SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #769 (35), Friday, May 17, 2002
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TITLE: City Begins Road-Mending Season
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalyev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The full-scale road-construction season kicked off this month, with the major share of efforts concentrated on the city center ahead of next year's 300th-anniversary celebrations, the City Hall Maintenance Committee said on Thursday.
"This year, more of the activity has been transferred to the center so that the city will be prepared [for the celebration]," Vladimir Kuznetsov, the Maintenance Committee spokesperson said in a telephone interview on Thursday. "Most of the events, as far as we know, are going to take place in the city center."
The task ahead of the workers is even more daunting than is usually the case. According to the City Hall plan, 6.5 million square meters of road will be repaired this year, 500,000 square meters more than for the same period last year.
According to Alexander Dedyukhin, the head of the Maintenance Committee, the total cost of this years road-works projects will be 9 billion rubles (about $284 million), 1 billion rubles (about $32 million) more then last year. At a briefing in March, Dedyukhin said the growth would be achieved mainly due to growth of federal budget transfers to local road construction, which rose from 1.7 billion rubles (about $53.5 million) in 2001 to 2.5 billion rubles (about $79 million) in 2002.
Among the sites Maintenance Committee included in this year's construction plan are all of Palace Square, the segment of Sadovaya Ulitsa running along Mikhailovsky Garden; Millionnaya Ulitsa; Suvorovskaya Ploshchad; part of Sredny Prospect; the 8th, 9th and 22nd lines on Vasilievsky Island; parts of Nab. Reki Moiki, Nab. Kanala Griboyedova and Nab. Lieutenanta Shmidta; Ligovsky Prospect; and the segment of Moskovsky Prospect running Sennaya Ploshchad to Nab. Reki Fontanki. Work on most of the sites will be started this year and is scheduled for completion just before the official anniversary date of May 27th, 2003.
There are also large-scale road-works projects scheduled for outside the city center, including roads close to Prospect Stachek and in the Shuvalovo Ozerki District that will eventually hook up with the eastern segmant of the planned 154-kilometer ring-road project. The eastern part of the $1 billion ring-road project is also scheduled for completion in 2003.
While the annual rush to fill potholes and resurface roads is derided by motorists as a losing struggle and simply a way to foul up traffic, Kuznetsov says that the road crews are begining to win some battles, if not the war.
"The quality of roads becomes better every single year due to the use of modern asphalt materials and the new road-construction equipment that is currently at the disposal of almost all of the construction companies," Kuznetsov said.
But Valery Selevanov, a Legislative Assembly lawmaker from Narodovlastiye faction, disagrees, saying that the quality of repaired roads remains extremely poor, at least in the Kalininsky District that he represents.
Selevanov says that, after Prospect Nauki was renovated and new streetcar tracks installed, the shoddy nature of the work caused streetcars running on the line to be derailed.
"Everything they built was collapsing day-by-day, causing accidents there. A number of streetcars have been derailed already," Sekevanov said in an official inquiry he wrote to City Hall in May. "In some instances, wooden boards have been laid under the tracks instead of proper rubber gaskets, while in other places the rails are not linked together or welded joints have broken."
"When streetcars derail it might be exciting for the children," Selevanov said Thursday. "My son, who is still in school, told me that it was just great when he saw a streetcar derailed. It was a big moment for him when he saw a long line of streetcars standing still."
Selevanov said the workers returned to the site again only after he wrote the inquiry.
City Hall has spent 112.2 million rubles (about $3.5 million) to renovate Prospect Nauki, including 16.3 million rubles (about $500,000) to install new streetcar tracks.
Kuznnetsov said that he had not heard about the case.
One of the biggest complaints about the road-works program - especially from city motorists - is that it is implemented too rigidly.
"If the authorities had a more flexible plan, it would be more effective," said Olga Pokrovskaya, a Yabloko faction member of the Legislative Assembly said Thursday.
"This year, for instance it started getting warmer earlier then usual, so they should have started working earlier, which would have allowed them to distribute the construction site in a more convenient way."
Kuznetsov says that, given the number of cars in the city, there's little that can be done to alleviate the strain construction work puts on traffic.
"It takes me 1 1/2 hours to drive home now, and none of the work has begun in the city center yet," he said. "It's just the case that the number of cars here is growing significantly every year.
"There are more than 1 million cars in a city of 5 million people."
TITLE: Russians Put Their Faith in Letters to Putin
AUTHOR: By Judith Ingram
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Across the street from the Constitutional Court, Russia's highest judicial authority, dozens of people jostle to enter the agency they trust to solve their bureaucratic problems: President Vladimir Putin's Office for Citizens' Appeals.
"I place my hope in God and Vladimir Vladimirovich," says Raisa Gorelova, 75, clutching a bag full of family photos, ID papers and a few yellowed pages from a book on Soviet heroes of World War II, including one of her brothers.
She has traveled 30 kilometers on a bus to deliver her petition at the office on Ulitsa Ilyinka. She is seeking a grant so she can afford to move to a town where her relatives live, from the city where the government assigned her housing 12 years ago when she fled ethnic tension in Central Asia.
As a guard nudges open the office door and the crowd surges inside, some shrieking and pushing, Gorelova hangs back calmly. "I'm number 120 on the list today," she says. "But I think I'll get help - even if I'm just one of the millions who need it."
For centuries, Russians have brought their problems large and small straight to the top - petitioning the tsar, then the Communist Party, now the president. The tradition reflects public frustration with lower-level offices dominated by bureaucrats indifferent or on the take and with the country's underdeveloped administrative law system.
"People don't turn to the president because they've already knocked on every door and been turned away," says office head Mikhail Mironov. "People turn to him because he's been elected by the people, and the constitution says that the president is the guarantor of basic rights and freedoms in Russia."
This president in particular seems to inspire hope. As well as seeing between 120 and 150 people who visit the office every day, Mironov and his 25-member staff handle reams of letters. Putin got 565,000 letters last year - about twice the annual average for former President Boris Yeltsin. In addition, some 492,000 people telephoned or sent Internet messages just during the week preceding Putin's televised national call-in show in December. That public-outreach effort was part of what appears to be a concerted Kremlin effort to project an image of Putin as a caring leader.
"Vladimir Vladimirovich reacts and responds to people's problems actively, whether they be schoolchildren, veterans or workers in various enterprises," Mironov says.
Mironov and his staff spend much of their day meeting with supplicants. Once the petitioners get inside the door and go through the metal detector, they line up quietly at two windows, where clerks enter their names, other personal information and the reason for the visit into a computer. Then they sit in a corridor waiting to be called into a private office for a conversation with a staff member. Most meetings take about 15 minutes, Mironov says.
"From the homeless to academicians, they all come to our offices," he says. "We have to find not only a common language, but solutions to their problems."
Every Saturday, Mironov sends Putin and his key aides a two-page summary of the letters and visits the office received the previous week. About 70 percent of the letters concern complaints about social rights such as housing and pensions, and fewer than 10 percent contain policy proposals, he says. Many letters are forwarded to lower-level agencies responsible for the issues raised. Others prompt phone calls to government offices from Mironov or his aides. The office also prepares briefing material before Putin's tours around the country. When Putin sits down with a regional governor, for instance, he has a thick file of popular comments on the governor's performance.
"Vladimir Vladimirovich very clearly has put an accent on increasing government officials' personal responsibility: 'You've been elected, you should answer to the people,"' Mironov says. "He talks knowing what problems they face."
The visitors to Mironov's office are indifferent to their role in shaping Putin's vision of Russia. What they want is a solution to their problem, be it a new apartment, higher pension or citizenship, the latter one of the few issues that fall directly within Putin's responsibility.
The appeals office decides on every appeal for citizenship - a potentially huge job, considering the millions of ethnic Russians who have arrived over the past decade from elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. Other former Soviet citizens, too, are pleading for citizenship in Russia, where the economy is stronger and political life more stable than in many other former republics.
"I'm 99 percent sure my appeal will be answered positively," says Sergei, a 50-year-old construction engineer from Armenia who spent 11 years building gas pipelines in the far north.
Others have no faith they will succeed. Lena Yersh, a 30-year-old ethnic Russian from Kazakhstan, says she's been living in Russia for eight years. She says she has visited the appeals office repeatedly, only to be sent away. She's back seeking a final, written rejection she can present to the Canadian Embassy to back up her family's application for emigration.
"You get the feeling they don't read the letters," she seethes. "They mock us."
TITLE: Dagestanis Call for Tough Terror Laws
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The leaders of organizations representing over 20,000 Dagestanis living in St. Petersburg spoke out on Wednesday in support of a call by the republic's government for harsh measures to deal with terrorists there, and asking for the lifting of Russia's ban on capital punishment.
The Dagestan Republic State Council appealed to the State Duma to lift the ban after 42 people were killed and another 150 were seriously wounded after a landmine explosion at a Victory Day parade in the town of Kaspiisk on May 9.
Russia's capital-punishment ban was declared in 1996 by then-President Boris Yeltsin. The ban was to stay in place until jury trials were available in all Russian criminal courts, in keeping with human-rights standards set by the Council of Europe, of which Russia is a member.
"The people who commit such crimes, who kill innocent children, have no right to live," said Gasan Gasanov, head of the Dagestan Representation in St. Petersburg, at a Wednesday press-conference. "These are not people, these are fascists." Fifteen children died as a result of the blast.
Gasanov said the move to have the ban on the death penalty lifted came from those who saw the Kapiisk tragedy.
"The criminals knew how to hurt us the most. They realized that children like to go to parades and so they targeted them, as well. We can't let it go," said Ibragim Islavov, a deputy in the People's Council of Dagestan Republic.
"We understand that the explosion was aimes at destabalizing the situation in Dagestan and to split the population of the republic from the Russian troops guarding Dagestan," Gasanov said. "The people who organized this terrible act want Dagestan to move the Russian military off of our territory, but events like this won't let us do this."
Gasanov appealed for the press to publish information about the account that has been set up to help the families of those killed or wounded in the incident and saying that Dagestanis living in St. Petersburg have already gathered supplies, medicine and money for their compatriots. "Many of these people have relatives who suffered in Kaspiisk," Gasanov said, adding that one of his cousins died in the blast.
Meanwhile, Nikolai Volkov, a representative of the St. Petersburg Anti-Organized Crime Unit, said that local police had arrested five people - three men and two women - on May 10, who are suspected of being connected with with terrorist acts in Dagestan.
According to him, local police received the information about those arrested from police in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, on May 9. "It is still under investigation whether these people are connected with the latest terrorist act," Volkov said. "But there are significant grounds to suspect them of involvement in previous terrorist acts on the territory of Dagestan."
The suspects have already been moved to Makhachkala.
TITLE: Russia, NATO Embarking on a New Era
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: REYKJAVIK, Iceland - Heralding the Cold War's funeral, NATO and Russia reached a historic agreement Tuesday to combat common security threats in the post-Sept. 11 era.
The deal establishing a NATO-Russia council to set common policy on counterterrorism and a range of other issues was reached by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and other NATO foreign ministers after meeting in the Icelandic capital with Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov.
"This is the last rites, the funeral of the Cold War," said British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. "Fifteen years ago, Russia was the enemy, now Russia becomes our friend and ally. There could be no bigger change."
