SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #745 (11), Friday, February 15, 2002
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TITLE: Scandal Casts Cloud Over Olympics
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — Local figure-skating champions Russians Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze continue to be at the center of a furor surrounding a controversial decision awarding them gold medals at the Salt Lake City Olympics on Monday.
With the credibility of the sport under assault in the biggest judging controversy in Olympic figure-skating history, the lead referee in Monday’s pairs final said Wednesday that a judge had admitted during a post-competition meeting with other judges to feeling pressured to vote a certain way.
International Skating Union President Ottavio Cinquanta said he interviewed the judge in question, who denied the allegation.
Lead referee Ron Pfenning said the judge made the comment during a meeting attended by every member of the nine-judge panel that on Monday awarded a gold medal by a 5-4 margin to Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze, and the silver medal to the Canadian pair of Jamie Sale and David Pelletier. Pfenning, who presided over the meeting, declined to identify the judge.
Sale and Pelletier skated cleanly and the crowd was chanting “Six! Six!” by the time they finished, pleading with the judges to award the Canadians a perfect score.
The Canadians got only four 5.9s for artistry compared with seven 5.9s for the Russians, even though Sikharulidze stepped out of a jump. Boos rained down from the crowd as the marks were flashed.
On Wednesday night, the head of the French Olympic team said that French judge Marie Reine Le Gougne had acknowledged feeling pressure before casting her vote for the Russian team.
Didier Gailhaguet denied any wrongdoing on the part of the French skating federation and said of Le Gougne: “Some people close to the judge have acted badly and have put someone who is honest and upright, but emotionally fragile, under pressure. She is a fragile person and I think she has been somewhat manipulated.”
Le Gougne declined to comment Wednesday.
For years, critics have scoffed at figure-skating judges, accusing them of using the sport’s presentation mark — the non-technical score each judge gives each skater — to promulgate cultural biases, Cold War politics and seemingly insignificant preferences over costumes, makeup and music. But Wednesday’s revelation, which hints at deal-making and vote-trading, goes to the heart of the sport’s legitimacy.
Pfenning conveyed the judge’s remark in a letter to Cinquanta on Tuesday, as a public outcry arose over the results. Skating fans, television commentators and coaches have expressed their dismay at the decision.
Acknowledging that he was embarrassed by the public uproar, Cinquanta on Wednesday fended off a flurry of questions and accusations at a raucous, standing-room-only news conference at the Main Media Center. Cinquanta took exception to the use of the word “scandal,” saying no misdeeds had been proven. He did acknowledge that he had received other charges against the judge from other sources besides Pfenning, but considered Pfenning’s letter the most serious.
Gailhaguet said that Le Gougne had been pressured to “act in a certain way” by “some people close to the judge.” 
After watching Cinquanta’s news conference, Canadian Olympic officials demanded an independent investigation into the judging system and said they planned to file an appeal to have the results overturned. Cinquanta said it was unlikely that the result would be changed because the votes already had been cast.
Meantime, International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge sent a letter to Cinquanta on Wednesday saying that the IOC would not meddle in the matte, but urging the ISU to address the problem promptly.
“Our message in this matter is we are thinking of the athletes,” IOC Director General Francois Carrard said, “and it is very important to act quickly.”
The ISU refused the request on Thursday.
Cinquanta stated that his sport’s governing body was sticking to its decision to carry out an investigation into the judging of Monday’s pairs competition at a meeting on Feb. 18.
Canada’s decision to appeal the result ruled out a swift decision, he said.
“We will wait for the appeal to arrive. It will be a legal appeal,” Cinquanta said. “We have to study the appeal. We cannot just read the appeal in 10 minutes and then decide.”
With the case unresolved, figure skating moves to the dance portion of the competition on Friday, with its credibility crumbling and suspicions swirling about the integrity of the sport’s judges. It does not help that Ukrainian judge Yuri Balkov — who was suspended for a year after being caught on tape at the 1998 games in Nagano relating the order of finishers in the ice dance final before it had taken place — is here and is expected to judge the ice-dancing competition. 
Unsubstantiated reports have circulated alleging that the French and Russian judges made a deal promising votes for the leading Russian team in the pairs competition and the top French team in the dance final.
The Canadians have a gold-medal-contending pair in the competition, Shae-Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz, who won the recent Grand Prix Final in Kitchener, Canada. The French, too, enter a top team, 2000 world champions Marina Anissina and Gwendal Peizerat.
Russian newspapers and television reports, most of which led with the story of Russia’s first gold medals of the games, staunchly defended their own, saying that Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze had danced a more technically complicated routine than the Canadians.
“On a technical and artistic level, our program was a little bit superior to theirs,” Sikharulidze was quoted as saying in an interview with Vremya Novostei newspaper.
Yury Chistyakov, a member of the St. Petersburg Sports Committee, also dismissed the allegations of a fix.
“I think the victory by the Russian couple was fair,” he said Thursday. “As for the Canadian protest, both American and Canadian sports are known for their love for all kinds of protests.”
“I don’t believe the talk of the Russian side pressuring the French judge or any other judges,” Chistyakov added. 
“Who would apply the pressure? I know Tamara Moskvina, the couple’s coach, personally. She is not the type of person who would be able to produce to put any pressure on the judges,” he said.
“As for the Canadian couple, I’d say they are a strong duet, real fighters, but they definitely the lack ballet-like artistry that the Russians have.”
Chistyakov said that judging was an integral part of the sport, and pointed out that the Russian couple had come up on the short side of questionable decisions themselves in the past.
“We also remember the 2001 wWrld Championship, where the Canadians won despite making two serious mistakes,” he said. “Sikharulidze and Berezhnaya skated a clean program and still ended up with the silver. But they didn’t protest the results.”

(WP, AP, Reuters, SPT)

TITLE: Court Nullifies State Secrets Order
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev and Natalia Yefimova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — In a major victory for human-rights advocates, the military arm of the Supreme Court ruled this week to invalidate a secret Defense Ministry document used to prosecute such high-profile espionage suspects as environmentalist Alexander Nikitin and military journalist Grigory Pasko.
The 1996 document, known as Order No. 055, gives a list of data that the Defense Ministry considers eligible to be classified as state secrets. 
But the Supreme Court’s military collegium decided on Tuesday that the order is “void and cannot give rise to legal consequences” because it was not properly registered with the Justice Ministry and has never been made publicly available.
Pasko’s lawyers, who filed the complaint together with colleagues involved in a different treason case, were elated by the decision, and predicted it could become an important deterrent against the wave of spy mania playing out in the country’s courts.
“The legal basis for the prosecution’s case against Pasko has collapsed,” lawyer Ivan Pavlov said in a telephone interview. 
“Without this order, the whole system of defending state secrets is paralyzed, because it will be impossible to designate information as a state secret.”
Pasko was charged with treason in 1997 for giving Japanese journalists information about waste dumping by the Pacific Fleet. He was acquitted in 1999 and was charged with the lesser offense of abusing office. Last year, after his lawyers appealed the decision, Pasko was sentenced again on treason charges and is serving a four-year prison term in Vladivostok.
Colonel Vladimir Milovanov, an aide to the country’s top military prosecutor who was present at the trial, said he supported the complaint by Pasko’s defense team because Order No. 055 did not conform to the federal law on state secrets.
“The Defense Ministry violated the procedure for issuing the order: Specifically, this order was not registered with the Justice Ministry,” Interfax quoted him as saying.
Russia has a federal law on state secrets, but its categories of classified information are very general and it allows ministries and other federal agencies to make up their own lists of potentially secret data. Pavlov said Order No. 055 had been “a major mechanism” for implementing the law.
The court’s decision can be appealed within 10 days; if no appeal is submitted, the ruling will come into effect at the end of that time. The Defense Ministry’s representative at the trial, Lieutenant Colonel Konstantin Rusanov, was quoted by Interfax as saying he did not know whether his agency would appeal the ruling. 
Pavlov called the court’s terms for bringing the ruling into force “a mistake,” saying the order should be considered void from the moment of its issuance in August 1996. He said he would submit an appeal to make the court’s ruling retroactive.
The first blow to Order No. 055 came last fall when the Supreme Court upheld a complaint filed by Nikitin’s legal team and annulled 10 of the document’s 650 articles. The Defense Ministry challenged the decision, but the appeal was rejected.
Nikitin’s lawyer Yury Shmidt was pleased with Tuesday’s decision, viewing it as a continuation of the effort by him and his client.
“Our mission was to trigger a domino effect and have everybody follow suit,” Shmidt said by telephone from St. Petersburg.
He added that he and Nikitin have filed a number of similar complaints to the Supreme Court, in part calling for a change in the law on state secrets that would strip federal agencies, including ministries, of the right to draw up their own lists of classified data.
“We hope to introduce some order to the mechanism of classifying data as state secrets and to decrease the total volume of such data,” Shmidt said. “Our activity is aimed at eliminating the restrictions on a citizen’s right to obtain information and at reducing the legal possibilities for creating spies.”
Shmidt said the annulment of Order No. 055 could have significant ramifications for two jailed espionage suspects whose charges are largely based on the document — Igor Sutyagin, a researcher with the USA and Canada Institute, and businessman Viktor Kalyadin.
Kalyadin’s lawyer, Lyudmila Trunova, filed the case against Order No. 055 together with Pasko’s attorneys.
Her client, the head of a Moscow-based company that traded in dual-purpose technologies, was sentenced to 14 years behind bars last October on charges of committing treason by revealing state secrets.
Kalyadin, who maintains he is innocent, was convicted for trying to sell classified documentation on a tank-defense system to a U.S. company. All of the alleged mediators in the deal, including a U.S. businessperso, were either not charged, or received nominal sentences, Trunova told reporters last week.
She said Kalyadin’s verdict was based on the conclusions of military experts who said the documentation in question fell under Order No. 055.

