SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #783 (49), Friday, July 5, 2002
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TITLE: Families Mourn Victims of Crash
AUTHOR: By Alexander G. Higgins
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: UEBERLINGEN, Germany - Grieving families piled flowers on Thursday around the airliner wreckage that fell from nearly 10 kilometers up with their children on board, and investigators said the Russian pilot had been given just 44 seconds warning before crashing into an oncoming cargo plane.
 
The initial results of a German-led inquiry into the collision - which killed 72 people, 45 of them Russian children headed for an end-of-school beach vacation - turned fresh attention on Swiss air-traffic control, which took charge of the planes shortly before the crash.
 The Swiss have already said that there was only one controller in the Zurich tower at the time and that there should have been two because a crash-avoidance system was out of service for maintenance. The second controller had taken a break.
 Chief German investigator Peter Schlegel said analysis of radio transmissions showed the Bashkirian Airlines Tu-154 was given six seconds less than the 50-second warning Swiss and German officials had previously reported. That is nearly a minute less than the Swiss had claimed shortly after the crash.
 The Russian-made Tupolev began to dive just 14 seconds after the initial warning and 30 seconds before the crash. The Russian plane was responding to a second Swiss warning.
 "The Tupolev should have begun descending, at the latest, one minute before the crossing point," Schlegel said, at a news conference in the north-central German city of Braunschweig.
 But he said it was too early to determine blame in the collision with a Boeing 757 DHL International delivery-service jet just before midnight Monday. Both pilots on that plane died.
 Schlegel denied a Russian news report that experts decoding the planes' flight data and cockpit voice recorders found the Russian pilot asked to change course one minute before the collision.
 The children - all gifted students from Ufa, an industrial city in Bashkortostan region in the southern Ural Mountains - were heading to Spain as a reward for getting top grades.
 On Thursday, parents and other relatives of the young Russians hugged, cried, piled flowers and placed wreaths at the wreckage in a solemn farewell. Some of the 150 family members were so overcome with grief they needed medical treatment, officials said.
 Women leaned on one another in the sun as they walked from a golden barley field where the jet's tail section lay askew in the gently rolling hills leading down to Lake Constance. The Swiss Alps towered in the background.
 An Orthodox priest and a Muslim cleric offered prayers, as the relatives left seven large flower wreaths.
 German officials had asked the parents for photographs and other aids to help in the "extraordinarily difficult identification" of their children. The bodies were in such terrible condition relatives should not have to identify them, said Baden-Wurttemberg state Interior Minister Thomas Schauble.
 Officials said they had recovered 68 by the time the parents arrived. The search was continuing.
 Many questions remained, including whether both planes' onboard collision-warning systems were functioning.
 "We don't know whether it was human error, or technical error, or whether there was a chain of unfortunate circumstances," German Transport Minister Kurt Bodewig said.
 Schlegel said the Zurich control tower received notification 14 seconds before the impact that one plane's collision-warning system was recommending it descend. Investigators believe it was the Boeing, which then began to dive - meaning that both planes were taking the same evasive action at the same time, thus continuing on their collision course.
 "That clearly worsened the situation and it will be a major issue in the investigation," Schlegel said.
 Officials said the Russian plane also had a collision-avoidance system, but it was unclear whether it was working at the time of the crash.
 Though several experts have said Europe's fragmented air traffic-control system was not to blame for the collision, the crash revived calls for a single, Europe-wide system.
 "The small-state thinking must be replaced by a unified system," Bodewig said.
 Swiss authorities had said shortly after the tragedy that their controllers gave the Russian pilot 90 seconds warning, but quickly scaled that back to 50 seconds to match subsequent German reports. The Swiss had also initially claimed the Russian pilot had not responded until a third warning from the tower.

TITLE: Police Scheme Looking to Future
AUTHOR: By Claire Bigg
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The threats of terrorism, narcotics-related crime and soccer hooliganism are all issues that have surfaced only in recent years for Russian law-enforcement officers, while their British counterparts have already gained a good deal of experience in dealing with them.
 