NATO Secretary-General George Robertson said the terror attacks in the United States had driven home the need for broad international cooperation to defend common values and interests, which now extend to Russia.
"This is not some sentimental journey. It's a hard-nosed, cold, calm exercise in collective self-interest," Robertson said.
The NATO-Russia pact, which arose from President Vladimir Putin's support for the West since the Sept. 11 attacks, was the second significant step Russia has taken this week toward its former enemies. On Monday, Moscow and Washington agreed to reduce their nuclear arsenals by two-thirds.
"We not only can, but we are obliged to act as partners in the face of this new threat," Ivanov said.
The new NATO-Russia Council will set joint policy on a fixed range of issues, including counterterrorism, controlling the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, missile defense, peacekeeping and management of regional crises, civil defense, search-and-rescue at sea, promoting military cooperation and arms control.
Straw emphasized the cooperation was more than symbolic: "It could make an enormous difference in the war on terrorism."
NATO officials say that the agreement will not affect the alliance's core mutual-defense role and that safeguards are built in to ensure Moscow will not be able to veto NATO decisions if relations sour.
The foreign ministers also adopted what Robertson called "the agenda of change." Buoyed by prospects for a new U.S.-Russia arms treaty, the ministers uniformly described an atmosphere of goodwill and consensus on the first day of meetings.
Capping an ambitious reform agenda to prepare for a summit in Prague in November, the ministers reviewed the alliance's plans to invite new members from eastern Europe, agreed to modernize NATO's military capabilities to respond to evolving threats and establish new relations with Ukraine and other former Soviet republics.
"NATO ... must change once more to deal with the threats of a new century," Robertson said. "Threats that cannot be measured in fleets of tanks, warships or combat aircraft. Threats no longer mounted by governments. And threats that can come with little or no warning."
NATO will inaugurate one of the most significant changes since the fall of Communism on May 28, when U.S. President George W. Bush joins other NATO leaders and Putin for the first meeting of the new Russian-NATO council outside of Rome.
"Countries that spent four decades glowering at each across the wall of hatred and fear now have the opportunity to transform the future of Euro-Atlantic security for the better," Robertson said.
The Bush administration welcomed the closer cooperation between Russia and NATO, but remained noncommittal on Wednesday on whether Moscow could eventually join the alliance.
Before the Italy meeting, Bush and Putin are to sign a new treaty in Moscow to cut nuclear warheads. Bush said the deal would "put behind us the Cold War once and for all."
Under pressure from Washington to narrow the "capabilities gap," the NATO allies also agreed to improve the alliance's ability to move troops into conflict areas quickly, enhance strike capabilities as well as shared communications and intelligence - all areas viewed as essential to combat threats revealed by the attacks on New York and Washington.
"The United States, which has the largest defense budget of all, is continuing to add more money to our budget," Powell told reporters. "We think that all of our colleagues in NATO should be doing likewise."
Ministers had no quarrel with Washington's push for modernization, but Straw said it would be tough to get support for a big increase in defense budgets.
"It will require a lot of effort by European statesmen to persuade their public to increase military spending," he told reporters.
While specific recommendations will be worked out by defense ministers next month, the foreign ministers acknowledged that new threats mean NATO missions could be executed out of alliance territory.
"NATO must be able to field forces that can move quickly to wherever they are needed, sustain operations over distance and time, and achieve their objectives," the ministers said in a statement.
The ministers added Croatia to the list of nine candidates for expansion, but did not indicate which were favored to receive invitations for membership at the Prague summit.
TITLE: Baltic States View Deal Reluctantly
AUTHOR: By Michael Tarm
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TALLINN, Estonia - Officials in the ex-Soviet Baltic republics on Wednesday gave cautious backing to the historic Russia-NATO deal giving Moscow a greater role in the alliance - though some said it makes them uneasy.
The Baltic states made NATO membership a top foreign-policy priority after regaining independence during the 1991 Soviet collapse, citing concerns about possible future threats from their giant neighbor as a main motivation.
Officials in the Baltic Sea coastal countries said the agreement, struck during a summit in Iceland this week, could allay Moscow's fears about Baltic membership - which Russia has repeatedly said it would see as a threat.
"Estonia welcomes this," said Madis Mikko, a spokesperson for Estonia's Defense Ministry. "Anything that calms down tensions between Russia and NATO, and between Russia and NATO applicant countries, is a good thing ... for Estonia, too."
Latvian parliamentarian Dzintars Kudums agreed.
"It means Russia is changing into a safer, more normal country and that can only be good for us," he said.
Critics said they feared Russia could use its strengthened voice in NATO to try to foil Baltic bids to join the 19-country alliance.
Former Latvian Prime Minister Guntars Krasts said a new 20-member NATO-council that will include Russia - part of the deal made in Iceland - would be useful if it stuck to fighting terrorism - and avoids NATO expansion issues.
"But Russia has a tendency to stick its nose where it doesn't belong," he said. "If they do that in NATO, we all should be worried."
Marko Mihkelson, head of the Tallinn-based Baltic Center for Russian Studies, said he believed even Russia accepted that Baltic entry - with such widespread Western support - was inevitable.
"Given our history of rule by Moscow, average Estonians are suspicious of everything linked to Russia," he said. "But I don't think Russia could try to use this new NATO council to stop Baltic entry."
TITLE: Kremlin Defends New Arms Pact
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov on Wednesday dismissed accusations that Russia had compromised its national interests in agreeing to an arms control pact with the United States that slashes arsenals by two-thirds.
The agreement, announced Monday, is to be signed next week in Moscow by President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President George W. Bush.
"Neither side, neither Russia nor the United States, surrendered any national interests while drafting this agreement," Ivanov said at a Moscow meeting of defense ministers from China and four former Soviet republics in Central Asia.
"This agreement is the result of a compromise, like any other international agreement." The document is "pragmatic and realistic and fully reflects the present-day situation," he said.
The agreement foresees cuts in each country's arsenal to 1,700 to 2,200 warheads. The treaty will include a provision for possible further cuts, a high-ranking Foreign Ministry official said on condition of anonymity Wednesday.
TITLE: Code for Farm Land Passes First Reading
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The State Duma approved in first reading Thursday a government-backed bill allowing the sale of farmland. The vote marks one of Russia's most radical steps to liberalize the economy since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
If adopted into law, Russia's farmland will become a commodity for the first time since the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Farmland accounts for 23.8 percent of the country and is worth between $80 trillion and $100 trillion, according to Agriculture Minister Alexei Gordeyev.
Lawmakers voted 256-143 with one abstention for the Cabinet's version of the bill, 30 votes above the minimum required.
The Duma must pass the legislation in two more readings before it is sent to the Federation Council and President Vladimir Putin for approval. Putin has indicated he will sign the bill.
The president signed separate legislation allowing the sale of industrial land and dacha plots late last year.
In addition to the land under crops or farms, farmland includes wilderness, buildings, roads, small lakes and rivers and even small forests.
Voting on Thursday took place after a heated, day-long debate in which the Communists and their allies fiercely denounced the proposal as the sale of the motherland.
Outside the Duma, about 200 Communist protesters rallied with signs reading "To Sell Land Is to Sell the Motherland" and "Fire the Government."
Nearby, a small group of people waving Union of Right Forces flags chanted, "Forward with Reform."
At the start of the discussion, deputies were presented with seven drafts drawn up various factions and deputies. The version offered by the Communists and their Agrarian supporters demanded a ban foreigners from owning land and attempted to avoid using the word "sale" altogether.
Duma Speaker Gennady Seleznyov, a Communist, and Agrarian Deputy Oleg Smolin also attempted to postpone the reading in favor of putting the issue to a national referendum.
Two versions of the bill were quickly withdrawn in a gesture of support to the government, leaving five for the deputies to debate. In the late evening, the government's version was voted the best.
The bill offers a general framework for the sale of farmland that prohibits foreigners from buying land around national borders or near restricted and top-secret facilities. It also limits sales in areas where the amount of farmland per capita is limited.
A list of territories excluded from the market will be outlined by a separate presidential decree.
The bill also requires that purchased farmland be purposefully used and limits the options for converting farmland for other uses.
To further control the turnover of farmland, the bill includes a clause that gives local authorities first rights of purchase at the asking price.
Regions will be able to decide for themselves issues such as how much farmland foreigners and individual owners can buy.
"The government-proposed draft foresees tough state control of farmland sales, with the control levers in the hands of the regional authorities," Gordeyev said, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported Thursday.
Foreigners' rights to buy farmland and the size of the plots are likely to be the focus of debates before the second reading. The date for the reading has yet to be set.
Although farmland sales were formally allowed in the 1993 Constitution, no legal mechanism has allowed the right to become a reality.
The leftist-dominated State Duma of the 1990s managed to avoid the issue for two terms. The 1999 elections changed the political ratio in the Duma.
Some 12 million Russians already own farmland, much of which they received through the privatization of collective farms, The Associated Press reported, citing government data. However, until the farmland bill is passed into law, there is little the owners can do with the land.
TITLE: AIDs Report Stresses Economic Risks
AUTHOR: By Torrey Clark
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Using language that President Vladimir Putin is sure to understand, the World Bank warned on Wednesday that AIDS is threatening not only the health of Russians but the health of the whole economy.
If Russia fails to take urgent steps to stem the rampant spread of HIV, Putin could see his hopes for strong annual growth over the next decade evaporate into thin air, according to a World Bank model to forecast the economic impact of the infection.
"If Russia wants to see economic growth of 5 percent or more per year to catch up economically with OECD countries, it had better do something now," Christof Ruhl, the chief economist of the World Bank's Moscow office, said in an interview. "HIV is a time bomb."
As HIV spreads through society, the economy suffers from a decline in the workforce, while enormous health-care costs eat up money that is desperately needed for investment in industry and infrastructure, Ruhl said.
As a result, if current transmission rates slow down and 2.32 million people become HIV positive by 2010, gross domestic product would be depressed by 0.15 percent, according to the World Bank's optimistic scenario. But the conservatively pessimistic scenario indicates that if 5.25 million people become HIV positive, a staggering 4.14 percent would be shaved off GDP.
"[Even 1 percent] does matter in a country that needs very high growth rates to catch up to other countries," Ruhl said in presenting the model, the first in Europe, at a news conference.
Currently, 194,033 Russians are registered as HIV positive, but the actual number is probably closer to 1 million, said Federal AIDS Center head Vadim Pokrovsky, who worked on the model. Almost none of those infected are receiving modern anti-retroviral treatment, he said.
"This 1 million people will die in about 10 years time," Arkadiusz Majszyk, the UNAIDS representative in Russia, said by telephone.
The disease remains largely invisible, in part because there have been so few AIDS-related deaths in Russia, only 2,277 since 1987. But within three years between 6,000 and 9,600 people per year could be dying, according to the World Bank's estimates.
In addition, most of the people infected are 15 to 30-year-old intravenous drug users, who receive little sympathy from the public. In 2001, almost 93 percent of all registered HIV cases were drug users. Nearly 77 percent of all registered cases are male, 82 percent of whom are in the 15 to 30-year-old age group. The same demographic trend is seen among women, with 87 percent of cases in the 15 to 30-year-old age group.