TITLE: Church Relations Hit New Low
AUTHOR: By Andrei Zolotov Jr.
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Pope John Paul II’s decision this week to upgrade the Roman Catholic Church’s status in Russia will do little to change the rights of Catholic believers here. But by setting up a full-fledged Catholic Church in Russia, the pope has shed all but a few of the ecumenical niceties in the Vatican’s approach to the Russian Orthodox Church and has raised new questions about a long-discussed papal visit.
The Russian Orthodox Church’s Moscow Patriarchate, stopping short of severing all relations with the Vatican, on Wednesday indefinitely postponed a visit by the Vatican’s chief ecumenical official, Cardinal Walter Kasper, who was scheduled to arrive Feb. 21 to meet with Russian Orthodox Church head Patriarch Alexy II.
The patriarch’s consent would be needed for the pope’s visit to Russia. President Vladimir Putin said last month that he was prepared to invite the pope at “any minute.” But for that to happen, relations between the two churches would have to improve — something Putin said he was ready to encourage.
Igor Vyzhanov, the Moscow Patriarchate official in charge of relations with the Vatican, said the pope’s decision to set up Catholic dioceses dashed hopes that he would come any time soon.
“It moves us away, in fact very far away, from the prospect of a visit,” Vyzhanov said.
Putin’s remarks about the possibility of a papal visit has fueled speculation in Moscow that Putin and the Vatican may have agreed behind Alexy’s back to go ahead with a visit.
Vyzhanov denied the talk. “We have a complete mutual understanding with the government on this matter,” he said.
In a letter to Kasper on Wednesday, his Russian Orthodox counterpart, Metropolitan Kirill, said the Vatican’s decision meant the planned talks “would not be able to achieve their main goal — a real solution to problems existing between the two churches and a radical improvement of relations between them,” Interfax reported.
The Moscow Patriarchate on Tuesday declared the decision a “challenge” to Orthodoxy, accusing the Vatican of trying to poach Orthodox believers.
The Vatican announced Monday that it had upgraded its four “apostolic administrations” into full-fledged dioceses united in an “ecclesiastical province” under the guidance of a Moscow-based metropolitan, Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz.
Under Russian civil law, apostolic administrations are already registered as centralized religious organizations, and a switch to dioceses will mean little more than the registration of a new name. 
But under Catholic Church law, the change is significant.
“Today we can say that at last Russia has received normal Catholic structures similar to those that exist in other countries,” Kondrusiewicz said in a statement.
The Foreign Ministry has also criticized the decision. After being notified Feb. 4, the government tried to convince the Vatican to hold off for talks with the Russian Orthodox Church, “taking into account that this issue chiefly concerns interchurch relations and might become a reason for their serious exacerbation.”
Orthodox sensitivity to the status of Catholics is based on the fact that Orthodox view Catholics as a separated but real church and Catholic bishops as real bishops who, like their Orthodox counterparts, have retained the line of succession dating back to the apostles.
At the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, the Catholic Church recognized the Orthodox as “sister churches,” with the right means for salvation. Since then, two opposing logics — and apparently two parties — have emerged in the Vatican: one seeking a closer relationship with the Orthodox in hopes of finding unity through theological dialogue and cooperation, and the other seeking to expand the Catholic Church.

TITLE: Compromise Army Bill Agreed
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — After three weeks of stormy debate, the military, cabinet and State Duma on Tuesday reached a compromise bill on alternative military service that allows draftees to serve outside army bases and near their hometowns.
Left in the draft law, which is expected to get final approval from the cabinet on Thursday, are military proposals requiring civil service personnel to serve up to four years — compared to two years in the army — and be subject to background checks.
“We will consider the bill that has been agreed on with the deputies so that the deputies will withdraw their alternative drafts and will consider just one version,” Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov told the Moskovskiye Novosti weekly.
Duma deputies have drawn up three separate bills on alternative service. The Defense Ministry’s own bill drew criticism from the cabinet, Duma and human-rights activists for provisions such as making draftees put in up to four years and possibly sending them to regions far from their homes.
Vladimir Lysenko, a deputy in the Russian Regions faction and a co-author of one of the bills, said the compromise included a number of “serious, positive changes” from the military’s version. 
“All those who choose alternative military service will live at home, go to work and work under the Labor Code, while in the evening they will be given an opportunity to study,” Lysenko said in a telephone interview Tuesday.
He also said the military had objected to giving civil service personnel more privileged than regular servicemen, but it gave in to pressure from the cabinet.
He also praised the change allowing recruits to perform civil service outside of military bases, a move resisted by the Defense Ministry.
The military — while not insisting draftees prove their aversion to weapons — wants the alternative-service commission to be given the right to double-check information supplied by conscripts with the police, school teachers, employers and relatives. The military is also calling for two years of alternative service for conscripts with university degrees and four years for those without. Lawmakers are seeking 18 months for university graduates and three years for those without the education.

TITLE: Is There Enough Room For New Liberal Parties?
AUTHOR: By Gregory Feifer
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: When several high-profile legislators split from the Union of Right Forces in December, they accused the party and Yabloko, the country’s other main liberal political movement, of irrevocably tainting themselves by toeing the Kremlin line. Their new Liberal Russia Party, the deputies said, would pick up the mantle of opposition.
Political observers, however, paint a bleak future for Liberal Russia, saying that three’s a crowd in the political arena already dominated by Grigory Yavlinsky’s opposition-minded Yabloko and the Kremlin-friendly Union of Right Forces, or SPS.
“The liberal niche is taken,” said Sergei Markov, a Kremlin-connected political analyst. “Liberals who support [President Vladimir] Putin will vote for SPS, and liberals critical of him have Yabloko.” Andrei Ryabov of the Moscow Carnegie Center agreed. “The Russian election system functions with an elite that has already formed,” he said. “It’s very tough going for a new party, especially one without the support of the executive branch.”
That prognosis does little to dampen the spirits of the Boris Berezovsky-bankrolled Liberal Russia, which predicts a possible further split in SPS — and even Yabloko — sometime down the road. “Both SPS and Yabloko seriously compromised themselves by taking part in the total bureaucratization of the country,” Liberal Russia co-chairman Viktor Pokhmelkin said.
“Totalitarian control is no longer possible,” Pokhmelkin said. “And if you can’t control the country with totalitarianism, then part of society will increasingly battle for freedom. This creates a chance for the Liberal Russia Party.”
Liberal Russia aims to garner 15 percent of the vote in the next State Duma elections. But analysts give it virtually no chance of attracting even the 5 percent needed to qualify for a place in parliament. Moreover, any splits in SPS and Yabloko are highly unlikely, they say. 
Nevertheless, speculation — often the stuff of politics as much as anything else in Russia — cannot just be written off. In this case, the talk revolves around SPS’s balancing act as both a self-stated liberal party and — when push comes to shove — an unconditional supporter of Putin.
That ideological strain reached breaking point when Pokhmelkin and three other SPS members, Sergei Yushenkov, Yuly Rybakov and Vladimir Golovyov, defected to form Liberal Russia. 
But conflicts within SPS go back to the organization’s formation in 1999 from nine groups, most headed by the so-called young reformers of the Yeltsin-era. At the time, supporters hoped the new political bloc’s members would use their clout to exert significant pressure on the Kremlin. Expectations grew following the December 1999 parliamentary elections, when SPS landed an unexpected 8.7 percent of the popular vote.
For SPS leaders, however, political loyalty came first. Most of them, including Unified Energy Systems chief Anatoly Chubais, former acting Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar and former Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko, owed their careers to former President Boris Yeltsin, and they remained faithful to their political patron.
When then-Prime Minister Putin launched Russia’s second military campaign in Chechnya, Chubais and SPS chief Kiriyenko wholeheartedly backed the move. SPS leaders followed suit several months later by throwing their support behind Putin’s bid for the presidency. 
Since his election in 2000, Putin has pushed through a series of measures to reform the economy and military that were backed — and in some cases proposed — by SPS. But the president’s strong-arm tactics to strengthen centralized political power also sparked accusations of authoritarianism. 
SPS’s critics, meanwhile, accused the party of selling out its principles by generally giving Putin its unconditional support and acquiescing on issues such as freedom of the press during the takeover of independent television stations NTV and TV6.
At the same time, Kiriyenko — once the most visible of the young reformers — was appointed representative to one of Putin’s new administrative super regions, the Volga Federal District, and disappeared into the Kremlin bureaucracy.
“SPS is on the political border,” said Vladimir Pribylovsky, president of the Panorama think tank. “It walks a fine line, because those who support Putin will tend to vote for the [centrist, pro-Kremlin] Unified Russia Party, and those who don’t have Yabloko.”
While SPS chose to work within the system, Yabloko emerged as the lone dissenting among national liberal parties. The party emphasizes human rights and appeals to an older part of the liberal electorate. “It’s the most classic liberal party in Russia,” said Ryabov of the Moscow Carnegie Center. “It tries to hold the most liberal principles.”
Liberal Russia founders say both Yabloko and SPS are unable to oppose what they call Putin’s creation of an “autocratic-bureaucratic” state. They accuse both parties of compromising their liberal credentials by essentially giving their unquestioning support to the government’s 2002 budget and by fully backing Putin’s foreign policy since the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.
Pokhmelkin said his role in Liberal Russia came about after he unsuccessfully vied for a leadership position in SPS. “I wanted to become the head of SPS to defend the values I stand for after [SPS leader Boris] Nemtsov stopped doing so,” he said at the news conference last month. “I realized I couldn’t. SPS’s split is between those who uphold human rights and those who support Putin.”
Nemtsov dismissed the accusation as well as speculation of another SPS split. “Regarding SPS, you shouldn’t worry,” he said in an interview. “A million people will vote for us. ... The thing is that those who left us went to Berezovsky’s party,” he said. “It’s like destroying your political career before it starts. They’ve made a mistake. But they have a chance to correct themselves, and we’re ready to discuss the problem with them.”
Despite its growing reputation of acquiescence, SPS does speak out against the Kremlin. Nemtsov roundly criticized the Kremlin’s policies on free speech at a media conference he co-chaired last week.
“Freedom of the press is under grave threat,” he said, adding that “under Yeltsin, no one would have even thought of organizing such a conference.” 
Such words reflect what seems to be an increasingly hard-line attitude toward Putin. “For people like Nemtsov and Gaidar, working from the inside has its contradictions,” Pribylovsky said.
But seasoned commentators agree that Nemtsov’s criticism of the Kremlin does not mean the party’s internal conflicts will spill out again. “Those who wanted to split have left already,” Pribylovsky said.
Ryabov said the remaining SPS members have “already worked out a firm line concerning their cooperation with authority.”

TITLE: Berezovsky Makes Offer To Sell TV6 Assets
PUBLISHER: The Moscow Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — While talks continue behind the scenes about a future investor for TV6 television, the majority shareholder of the shut-down channel, Boris Berezovsky, offered Thursday to sell the company’s studio equipment, film library and other assets to the winner of the tender scheduled for March 27.
The offer was made for Berezovsky by former ORT general director Igor Shabdurasulov after a general shareholders meeting for MNVK, TV6’s parent company. The meeting decided to form a liquidation commission to oversee the channel’s court-ordered bankruptcy.
Shareholders representing Berezovsky’s 75 percent of MNVK met despite protests from minority shareholder LUKoil-Garant, which won a court ruling earlier this month banning the meeting. Yet no court marshals disrupted the meeting, Shabdurasulov said.
Shabdurasulov also said Berezovsky had instructed him to oversee the bankruptcy process and negotiate the possible sale of TV6 assets to OOO TV6, a new company formed by Yevgeny Kiselyov and his team of former TV6 journalists. Kiselyov and other TV6 managers resigned Thursday from their positions in MNVK in what Kiselyov said was a move meant to better concentrate on preparations for the tender, Interfax reported.
Shabdurasulov said that as of this month MNVK assets are worth $28 million and debts are $37 million.
He said LUKoil-Garant would probably be unable to claim any assets in the bankruptcy since Berezovsky-owned companies are the main creditors of MNVK. 
The meeting appointed TV6 external manager Pavel Chernovalov, who previously worked with ORT, as chairperson of the liquidation commission. 
Shabdurasulov said that he was “sympathetic” to Kiselyov’s team and would prefer to sell all the assets to OOO TV6 so it would not have to begin from scratch but was willing to sell it to whomever won the tender. 
Kiselyov is in negotiations with a consortium led by Anatoly Chubais, the head of Unified Energy Systems, for funds to bid in the TV6 tender.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Ivanov Warns U.S.
n MOSCOW (AP) — Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov on Thursday joined the chorus of Russian officials warning the United States against attacking Iraq, saying that U.S. action would not help the international anti-terrorism effort, Interfax reported. 
Ivanov’s comment followed U.S. President George W. Bush’s announcement Wednesday that he had ordered a review of options to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
Earlier this week, President Vladimir Putin and Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov voiced concern about U.S. intentions toward Iraq, which Russian leaders fear may become the next target in the U.S.-led anti-terror campaign. 
Referring to Bush’s identification of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an “axis of evil” in his State of the Union speech, Ivanov said that “labeling various states is an approach that is hardly in compliance with international efforts to combat terrorism,” Interfax reported. 