But officials involved in a 10-year old cooperative program between the Metropolitan Police Training Center, located in the London suburb of Hendon, and St. Petersburg's Interior Ministry University, say that the aims of their program are much broader in scope and time frame.
 "The aim of the exchange program is not to tell Russians what to do, but to show them how we work," said Richard Farmery, the head of External Liaison for the Metropolitan Police Service, in an interview during his visit to St. Petersburg on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the program last week. "The program will bear fruit in the long run, once the young Russian cadets who were trained in England are in positions of power and can bring bout some changes on their own," he said.
 In each of the last 10 years, 20 of the top students from the Interior Ministry's university have taken part in a five-week exchange program at the Hendon center, where they receive training in a number of fields, including forensic science, interrogation techniques, crime investigation and prevention, as well as gaining extensive practical experience in patrolling the streets of London, accompanied by British police officers. 
 The exchange program was created in July 1992, when Peter Imbert, then commissioner of London's Metropolitan Police Service, came up with the idea following a visit to St. Petersburg, as a way to assist Russia in reforming its police forces and to facilitate a dialogue with Western Europe. The program received its initial funding from Britain's Know How Fund, which was targeted to provide bilateral development assistance to countries under transition in Central and Eastern Europe and Asia.
 Since then, over 180 Russians have visited the Metropolitan Police Training Center, the majority of whom were young cadets, although a few senior officers have also visited the London institution.
 In addition to the course at Hendon, the Russian cadets also get to visit the headquarters of Britain's police force at New Scotland Yard, a Crown Court, the British Parliament and London's Metropolitan Forensic Science Laboratory.
 "One of the things that impressed me most during my stay was New Scotland Yard," said Dmitry Kuznetsov, a 20-year old police cadet who took part in the program in the Spring of 2001. "The police officers there can monitor what happens on the streets of London from their office, thanks to 400,000 cameras scattered throughout the city."
 "Generally, the program was very beneficial, and the extensive practical training gave us a very clear idea of a police officer's work in London," he said.
 Kuznetsov said, however, that he was overwhelmed at first when he was sent to walk a street beat with a London Bobby without really having any training in this area but, like most of the cadets, he quickly learned to enjoy the experience of patrolling the streets of London wearing a Russian uniform. 
 "People's reactions were always friendly. One day, some people saw my uniform and thought I was from the British Intelligence Service. It was funny, because nobody noticed the Russian flag and symbols on my uniform," Kuznetsov said, with a chuckle.
 General Viktor Salnikov, the head of the Interior Ministry University, said that the direct work with civilians was the most crucial aspect of the cadets' training at Hendon.
 "The most valuable quality trainees gain from the course is a better ability to work with people," he said.
 While both sides see the value of the experience the cadets get in London, they also realize that police officers in Russia have a reputation of being corrupt and often brutal, and that a large number of Russian's look upon police here with a good deal of enmity. They say the value of the program is that it is an attempt to reform the system from below.
 "Now many of the earlier trainees are working in various fields throughout Russia and can put to use the experience they gained at Hendon," Salnikov said.
 "The program is beneficial to the university, but also to the Ministry of Interior and to London," he added.
 One specific negative aspect of the Russian police system that the program tries to counter is that of corruption. While the course does specifically deal with ethics issues, representatives from the British side say that the attitudes of individual officers are not the only culprit behind the problem.
 "Of course, the low salaries here encourage the taking of bribe but, if the government reduced the number of police officers, it could afford to pay them more," Farmery said. "There are 120,000 police officers in Moscow alone, whereas in London there are only 26,000. This is a rollover from Soviet times."
 "Corruption also stems from the fact that people still think they have to pay bribes. Not only that of the police, but also the people's perception of police officers has to change," he added.
 While the exchange program remains the central component of the collaboration between the Interior Ministry University and London's Metropolitan Police Service, the framework of the collaboration has expanded.
 Over the past few years, both sides have hosted a series of conferences centered around the topics related to democracy and crime fighting in order to facilitate cooperation in these domains between Great Britain and Russia. Fighting terrorism is one subject that has drawn their attention.
 "With the development of new technologies, terrorism has become an international problem, which requires international solutions. In October 2001, we organized a conference on terrorism in St. Petersburg, during which the head of the British Flying Squad [a rapid-response mobile unit that is part of London's Metropolitan Police Service] met his Russian counterpart to discuss terrorism issues," Farmery said. "Now, instead of having to go through lengthy bureaucratic procedures to contact each other, they can simply pick up the phone."
 "But the British police's activity in Russia is ultimately addressed to the poor, the disadvantaged people of Russia," he added.
 One example of this focus is program targeting domestic violence that has been organized in collaboration with the Interior Ministry University. The aim of the program is to encourage victims of domestic violence to turn to the police for help.
 Earlier this year, St. Petersburg police representatives took part in a pilot project that involved a program on a local radio station addressing the subject, during which over 2000 calls were received from people who said that they had been victims of domestic violence.
 The university consequently introduced a course on dealing with domestic violence into its curriculum, developing the course materials and teaching the subject in collaboration with NGO workers from the Alexander Center, a St. Petersburg association that deals with domestic-violence issues.
 The turn to paying more attention to issues, such as domestic violence, that have received little serious attention for a long time in Russia comes side-by-side with help in dealing with and policing relatively new difficulties, including drug-use and hooliganism.
 To try to help reduce the spread of infectious diseases through drug use, the Metropolitan Police Service has helped set up a needle exchange program in Krasnoyarsk, which has involved overcoming traditional police culture.
 "Sometimes it is difficult convincing Russian police forces to support something that is illegal. But such preventive measures will avoid many problems in the future," said Farmery.
 In one other way, Farmery says, Russian police cadets learning some tricks from their British counterparts makes sense, as one group of Russian criminals has already done the same.
 "We are also very worried about the rise of hooliganism, which was best illustrated in May in Moscow, after Russia lost to Japan in the World Cup," Farmery adds. "Russian hooligans say that they model themselves on British hooligans, so now we would like to help deal with this problem in Russia."