HIV has begun moving into the general population through sexual transmission, Pokrovsky said. In 2001, 4.3 percent of registered cases were due to sexual contact with non-intravenous drug users, nearly triple the number of cases the year before.
HIV is thus striking at the core of the workforce for the next few decades, and they are the parents of the next generation, experts warned. This makes the toll particularly onerous for Russia, where the population is already in a free-falling decline. "In Russia no one is yet taking HIV seriously as an influential factor on the economy," Majszyk said. "Even the social aspect - how much it can destroy the social system - is not yet taken seriously.
"Another generation will not be born to the people who are dying. The demographical damage will be quite serious."
The epidemic could slash the total labor market by 1.2 percent to 11.5 percent, according to the World Bank's model. "The fact that Russia has a declining population and AIDS affects mostly young people makes the economic consequences worse," Ruhl said.
Moreover, the overall effectiveness of the labor market drops as HIV infections grow. Upon finding out they are HIV-positive, people tend to be 13 percent less productive due to psychological and physical stress, said Vyacheslav Vinogradov, a professor at the Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education at the Czech Academy of Sciences, one of the developers of the model.
"Over the last two years, the epidemic is growing very quickly in regions where industry is increasing the standard of living, such as Tyumen, Khanty-Mansiisk and Yamalo-Nenetsk, where oil and gas are located," Majszyk said. "This means industry will be affected as well."
The federal budget has a mere 160 million rubles ($5 million) earmarked for the fight against HIV and AIDS, of which about 100 million rubles is for treatment. The regions are expected to come up with another 200 million rubles for treatment, Pokrovsky said.
"Even with high treatment costs, society is better off paying now. As HIV moves into the general population, the future economic savings will outweigh the fiscal costs," Ruhl said.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Myanmar Reactor
MOSCOW (AP) - Russia has agreed to help Myanmar's military regime construct a center for nuclear studies and a research nuclear reactor, the Russian government said Wednesday.
Under the agreement, the two countries will cooperate in designing and building a nuclear-studies center that will include a research nuclear reactor with a thermal capacity of 10 megawatts and two laboratories, Russian authorities said in a statement.
The agreement will also include structures for the disposal of nuclear waste and for a waste burial site.
Budanov Forensics
ROSTOV-NA-DONU, Southern Russia (AP) - A court in southern Russia will hear forensic testimony in the trial of Colonel Yury Budanov, a tank commander charged with murdering an 18-year-old Chechen woman, one of Budanov's lawyers said Wednesday.
Lawyer Alexei Dulimov said experts who examined the dead body of Elza Kungayeva will present their opinions in court Thursday. At issue is whether Kungayeva was raped before her death, as her family alleges, and whether she was buried alive, Dulimov said.
Budanov, who faces a first-degree murder charge, has admitted strangling Kungayeva two years ago, but says he killed her in a rage while interrogating her because he thought she was a rebel sniper. Kungayeva's family denies she was a sniper, and says she was dragged from her home, raped, and murdered during a drunken rampage by soldiers.
This week, two psychiatrists testified that Budanov was temporarily insane when he killed Kungayeva, and recommended that he be forced into immediate psychiatric treatment.
Citizenship Bill
MOSCOW (AP) - The Federation Council on Wednesday overwhelmingly passed a bill that would make it more difficult to acquire Russian citizenship.
It was approved by the State Duma in April. Now it goes to President Vladimir Putin to be signed into law.
The bill requires applicants to spend at least five years in Russia, pass a Russian-language exam and have a job to receive citizenship. The current law requires only a three-year residence and no language-testing.
TITLE: Can Producers Tender for Lenoblast Site
AUTHOR: By Andrey Musatov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Two can-producing companies, the Polish-based Can-Pack Group and Russian ROSTAR, are both planning to build aluminum-can-producing facilities in the region, and they have both applied to the Leningrad Oblast Administration for the same construction site near Vsevolozhsk.
The site is located next to the Ford and Russkiy Diesel plants in an industrial zone lying approximately 25 kilometers from the center of St. Petersburg. The site already has two semi-completed buildings, a railway embankment and a heating plant. Another two sites that suit the requirements of the construction projects are located in the Gatchinsky and Tosnensky regions, about 40 kilometers and 55 kilometers from the center of the city respectively. At present, neither boasts the infrastructure of the Vsevolozhsk site.
According to the head of the Foreign Investments Department at the International Relations Committee of the Leningrad Oblast Administration, Valentin Malyshev, the Vsevolozhsk region's administration has organized a commission to hold a tender in June to decide which company receives the plot.
Malyshev said, however, that the details of the tender procedure are confidential with regard to the investment conditions.
"It would be logical for the commission to estimate the volume of investment as one of the criteria in selecting the winner," he said on Thursday. "But it's very hard to say how the tender commission will decide who wins. There is a lot of space in the Leningrad Oblast. We've held almost no tenders before and have no experience at this"
Mikhail Babkin, the head of the tender commission, refused to comment on the tender.
Pavel Ulyanov, General Director of ROSTAR, insists that his company was the first to select the site, applying to the Leningrad Oblast for it, while the representatives of the Can-Pack Group only submitted their application on learning of ROSTAR's plans.
"Perhaps they are trying to frustrate the plans to construct a facility," Ulyanov told the business daily Vedomosti. "It's unlikely that they would be able to construct their plant by the end of the year."
At the beginning of this year, Stanislav Vasko, Vice President of Can-Pack Group announced the company's plans to construct a $60-million facility in the Leningrad Oblast, slated to open by mid-2003. ROSTAR plans to spend about $80 million on the project.
Can-Pack's desire to construct its own facility appears to have developed in the wake of Russian aluminum-can producers lobbying for a steep hike in the import taxes on cans, though Can-Pack was unable to comment on the situation on Thursday.
According to Gennady Guschin, Director of Raw Materials Development at the Baltika brewery, Russia's largest purchaser of cans from abroad, Can-Pack priced its cans at $100 per thousand before the hike, and $120 per thousand after. Russian producers are currently pricing their cans at $110 per thousand.
On the Russian market, there is an annual shortage of cans of between 400 million and 500 million, with the majority of those being needed by the Baltika brewery. According to Guschin, in 2002, Baltika will need about 700 million cans, with 230 million of those being purchased from Russian producers. In 2003, Baltika will need about 1 billion cans.
"The hike means that, in 2002, Baltika brewery will have to pay $11 million over the usual price," Guschin said. "The quality of the Polish cans is a little higher, but the Russian producers can easily fix that. In general, the quality is the same and we see no real difference between the contenders for the site in the Leningrad oblast."
The Poland-based Can-Pack Group is one of the largest can producers in Europe with revenues of about $300 million in the last year. The structure of the company includes six aluminum-can plants, in Poland, Romania, the United Arab Emirates and a pull-tab production plant in Ukraine.
TITLE: Tax Break Planned For Small Business
AUTHOR: By Simon Ostrovsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The government intends to broaden its definition of "small business" giving more enterprises a lighter tax burden.
Finance Minster Alexei Kudrin said this week that the Cabinet is preparing amendments to the Tax Code that would benefit all companies with yearly revenues of less than 30 million rubles, a figure three times higher than the government's original proposal by the government.
"We are prepared to move for enlargement," Kudrin was quoted by Interfax as saying.
If the Cabinet and the State Duma agree, the ceiling would be raised to nearly $1 million, the highest for any state-defined small business sector in Europe.
Previously the Finance Ministry opposed the move, but pressure from President Vladimir Putin and lawmakers appears to have changed that.
Putin has said on many occasions that higher economic growth is a top priority during his presidency and that expanding the small and medium-sized business sector is instrumental in achieving that goal.
In his state of the nation address last month, Putin criticized the government's economic forecast for this year, saying it did not "presume an active policy." He also initiated a number of measures he said were necessary to encourage small-business growth, including reforming the tax system and limiting government interference.
Since then, the cabinet has put forward amendments to the current Tax Code that would simplify tax-filing procedures and lower rates. The amendments, if passed, would allow businesses under the revenue ceiling to switch over to a simplified tax system, under which they could choose to pay a single tax of either 8 percent of their turnover or 20 percent of their profits. Gone would be the burden of value-added tax, sales tax, social tax and other taxes.
"This is major," said Alexei Zabotkine, head economist at United Financial Group. "Companies that have annual turnover of $1 million are not so small, so whether or not this move is good for the long term can be debated, but it fits well with plans to try to get companies out of the shadows."
One point of contention that has not been resolved is the number of employees an enterprise can employ and still be considered a small business, thus enjoying lower taxes. Currently, the law says that any enterprise with more than 20 employees cannot be considered a small business.
"It wouldn't be logical to set the turnover ceiling at $1 million but leave the employee limit at 20 persons," said Zabotkine. "Most companies that employ less than that have a turnover that would fall under the first proposed turnover ceiling of $325,000."
TITLE: Kasyanov Still Cautious On Putin's Targets
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW - Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov said Wednesday that his Cabinet might decide to push for the higher economic-growth rates sought by President Vladimir Putin, but cautioned that there are no quick fixes.
Speaking to State Duma deputies, Kasyanov also said the faster growth demanded by Putin could be achieved only after structural reform and he warned against any artificial efforts to speed up expansion.
"What we need now are balanced decisions. [Economic] growth of 6 to 8 percent is achievable if we succeed in switching to new sources of growth. That is why we need structural reforms, but they do not deliver results the next day," he added.
Putin accused the cabinet in April of not being ambitious enough to close the yawning gap between Russia and Western economies.
"We have not discussed the figures yet. We will be in a position to talk about revising our forecasts in August when we begin the consideration of next year's budget. Then we will see whether we can amend our forecasts for 2003 and later years," Kasyanov commented.
Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref promised on Tuesday to try to do a little better if oil prices were right, but he offered no chance of achieving very fast growth.
According to Gref's ministry - one of the key bodies charged with securing economic growth - there could be slightly higher gross-domestic-product growth of 4.4 percent next year, 5.4 percent in 2004 and 5.6 percent in 2005.
In comparison, the earlier forecasts were 3.5 percent to 4.5 percent over the next three years.
Kasyanov also said the government's inflation target for this year of between 12 percent and 14 percent would not be revised upward, as it has been repeatedly in recent years. Inflation from January to April was 6.6 percent, he said.
Kasyanov said the structure of Russia's economy was showing positive change, with growing domestic consumption and barter deals being replaced by cash transactions.
Barter transactions were down to 12 percent in February 2002 from 16 percent in 2001, 25 percent in 2000 and 40 percent in 1999, he said.
"This important indicator reflects the increasing efficiency of the Russian economy," Kasyanov said. But he cautioned that Russian companies are not yet capable of meeting the needs of the country's consumers, forcing the country to rely on costly imports, Kasyanov said. Imports rose 22 percent recently, he said, without providing further details.
Kasyanov said Russian industry must become more competitive. Small businesses, he said, are the key to making this turnaround. But too often they are "stagnant and in many cases locked up in the shadow sector of the economy," Kasyanov said.
(AP, Reuters)
TITLE: Russia Trailing In Bribery Rankings
AUTHOR: By Anna Raff
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Among the world's 21 leading exporting nations, Russian companies are the most likely to pay bribes to win or retain business in emerging-market countries, a Berlin-based watchdog group said Tuesday.