Temporary Troops
n MOSCOW (AP) — U.S., French and other foreign troops deployed in Kyrgyzstan for the anti-terrorism campaign in nearby Afghanistan will not remain indefinitely, Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev said Wednesday. 
“We declared from the outset that the deployment of the anti-terrorist coalition forces in the republic would be temporary,” Akayev was quoted by Itar-Tass as saying during a visit to Moscow. 
“The term of their presence has been set at one year,” he said, adding that the term could be extended only after consultations with members of a collective-security treaty among several ex-Soviet republics, and with countries in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which includes China, Russia and other Central Asian states. 

Coalition Concern
n MOSCOW (AP) — The Foreign Ministry voiced concern Wednesday that the U.S.-led anti-terrorism coalition is weakening because of differences over which terrorists to target. 
“Those who advocated ideas of the Cold War and geopolitical standoff, including the use of various terrorist groups as a foothold operating in different regions of the world, are again rearing their heads,” a Foreign Ministry statement said. 
To preserve the unity of the coalition, its members should stop “double standards of dividing terrorists into ‘good ones and bad ones,’” it said. 
The ministry reiterated Russia’s position that it is fighting international terrorists in Chechnya. It said international terrorism should be fought in strict compliance with international law and the UN Charter, and warned that the war against terrorism could not be won by “exclusively military means.” 

Chechen Refugees
n TBILISI, Georgia (AP) — A Russian delegation headed to Georgia on Thursday to discuss the repatriation of refugees to Chechnya, and a Chechen refugee representative close to the separatists said refugees would not return before peace talks with the rebels. 
The leader of the Chechen diaspora in Georgia, Khizri Aldamov, said that the refugees in Georgia were unlikely to go voluntarily. 
“Let the Russians first end the war, sit down at the negotiating table with the legally elected president and government of Chechnya,” Aldamov said. “Then, I assure you, all the Chechens will go home.” 
The delegation, headed by Deputy Emergency Situations Minister Yury Brazhnikov, intended to set a timetable for the repatriations, which are to be voluntary.

TITLE: Team Canada Plays the Kremlin
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — Canadian Prime Minister and “Team Canada” captain Jean Chretien flew into Moscow on Wednesday with more than 300 top politicians and executives for five days of deal-making and discussions on a host of issues, including arms reduction, HIV, business development — and hockey.
Chretien said in an interview published Wednesday that relations between the two northern countries “have never been better,” and a senior Canadian official said after arriving, “It is time to register this message: Things in Russia have been improving a lot.”
At his meeting with Chretien on Thursday, President Vladimir Putin said that the Canadian businesspeople accompanying Chretien on the trip were set to sign deals worth more than $1 billion later this week.
Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, doing his boss one better, said that a packet of bilateral trade and economic agreements that will be signed could be worth $2 billion. The Canadian side could not confirm either figure, saying only that they were glad the Russian side was so upbeat. 
Putin said that Russia, too, was interested in boosting economic ties, and he complained that, in contrast to many countries, Canada’s share of Russian foreign trade last year had decreased. Bilateral trade in the first 11 months of 2001 stood at $600 million, down from $870 million reached in 2000, according to Canadian figures.
“We have many things to be proud of. We can speak of achievements, but I would prefer to concentrate on problems and the search for solutions to them,” Putin said. One controversial issue on the agenda related to Canadian antidumping measures against Russian steel exporters. Chretien said regulation in the field was conducted by a tribunal, not the government, but promised to look into it, to “make sure that judgment is fair.” The official visit kicked off with a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and will include the launch of an HIV-AIDS network and Web site, as well as trips to the Star City space center and the Higher School of Economics, where the Canadian International Development Agency is supporting the development of a corporate governance center.
Included on Team Canada’s travel squad roster are 12 provincial and territorial leaders, but notably absent are representatives from two corporations — Norex Petroleum and Archangel Diamond Corp. — that have been embroiled in billion-dollar lawsuits over projects gone awry in Russia. Norex, which claims that TNK, a top Russian oil company, cheated it out of a lucrative Siberian oil field, was a topic Chretien brought up with Putin in Moscow last year.
Nonetheless, on Friday, “several business contracts will definitely be signed” at a ceremony at Luzhniki Stadium, which will include a highlight film of the historicfinal game of the 1972 Soviet-Canadian hockey series — the first time professionals from Canada played the Soviet elite. Canada won the game, which decided the series, 6-5 on a last-minute goal.

(SPT, AP)

TITLE: Telecominvest Hooks Up With Germans in Venture
AUTHOR: By Andrey Musatov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Germany’s TelesensKSCL, Europe’s leading provider of billing systems for the telecommunications industry, and the St. Petersburg-based Telecominvest holding company announced Tuesday the creation of a joint venture, TCI-Telesens, to set up the systems in the Russian market.
The systems are based on a computer-software package that allows the metering of cellular and fixed-line telephone calls and the creation of a detailed bill for each subscriber.
The move is a big step in a plan announced by Svyazinvest, the national fixed-line monopoly, at the beginning of 2000 to switch all of its regional subsidiaries over to billing for local calls. Presently, local calls in the most regions — including through local provider North-West Telecom — are provided for a monthly flat-rate fee. North-West Telecom is the new name for St. Petersburg Telephone System (PTS).
According to a statement issued by Telecominvest on Tuesday, the management of the TCI-Telesens is already in negotiations with North-West Telecom to set up a billing system.
Igor Samylin, deputy director of North-West Telecom, confirmed that negotiations are under way, but said that no documents had yet been signed as the details were still being worked out. He said that the deal would serve as a test case for the rest of the Russian market.
“If TCI-Telesens installs a successful system, it will become the priority supplier to most of Russia’s [local phone] companies,” Samylin said Thursday.
He also said that St. Petersburg required a billing system that could handle at least 4 million clients.
“There are simply no billing systems of that scale in Russia,” he said. “TCI-Telesens will be the first to be introduced here.”
While the installation of the billing system represents the final technical hurdle on the way to introducing metered local calls, Samylin said it is still difficult to predict when the system might be introduced.
“It all depends on how long the Federal Antimonopoly Ministry takes to set and approve tariffs,” he said.
With its main office located in Moscow, the goal for TCI-Telesens is not only to handle licensing and services in Russia, but also in other CIS states, according to Moritz Gerke, CEO of TelesensKSCL.
TelesensKSCL is expecting to turn a profit in its first year of operations and to bring in revenues of over 30 million euros ($26.2 million) over the first five years.
“We are committed to forging ahead with our internationalization strategy, focusing on our core markets,” he said in a written statement. “Due to the existing market structure and trends, Russia, eastern Europe and the CIS states are particularly relevant.”
The legal formalities of setting up TCI-Telesen will be completed by the end of February. The companies announced that Telecominvest owns a 51-percent stake in the joint venture, with TelesensKSCL owning the remaining 49 percent. 
According to Gerke, Telecominvest was chosen foron the basis of its holdings in and alliances with a large number of telecommunications companies both inside and outside of Russia. 
The Telecominvest holding gathers 32 regional Russian providers under its umbrella. Svyazinvest, which serves more than 25 million customers across the country, also owns a 15-percent stake in Telecominvest through its subsidiary, North-West Telecom. Germany’s Commerzbank owns the remaining 85 percent of Telecominvest shares.
With a population of over 145 million people, only 20 percent of Russian households have a fixed telephone line. Deregulation of the market is in full swing, and the first nine months of 2001 saw growth of more than 30 per cent over the previous year. A further significant rise in the number of lines is expected by 2006.

TITLE: Computer Makers Reporting Record Sales
AUTHOR: By Larisa Naumenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Computer makers shipped a record 607,000 personal computers in the fourth quarter of 2001, up 25.5 percent over the same period the year before, IDC said in a report released on Thursday.
The global information-technology research company said the number significantly exceeded the previous record of the 483,000 PCs that were shipped in the fourth quarter of 1997.
Imports account for 15 percent of Russia’s personal-computer market.
“Since the financial crisis of 1998 the Russian IT market has entered a new era characterized by stability and steady growth,” said Andrei Verkhovod, PC analyst at IDC Russia.
“We have been recording strong growth in the Russian PC market since mid-2000, and this growth has been rooted in a favorable economic and political environment,” he said.
IDC said that seasonal factors contributed to the record figure, as the October-December period is traditionally the most active in Russia
 Another significant factor was the government’s program to computerize rural schools. Under the program the government bought 60,000 PCs in the fourth quarter of 2001, and more than half were shipped, IDC said.
Notably, Russia, the fifth-largest computer market in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), according to IDC, was the only country in the top six that posted a growth in PC unit shipments. Shipments in Germany, Britain, France, Italy and the Netherlands declined from 0.6 percent to 14.7 percent.
The top five computer suppliers on the Russian PC market, according to IDC, were Formoza, Aquarius, Hewlett-Packard, R-Style and Compaq respectively.
Aquarius sold 88,594 PCs in Russia in 2001, a 40 percent increase over 2000, said Aquarius Group board chairman Leonid Goldenberg. He said the fourth quarter accounted for some 40 percent of the company’s annual sales.
Top suppliers all named political stability, the improving economy and growing demand from governmental organizations and real sector companies as the main reasons for the surge in sales.
“Companies are still at the stage when they begin or continue equipping themselves with computers,” said Svyatoslav Sorokin, the director for sales and marketing at Compaq in Moscow.
“For companies, buying computers is more of an investment question than a current cost question at the moment.” 
Compaq’s sales jumped 20 percent last year, with at least a third of that total coming in the fourth quarter, Sorokin said.
He declined to give concrete sales figures.

