A bomb exploded in the center of the Basque capital Sunday, damaging several cars but causing no injuries, news reports said.
Basque police said a homemade explosive device detonated at 9 a.m. in the door of an electronics shop that belonged to an officer of the autonomous regional police force, the Ertzaintzain, the Spanish news agency Efe said.
There was no claim of responsibility.
The Ertzaintza has increasingly become the target of the armed Basque separatist group ETA following the intensification of a crackdown on the group.
An hour after the explosion in Vitoria, the national Civil Guard raided an apartment near the scene. A man was arrested in connection with the recent dismantling of a cell of violent separatists in Barcelona, the agency said.
ETA, whose initials stand for Basque Homeland and Freedom, has claimed the killings of around 800 people since it began a campaign of bombings and shootings in 1968. The Basque region was given a considerable degree of autonomy in 1979.
TITLE: American Helps Russian Science
AUTHOR: By Terry Battles
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: As you cross a gray courtyard just off Ulitsa Marata, a fin-de-siècle apartment building becomes visible. In typical Petersburg fashion, it is easy to work out which three buttons on the lock are the ones you need to press to get in. A rundown elevator takes you to the top-floor apartment of American Paul Leonard.
Leonard, one of the most colorful and unconventional expats in town, opens the door, and his fluffy white purebred Siberian cat Carlito runs to inspect you. Right at the entrance, a curious row of five pairs of cowboy boots, ranging from light-brown to shining black, leaves no doubt that Leonard was raised in Texas. "My home is wherever I decide to hang my hat," he says light-heartedly. And this hat has not moved from St. Petersburg for the past nine years.
Leonard is an independent project developer working in Russia, and his job is to combine Russian scientific innovation with Western financing and marketing. He began his professional activities here after studying Russian for a year at the St. Petersburg State Univeristy. He says that the timing was right for small-businessmen "to find an opportunity to facilitate the creation of new technologies that would be both profitable and beneficial."
His many projects deal with different technologies in spheres as diverse as medicine and energy. Douglas Boyce, general director of the Lomonosov Porcelain Factory and a close personal friend of Leonard's over the past 15 years, says: "Paul is a unique figure in the Russian scientific community. As an outsider, it has taken him over a decade to gain the trust of the Russian scientific clique, partaking in both their problems and breakthroughs. It has required tremendous patience, but he has been rewarded with inside information on some little-known but startling achievements of Russian science."
According to Leonard, Western and Russian approaches to scientific research and development differ radically. He says: "Russian research and development has historically tended to be public and consequently subject to public and governmental interests, while Western research and devlopment is mostly private and therefore strongly relies on such factors as profit and market potential." Russian innovation in the hard sciences can partly be attributed to the lack of reliance of research and development on market factors and dollar profitability. As Russia has begun collaborating more with the West, Leonard has been instrumental in establishing several links between foreign investors and Russian scientists.
In particular, his involvement with two groups of private American investors, Kansas City-based GTAC Inc. International and Washington Synex Technologies Inc. has proven fruitful. Synex has invested in the development of an adaptive timing system for internal-combustion engines and various other energy projects. This invention, which is both inexpensive to manufacture and easy to install, could prove to be a technological breakthrough allowing developed countries to lower gas emissions and comply with the Kyoto protocol.
Last November, GTAC's CEO, Robert Hudspeth came to St. Petersburg and signed a contract with a group of Russian scientists who were represented by Tatyana Zimina, head scientist of the project. This contract will lead to a new stage of research and development locally in new technologies for analytical instrumentation and the possible creation of jobs for approximately 50 Russian scientists.
Leonard's favorite project is the promotion and distribution of the medical product Deltaran. This non-toxic substance is based on a fundamental discovery in cellular biology, which according to Leonard "identifies the concrete link between stress and disease." Leonard explains that stress of any kind, be it environmental, infectious or emotional is nothing more than an outside stimulus causing increased energy production from the cell's mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell. Deltaran has been recommended for use in all 73 Russian regional clinics.
Leonard says, "Russia is a country full of MacGyvers with a world-class education in the hard sciences." Many of these Russian scientists and inventors regularly gather for animated discussions at Leonard's kitchen table, among them Dr. Boris Voitenkov, general director of medical research and development at the company Komkon; Vadim Ivanov, academic secretary of the Russian Academy of Sciences; and Inessa Mik halova, a renowned researcher of peptides and proteins.
At Leonard's place, one even drinks vodka from 50-milliliter lab beakers. What's more, Leonard is an acclaimed chili cook and winner of Senor's Pepe's annual Mexican cooking competition. And he is happy to cook up a bowl of his famous hot chili for all his guests.
TITLE: Kuprin's Former Home, Writing, Both Neglected
AUTHOR: By Robert Coalson
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Aug. 26 marked the 131st anniversary of the birth of Alexander Kuprin, one of Russia's most lyrical writers noted for his evocative sketches and shimmering short stories. By a twist of fate, Aug. 25 marked the 63rd anniversary of his death here in St. Petersburg in 1938, just one year after he returned to the Soviet Union after living as an émigré in France. Kuprin was born in a village near Penza in 1870. In 1901, shortly after launching his career as a writer, he moved to St. Petersburg, the city with which he is most closely associated. He wrote his most remarkable works - the novella "The Duel," the short stories "The Garnet Bracelet," "At the Circus" and "The Horse Thieves," etc. - here during the increasingly tense and gloomy period in the run-up to World War I. He was a friend and fellow spirit to the more famous writers of his generation, Maxim Gorky, Nobel Prize-winning Ivan Bunin and Leo nid Andreyev. Even more than those writers, though, Kuprin was a victim of the upheavals of his time. Like Bunin and Gorky (Andreyev died in 1919), Kuprin emigrated after the revolution. Unlike them, though, he virtually lost his voice as a writer, never again writing anything that approached the subtle brilliance of his pre-war works. His later works drifted toward tendentiousness, openly tackling social issues without the strong characterizations and lyric descriptions that were his trademark. In France, Kuprin felt overwhelmingly isolated from his readers in the Soviet Union and nostalgic for the Russia of his youth. His health slowly but steadily failed, and in 1937 he made the difficult decision to return to Stalin's Soviet Union. Less than one year later, at the age of 68, he died in Leningrad and was buried at the Literaturskiye Mostki in the Volkovskoye Cemetery. This plaque, at 7 Razyezhaya Ulitsa, marks the building where Kuprin lived while at the peak of his powers, from 1906 to 1908. In this building, which today is run down and fairly depressing, the great writer - whose voice was stolen by history and who today is unjustly little known - wrote some of his finest works.
TITLE: Ace Pitcher Too Old After All
AUTHOR: By Dan Lewerenz
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SOUTH WILLIAMSPORT, Pennsylvania - Danny Almonte, the Little League pitcher who wowed fans with his 110-kilometer-per-hour fastball, was too old to compete in the World Series, league officials announced in stripping the team of its third-place trophy. Little League Baseball Inc. president Stephen Keener said the Bronx, New York, team would also forfeit all its 2001 tournament victories, and Almonte's perfect game - the first in 44 years at the tournament - would be erased because the boy was actually 14, not 12. The announcement came after a government official in the Dominican Republic, Almonte's home country, declared that a birth certificate that showed the boy was 12 was a fraud. "Clearly, adults have used Danny Almonte and his teammates in a most contemptible and despicable way," Keener said. "We're clearly sad and angry that we were deceived. In fact, millions of Little Leaguers around the world were deceived."