Russia received the lowest ranking on Transparency International's Bribe Payers Index. China, Taiwan and South Korea trailed closely. Australia was given the highest ranking, meaning that its multinational corporations were the least likely to bribe officials.
Corruption was deemed to be most rampant in the construction, defense and oil and gas industries. Agriculture, light manufacturing and fishing were considered to be the cleanest.
The results were compiled from 835 interviews with business leaders carried out between December 2001 and March 2002 in the following emerging market countries: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, South Africa, South Korea and Thailand.
According to one oil analyst who requested anonymity because of the delicate nature of the subject, foreign oil companies have been unsuccessful in lobbying for production-sharing agreements because of their reluctance to bribe officials.
Oleg Koshikov, the Economic Trade and Development Ministry's chief official for PSAs, put the problem another way as he explained the lack of progress. "Because of low salaries, either the passage of agreements is fraught with corruption, or we signed off on agreements [that were no good]," Koshikov said earlier this year.
TITLE: Trying To Tackle the Leviathan of Bureaucracy
AUTHOR: By Neil Parison
TEXT: IN his annual address to parliament last month, halfway through what is still widely expected to be only his first term as president, Vladimir Putin announced a major reform of the government administrative machine and of the country's civil-service system. This was greeted with skepticism in some quarters: Is this reform for real? If it is such a priority why has it been left until now? Is Russia's fabled bureaucracy indeed capable of being reformed?
There have been a number of attempts to reform the bureaucracy over the past 10 years. The first was in 1992 to 1993, when a small group of radical reformers in the government's personnel directorate, Roskadry, developed a set of reforms very much along the lines of programs at that time being launched in some countries in Central and Eastern Europe - downsizing, recertifying all existing civil servants and removing of security apparatchiks from civil-service positions. The response of the bureaucracy was swift and effective: Roskadry itself was simply and summarily abolished.
Then, in 1996 to 1997, then deputy head of the presidential administration and current First Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Kudrin announced plans he had developed to dramatically streamline the governmental machine. This time, then-President Boris Yeltsin stepped in to thwart this.
Significant reductions in the central civil service were nonetheless achieved: The Moscow-based central civil service was cut by 10 percent from 1995 to 2000, from 33,800 employees to 30,300 employees. There was also a small reduction of around 2 percent in the number of federal civil servants based in the regions, from 382,400 to 374,400 (mainly tax and federal treasury employees). However, over the same period the number of civil servants employed at a regional level increased by 7 percent, from 582,900 to 624,800.
So, while it is true that the total number of civil servants at all levels of government has gone up over recent years (from 1.06 million in 1995 to 1.16 million in 2000), the staffing of central ministries in Moscow, already small by international standards, has been cut significantly.
Finally, in 1997, a concept for administrative reform was developed by a group of senior advisers to Yeltsin. Yeltsin himself, in his address to parliament in 1998, devoted a significant amount of his address to spelling out the reforms envisaged. Yet nothing happened. None of the reforms announced were implemented. Will it be any different this time around?
There are a number of reasons why this time things look different. The measures announced by Putin represent perhaps only the tip of a reasonably sized iceberg. Significant effort has already been devoted to this set of reforms over the past 2 1/2 years. The original program of German Gref from early in 2000, as produced by the Center for Strategic Studies, comprised three components: state reform, economic and structural reforms, and social reforms. While the latter two became the core of the present government's work program, the first was never published.
From media discussion at the time it was possible to identify that the state reform program comprised a number of fundamental reforms: the development of the federal districts, intergovernmental fiscal reform, judicial reform, deregulation and civil service and administrative reform. The Gref team had looked long and hard at the lessons from development and particularly implementation of reforms over the previous 10 years in Russia. They had concluded that it would not be possible to achieve the results hoped for in the areas of economic and social reform without implementing also this set of radical, deeper institutional reforms. And this view also chimed neatly with the conclusions then-Prime Minister Putin had drawn and summarized in his December 1999 address about the absolute necessity of rebuilding the state's administrative machine and restoring its effectiveness. So it seems that both the president and the reform team in government consider these set of reforms to be an essential priority.
So why then has so little been heard about this reform, while major attention has rightly been paid to related reforms such as judicial reform and deregulation? The answer appears to be that the reform team had understood the lessons from the earlier reform efforts in this area and had decided to approach development of reforms very carefully both from a strategic and a tactical perspective. A lot of effort over the past two years has gone into building up within the government and the presidential administration the broad consensus around the strategic objectives for, and priorities of, reform of the civil-service system, to create a modern, merit-based and corruption-resistant civil service.
A comprehensive concept for reforming the civil service was prepared by a team with broad representation from the president's administration, the government and leading Russian experts and academics in this area. This was formally approved by Putin in August 2001 although not published. The concept covers modernization of the federal civil service as well as the civil services of the regions. Putin's order of August 2001 setting up a government commission on civil-service reform, led by Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, and a working group led by Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of the presidential administration, were, however, published.
This stipulated that a detailed action plan for civil service reform should be elaborated and submitted for formal approval. It now appears that such an action plan has indeed been finalized and that this should be formally approved - and published - within the next few months. Early priorities appear to be to improve the government's decision-making capacity; to undertake a comprehensive series of functional reviews so as to align functions more closely with key priorities of the government work program and to eliminate, commercialize or spin off non-priority functions and all commercial services and functions at present provided by federal-government structures; to initiate major pay reform, targeted at senior management and professional skills areas where recruitment and retention difficulties are being experienced; to revisit service decentralization; and to strengthen internal - and particularly external - accountability mechanisms and institutions and to significantly increase participation by citizens and service users and the private sector in decision-making and to build a new culture of openness and transparency.
So this reform does indeed seem to be for real. The president and government appear extremely serious about ensuring real implementation of civil service reform in Russia. The reform itself has been carefully prepared and seems to command a degree of consensus that was lacking in earlier reform efforts. While this is extremely good and positive news, it is also, of course, the case that reforms in this area can take some years before they deliver results in terms of more effective policy analysis, development and implementation; improved quality of public-service provision; and reduced corruption.
The business community can, however, do its bit to help accelerate the implementation of these reforms by demanding effective and appropriate behavior from the public agencies and officials with whom individual companies, banks and managers interact at all levels of government. The business community should also demand more effective participation and consultation on matters affecting the investment climate; should press for greater transparency of decision-making by the government both centrally and locally; and should insist on greater accountability. Complaints about the bureaucracy are legion and legendary. And skepticism about the present, beginning reform will remain until it starts to deliver results. But now would be a very good time for the private sector also to try to help to make a real difference.
Neil Parison, a program team leader with the World Bank and former head of the EBRD's office in Moscow, contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times. The views stated are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Bank.
TITLE: A Good Deal or a Worthless Scrap of Paper?
AUTHOR: By Pavel Felgenhauer
TEXT: U.S. PRESIDENT George W. Bush and President Vladimir Putin have agreed to sign next week in Moscow a treaty to cut strategic nuclear weapons over a period of 10 years from their present level of 5,000 to 6,000 warheads each to 2,200 to 1,700.
It has also been announced that the proposed treaty is only three pages long, in sharp contrast to previous strategic arms-control agreements like START-1, signed in 1991, or START-2, signed in 1993, that were hundreds of pages long, with appendices describing in detail verification of compliance procedures, timetables for decommissioning of specific weapons systems, precise definitions of the methods of counting warheads on sea, air, and land strategic platforms and so on.
A high-ranking Russian official who has access to the new draft treaty, told me this week that most of the text consists of a long preamble that includes a declaration of good intent, assurances of friendship, speaks of peace on earth and so on. The treaty, per se, is only half a page long (double spaced). Apparently Bush this week read out the entire "treaty" to reporters virtually verbatim: "Russia and the U.S. will by 2012 have 2,200 to 1,700 warheads."
This "treaty" does not have any timetable for decommissioning, no definitions of what a warhead is or how to count them, no verification procedures - no nothing. Russian sources say that Washington has supplied Moscow with some plans for future decommissioning of strategic weapons systems (e.g., 50 MX Peacemaker missiles with 10 warheads each are earmarked by the Pentagon for scrapping soon). But these decommissioning plans are not part of the new treaty and are in fact unilateral, nonbinding promises.
Washington has also vowed great openness and says it will allow the Russians full access to verify future cuts. But again the verification procedures are not stipulated in the treaty and depend only on future goodwill.
Legally speaking, in military arms-control terms, the new treaty is nothing more than a worthless scrap of paper. Without any agreed procedure on how to count nuclear warheads, an entire nuclear submarine with 20 ballistic missiles and capable of carrying 400 nuclear devices may be counted as one "warhead" if most of its payload is temporarily stored on land.
The new treaty essentially allows Russia and the United States to cut or not to cut as they please, to deploy new attack systems or to keep old ones. This is not arms control. This is the end of arms control as it has been known for 30 years.
Of course, the new treaty will be condemned as a national sellout by many in the Russian elite. Last Sunday, Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, anticipating a wave of criticism, announced that the new treaty is only a brief outline and that some follow-ups may be negotiated. However, the possibility that Washington will continue traditional arms control negotiations is minute.
The new treaty is seen as a major victory for Washington and a defeat for the Kremlin, which wanted some substantial guarantees that planned U.S. missile defenses will not threaten Russia and that offensive nuclear cuts will be "irreversible," but got a worthless piece of paper instead. However, the "treaty" is assured of ratification in the State Duma, where Putin has a comfortable majority.
In fact, some of Russia's military chiefs also support the accord. From 1997 to 2001, when Igor Sergeyev was defense minister, almost all procurement money was spent on strategic nuclear weapons. Since Sergeyev's ouster there has been a backlash against strategic nuclear weapons led by Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Kvashin. The General Staff is planning to use the "treaty" to cut strategic missiles swiftly and deeply and spend its money on other projects.
Strategic nuclear weapons are increasingly seen as senseless and unusable by many Russian generals. In 1999, Russia strongly objected, but NATO still bombed Yugoslavia and nuclear deterrence could not prevent it. The outcome would have been the same whether Russia had 1,500 warheads or 5,500.
The new treaty may actually turn out to be a "win" for both Moscow and Washington, inasmuch as its signing signals that Russia has abandoned the cherished principle of nuclear parity with the United States - the last vestige of former Soviet superpower status.
Now it is time the Kremlin stopped acting as a lame superpower in other fields, by downsizing not only its nuclear arsenal by two-thirds, but its entire military machine and reforming what's left into something more professional, so that Russia may begin to develop as a normal, civil state.
Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent defense analyst.
TITLE: boris more than good enough
AUTHOR: by Peter Morley
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Modest Mussorgsky's opera "Boris Godunov" has a tortuous history. The composer wrote his own libretto, based on Alexander Pushkin's tragic drama in verse of the same name and on Nikolai Karamzin's monumental history of Russia, and began work on the score in 1868. In 1869, he completed it and submitting it to a committee of his fellow composers for scrutiny.
They took two years to return the manuscript and were not impressed. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov wrote of the opera that, "The novelty and the unusual nature of the music put the honorable committee in a quandary ... many of the committee's objections were simply amusing," while Pyotr Tchaikovsky damned the composer and his works, saying, "With my heart and my soul I send Mussorgsky and his opera to the devil." The score was also rejected by the Mariinsky Theater, where Mussorgsky had hoped to see the opera premiered.