TITLE: Buys May Signal Digital Plans
AUTHOR: By Andrey Musatov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: With the arrival of Mobile TeleSystems (MTS), the local cellular-phone market finally attracted a second GSM-standard operator, and rumors continue to swirl that the arrival of a third is emminent. But a couple of moves in recent months have also rekindled speculation that market players are lining up to construct third-generation cellular networks here and in Moscow.
At the end of January, North-West Telecom and Telecominvest announced that they were in negotiations to sell their shares in analog-standard cellular provider Delta Telecom.
PTS owns 43 percent of Delta, while Telecominvest has a 25-percent stake. The remainder of stock belongs to a subsidiary of MCT, a U.S.-based telecommunications holding.
In Moscow, at the end of 2001, Sistema Telecom President Alexander Goncharuk announced that the company had sold the Moscow-based analog-standard operator Sonet and its 23.5-percent stake in the third-generation, CDMA standard operator Moscow Cellular Network (MSS).
But neither Sistema Telecom, North-West Telecom, nor Telecominvest are dosclosing the purchaser involved in the deals.
All three companies had earlier said that they planned to operate on the third-generation CDMA standard, which provides very high sound quality and a greater broadcasting range than existing cellular standards. CDMA also allows higher rates of data transfer, making possible such services as cellular Internet access.
One rumor is that the providers may have been purchased by Britain-based Inquam Limited, a subsidiary of Qualcomm, a telecommunication equipment supplier and the author of the CDMA standard.
“I have no evidence of this, but the purchase of these companies would be in keeping with the Inquam’s corporate strategy,” Anton Inshutin, an analyst at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter global financial services said Monday. “Inquam’s latest purchases were of Telefonica Romania, a Romanian NMT operator, in 2000, and the recently announced purchase of PT Telselindo Nusantara, an operator in Indonesia.”
According to Inshutin, Inquam has the financial resources to build CDMA networks in both Moscow and St. Petersburg, which would cost about $100 million each.
An official at Inquam refused to comment, citing company policy not to discuss such purchases.
Inshutin says that, regardless of who bought the companies, setting up a successful CDMA network in Russia will not be easy.
“It’s hard to tell if the launch of a CDMA network will be successful in Russia, as there are no examples in the world of such a system with a large subscriber base,” he said. “It will be a while yet before customers come to appreciate the technical advantages of CDMA.”
Meanwhile the rapid growth in the subscriber base at North-West GSM and MTS continues to show the popularity of the GSM standard.
According to Andrei Braginsky, vice president of the analysis department at Renaissance Capital market-research agency, due to the low penetration rate and the former absence of competition in the cellular market, expectations were for growth to be rapid. Still, the numbers have outstripped these expectations.
“The numbers for [MTS], the newly arrived GSM operator, have shown strong growth recently, and its market share by end of the year will be about 30 percent,” he said.
Kirill Lubnin, the MTS spokesperson, said that the low prices and special offers, like $0.01-per-minute calls within the MTS network, that the company is offering, were not significantly cutting into the company’s bottom line.
“We’re not looking at St. Petersburg as a source for big profits yet,” he said Monday. “MTS has 2.5 million subscribers in other cities, so our present aim in St. Petersburg is to build market share.”
The total number of GSM-standard subscribers in the city recently breached the 1-million mark, as North-West GSM has about 847,000 clients and MTS already about 150,000 in a city with a population of 4.7 million.
At the beginning of 2001, federal Communications Minister Leonid Reiman said that a third GSM license would be granted after subscriber penetration rose above 10 percent. The present figure is already above the 20-percent mark, and speculation about who will get the third license is heating up.
But there might be more than one license granted. Petersburg Telecom, which operates an AMPS analog-standard network under the Fora Communications brand name, has applied to the Communications Ministry for a GSM-1800 license. Moscow-based Vimpelcom has also applied for a GSM 900/1800 license.
The Communications Ministry could not be reached on Thursday.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Distillery Deal
n ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — State-owned alcohol-production company Rosspirtprom and the Veda Distillery, located in the Leningrad Oblast town of Kingisepp, have agreed to spend about $30 million on the construction of a new distillery in oblast, Veda General Director Anatoly Maschenko announced Thursday, Interfax reported.
According to the report, Rosspirtprom will finance 51 percent of the construction, and Veda will pay the remaining 49 percent.
Construction of the distillery actually began at the end of last year, and is slated to be completed by Fall 2003.
Maschenko said that presently his company produces alcohol at the Bakhus plant, located in Smolensk, and that the new facility witll improve the quality of Veda’s product, Interfax reported.


$1.3Bln to Paris Club
n MOSCOW (SPT) — The Finance Ministry plans to pay $1.3 billion to the Paris Club of creditors on Feb. 20, one of the largest payments of the year, Prime-Tass reported Thursday. 
Russia’s debt to the Paris Club of creditors amounted to $44.8 billion as of Jan. 1. Russia is due to pay $2.95 billion to the club this year. 
Russia’s sovereign foreign debt totaled $118.9 billion as of Oct. 1, 2001.


Building Company
n ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The Skanska East Europe construction company has purchased an 80-percent stake in Peterburgstro, one of St. Petersburg leading residential-building construction firms, Interfax reported on Thursday. 
According to Martti Rautee, president of Skanska East Europe, the purchase agreement was signed Wednesday.
Terms of the deal were not announced.
The management of the company and employees will remain in place, while the name will be changed to Peterburg-Skanska, the report states.
Skanska East Europe is one of the leading Western construction companies in Russia. In the last 8 years, Skanska has built or reconstructed more than 60 buildings in Russia, Interfax reported.

Inflation Calms
n MOSCOW (Reuters) — Average daily inflation fell to 0.06 percent between Feb. 1 and Feb. 11 from 0.098 percent over the whole month of January and 0.081 percent in February 2001, the State Statistics Committee said Thursday. Consumer prices on Feb. 11 stood 0.7 percent higher than on Feb. 1. 
The committee announced Feb. 6 that month-on-month consumer-price inflation jumped to 3.1 percent in January, the highest since February 1999. 
The government has forecast consumer prices will rise by 12 to 14 percent in the year to December 2002. Most analysts expect the increase to be nearer 16 percent. 

$800M From EBRD 
n MOSCOW (SPT) — The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development invested over $800 million into projects in Russia in 2001, EBRD business director Peter Reiniger said Thursday, Prime-Tass reported.
The EBRD is currently participating in 760 projects in Russia, and has over 60,000 companies as clients, including small businesses. 
He said that in 2001, 1/3 of the bank’s investments were in the financial sector, and about 40 percent was spread out among transportation, energy, oil and gas companies.

TITLE: IFC Offers Regional Carriers Lease on Life
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s troubled aircraft makers are set to enjoy as much as $2 billion in new orders for short-range airplanes over the next couple of years — but only if they can work out financing schemes that would make it affordable for airlines.
With hundreds of short-range airplanes that are more than 25 years old facing decommissioning, domestic carriers are on the lookout for new craft.
But a dearth of options, and little help from the cash-strapped state, has many regional carriers looking for ways to stay in business.
Enter the Ilyushin Finance Co., set up in 1999 by the National Reserve Bank and the Ilyushin aviation complex. IFC, which is already financing six long-haul Il-96-300s for Aeroflot, says it is ready to pave the way for domestic regional aircraft to enter the market.
“We are looking at applications from a number of regional airlines,” said IFC chief Alexander Rubtsov. He said Krasnoyarsk’s Sibaviatrans and Moscow’s Centravia have both “turned to us” with requests for a total of 10 Il-114s.
Retailing for some $9 million, the Il-114 can carry up to 64 passengers as far as 1,200 kilometers. It has been in production since 1992, and was certified in 1997. Designed by the Ilyushin Design Bureau in Moscow, between 80 percent and 90 percent of its components are made in Russia, although it is assembled at a facility in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The plane can be fitted either with two Russian-made turboprop TV-7 or Canadian Pratt & Whitney PW127C engines. It can also be fitted as a cargo plane, called the Il-114T, which has yet to be certified.
Rubtsov sees demand for some 200 craft like the Il-114 over the next five years. But only two are currently in use, by Uzbekistan’s national airline, Ozbekiston Havo Yollari.
In December, the State Civil Aviation Service said craft older than 25 years must be decommissioned, although it left the time-frame up in the air. The decision will mostly effect regional workhorses like the Tu-134, An-24, and Yak-40. There are 214 Tu-134s, 264 An-24s, and 324 Yak-40s currently in service in Russia, the aviation service said.
Nikolai Talikov, the designer of the Il-114, said in a recent telephone interview that companies inherited most of these planes from the Soviet Union for free and are reluctant to replace them. This prevented the Il-114 from hitting the market earlier.
“The [aviation service’s] decision must have whipped up the companies to look at new regional craft,” said Talikov. “The Il-114 should be a hit with the regional airlines,” he added.
“We need to cover this market. Russia is a big country with no connections to some regions other than by air,” Talikov said. “Out of the 25 million people that domestic airlines carried last year, at least one-third were on short-range craft.”
Centravia, which is looking to lease seven Il-114s, could use that plane on 30 routes from Moscow, said Mikhail Uryvayev, the airline’s deputy director, adding that the craft is well-suited to regional airstrips.
Centravia is negotiating a $10-million loan to obtain the craft, Uryvayev said. If the first leasing project is a success, he said, the company would like to get up to 30 Il-114s. It now operates a fleet of 15 Yak-42Ds and one An-24.
The new Il-114 will be part of a marketing experiment for the airline, Uryvayev said. “To really understand the need for these aircraft, we have to get them and offer them to customers.”
Sibaviatrans is looking to acquire three Il-114s this year, with further plans to lease 10 craft by 2008, including two or three of the cargo version, which it hopes to have certified at its home base in Krasnoyarsk, said company Marketing Director Alexei Uchevatov.
But for that to happen, the company would need to strike a deal with IFC that puts its monthly payment at no more than $50,000 per plane. “This is what the company can afford,” he said.
The Tashkent plant that makes the Il-114 currently has 10 craft in different stages of assembly. Its own leasing company, Uzavializing, has a contract to supply three such craft to the St. Petersburg-based Vyborg airline.
Talikov, the Il-114’s designer, said the plant can produce 100 planes per year. Aeroflot-associated Nizhny Novgorod Airlines, Sibir and Yakutavia are also interested in the craft, he said, adding that he is flying to China this week to explore the possibility of exporting.
Moscow-based aviation analyst Paul Duffy said attempts to mass produce regional craft could be jeopardized by airlines’ need to pass on to passengers the cost of acquisitions. “Short-haul passengers are paying very low fares,” he said. “I doubt airlines would be able to generate enough revenue to pay for new aircraft.” If the funding issue is resolved, he said, the Il-114 or Ukraine’s An-140 would be the logical choice.
Another option, if it weren’t for prohibitive import and VAT duties totaling 40 percent, would be short-range models from foreign giants such as Canada’s Bombardier and Brazil’s Embraer, whose executives have been visiting Russia with increasing frequency.
Some domestic airlines, such as Aeroflot, are lobbying the government to scrap import duties altogether.
Russia could lose the entire regional market because there are no mass-produced regional jets available domestically, Aeroflot CEO Valery Okulov said last week. He said the government should stop charging import duties on jets that have no analogs at home until they appear.
Tyumenaviatrans is in preliminary talks with Bombardier over its DHC Dash-8 regional jet. And Sibaviatrans is also looking at the Dash-8, French-built ATRs, and Swedish Saab-2000s, Uchevatov said, but only if the import duties are lifted.

TITLE: Chubais Weighs In Against Government Tariff Program
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Unified Energy Systems CEO Anatoly Chubais slammed the government’s tariff policy Tuesday, saying it failed to give the natural monopolies’ customers a clear idea of prices for the entire year.
Setting up new tariff rates that only cover the first half of 2002 was simply a failure, Chubais told reporters Tuesday. “As a result, I do not understand what will happen with tariffs after June. ¾ This is not a strategy, it is a weakness.”
The cabinet last month approved a 16-percent hike in rail-cargo tariffs starting Feb. 15, a 20-percent increase in electricity rates starting March 1, and a 20-percent increase in natural-gas prices starting March 15. 
The decision followed a heated debate with the natural monopolies that was overshadowed by concerns over growing inflation. The government promised to return to the debate in the second quarter.
Even with the uncertainty related to tariffs, UES seems to be doing better than ever, thanks in part to a complex scheme late last year between the Russian power monopoly and obscure Czech company Falkon Capital that reduced Russia’s debt to Prague by $2.5 billion to $1.1 billion. 
“A major, serious deal took place, and as a result, UES considerably improved its financial position,” Chubais said, adding that the release of second-quarter financial results in the summer will shed some light on UES’s part in the deal.
The scheme resulted in the elimination of all of UES’s unsettled debt to Gazprom, Rosenergoatom and the federal budget as of Jan. 1, Chubais said. Debt previously owed by UES’s production units to various structures outside the holding is now owed to UES itself. 
The debt swap, however, will not lead to an increase in UES’s stakes in regional energos, he said, adding that UES wants to reduce its stakes in production units. UES can now proceed with restructuring without the risk of its debt being brought up and used against it, he said.
Meanwhile, UES is planning to hold a tender before the third quarter that could result in the arrival of Russia's first strategic investor into the power industry, Chubais said.

TITLE: Could This Be the End for Figure Skating?
AUTHOR: By George Vecsey
TEXT: SALT LAKE CITY — Figure skating is in terrible, terrible trouble. The admission by a French Olympic official that a French judge had been swayed in her voting constitutes one of the great scandals in Olympic history.
The loud and angry wisdom of the crowd, the roars of “Six! Six! Six!” clearly had more substance than the rules and the ethics of a highly visible sport. Some of the things that people wondered about figure skating may indeed be true. Votes can be affected by peer pressure, or maybe even outright greed. Who believes anything about this sport right now?
The International Olympic Committee must now get more involved in the decision about what do about a gold medal for the two Canadian skaters who were harmed Monday night by a close and tainted vote.
The Canadian skating association was planning to appeal the decision that gave a gold medal to the St. Petersburg pair of Yelena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze ahead of the Canadian pair of Jamie Sale and David Pelletier.
Now that we have heard about the French judge, I would opt for giving duplicate medals to the Canadians and not take away the gold medals from the Russian pair, who presumably did nothing dishonest themselves. Whoever caused the judge to be swayed can be rooted out soon enough.
Whoever cheated, throw them all out, forever. They won’t be missed. They have already soiled a Winter Games that was well planned by the local organizers and, much more importantly, they have taken away from the athletes who deserved more attention from the world.
The big break in this story came last night when Didier Gailhaguet, the head of the French Olympic team, said that a French judge had been pressured to act in a certain way, presumably to vote for the Russian pair.
Some people close to the judge have acted badly and have put someone who is honest and upright, but emotionally fragile, under pressure, The Associated Press quoted Gailhaguet as saying about Marie-Reine Le Gougne, the judge. She is a fragile person and I think she has been somewhat manipulated.
Gailhaguet, speaking as president of the French skating federation, said: Contrary to the accusations, there was no collusion with the East European countries.
Maybe yes and maybe no. The sport itself is also in trouble, because we looked at the arbitrary and inconsistent patterns of judges and wondered if there were not politics of some sort or another.
When judges can be swayed, a sport is in danger of turning into a spectacle. The men’s long program is Thursday night. I can hardly wait to see how the North American fans treat the marks involving Tim Goebel, who is currently ensconced in third place, with Russians first and fourth. Everybody is a judge now.
One sign that the sport was in trouble was that a proud and important sports official named Ottavio Cinquanta spent a full 80 minutes yesterday fielding questions that ranged from skeptical to snide.
With the French admitting its judge was malleable, and with Cinquanta, the head of the International Skating Union, revealing that Ron Pfenning, the head referee, had filed a complaint, and with the Canadians demanding justice and gold medals, figure skating is looking bad in front of the International Olympic Committee and television networks and sponsors. Bluntly, this image could cost figure skating much of its lucrative income, which depends on credibility.
Another sign of skating’s big problem is that the post-scandal IOC held a special meeting last evening and released a paper from its new president, Jacques Rogge, to urge Cinquanta and the ISU to take adequate action as quickly as possible.
One could attribute Cinquanta’s patience to his deep belief in freedom of the press. Or, one could attribute his staying power to his knowing things could only get worse in a matter of hours.
What we have here is an upscale Tonya and Nancy, but without the lurid detail of another knee-whacking. The host city and the IOC cannot be happy with the flareup of the old suspicions about powerful judges who appear to answer to nobody.
It is our games, said Francois Carrard, the director general of the IOC, last evening.
Cinquanta is a 63-year-old businessman from Milan. It is my guess that he normally does not suffer fools or critics or journalists. Yet in a packed hall at the media center, he noted that the figure-skating union had been formed in 1892 and held its first championships in 1894, before the modern Olympic Games began. He said, “We are guests” of the IOC but noted that the technical rules are from the ISU.
Figure skating has carried the Winter Games for several decades now, but this sexy and artistic entertainment depends on nine judges from major skating countries who assign marks to skaters from their own and rival countries. Asked about his opinion of the judging, Cinquanta said, “I am not a judge. I am a spectator, and spectators do not judge.”
Cinquanta said the issue would be taken up at the regular session of the board of the ISU next Monday. Journalists asked him about rumors that the ice-dancing winner has already been chosen before the competition scheduled for Friday, Sunday and Monday.
“There is no relationship between pairs and ice dancing,” Cinquanta insisted, but nobody will believe his sport right now.
People kept asking Cinquanta what he would do if a judge were found to have acted improperly, but he danced and blustered. He had witnessed a vast majority of 16,000 fans chanting “Six! Six! Six!” for the Canadian pair, but he said, “I cannot give the public the right to judge.”
He is absolutely right. Imagine what would happen in American football or Canadian hockey or Italian soccer if the sentiments of the home crowd could overturn a call.
But now it turns out that the crowd Monday night was right in its sense that something was wrong with the judging. Television audiences believed somebody had been swayed. Now a French official is saying a French judge was indeed swayed. Just when the IOC seems to be trying to clean its own house, the skating world is facing one of the great disgraces in Olympic history.

George Vecsey is a sports correspondent for The New York Times, to which he contributed this comment.

TITLE: Armageddon for Politics as Usual
TEXT: WASHINGTON — It will be “Armageddon,” according to the speaker of the House of Representatives: This week, Congress takes up a bill to push corporate money out of U.S. politics.
Dennis Hastert, the Republican speaker, never wanted this bill. But the rank and file, including about 20 from his own party, signed a petition to force it to the floor. So last week, Hastert issued a stark warning to all Republicans: If this bill passes and curtails corporate campaign spending, we could lose control of the House. (A similar bill has passed the Senate, and President George W. Bush has made clear he ain’t going to veto such a thing in the midst of the Enron mess).
Some progress is better than no progress, of course, but this bill alone will never do it. We are in a new Gilded Age, and money from corporations sets the agenda — an agenda that boils down to give corporations more money. That this is happening despite Sept. 11 simply makes it more painful: To paraphrase the pro-campaign-reform web site howdarethey.org, while we have our hands on our hearts pledging allegiance to the flag, corporate lobbyists are picking our pockets. Consider:
• The Republican leadership has been gnashing its teeth over the failure of its “economic stimulus” bill to help recession-wearied places like New York City. This bill was trumpeted as offering $574 million to New York to help deal with rising recession-related health costs — but it turns out it would have also forced New York city to cut taxes to the tune of $1.2 billion, at a time when the city is already so strapped the new mayor is joking about letting a corporation pay to have City Hall named after it.
• That same “economic stimulus” bill retroactively eliminated one corporate tax and so would have refunded to corporations $24 billion in past taxes. In general, the bill was so extreme that The New York Times reports, “when political consultants tried to get reactions from voter focus groups, the voters refused to believe that they were describing the bill accurately.”
• The Center for Public Integrity, a money-in-politics watchdog, reports that the Bush administration tried to slip language protecting the U.S. tobacco industry from foreign lawsuits into post-Sept. 11 anti-terrorism legislation.
• The Republican “energy plan” legislation would give $35 billion over 10 years as taxpayer giveaways to the oil, gas, coal and nuclear power industries. As The Washington Post noted, these giveaways are “unencumbered by any discernable logic.”
• Eight days after our national tragedy, on Sept. 19, Republican Frank Murkowski of Alaska took to the Senate floor to deny he was trying to tack an oil-drilling provision to an emergency defense bill. “That is certainly not the case,” Murkowski said. “It would be inappropriate and in poor taste.” But a few hours later, a Murkowski ally in the Senate tried to do just that. And by Sept. 24, Murkowski and Senate Majority Leader Tom DeLay, good taste be damned, were calling for a “Homeland Energy Security Act” to drill in the Alaskan national wildlife refuge. Ever since, Senate Republicans — egged on by President Bush — have tried to attach refuge-drilling amendments to bills on airline safety, on economic recovery, even on a railroad bill.
This is not a picture of a functioning democracy. An Armageddon for corporate political money can’t come soon enough.

Matt Bivens, a former editor of The St. Petersburg Times, is a Washington-based fellow of The Nation Institute [www.thenation.com].