Dejected, Mussorgsky returned to the score later in 1871, lengthening the opera by four scenes and adding a love interest, before completing the final, sprawling version in 1874. This time, the Mariinsky accepted the work, and it finally received its full premiere in February that year. Still, some doubts remained. Rimsky-Korsakov revised the opera twice, in 1896 and 1908, switching scenes around and cutting and reorchestrating passages, and Mikhail Ippolit-Ivanov later reorchestrated the scene outside St. Basil's Cathedral.
Now, the Mariinsky, which rejected the 1869 score, is reviving that same version in a new production that premiered on Sunday. To stage this latest venture, the Mariinsky's Artistic Director Valery Gergiev, who also conducted, has hired Viktor Kramer, the stage manager for the city's 300th anniversary celebrations next year.
Gergiev's choice was a wise one. Kramer's set is a minor masterpiece, integrated thematically with the action while allowing the production the room it needs to breathe. There is a Russian proverb that translates as, "Heavy is the crown of Monomakh," a reference to one of Russia's earliest rulers, and Kramer's set illustrates its relevance to the opera: Mussorgsky focuses primarily on the personal tragedy of Boris himself, and the set, which is built on a huge scale and shot through with images of cages, brings out this aspect. The lighting in particular is astonishing, from the cold, bleak gray of the first scene, to the blazing, imperial red of Boris' coronation, to the darkness of his hallucinations.
The four huge columns that frame the action in all but the first scene and the enormous crowns which often hang suspended above the stage give an impression of the enormity of Boris' position and the hopelessness of his efforts to be a good ruler. Kramer adds to the effect by portraying the boyars, Boris' advisory council, as soulless shells, and the people as essentially a flock of sheep. Boris is left with no-one to confide in except for his son, Fyodor. However, Boris is not exculpated from his past. As Pimen, an old monk on the point of completing an historical chronicle, explains, Boris is suspected of having ordered the murder of the Tsarevich Dmitry in order to ease his path to the throne, a thought that returns to torture Boris throughout. Indeed, he is on the point of confessing his guilt to Fyodor before being interrupted by his arch-enemy, Prince Shuisky.
The singing is superb across the board: Yevgeny Nikitin as Boris is wonderfully contradictory, conveying the futility of his character's internal struggles and his desperate desire to see his son be everything he was not; 13-year-old Ivan Pushkin, a student at the Glinka Choral School, plays Fyodor with great maturity, while perfectly conveying Fyodor's innocent fright at his father's behavior; Konstantin Pluzhenkov plays Shuisky with insinuating, scheming elegance; Gennady Bezzubenkov portrays Pimen with great world-weariness and, at the same time, a monkish passion for the truth. Of the minor characters, Yevgeny Akimov's passionate Fool is hypnotic, and the two alcoholic monks in the tavern scene are hilarious: Alexei Tanovitsky fully deserved his round of applause for the outrageous drinking song, "In the Town of Kazan."
A couple of decisions did not work: The flirting between Grigory - the false Dmitry, played with youthful impetuosity by Yury Alexeyev - and the innkeeper seemed completely out of place, and why did Nikitin, a lonely figure throughout, take his bow with the six children representing the murdered Tsarevich - who only appeared on stage for the last 30 seconds as Boris lay dying? A sentimental and silly decision.
Musically, Gergiev's interpretation of the score is as high-quality as one has come to expect, and both the orchestra and the chorus were in top form. For most of the opera, the presence of the orchestra was barely noticeable, allowing the action on stage to speak for itself. Additionally, the performance - which runs to 2 1/2 hours - has no interval, forcing the audience, however uncomfortable it may be, constantly to engage with the opera. A distinctly unsettling, but ultimately rewarding, operatic experience.
TITLE: spring cleaning for 'the overcoat'
AUTHOR: by Alice Jones
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Anyone who has lived through one of St. Petersburg's winters will tell horror stories about its blizzards, black ice and biting winds. It sometimes seems that nowhere on earth has a crueller climate than the "Venice of the North."
This is one reason why Nikolai Gogol's short story "Shinel" (known in English as "The Overcoat") could not have been set in any other city. "Shinel" tells the story of a downtrodden office clerk, Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, and his struggle to scrape together enough rubles to buy a new winter coat to ward off St. Petersburg's icy chill. Having finally managed to save enough money, he purchases his dream coat, which becomes a key to the previously hidden world of parties and socializing. However, this paradise does not last long, as he is attacked in the street and robbed of his robe. Akaky dies lonely and forgotten but, in typical Gogolian fashion, the story takes a fantastical turn after his death.
The Theater on Liteiny has given Gogol's classic work a spring cleaning, as part of its project "Workshop at the Theater on Liteiny," the aim of which is "to acquaint Petersburg audiences with new directors" and to be a breeding ground for fresh talent and artistic ideas in dramas ranging "from Antiquity to Brecht." In March, the young team of director Andrei Prikotenko and writer Alexander Obraztsov remade Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex" for the 21st century, and now Obraztsov has turned to Gogol. The driving force behind "Shinel" is director Oleg Kulikov, who, having previously worked at a number of theaters in England is making his St. Petersburg debut.
Obraztsov's play interprets Gogol's tale as a fantastical romance, where the cruel elements become human tricksters taunting Akaky, and the overcoat has a mind of its own - becoming a beautiful, but seemingly unobtainable, woman. Thus, Akaky's stunningly monotonous routine turns into a breathless rollercoaster ride, as he falls in love with and starts to pursue the beautiful stranger.
The play is not performed in the theater itself, but in the foyer, which - quite apart from thoroughly confusing the kindly babushka on the door - makes for an experience that is unusual and almost uncomfortably intimate. The cast - Irina Lebedeva, Alexander Orlovsky and Leonid Osokin - do not so much act as throw themselves headlong into all manner of performing - from stand-up-comedy monologues to circus acrobatics and farcical clowning. Anna Lavrova's set is used to great effect, as the three clamber up and down scaffolding, hurl themselves onto beanbags and orate from window sills. The detail in the scenery, with great swathes of coat-material hanging from the ceiling, a giant washing line and even a bust of Gogol on stage, greatly enhances the comedy. The non-stop action takes place against the background of a special "soundtrack" that gives the play a carnival feel.
Orlovsky is endearingly wide-eyed and timid as Akaky and his scenes with Lebedeva are touching, as we see him equating the physical warmth of his coat with the spiritual warmth of a woman's love. Osokin is hilarious as the monstrous tailor, Petrovich, and steals the show when on stage. Obraztsov's plot sometimes seems obscure and bizarre, but the oddities and surprises add up to make a suitably exaggerated version of Gogol's tale of the absurdities of Petersburg life. As Akaky states, "My overcoat is just like Russia - a bit scruffy, wearing out in places and in need of repair."
Shinel plays at Theater on Liteiny on May 24 and 25. See Stages for details.
TITLE: chernov's choice
TEXT: The usual round of big-name spring and summer concerts starts this week, with Manu Chao playing at the Yubileiny Sports Palace on Sunday. The provocative, ethno-punk bard will be backed by his band, the Manu Chao Radio Bemba Sound System. Chao will also be appearing at Moscow's Gorbunov House of Culture on Friday as the first part of his tour in eastern Europe.
Chao, 40, who is currently enjoying massive international success after years of low level, cult popularity, is a bundle of contradictions: An ardent anti-globalist and a regular at anti-globalization rallies, his recording contract is with EMI, one of the world's five major labels and just the sort of corporation that anti-globalization campaigners abhor. Furthermore, Chao, who claims to be against violence, donates a percentage of his royalties to Mexico's notorious Zapatista National Liberation Army.
Finally, despite saying that he doesn't want to be percieved as a pop star, Chao engages in precisely the kind of primadonna behavior pop stars are known for: He refuses to grant pre-tour interviews, and also distributes stringent guidelines to the media about publishing his photograph.
As well as Chao, who sings and plays guitar, the Manu Chao Radio Bemba Sound System includes Jean-Philippe Boukaka (a.k.a. Bidji, vocals), Madjid Fahem (guitar), Julio Garcia Lobos (keyboards), Bruno Roy (a.k.a. B-Roy, accordion), Jean-Michel Dercourt (a.k.a. Gambeat, bass), Gerard Casajus Guaita (percussion) and David Bourguignon (drums).
Chao's concert will be followed by the German so-called "alternative" band Guano Apes, which plays the Ice Place on May 24. Despite all the hype surrounding the concert, rock music has never been a traditional German forte, and this is borne out by this imitation of a rock band. Another, equally convincing example of a bad band is the Apes' compatriots Rammstein, which plays an open-air gig at the Petrovsky Stadium on June 17.
Angst-ridden U.K. guitar band Muse, which postponed its Russia tour earlier this year, now plays St. Petersburg later this month, although posters advertising the gig did not appear until late last week. The Radiohead soundalike trio, which consists of singer/guitarist Matthew Bellamy, bassist Chris Wolstenholme and drummer Dominic Howard, plays at LDM on May 28. The band first played Russia last September as part of the launch event for the Russian version of British music mag New Musical Express.
Garbage returns to St. Petersburg to boost illegal, $2 sales of its third and most recent album, "Beautifulgarbage," by playing at the Ice Palace on June 2. Old, creaky rock monsters appearing in the city in the next two months are former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters May 27, and former Black Sabbath wildchild Ozzy Osbourne on June 15. Both play at the Ice Palace.
On a smaller, more refreshing scale, Helsinki-based club Sputnik, which promotes concerts there by St. Petersburg bands and here by Helsinki groups, resumes its events at underground rock club Moloko on Friday, with a gig by Helsinki-based band Kuukumina and local act Tres Muchachos, both of which play Afro-Cuban and Brazilian-style music.
- by Sergey Chernov
TITLE: a bistro to rank with the best
AUTHOR: by Stephen Bierman
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Ever go out to lunch and get back to work the next morning? Get your dessert first and entree last? Find out a new president got elected? The best way to avoid inconsistent Russian food service is to avoid it entirely, and the buffet at BBQ Bistro fits the bill nicely.
BBQ Bistro's shvedsky stol, or Smorgasbord, offers a choice of 21 different items - seven cold dishes, seven main courses and seven side dishes - all for 150 rubles ($5). Bistro manager Marina Valetenova said that the buffet is the most popular choice among diners and, having eaten from it, I can see why. The buffet changes on a daily basis but, when I was there, the cold dishes included pickled beetroots, pickles, and a vegetable salad with fresh cucumber, broccoli, pepper and tomato. Main courses included chicken wings, beef stroganoff, fish in cream sauce and goulash. The side dishes, of course, always include some sort of potato dish, and when I went it was potato cutlets. There was also a salad with string beans and tomato, a macaroni dish and soup.
Valentonova also mentioned some a la carte dishes - the turkey salad, at 150 rubles ($5); the cream-of-salmon soup, at 200 rubles ($6.67); and the turkey tetrazzini at 300 rubles ($10) - as restaurant specialities. The latter item is turkey served with proper Italian macaroni - they claim - and a spicy tomato sauce. For those after something more homestyle, the menu also features cheeseburgers and turkey sandwiches.