TITLE: Good Lesson in Magic Realism
AUTHOR: By Boris Kagarlitsky
TEXT: On this trip to Latin America, I finally grasped the meaning of magic realism.
The World Social Forum consisted of a huge number of events taking place simultaneously all over the city of Porto Alegre in Brazil. The program of seminars and conferences was laid out in a 150-page bilingual directory. But the morning sessions began at different times, depending on what language you spoke. Things got under way at 8 a.m. in Portuguese and at 8.30 a.m. in English.
“You know the Brazilians,” a local participant explained. “If you print the right time, they’ll show up an hour later.”
All the same, everything shut down at noon, when the translators left their booths and went home for their siesta.
An acquaintance from Moscow promised to call my hotel room one morning before picking me up to visit the forum’s camp for young people. When he didn’t call, I went down to the front desk, where I learned that my compatriot was not to blame. He had been diligently calling all morning, and the receptionist had just as diligently been connecting him with the wrong room, then conscientiously leaving me messages when I failed to pick up the phone.
By the time I sorted things out, I was late. I had no choice but to hop in a taxi and get to the camp on my own. I had to find my compatriot in any case, because we had a meeting with Scandinavian colleagues that evening. The taxi driver, however, mistakenly proceeded to take me to the university campus.
When it became clear that I wouldn’t make it to the youth camp, I began wandering through the bookstalls of the radical publishing houses. And wouldn’t you know it, I ran into the very compatriot I was supposed to meet. He had also wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Or was it the right place after all?
My acquaintance couldn’t catch a break that day. In the evening, his cabby was in a foul mood and drove him to the wrong hotel. The first people he saw there were the Norwegians we were to meet and who had also been delivered to the hotel by mistake.
Or was it by design?
This is evidently the secret of Latin America’s vitality: Nothing goes as planned, but everything turns out all right in the end.
We will have an opportunity to test this observation in the fall, when Brazil holds presidential elections. This is why my strongest impression from the Forum was produced by Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva, the Workers’ Party candidate. When I saw Lula, as he is better known among Brazilians, he was making his way through a throng at the main market, surrounded by supporters, gawkers and tourists. His supporters chanted slogans like soccer fans in the terraces. People were constantly trying to get their picture taken with him, or failing that to touch the national hero on the cheek or tug on his beard. The candidate smiled a perplexed smile as he tried to reach a cheap restaurant where the mayor and the governor were waiting.
The Workers’ Party owes its current popularity to general disillusionment with neo-liberalism. The liberal government’s victory over inflation proved ephemeral, but the price paid by the Brazilian people has been all too real.
When the ruble collapsed in 1998, it was obvious that the real and the Argentine peso would follow. The Brazilian government deserves credit for not waiting until the last minute to devalue the real, flouting the advice of the International Monetary Fund. Unfortunately, when the real fell, it dragged down with it the reputations of President Fernando Cardoso and his Social Democratic Party. Lula likes to remind people that his party always opposed the introduction of the new currency, but the upcoming election presents him with a difficult problem. 
After devaluation of the real, Brazilians were quick to remember what it had cost to stabilize their currency in the first place. They will look to the victor in this year’s election to solve a host of social problems and to root out corruption. At the same time, however, inflation cannot be allowed to run wild.
While Lula was mingling with supporters, Russia’s leaders prudently chose heavily guarded New York hotels over meetings with Latin American activists. And yet Russia, with its oligarch-dominated economy, looks more like Latin America every day. Theft is just as rampant here, but for some reason we have snow on the ground all winter and no carnivals. We also have no protesters and no opposition. No one tugs our politicians by the beard or heaves cream pies in their faces. There’s no joking around with them.
That’s simply not in our character.

Boris Kagarlitsky is a Moscow-based sociologist.

TITLE: World Rushes To Form Axes Before It’s Too Late
AUTHOR: By Andrew Marlatt
TEXT: Bitter after being snubbed for membership in the “Axis of Evil,” Libya, China and Syria today announced they had formed the Axis of Just as Evil, which they said would be “way eviler” than the Iran-Iraq-North Korea axis U.S. President George W. Bush warned of in his State of the Union address.
Axis of Evil members immediately dismissed the new axis as having, for starters, a really dumb name.
“Right. They are Just as Evil ¾ in their dreams!” declared North Korean President Kim Jong Il. “Everybody knows we’re the best evil. I mean the best at being evil. We’re the best.”
Diplomats from Syria denied they were jealous over being excluded, although they conceded they did ask if they could join the Axis of Evil. “They told us it was full,” Syrian President Bashar Assad said.
“An Axis can’t have more than three countries,” Iraqi President Saddam Hussein explained. “This is not my rule, it’s tradition. In World War II you had Germany, Italy and Japan in the evil Axis. You can only have three. And a secret handshake. Ours is wicked cool.”
International reaction to Bush’s Axis of Evil declaration was swift, as within minutes, France surrendered.
Elsewhere, peer-conscious nations rushed to gain triumvirate status in what has become a game of geopolitical chairs. Cuba, Sudan and Serbia said they had formed the Axis of Somewhat Evil, forcing Somalia to join with Uganda and Myanmar in the Axis of Occasionally Evil, while Bulgaria, Indonesia and Russia established the Axis of Not So Much Evil, Really, As Just Generally Disagreeable.
With the criteria suddenly expanded and all the desirable clubs filling up, Sierra Leone, El Salvador and Rwanda applied to be called the Axis of Countries That Aren’t Necessarily the Worst But Won’t Be Asked to Host the Olympics Any Time Soon; while Canada, Mexico and Australia established the Axis of Nations That Are Actually Quite Nice But Secretly Have Nasty Thoughts About America.
“We have a waiting list as long as my arm,” said Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien.
While wondering if the other nations of the world weren’t perhaps making fun of him, a cautious Bush granted approval for most axes, although he rejected the Axis of Countries Whose Names End in “Guay,” accusing one of its members of filing a false application. Officials from Paraguay, Uruguay and Chadguay denied the charges.
Israeli officials, meanwhile, insisted they didn’t want to join any axis, but, privately, some world leaders said that’s only because they haven’t been asked.

Andrew Marlatt runs SatireWire.com, where this article originally appeared, and author of “Economy of Errors.”

TITLE: leningrad’s real swan song?
AUTHOR: by Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Leningrad, the local rock band that revolutionized the Russian rock scene and rocketed to national popularity over the past two years, will play its biggest show ever this week — and is claiming that it will be its last.
The band is set to play the cavernous Yubileiny Sports Palace on Feb. 16.
Even as the band’s enhanced, 20-piece lineup is busy rehearsing for the event, the “last concert” promotion posted all around the city calls up a strong feeling of deja vu. 
When the band played the approximately 2,000 seat Lensoviet Palace of Culture in 2000 — which at the time was the biggest show the band had ever played — was also widely billed as the group’s swan song.
Nonetheless, after that successful show, Leningrad continued to play happily and extensively all over the club circuit, both locally and in Moscow.
“Every concert is our last — until the next one,” was frontman Sergei Shnurov’s trademark reply when reproached for deceiving the public.
Shnurov is notorious for his frequent, shameless publicity stunts. For instance, he billed himself as the “former leader of Leningrad” when he performed with the spin-off band Tri Debila. 
But he insists that this time he really is serious.
“Leningrad as a collective of individuals is constantly in a state of crisis and semi-disintegration,” says Shnurov. “It’s because Leningrad has done too much in the past two years and, as the carrier of the idea, I got tired. 
“So I really need a sabbatical.”
When confronted with the fact that he made almost exactly the same statement last year, Shnurov says that the band managed temporarily to overcome that crisis.
“There was a new splash of energy, a second wind, but there can’t be a third. I have to look for that first one again.”
Recently, virtually all the content was removed from Leningrad’s official Web site. Shnurov insists that this is an example of his “intentional burning of bridges” and claims that there will soon be nothing but a blank page at www. leningrad.spb.ru.
Officially, the Yubileiny stadium concert’s aim is to promote Leningrad’s long-awaited new album, the group’s first CD of new material since 2000’s “Dachniki.” 
The new album’s title, “21st-Century Pirates,” is probably hinting at last year’s incident when unfinished tapes of the album were stolen and released by record pirates as a 28-minute CD called “Ya Prosto Bukhayu, No Mogu Uskoritsya” (I Do Booze, But I Can Speed It Up.)
“[The new album] is very strange and, as usual, atypical for Leningrad. It doesn’t sound like anything Leningrad has released previously,” says Shnurov, who had to reconsider the album’s track listing after the leak, eventually including only one song from the pirate release, “Mne by v nebo” (I Wish I Was in Heaven).
Shnurov complains that the band’s record label, Moscow’s Gala Records, forced him to cut the number of songs on the album.
“We recorded 19 tracks for the new album, but it ended up with only 13,” he says. “I don’t understand how they make records.”
In fact, Shnurov is critical of the entire Russian music industry, saying that he doesn’t even follow developments anymore.
“In general, I haven’t followed mass culture for the last six months. Its problems are not interesting for me. I have my own world.”
However, among local bands that have appeared on the local scene, Shnurov has praise for La Minor, which performs in the genre of Russian gangster songs (blatnyak). 
“They are like The Cure performing blatnyak,” he says.
Otherwise, he spends his time listening to the classics.
“I listen exclusively to Jimi Hendrix now,” he says. “My favorite song is ‘Foxy Lady.’”

Leningrad will be in concert at Yubileiny Sports Palace, 18 Pr. Dobrolyubova, 119-5614, at 7 p.m. on Feb. 16. Tickets cost from 180 to 250 rubles and are on sale now. The album “21st-Century Pirates” will be out on Gala Records on either Feb. 25 or March 4.

TITLE: if only all operas were like that
AUTHOR: by Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Last weekend, the audience at the Mariinsky Theater witnessed history with the premiere of the famed company’s first-ever production of Mozart's 1790 classic “Cosi fan Tutte.”
The new production is sung in Italian and boasts an almost entirely Italian production team. The director is Walter Le Moli, artistic director of the Fondazione Teatro Due-Teatro Stabile di Parma e Reggio Emilia, and the conductor and musical director is Gianandrea Noseda, the Mariinsky’s principal guest conductor. 
Likewise, Tiziano Santi is responsible for the interesting sets, Giovanna Avanzi for the costumes, and Claudio Coloretti handled the lighting.
The major challenges facing any production of “Cosi van Tutte” involve the ensembles, and it is precisely here that the Mariinsky has scored its highest marks. 
The new production demonstrated a stunning vocal rapport among the singers and featured some remarkably nuanced performances. It delivered that uniquely Mozartian delicacy and harmony and remained faithful to the typically 18th-century light touch in dealing with human emotions.
Overall, the Mariinsky’s “Cosi fan Tutte” demonstrated remarkable teamwork. Tatiana Pavlovskaya (Fiordiligi) and Galina Sidorenko (Dorabella) both gave magnificent and seemingly effortless performances as two sisters whose fidelity is challenged by their betrothed Guglielmo (Ildar Abdrazakov) and Ferrando (Daniil Shtoda), who have been goaded by the evil schemer Don Alfonso (Gennady Bezzubenkov) into courting one another’s beloved.
Abdrazakov's Guglielmo was one of the show's highlights, both vocally and artistically. Irina Matayeva’s adroit Despina provided timely comic relief, while Bezzubenkov was impressively convincing as the show's driving engine, the cynical intriguer, Don Alfonso.
In essence, “Cosi fan Tutte” is a triumph of hypocrisy. The orchestra tells a story of true love, admiration and despair, while the acting presents a masterful counterfeit of all these elements.
At the same time, the performers must sustain the audience’s hope that the intrigues will fail. This plot is tricky to perform even in a drama theater, to say nothing of an opera.
All in all, however, the Mariinsky rose to these dramatic challenges, and the theatrical element was admirable. Walter Le Moli made a winning decision to synchronize the female and male pairs' moves, skillfully stressing the playful element of the plot. Yet the drama is revealed all the more clearly at the finale. 
Before the premiere, Noseda said the opera — and particularly its uncertain finale, which leaves the lovers’ futures murky — leaves a bitter taste in one’s mouth.
“Neither Mozart, nor [librettist Lorenzo] Da Ponte make the heroes’ eventual fate at all clear,” he said. “When the opera comes to the end, we can only guess whether Dorabella will stay with Guglielmo or Ferrando. In certain sense, the finale of ‘Cosi fan Tutte’ is more tragic than that of ‘Don Giovanni.’”
Noseda also mentioned that the opera's title, which translates literally as “women are like that,” reflects a palpable male-dominated mood in the society of the time. It would be fairer, the conductor said, to translate the title as “people are like that.”
Nonetheless, despite the passage of over two centuries, a certain amount of this sexist culture remains in Le Moli’s direction. Dorabella and Fiodiligi spend way too much time on the floor, as when they are groveling and begging Ferrando and Guglielmo not to go off to war.
Despite the excellent performances, the premiere was marred by a technical glitch. A set panel from the first scene got stalled part way as it was being lifted to reveal the next scene.
The curtain was brought down and after 15 minutes of repair work, the production began again from the beginning.
No doubt, Mariinsky Artistic Director Valery Gergiev will use this embarrassing incident as a further argument in support of the immediate reconstruction of the theater.

“Cosi fan Tutte” next plays on March 1. For ticket information, call the Mariinsky ticket office at 114-4344.

TITLE: chernov's choice
TEXT: The local club scene continues to thrive with another two new venues opening this Saturday.
Drive Mad Club will be located at 3 Grazhdanskaya Ulitsa, close to Sennaya Ploshchad, while to get to Eklektika Art Club, you’ll have to trek way out to the city’s industrial outskirts, as it will be at 158 Prospekt Stachek.
Both are part of a project called Great Music Forever, which was launched by promoter Anatoly Bystrov as a vehicle for “doing different things.” 
The repertoires of the two clubs look to be pretty similar, with bands like the ethno-jazz Samkkha and the acid-jazz Angel Dust Band playing both venues by turns. You can contact Eklektika at 153-9423. Drive Mad Club has no phone number so far.
Meanwhile, Eurasia, which got started toward the end of 2000 as a disco for local youth before disappearing for several months, reemerged in January as an art cafe. 
The place’s art management claims that the club is open to all musical styles except “extreme” ones, and sees Eurasia as, in a way, heir to Africa Club, which folded last summer.
Like Africa, Eurasia hosts mainly folk and art-rock acts and keeps the entrance fee as low as 20 rubles. It is at 65/8 Lesnoi Prospekt, just opposite Poligon. M: Lesnaya. Tel. 596-3852. Check the club’s official Web site at www.evrasia.nm.ru.
The location and date for the local show by Marc Ribot has finally been set. The New York guitarist, who packed Moscow’s 16 Tons club in January when he played a solo set, will perform with his band Los Cubanos Postizos at Red Club on March 12. He will then play 16 Tons the following night.
Red Club seems to be slowly growing into a more exciting place than it was for the first six months of its existence.
Following excellent concerts by local favorites such as Markscheider Kunst (Saturday) and Babslei (Friday, Feb. 22), the club will host France’s Les Hurlements d’Leo and Finland’s Cleaning Women in March.
Les Hurlements d’Leo, which plays a colorful and lively mix of folk and rock styles in a manner not unlike that of Manu Negro, performed in St. Petersburg last May and won the hearts of the local club crowd when they played an impromptu concert in Cynic after the “proper” one at LDM. Check out the French-language site at www.hurlements.com.
Cleaning Women, a group of cross-dressing men with a fairy clever concept, is less exciting. This group made its local debut at the alternative film festival Deboshir in 1999 and became something of a favorite with Russian audiences for some mysterious reason.
The same can be said about The Tiger Lillies — a London pub band with an operatic-voiced lead singer and dubious taste. However, after a big concert at Manege last year, the band will glide into the more modest premises of Poligon for shows on March 8 and 9.
Also watch out for Leningrad, S.P.O.R.T. and Volkovtrio this week (see Gigs for dates and location.)

— by Sergey Chernov

TITLE: dungeon serves some surprises
AUTHOR: By Thomas Rymer
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: If you keep them there long enough, working in a dungeon will inevitably get to the employees. 
After making our way down into Dungeon, a basement restaurant on Vladimirsky Prospect, and seeing that all the tables were occupied, my dining companion and I sidled up to the stool-less bar at the front of the room and asked if we could have a beer while we waited. The reply we received was “probably not.”
To be fair, things did get better. The woman who turned out to be our server approached us and told us that there was a table for six at which were seated only two people, so over we went. She also later helpfully told me that what I had ordered was a lot of food and that I might have difficulty getting through it all.
As far as atmosphere is concerned, Dungeon is as interesting as its name suggests and much more inviting. The walls and ceiling are done in a rough-finished natural red brick, highlighted by wooden paneling in places. On the walls are hung pikes, swords, battle-axes, pieces of armor and a large assortment of heraldic bric-a-brac. The seats along the walls are in the form of high-backed upholstered benches. The remaining seats are particularly interesting, wooden and with very high backs, which cut off sight from behind and give each of the tables in the restaurant a booth-like feel.
With regard to the menu, the most expensive entree on the menu — rack of lamb — goes for 500 rubles ($16.67), but most of the other dishes go for less than 200 rubles ($6.67).
We started off with salads, which were, as all the dishes, served up in generous portions. My chicken with white asparagus (85 rubles, or $2.75) was a standard, ingredients-in-mayonnaise concoction, which turned out to be good, if a bit bland. 
My dining companion’s Dungeon salad (89 rubles) had a bit more zing and an interesting combination of pinto beans, onion, red peppers, grated cheese and egg.
We decided to sample a couple of items from the bar-snack category, and both of our selections turned out to be impressive. The breaded cheese cubes (45 rubles, $1.50) were not of the all-too-common frozen variety, but were obviously prepared in-house — lightly browned and perfectly melted cubes, served on toothpicks. albeit without any sauce for dipping. The fried sausage (63 rubles, $2) would be the perfect after-theater snack for those coming out of one of the four local venues, including the Lensoviet, which is virtually next door. It was a good-sized Italian sausage served in a tangy red sauce with a cucumber-and-tomato garnish, and was well ahead of anything I’ve tried in other bars.
A chicken-and-mushroom julienne (89 rubles, $3) was next on the program for my dining companion, and it received a hearty thumbs-up, while I spooned my way through a sizeable bowl of goulash, which was rich and tangy, with chunks of beef, potato and red pepper.
For our mains, my coworker went with the Italian-style pork (141 rubles, $4.50), which at first seemed to be a simple pork cutlet topped with tomatoes and green onions under melted cheese. Lurking under the melted cheese, however, was a mustard/ horseradish mixture that lent the dish enough of a snap both to justify its Mediterranean name and to prompt a positive reaction from my cohort.
My main course, the chef’s steak (145 rubles, $4.50), managed to top what had already been a great experience for me from the culinary standpoint. The presentation was attractive, with three green-onion stalks radiating out from a stewed tomato to rest on my steak, which came properly done rare as ordered, and rested on a potato pancake in a sea of hollandaise sauce(!). The steak would have been tasty enough by itself, but the combination of the other tastes made it one of the most enjoyable I’ve had in the city. And you can’t beat the price.
So don’t let the name or the initial reactions of the staff scare you off. Dungeon boasts great food at prices that shouldn’t cause any budgetary shuffling and an intriguing atmosphere. Check it out before or after the theater.

Dungeon. 14 Vladimirsky Prospect. Tel. 310-4780. Open daily from 12 p.m. to 12 a.m. Dinner for two with beer, 834 rubles ($27). Menu in Russian and English. No credit cards accepted.

TITLE: hobbits not habit-forming
AUTHOR: by Gulyara Sadykh-zade
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Zazerkalye Theater has added a new opera to its repertoire or, more precisely, an opera-musical composed by the hitherto unknown Roman Lvovich. 
Lvovich is a young Moscow-based composer and a recent graduate of the Moscow Conservatory, who decided to test himself in the frontier genre of musical theater by creating an unusual combination of opera and musical. Pure musicals, Lvovich argues, are hard for Russians to understand, despite recent successes such as “Metro.”
Many local theatergoers were sincerely glad to hear about the imminent premiere of “Hobbits.” After all, it would be hard to find a more suitable subject for a children’s show than J.R.R. Tolkein’s legendary “The Lord of the Rings” series, which has been a literary staple for many decades now. This is all the more true in the wake of the big-budget film “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” which was just recently released.
For “Hobbits,” Lvovich has chosen the prologue to the later trilogy as the basis of his libretto. The book tells the story of a hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, who, with a company of dwarves, makes a long journey to a far-away land (the book’s full title is “The Hobbit, or There and Back Again To See How Far It Is”). 
There, the intrepid company defeats a perfidious dragon named Smaug, who sleeps in the middle of a mountain on his horde of treasure.
Compared with the later trilogy, which is rich in complex symbols and mythology, “The Hobbit” is written in a clear, simple style that is free of philosophical subtexts, hence its suitability for adaptation to opera, for which it would have to be simplified only slightly. 
In Lvovich’s work, however, the plot lines have not just been simplified and straightened out. Instead, the point of the story — where Bilbo finds the ring and wins it by beating Gollum in a riddle contest — has been completely removed.
The opera also includes material not found in the book, such as the half-elf daughter of the elf king Arwen, the keeper of one of the nine elven rings. Because of things like this, the story rapidly turns into a cozy domestic tale and becomes trivial and vulgar instead of romantic.
The changes were suggested to Lvovich by Alexander Petrov, who directed “Hobbits.” For some reason, Petrov seems to believe that there should be a love story in every theatrical script. Even in his staging of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Nightingale,” Petrov contrived to have the emperor fall in love with the singing bird and thereby removed the elevated pathos of the original. 
Petrov’s insatiable desire to “correct” classic stories — forgetting that love for a woman is not the only possible motivation for a story — debases the aesthetic value of the production in this case as well.
From the musical point of view, the performance also created a strange impression. The language and compositional methods used seemed to drift from serious opera to spoken language to variety shows. Dances — effective, but essentially unnecessary to the drama — and inserted arias brought the performance to a standstill. Cliched phrases; a plethora of low-quality, variety-show material; an absence of any sort of memorable tune — which are essential for any type of musical — are all characteristic of Lvovich’s score.
It seems impossible to ignore the serious defects in the score: Pavel Bubelnikov and Arkady Shteinlukht — the theater’s conductors — realized that putting on such a mediocre piece was ill-advised. However, the Zazerkalye’s lack of any new children’s opera in recent years had been so obvious that Petrov decided to take gamble. It seems that he thought that three things would prevent the performance from being a flop: the colorful costumes and sets by Vladimir Firer, the many lively dance scenes and the director’s active intervention. However, he was mistaken.
Perhaps the reason for the failure is that only a high-quality, profound text can fire an artist’s imagination, inspire a director’s decisions and so on. When the material is poor, pretentious and clearly market-oriented, there is very little chance of success. And, having seen this performance, there is no doubt that Roman Lvovich, young but obviously talented, wrote the opera for a specific audience.
Every theater has its failures, but this one is particularly worrying. After the premiere, television stations such as RTR, Petersburg’s Channel Five and Kultura gave the opera glowing reviews. Some may think that such professional public relations can depict black as white or, as the king says in Yevgeny Shvarts’ “Cinderella,” “make a foot small or a heart just.”
However, to cite another fairy tale, there will always be someone in the crowd pointing out that the king is naked.