There is Bochkarov on tap if you are thirsty, a whole bar of rum, whisky, gin, vodka and tequila if you are really thirsty - although I didn't notice many people lounging around with cocktails - and the wine list has bottles from around the globe. If you only want to pretend that you're thirsty, there's also the standard selection of non-alcoholic drinks.
While this is not necessarily a place where people will go to be seen, its clean, spartan decor is interesting: A stainless-steel bar runs the length of the restaurant; grey, painted metal tables match grey, painted metal chairs with cushions made of maroon leather, or a very good imitation thereof; and some of the tables are hung from the ceiling, which is pretty unusual. Although the restaurant is at basement level, it is amply lit by the industrial-style fixtures hanging above the tables and by the large windows that overlook (underlook?) Gorokhovaya Ulitsa. The steel light fittings also serve as a neat place for a cigarette advert. It feels a bit like being on a ship, because everything is either bolted down or heavy enough to be un-stealable, but somehow still feels comfortable.
There is an English-language menu but, if you're still menu-shy, the buffet makes everything pretty obvious. It also allows you to try something new without getting stuck with an unwanted meal. For example, I'm not a big fan of fish soup, but I still figured to try it, on the "when in Rome ..." principle. I found out that I still don't like fish soup, but otherwise I had a decent lunch.
I had some middling barbeque, sampled some meatballs and rice, chomped through a really good pickle salad, and enjoyed an excellent potato-and-onion dish - all this alongside the usual bread, cabbage and beetroot. I walked out having eaten at my own pace, feeling full, content and without having forked over half my yearly wage.
BBQ Bistro, 17 Gorokhovaya Ul. Open 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Buffet breakfast, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., 70 rubles. Buffet lunch, 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. Buffet dinner, 6 p.m. to 11 p.m.
TITLE: pro arte lights up easter day
AUTHOR: by Gyulyara Sadykh-zade
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: On Easter Sunday, a concert took place for the cream of society in the hall of the Menshikov Palace. For this special project organized by the Pro Arte institute, seven composers from St. Petersburg, Moscow and other countries wrote music, which was united and inspired by Haydn, whose "Seven Last Words of Christ From the Cross" - one of the most famous Easter-themed pieces of music ever written - became the basis for a multi-section, multi-authored, 90-minute composition.
The idea was concieved by Boris Filanovsky, who supervised the project as well as took part in it, and it came across as formally very elegant and very clever in terms of content. Haydn's work, written for Easter Saturday, exists in many different forms - an orchestral version, an oratorio, a piano version and a string quartet. For this project, the original text was rearranged and adapted for a contemporary audience by enriching Haydn's seven layers with layers of contemporary music.
In his address, which opened the concert, Filanovsky, who wrote an arrangement for ten string and brass instruments, claimed that he only slightly retouched the original work. However, on closer inspection, his "retouching" appeared to be quite significant. The key-base seemed to have been shifted to a darker, lower part of the spectrum, so that the rumbling of the double bass sometimes approached ultra-low frequencies, almost out of human hearing. The different voices were stretched to their limits and thinned down - for example, a squeaky piccolo would be accompanied by low strings. The most remarkable detail about the concert was the dominant instrumental timbre created by two newly invented instruments - five-stringed "quintones," violin-viola hybrids created by respected St. Petersburg violin-maker Alexander Rabinovich, who says that they are intended to combine the best timbres and the ranges of both instruments. Rabinovich named the two quintones Cyril and Methodius - in honor of the two Orthodox saints credited with giving the Russians their alphabet - probably following the example of the violin-makers Stradivarius and Guarnerius, who named some of their violins after Catholic saints. It also provided another nice link to the Easter Saturday theme.
Disappointingly, Pro Arte's performance of the Haydn sounded horribly off-key. The feeling of dissonance, of octaves being too narrow and thirds being approximate was probably not helped by the fact that the voices were spread over a large range and by voice-doubling, a feature not usually employed in skilful orchestration. However it happened, the fact remains that the Haydn was out of tune. This shortcoming was not as noticeable in the new works - all the attention there was focused on the content, the structure and compositional technique.
A piece by Dmitry Smirnov that began a sequence of fragments was written in a rough serial technique. The music was full of expressive dissonance and mini-motifs, thoughtful textures and echoes of Wagner's "blue chords." This was contrasted by a piece by Alisa Firsova, which summoned up images of young spring waters and rustling trees with ringing, Rachmaninov-esque bells.
The third piece was a miniature for two quintones and double bass by Anatoly Korolyov, in his traditional minimalist style - a fine stylization of medieval organ music interspersed with more Renaissance-era chords. "The Fourth Word," which followed this, was by Yevgeny Reutman, an aggressive, impetuous piece for French horn and bassoon. "Desire," by Boris Ioffe, seemed out of place in such exalted company, as it was unconvincing and unprofessional.
More Wagner allusions came to the fore with Fialnovsky's piece "It Is Finished," and the whole composition ended with "The Seventh Word" by Alexander Vustin, an exceptionally thoughtful, serious composer not inclined to playing with allusions and cultural contexts.
Ninety minutes of music passsed by astonishingly quickly. It should be noted that most of the pieces found individual sound-worlds, their vividness enhanced by a similarity to post-Romantic and ancient music. It was remarkable that none of the audience seemed to be stricken with the heavy feeling that, as a rule, appears at contemporary-music concerts - as if one had listened to one dreadful, and dreadfully long, composition. The project, although a curious idea, was well written and artistically justified in terms of its contents.
TITLE: piter springs into action
AUTHOR: By Larisa Doctorow
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The 38th running of the annual "St. Petersburg Musical Spring" festival, which opened on May 12, this year comprises 18 concerts at a number of venues around town - including the Capella, the Sheremetyev Palace and the Beloselky-Belozersky Palace, as well as the more predictable Shostakovich and Glinka Philharmonic halls.
Diversity is a characteristic of the festival's musical content as well, although the program is clearly designed with one aim in mind: to showcase St. Petersburg composers - both the great names from the past and the 150 active composers and teachers who form the city's Composer's Union.
As the festival's artistic director, Grigory Korchmar, a member of the union, says, "For many of us, this is the only chance to have our music performed and heard."
Ironically, works by local composers are more frequently heard abroad than in Russia. Several works in the festival have been commissioned abroad and are only now getting their first hearing in their home city. Gennady Banshchikov's "Capriccio," for example, was commissioned by the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre.
Concert-goers suspicious of the more outre trends in modern music can be reassured that the contemporary St. Petersburg school is of a conservative bent. As the festival's general director, Andrei Petrov, himself a renowned composer, explains, "In contrast to the Moscow school, [St. Petersburg] has not had strong modernists, such as Alfred Schnittke or Sofia Gubaldulina."
With few exceptions, the works in this year's festival are melodic and can be appreciated by a broad audience. Furthermore, the organizers have deliberately programmed the new works in among old favorites. This blend of the contemporary and the traditional runs through individual concerts: Indeed, the festival is structured along similar lines to London's Proms or the Boston Pops.
The opening concert, in the Glinka Philharmonic on May 12, set the tone, with a retrospective of St. Petersburg choral music, from the 18th century right up to the newly commissioned "Inimitable St. Petersburg" by Viktor Pleshak, which is the official anthem of next year's city-tricentenary celebrations. The second half of the program featured Soviet-era classics - which stirred a nostalgic audience into full song.
The city theme continues on May 21, with a concert called "Petersburg Waltzes," which traces a path from Glinka to recent classics along populist lines. The previous day sees the a more unusual concert, dedicated to one of the city's least popular residents: "St. Petersburg Cockroach" promises a potpourri of music linked not only to cockroaches but also to other creatures. The program includes Rimsky-Korsakov's magnificent - and very short - "The Flight of the Bumble Bee," from the opera "The Tale of Tsar Saltan."
As in previous years, "St. Petersburg Musical Spring" dedicates several evenings to the city's musical partnerships with foreign cities and countries. May 18 sees a concert of modern Korean works, while May 23 juxtaposes works by St. Petersburg composers Sergei Slonimsky and Yury Falik with three of their counterparts from Boston: Lucas Foss, Charles Fussel and John MacDonald. On May 21, for those not of a waltzing inclination, "From Europe to St. Petersburg" is dedicated to contemporary composers from across Europe, including France's Francoise Choveau, and Alexander Comitas from the Netherlands.
The festival closes on May 24 with a mouthwatering concert in the Shostakovich Philharmonic. Yury Temirkanov will be conducting the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra in Shostakovich's first Violin Concerto and Brahms' Second Symphony. The soloist for the Shostakovich will be local wunderkind Ilya Gringolts, who, at the age of only 19, has garnered plaudits around the world, including being named by BBC Radio 3 as one of its prestigious "New Generation Artists."
The performer, according to Andrei Petrov, is today more important than the composer for today's audiences. As a nod to this, in addition to Gringolts, the festival featured young virtuoso pianist Miroslav Kultyshev in a performance of Boris Tischenko's Piano Concerto on May 15. Kultyshev has been compared to Yevgeny Kissin, another Petersburg who has become a world star.
In contrast to previous years, this year's festival has a relative absence of foreign performers, a situation the organizer's put down to financial considerations. The festival is financed chiefly by government agencies, although a general sponsor, Bank St. Petersburg, has stepped in and further private sponsorship is being sought.
"St. Petersburg Musical Spring" runs through May 24. See Stages for details.
TITLE: the artists as young men
AUTHOR: by Gerard McBurney
PUBLISHER: New York Times Service
TEXT: The cellist, conductor and pianist Mstislav Rostropovich is a wondrous teller of anecdotes. Many of them concern his late friend, the composer Dmitri Shos ta ko vich. Despite his air of uproarious amiability, Rostropovich clings to certain formalities. So Shostakovich figures respectfully in these stories as Dmitri Dmitriyevich, or, in Rostropovich's distinctive pronunciation, "Meet Meech," with a sharp staccato attack on each syllable.
In one often-repeated story, Meet Meech wanted to celebrate the completion of a new piece. It was winter, they were in the Russian countryside and there was no vodka in the house. So Shos ta ko vich ordered a horse-drawn sleigh, and the two set out for an open-air booth that, Shos ta kovich knew, sold alcohol at all hours.
"I can still hear the snow squeaking under the runners of the sleigh," Rostropovich says. To their consternation, when they got there, the alcohol proved to be an illegal green concoction made from industrial fluid. Shos takovich, undaunted, took a healthy slug. "Strashno!" says Rostropovich - "Terrible!"
Rostropovich - who conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in three concerts of Shostakovich's music at New York City's Avery Fisher Hall late last month - glories in his association with the composer, whom he places with Sergei Prokofiev and Benjamin Britten among the most important friends of his life. When he discovered the music of Alfred Schnittke, he was loud in his joy at adding a fourth great composer to his list.
But his interest in the music of his time extends far beyond that mighty handful. Hundreds of composers of many nationalities have written for him. In the process, some of the great works of the last century came into being, including wonderful cello concertos by Witold Lutoslawski and Henri Dutilleux.
Indeed, Rostropovich has engendered a whole new repertory for the instrument. Cellists all over the world play music originally written for him. In addition, he has changed both the sound and the technique of the instrument - the spider-like flexibility of his hands and their exceptional muscularity have encouraged composers to write in ways not thought of before, often using his ideas. To that extent, his transformative effect on how the cello is played might be compared to what Paganini did for the violin or Chopin for the piano.