TITLE: olympic watch
TEXT: Youngest Medalist
n SALT LAKE CITY, Utah (Reuters) — South Korea’s Ko Gi-Hyun became the youngest winner of an Olympic individual short-track gold medal on Wednesday.
Fifteen-year-old Ko, who began competing when she was just seven, ran much of the race from the front steering clear of jostling and bumping that resulted China’s Yang Yang (S) crashing just laps from the finish. Ko, displaying the poise of a veteran, came home just in front of her 17-year-old compatriot Choi Eun-Kyung, who had set a new world record in the semifinals.
“When I see my friends outside playing sometimes it is hard,” said Ko, who became interested in skating when she was taken to a small rink by her aunt. “But when you win a gold medal for your country it makes up for all you miss.”
World record holder Catriona LeMay Doan held a narrow lead going into Thursday’s women’s 500 meters but was still hot favorite to retain her title.
The Canadian skated an Olympic record of 37.30 seconds in race one on Wednesday to lead the competition by four hundredths of a second from Germany’s Monique Garbrecht-Enfeldt. 
I Am the Eggman
n SALT LAKE CITY, Utah (Reuters) — Alexei Yagudin adopted an unusual game-day strategy that he hoped would propel him to the top of the Olympic podium on Thursday. 
Russia’s three-times men’s world figure skating champion was going to have an omelette for breakfast, then fast before taking to the ice for his long programme finale. 
“It’s a mental thing,” explained the first round leader. “You want to lose weight to make your mind think you are lighter so it’s going to be easier for you to jump.”
Russia’s reigning world champion Yevgeny Plushenko failed to stay on his feet in the short program on Tuesday and is ranked back in fourth.
With a superb skate in the final, he could climb ahead of third-placed Timothy Goebel, of the U.S., and second-ranked Takeshi Honda, of Japan, into silver medal position, but the gold is virtually out of reach.
Given that scenario, the jinx which has kept every reigning men’s world champion off the top step of Olympic podium at the last four Games, will not be broken.

TITLE: Iginla Can’t Stop Ducks Topping Flames
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ANAHEIM, California — The Western Conference playoff chase is as tight as the NHL scoring race, and Calgary Flames right wing Jarome Iginla will probably play a big role in determining the outcome of both.
Anaheim defenseman Pavel Trnka and rookie Andy McDonald scored 87 seconds apart early in the third period as the Mighty Ducks overcame Iginla’s league-leading 35th goal to beat Calgary 3-2 Wednesday night.
“If we’re going to make the playoffs, we’ve got to be a good line,” Iginla said. “As a team, we’ve had a tough time scoring goals, so our line feels pressure and we put pressure on ourselves to contribute. But we do need everybody contributing, and we all know that in this room.”
Iginla has 64 points — three more than Boston’s Joe Thornton and Vancouver’s Markus Naslund. His 13 career goals against Anaheim are his most against any team.
Trnka tied it 2-all at 1:29 of the third with a one-timer from the top of the left circle. McDonald put the Ducks ahead with 17:04 left, beating goalie Roman Turek with a short wrist shot at the end of a 2-on-1 break with Mike Leclerc — just seconds after Iginla hit the crossbar at the other end.

Blackhawks 5, Panthers 4. The Chicago Blackhawks’ Olympians didn’t want to leave their team on a sour note.
Among the four — Alex Zhamnov, Tony Amonte, Michael Nylander and Phil Housley — they scored five goals and combined for five assists in the second period of a 5-4 win over the Florida Panthers on Wednesday night.
Zhamnov scored twice and had two assists as Chicago erased a 3-0 Florida lead. Amonte had a goal and two assists as the Blackhawks outshot the Panthers 18-4 in the period.
Nylander got the rally rolling with a power-play goal at 5:53 of the second. Housley netted the eventual game-winner with 1:59 left in the period during a 5-on-3 Chicago power play.
“Our Olympic guys were outstanding,” Blackhawks coach Brian Sutter said.
“We talked about it [the Olympic break] and we prepared them. Guys like Alex and Tony, they led the charge.”

(For other results, see Scorecard.)

TITLE: Kafelnikov Through in Open 13
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MARSEILLE, France — Defending champion and second seed Yevgeny Kafelnikov moved into the second round of the Open 13 Tournament on Wednesday by beating Max Mirnyi of Belarus 7-5, 7-6.
Meanwhile, Australian Open champion Thomas Johansson lost, eliminated in three sets by Greg Rusedski. In a rematch of a Davis Cup encounter won by Johansson over the weekend, Rusedski won 6-4, 3-6, 6-3.
Also Wednesday, top-seeded Juan Carlos Ferrero — playing only his second tournament of the year, after a knee injury kept him out of the Australian Open — beat Michel Kratochvil 6-3, 7-5. Thomas Enqvist beat Francisco Clavet 6-3, 1-6, 6-2, while third-seeded Sebastien Grosjean topped Noam Okun 6-4, 6-2.
In Antwerp, Belgium, Venus Williams powered past Anna Kournikova 7-5, 6-0 Wednesday to reach the quarterfinals of the $585,000 WTA Diamond Games tournament.
Williams appeared to take some time to adjust to the fast court, and she had to deal with eight break points.
“Anna played real well,” Williams said. “I needed time to find my rhythm on the surface.”
She saved three break points at 5-5 and eventually took the first set when Kournikova double-faulted.

TITLE: Minnesota Send Suns Down, But Lose Brandon for Season
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MINNEAPOLIS — The Minnesota Timberwolves’ satisfaction with beating their former point guard was tempered a bit by news that their current floor leader is out for the season.
Kevin Garnett had 33 points, 13 rebounds and six assists to lead the Timberwolves past Stephon Marbury and the Phoenix Suns 107-92 Wednesday night.
Before the game, Minnesota learned Terrell Brandon will miss the rest of the year with an injured left leg.
“It’s a blow, but we’ve had bigger blows,” Garnett said. “We’ve been through it before. Every year, we go through something that only makes us stronger.”
Chauncey Billups, who must play most of the minutes at point guard with Brandon out, had 16 points.
Marbury, who snapped Minnesota’s nine-game winning streak Jan. 18 with a 3-pointer in overtime that gave the Suns a 103-100 victory, scored 71 points in his first two trips to Minneapolis after the Timberwolves traded him to New Jersey in 1999.
This time, Marbury managed just 15 points on 6-of-14 shooting. He added 11 assists and five rebounds.
“They’re a good team,” Marbury said. “I think it’s a perfect opportunity for Chauncey. He has a chance to put his mark down. I’m happy for him. All you need in the NBA is the opportunity.”
Garnett, who had 10 rebounds by halftime, has 65 points and 27 rebounds in two games against Phoenix this year.
Shawn Marion led the Suns with 24 points.
Anthony Peeler scored 17 points for Minnesota, including three 3-pointers in the second quarter.
Joe Smith added 19 points and 10 rebounds.
“It was huge for us,” Smith said. “Especially because we lost to this team before. They kind of ran off their mouth as they were leaving the court. Idon’t think we forgot.”
Brandon will miss the rest of the season because of a leg injury. 
“I’m out for the year,” Brandon said after Minnesota’s victory over Phoenix on Wednesday night. “I got the news today. I was totally shocked.
“This had nothing to do with the injury before. Anytime you have surgery on the same knee twice, it’s not normal.”
Brandon was placed on the injured list Wednesday. He’ll have arthroscopic surgery — his second operation this season — to repair a cartilage fracture on the surface of his left femur. 

Raptors 89, Knicks 92. As bad as things are for the New York Knicks, they’d be a whole lot worse if not for their three games against the Toronto Raptors.
Taking advantage of Vince Carter’s absence and Toronto’s other injury woes, the Knicks survived a fourth-quarter challenge and defeated the Raptors 89-82 Wednesday night to avoid falling into last place in the Atlantic Division.
“It was definitely a must-win, but we’ve had a lot of must-win games and we haven’t won all of them. That’s why we’re in the situation we’re in,” Allan Houston said.
The Knicks’ troubles have led them to examine several trade options, and coach Don Chaney said there were a couple of deals being discussed.
None of the eight Knicks who played did anything to diminish their trade value. Kurt Thomas scored 19 points, Latrell Sprewell added 14, Allan Houston 13 and Clarence Weatherspoon 12.

(For other results, see Scorecard)

TITLE: Wildcats Turn Defensive To Beat Vanderbilt
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LEXINGTON, Kentucky — Struggling to score consistently, the Kentucky Wildcats again turned to their smothering defense when they needed to put an opponent away.
Tayshaun Prince had 20 points, and No. 10 Kentucky held Vanderbilt to 36 percent shooting in Wednesday night’s 67-59 victory over the Commodores.
The Wildcats (17-6, 7-4 Southeastern Conference) shot only 39 percent themselves, but forced 17 turnovers and blocked eight shots. They are 11-1 this season when they limit opponents to less than 40 percent shooting.
“The next two weeks, we have to play defense like we did,” said Keith Bogans, who had 12 points, four rebounds and three assists. “We also need to make some shots, but the main thing is defense.”
The victory was the second in a row for the Wildcats and fourth in five games as they try to keep pace with Florida and Georgia in the SEC’s Eastern Division.
Kentucky coach Tubby Smith covets hard-nosed, pressure defense above all else. Although disappointed by his team’s lackluster showing on offense, he was thrilled with its defensive intensity.
“It took us playing good defense to pull this one out because Vanderbilt did a good job controlling the tempo,” Smith said.
“We just aren’t scoring points. We were at the beginning of the season, but we haven’t been lately.”
Elsewhere, it was No. 16 Oklahoma St. 79, No. 4 Oklahoma 72, OT; Wisconsin 64, No. 22 Indiana 63; No. 13 Miami 79, St. John’s 56; No. 7 Alabama 52, South Carolina 51.