Rostropovich is also rare among the great performers of the age in his passionate commitment to new music. Few have devoted so much time and energy to the modern repertory. Instead, they have tended to leave the field to "specialists," and many composers of the last 100 years, even those as famous as Stravinsky and Schoenberg, have often had to endure depressingly inferior standards of performance.
There have been exceptions. A number of committed conductors spring to mind, including the evergreen Ser ge Koussevitzky and his protege Leo nard Bernstein. But what of the world's leading pianists and violinists, let alone opera singers? Hardly any have come close to what Rostropovich has done all his life, seeking out composers wherever he happens to be, seizing their scores and nagging them to write more. Perhaps most important, he has used his fame and audience-pulling power to lean on cash-strapped concert promoters and orchestra managers to program music they would otherwise have avoided.
To be fair, Rostropovich's commitment to new music didn't seem so odd in the later decades of the Soviet Union, where pressures on performers and promoters were ideological rather than economic. Then, no one seemed to worry about who was going to pay. What mattered was the excitement felt by so many artists, academics and other members of the intelligentsia that they were on the same anti-authoritarian side - or, the "underground," as it was romantically called. For them, new music could exist not in the usual pointless vacuum, but in a lively, if provincial, social and political context.
In a tradition dating at least to the 1940s, major Soviet performers championed new pieces and composers. Two of Rostropovich's greatest colleagues, the violinist David Oistrakh and the pianist Sviatoslav Richter, had important working relationships with Prokofiev and Shostakovich.
Still, neither player extended his interests much beyond those masters - certainly, neither came anywhere near Rostropovich in the omnivorous compulsion to engage with new music that he still shows today. It fell mostly to Soviet performers of a younger generation to follow his example and make the commissioning and programming of new music a significant part of their work.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, such idealism has almost disappeared. Russian classical musicians now find themselves in the same economic frying pan as their colleagues the world over, and the social, political and emotional raison d'etre for the modern music they used to play has more or less vanished. "I just can't see who needs this music anymore," the pianist Alexei Lyubimov, once an indispensable champion of contemporary Russian music, said recently.
But Rostropovich seems unhampered by such anxieties. Rumors abound of new composers he has discovered and new pieces he is planning to program in Berlin, London and St. Petersburg. And he keeps returning to the works of his greatest composer friends - Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Britten.
Among this trinity, the relationship with Shostakovich seems the deepest and richest, an affinity that probably says as much about the composer as about the cellist. Shostakovich had extremely alert antennae for the particular gifts of performers. Symphonies were written for the conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky and his Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, chamber music for the members of the Beethoven Quartet, preludes and fugues for the pianist Tatyana Nikolayeva and two violin concertos and a violin sonata for Oistrakh.
In this context, Shostakovich's output for Rostropovich is not huge: just two concertos. The rest of the composer's extensive cello music was written for others. The 1934 Sonata was composed for the small-scale talents of Viktor Kubatsky, and the difference shows in the music's relative simplicity and gentle lyricism. The cello parts in much of the chamber music were for the Beethoven Quartet's Sergei Shi rin sky, an accomplished team player but - to judge by what survives on recordings - not one for drama or virtuosity.
The concertos for Rostropovich are unimaginable without those qualities. Both depend spectacularly on the power and almost operatic heroism of Rostropovich's bowing, as it is today and especially as it was in earlier days. Both revel in his rich, cutting tone, the astonishing span of his hands, his dramatic nerve and his sheer ability to oppose the sound of his single instrument to the thunder of an orchestra, which often takes on a shrill, hysterical edge. These works exist far from the lyrical and elegiac tone of famous cello concertos like those of Schumann and Elgar.
Even more revealing, both Shosta ko vich concertos are characteristically driven by the aggressive yet unpredictable repetition of one or two obsessive ideas, little motifs, smaller than tunes, almost like what pop musicians call hooks. Here, perhaps, lies the heart of this composer's relationship to one of the greatest performers of his age.
In the First Concerto, the hook is just four notes, played by the cello alone in the first bar and a little like the beat of some mysterious tom-tom. In the Second Concerto, the hook is quite different, the ludicrously banal opening phrase of an Odessa street song, a hawker's cry: "Bubliki! Buy my bubliki!"
The barely chewable bublik, or boiled ring of dough, might be thought an apt symbol for Rostropovich's character. But there is apparently a more precise personal connection. A few months before composing this concerto in 1966, during a game at a New Year's party with Rostropovich and his family, Meet Meech had surprised the company by claiming that this lowdown ditty was his favorite tune. At the time, the claim had seemed a tease, but in the concerto the tune takes on a terrifying aspect.
Whatever significance we might choose to read into such connections, there can be little doubt that these concertos were written for someone Shostakovich trusted and believed in, and someone whose talents had astonished the composer into writing in a startling way.
Understandably, in return for two such overwhelming compliments, Rostropovich has spent much of his life bringing those talents to bear not only on the two pieces specially written for him but also on vast swathes of the composer's output: the other cello music, the other concertos, the symphonies, the songs, the operas, the light music, the film scores.
More than a quarter-century after Shos takovich's death, the spectacular symbiosis between these two men is a continuing musical story of our time.
TITLE: Netherlands Voters Swing to the Right
AUTHOR: By Arthur Max
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: AMSTERDAM - Dutch voters veered to the right after eight years of unchecked liberalism, giving a surprisingly wide victory to the opposition Christian Democrats and a new anti-immigration party whose charismatic leader was murdered last week.
With the vote count completed, the Christian Democrats won 43 seats - a gain of 14 seats in the 150-member parliament - followed by 26 for the upstart party founded by the assassinated populist Pim Fortuyn.
The outcome of Wednesday's vote was a stinging defeat for Prime Minister Wim Kok's Labor Party and its two coalition allies, which dropped from a total of 97 seats to 54.
Jan Peter Balkenende, a 46-year-old professor of Christian philosophy who has voiced distaste with the Dutch policies allowing euthanasia, gay marriages and tolerance of soft drugs, is likely to be the next prime minister.
Forging a rightist coalition would mean the inclusion of the novice legislators from Pim Fortuyn's List, seen as an unstable group with no natural leader after Fortuyn's death, and lacking a cohesive ideology.
Balkenende's plainspoken manner was seen as a refreshing change from the staid professional politicians of the three-way center-left coalition that ran Holland for eight years. His public appeal has been heightened by the good nature with which he has taken jokes about his likeness to the movie character Harry Potter, with his hairstyle and round glasses.
Christian Democrats participated in every Dutch government after World War II until they lost power in 1994.
The most likely coalition to take office would be a three-party alliance of Christian Democrats, Pim Fortuyn's List and the free-market Liberals, which would command a comfortable 92 seats in the Second Chamber, the dominant body of parliament.
It could take several weeks for the parties to reach a common government policy, with no guarantee of success. Party leaders began contacting each other and Queen Beatrix on Thursday to start the negotiations.
Kok's two four-year terms saw the economy grow faster than most in Europe, but his government failed to recognize public discontent with the rising tide of immigration and crime - and public services that didn't match the country's wealth.
"Let's be realistic. The voters gave us a huge thrashing. The people of the Netherlands have made a different choice," said Kok, who had previously announced his retirement from politics.
Labor leader Ad Melkert resigned, saying "the message of the voter was loud and clear."
Fortuyn tapped a groundswell of discontent with the ruling politicians and the country's swelling immigrant population, especially Muslims, who many feel have refused to adopt Dutch ways and assimilate into Dutch society. Fortuyn had called for closing Dutch borders to more immigrants.
Fortuyn was killed May 6 by a lone gunman after a campaign radio interview. His murder shocked this country of 16 million, which had long been proud of its consensus politics and seemed immune to political violence.
The swing in the Netherlands was the latest in a tilt to the right by voters across Europe. Conservative parties have made gains in Denmark, Italy, Portugal, and, most dramatically, in France, where right-wing extremist Jean-Marie le Pen fought his way into the second round of the presidential race.
Although Balkenende and most of his party opposed legislation last year to legalize euthanasia and gay marriages, his spokesman said he would not try to repeal those laws. "Balkenende sees it as an irreversible fact," said Hans van der Vlies.
Balkenende hoped to begin a movement to end the sale of marijuana in hundreds of so-called coffee-shops, a practice that is technically illegal but not prosecuted.
He admits that may take many years.
Like other parties, the Christian Democrats have promised to tighten immigration policies and promote the integration of newcomers.
It has demanded that all immigrants demonstrate knowledge of the national anthem, and would require refugees to pay a large deposit before being allowed to bring a spouse to the Netherlands.
The deposit would be refunded only after the partner completes an assimilation course in Dutch language and culture.
TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: ETA Attack Foiled
MADRID (Reuters) - Spanish authorities said on Wednesday that they had foiled a plan by armed Basque separatist group ETA to attack a summit of Latin American and European leaders in Madrid this week.
Francisco Javier Ansuategui, delegate for Madrid for Spain's ruling Popular Party, said two suspected ETA members detained Tuesday had stockpiled 200 kilograms of explosives, a limpet mine, automatic weapons and forged documents in an apartment in Madrid. "These two individuals did not want just to frighten people. They wanted to kill, and kill with all the implications that would have within the framework of the European Union summit," Ansuategui said.
Delegates had already begun to arrive for Friday's opening ceremony for the EU-Latin America summit, to which 48 heads of state have been invited.
Ireland Set To Vote
DUBLIN (Reuters) - A prosperous Ireland is set to vote Friday in an election almost certain to return the party that has presided over the biggest economic boom in the country's history.
The main issue left in the air as the three-week election campaign ended on Wednesday night, with Thursday mostly a day off, was just how big a win incumbent Prime Minister Bertie Ahern and his center-right Fianna Fail would get.
All opinion polls point to a landslide, which could give Fianna Fail, the dominant party, the first overall majority in the 166-seat Dail, or lower chamber of parliament, in 25 years.
Iraq To Let UN In?
UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Iraq appears to be seriously considering allowing UN weapons inspectors to return, more than three years after barring them from the country, a top U.S. diplomat says.
"I think a lot of people are telling us the Iraqis are seriously thinking about this now," James Cunningham, the U.S. Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations, told reporters on Wednesday.
Since March, Iraq's Foreign Minister Naji Sabri has held two rounds of talks with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the return of inspectors who left Baghdad ahead of U.S. and British airstrikes 3 years ago and have been barred from returning.
Taiwan, China Ink Deal
TAIPEI (Reuters) -Taiwan's state-run Chinese Petroleum Corp. and its Chinese counterpart signed a pact to jointly explore for oil on Thursday, in one of the boldest moves to tear down obstacles to trade and investment.
CPC and China National Offshore Oil Corp plan to invest a total of $25 million over four years to hunt for oil, sidestepping a political stalemate between Taipei and Beijing, rivals since the Chinese civil war ended in 1949.
The agreement also paves the way for both state firms to jointly develop the Chaoshan block in the open seas about 140 kilometers from Taiwan's southern port city Kaohsiung.
General on Trial
THE HAGUE, the Netherlands (Reuters) - A former Yugoslav Army general accused of ordering the massacre of 200 non-Serbs near the Croatian city of Vukovar in 1991 pleaded not guilty to war crimes on Thursday at the United Nations tribunal.
Mile Mrksic is charged with six counts, two of them crimes against humanity, for the beating, then killing of at least 200 people taken from the city's hospital in November 1991.
TITLE: Nets Move Into Strange Territory
AUTHOR: By Tom Canavan
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: EAST RUTHERFORD, New Jersey - The New Jersey Nets haven't enjoyed this kind of glory since their ABA days.
Jason Kidd scored 23 points and made several plays that swung the momentum as the Nets defeated Charlotte 103-95 Wednesday night in Game 5, in the Hornets' last game before moving to New Orleans next season.
The Nets earned their first trip to the Eastern Conference finals since joining the NBA in 1976, and will play the Boston Celtics in a best-of-seven series that will start here on Sunday.
In the West, the Lakers and Kings begin their conference final in Sacramento on Saturday.
The Nets-Celtics series pits a two-time ABA champion in the 1970s against a franchise that has won an NBA-best 16 titles.
"We have answered a lot of questions that were out there since October and the next question is if we are going to beat a talented team in Boston," said Kidd, who also had 13 assists, seven rebounds and five steals. "I think this has been a dream season for us and we do not want it to end."
Before this season, the Nets had made it out of the second round of the playoffs only once - in 1984 - in their first 25 years in the NBA. They made the playoffs once since 1994.
However, everything has changed this year following the offseason trade with Phoenix for All-Star point guard Stephon Marbury.
"I came in with the attitude that, on paper, we had some talented guys and my job was to get them to play and have confidence in each other," Kidd said.
Kidd did that and the Nets went 52-30, just a year after going 26-56.
The thread most of the season was Kidd's ability to deliver in big games.
It happened again in this series, notably in Game 4, when a one-eyed Kidd scored 24 points a little more than two days after getting 15 stitches to close a gash above his right eye.
"Jason has been like this in big games all season long," Nets coach Byron Scott on Wednesday. "He has been the one guy who has done a little of everything for us and tonight was no different. He didn't want to lose this game."
The game featured 14 lead changes and 18 ties, and the key for the Nets again was fourth-quarter defense. New Jersey held Charlotte to one field goal in the final 7:37.
"The fourth quarter seems to be our time," said Nets center Todd MacCulloch, who contributed a big put-back basket after Kidd's steal. "When it comes down to six minutes left, five minutes left, we're going to do a good job defensively."
Jamaal Magloire had 14 points and Wesley scored 13 for Charlotte. The Hornets were forced to play the entire series without star forward Jamal Mashburn, who was sidelined with a viral ailment.
TITLE: Forsberg Paces Avalanche Again
AUTHOR: By John Marshall
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: DENVER, Colorado - Peter Forsberg has been so good in the playoffs, it's easy to forget he missed the entire regular season.
"It's unbelievable," Colorado's Dan Hinote said. "It's amazing what kind of athlete he is to take the time off that he did and come back."
Forsberg scored his second-straight winner and Patrick Roy bolstered his mighty reputation as a big-game goalie, stopping 27 shots, as the Avalanche beat the San Jose Sharks 1-0 in Game 7 of the Western Conference semifinals.
The victory Wednesday night puts Colorado in the conference finals for the sixth time in seven years. The Avalanche open against the Detroit Red Wings on Saturday in a best-of-seven matchup of the West's top two teams during the regular season.
In the East, the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Carolina Hurricanes began their final Thursday night at Carolina.
Forsberg missed the regular season because of a leave of absence and several foot operations, but he has dominated since returning just before the playoffs.
Forsberg, the playoffs' leading scorer with 19 points, scored with 2:10 left in the second period of Game 7 on a give-and-go with Alex Tanguay, two days after getting the winner in overtime in Game 6.
San Jose led the series 3-2 after a 5-3 victory in Game 5, but scored one goal in the final two games in failing to reach the conference finals for the first time.
It was the second time the Sharks lost the final two games of a series after leading 3-2. They did against Toronto in the 1994 conference semifinals.
"We were one chance short in two games," San Jose coach Darryl Sutter said. "I think we showed that we can play with them. Now we have to figure out a way to beat them."
The Sharks will first have to find out a way to get past Roy. He extended his league record with his 22nd career playoff shutout and tied a record with his 11th game 7. He is 6-5 in Game 7s, but has allowed a total of two goals to win the last four - three of which have been in the Avalanche's last three playoff series.
Roy has allowed three goals the last six times Colorado has faced elimination, including one in a 2-1 overtime victory in Game 6 Monday against the Sharks.
San Jose had a two-player advantage for the final 55 seconds after pulling goalie Evgeni Nabokov and a tripping penalty was called on Colorado's Rob Blake. But the Sharks couldn't beat Roy.
Roy blocked a hard shot from the right circle by Mike Rathje, then stopped Teemu Selanne from the left side with nine seconds left. Joe Sakic won a faceoff in Colorado's zone with four seconds left to seal it.
TITLE: Labor Strife Looming In Baseball
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK - Baseball's labor talks are stalled, and some players think the union will set a strike date for August.
"That's really the only thing we can do," New York Yankees player representative Mike Stanton said Wednesday. "It's not a situation where we have a lot of options."
Union officials told player agents at a meeting in New York on Tuesday that the staff is considering if and when to set a strike date, two agents said on Wed nesday, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Union head Donald Fehr, who told players during spring training to prepare for missing their last two or three paychecks, was to hold a similar meeting with West Coast agents in Los Angeles on Thursday.
The New York Times reported Thursday that the first day of the postseason, Oct. 1, also was being considered. It quoted an unidentified player representative as saying a date could be set in advance to allow time for a settlement.
"Before everybody reacts - or overreacts - we've got to remember that there's been no strike date set," commissioner Bud Selig said Wednesday night. "The industry's had three or four decades of all this stuff, and nobody knows better than I do how tired people are of it, so I'm hopeful that we can use the coming months to solve our problems. I'm very hopeful."
TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: Hingis Hanging Up?
ZURICH (Reuters) - Former world No. 1 Martina Hingis may be forced to quit tennis due to a serious foot injury, the doctor treating her indicated on Wednesday.
"We have to see how far the inflammation in the joints has already led to arthrosis," Dr Heinz Buhlmann told the private Swiss station Radio 24.
"We cannot yet say how sensible it would be for her to continue her career or whether to end it would be advisable on medical grounds."
Arthrosis is another name for osteoarthritis.
Buhlmann, who is treating 21-year-old Hingis in a Zurich clinic, said she is suffering from pain in the joints of her left foot, left knee and left hip.
Buhlmann, who has yet to make a firm diagnosis, warned that long term inflammation could have led to joint damage, which would force Hingis to end her career.
Melanie Molitor, Hingis' mother, confirmed that her daughter is undergoing tests in Zurich and speculated that any joint damage may have been caused by the shoes she wore from the age of 11 until three years ago.
Hingis is still involved in an ongoing legal battle with shoe manufacturers Sergio Tacchini after alleging that their shoes damaged her feet.
Late Coach Honored
KIEV (Reuters) - Dinamo Kiev coach Valery Lobanovsky has been posthumously awarded the country's highest honour - the Hero of Ukraine - by President Leonid Kuchma.
The much-loved Lobanovsky, who had a history of poor health, died on Monday after suffering a stroke and undergoing brain surgery.
He was one of soccer's most illustrious figures in the former Soviet Union after taking Dinamo Kiev to two European Cup Winners' Cups and guiding the Soviet team to second place at the 1988 European Championships.
"The title was granted after Lobanovsky's death for his years of service to the state, to the development of soccer and for his successful coaching," the presidential press service said in a statement.
Lobanovsky, who was given a state funeral on Thursday, helped make Dinamo Kiev, for generations Ukraine's most popular club, a potent national symbol for many with little else to cheer about in the impoverished ex-Soviet state.
Lobanovsky returned to Kiev from abroad after a six-year absence in November 1996 to begin his third coaching spell with Dinamo. His return paid immediate dividends for the Kiev side, as it won five consecutive league titles from 1997 to 2001.
In 1999, he was appointed Ukraine coach and guided his Kiev side to the semifinals of the Champions League.
Dogged by ill-health, Lobanovsky lost his Ukraine post following the 5-2 defeat to Germany in the two-legged World Cup play-off last November.
Pena Gets New Staff
KANSAS CITY, Missouri (Reuters) - The Kansas City Royals named former major-league catcher Tony Pena as the team's new manager on Wednesday, hoping his experience handling pitchers will help the struggling ballclub.
"His success at understanding pitching was a key factor [in hiring Pena]," Royals General Manager Allard Baird said.
John Mizerock, who took over as interim manager after Tony Muser was fired on April 29, had posted a 5-8 record.
The 44-year-old Pena promised changes on a team that is fourth in the American League Central with a 13-23 record, but said he will not make any hasty decisions.
"I need to see what I've got before I can do anything," Pena said. "Anytime you go into a house you need to find out what is wrong and then go from there."
They're at the Post
BALTIMORE, Maryland (Reuters) - Buoyed by a strong finish in the Kentucky Derby, Medaglia d'Oro drew the No. 5 post position and was installed as the early favorite, at 5-2, to win Saturday's 127th running of the Preakness Stakes.
Derby winner War Emblem is the second favorite at 3-1 after landing the favoured No. 8 post at Wednesday's draw.
"We really weren't sure of six, seven, eight or outside," said War Emblem trainer Bob Baffert. "We figured a lot of speed horses would be outside of us.
Following Taffic Rules?
LONDON (Reuters) - Formula One's ruling body has summoned Ferrari and the team's drivers Michael Schumacher and Rubens Barrichello to explain their conduct at Sunday's controversial Austrian Grand Prix.
Brazilian Barrichello led the race from the start but, after being ordered to move over by Ferrari, slowed in the final few meters to allow world-champion Schumacher, who leads this season's standings, to take the checkered flag.
Ferrari was pilloried by rival teams and spectators at the track for manipulating the sixth race of the season.
The International Automobile Federation (FIA), which has in the past been unclear about whether "team orders" are allowed, said in a statement that Ferrari had been summoned to appear before their World Motor Sports Council in Paris on June 26.
The Italian team will be asked to explain what the FIA termed the "incident" on the last lap and also incidents during the winner's ceremony.
"It is perfectly legitimate for a team to decide that one of its drivers is its championship contender and that the other will support him," the FIA said in a reminder dated August 26, 1999.
"What is not acceptable, in the World Council's view, is any arrangement which interferes with a race and cannot be justified by the relevant team's interest in the championship.
Too Happy To Win
MADRID (Reuters) - Riot police clashed with stone-throwing Real Madrid fans as hundreds of thousands of people packed the center of the Spanish capital to celebrate the team's European Cup triumph on Wednesday.
Police charged fans who rained bottles on them near the Cibeles fountain in central Madrid, where Real supporters traditionally celebrate the team's successes, witnesses said.
A spokesperson for the ambulance service said two fans and one police officer had suffered facial injuries.
"The police officer was hit with a stone when a group of people threw stones and bottles at the police," the spokesperson said.
Fans were determined to celebrate the feast day of San Isidro, Madrid's patron saint, with car horns blaring throughout the city and firework displays lighting up the night sky.