TITLE: Beglov Approved as First Vice Governor
AUTHOR: By Claire Bigg
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Legislative Assembly confirmed Alexander Beglov, St. Petersburg Governor Vladimir Yakovlev's nominee for the post of first vice governor and head of the city's treasury, by a 38-7 vote on Wednesday, two weeks after it had voted against his appointment.
 
On June 19, Beglov received only 21 of the minimum 26 votes necessary for confirmation, and the overwhelming margin this time had some local politicians scratching their heads. 
 Ruslan Linkov, the leader of the local branch of the Democratic Russia party, said he thought that some of the deputies were persuaded to vote in favour of Beglov after having received assurances that he would not hinder their campaigns during the elections for the Legislative Assembly to be held in December.
 "I think those deputies who voted against Beglov the first time have since received garanties that he will lend them assistance, or at least that he will not work against them," Linkov said Friday.
 As first vice governor, one of Beglov's duties is to head St. Petersburg's treasury, meaining that he would be responsible for supervizing the financial organization of the upcoming election campaign.
 Others, however, said that the shift in attitudes was more due to Beglov's own success in presenting himself to the chamber and getting accross his message.
 "Beglov wasn't confirmed the first time because he did not appear convincing enough," said Vatanyar Yagya, a deputy from the St. Petersburg's Will faction.
 "He laid out the facilitation of dialogue between the different political forces in St. Petersburg as his highest priority, and this scared off a number of deputies because this really isn't one of the chief responsibilities of the head of the Treasury," Yagya said.
 "This time, Beglov was more familiar with the position for which he was being considered and was able to put togehter the right priorities and arguments," he said.
 "Nobody really knows Beglov at the Legislative Assembly," said Boris Vishnyevsky, a local Yabloko party member.
 "I think the previous vote was a misunderstanding, and it baffled many politicians," he added.
 Since September 1999, Beglov has worked as the head of the Kurortny District Administration in the city, and his work there has drawn praise.
 "Beglov's performance and achievements as head of the Kurortny district were good, and I think he will continue to do a good job in his new position," said Unity lawmaker Viktor Yevtukhov. 
 Addressing the Legislative Assembly ahead of the June 19 vote, Beglov said that he would resign his Kurortny District position in order to take up his new responsibilities
 The first vice governor post was left vacant when Yury Antonov resigned from office on May 31, citing personal reasons.
 Beglov's nomination had originally drawn fire from different interests within the assembly, including its judicial department, which sent a finding to Yakovlev claiming that, as a graduate of the Leningrad Instititute for Engineering and Construction, Beglov was not suitably qualified to function as head of the treasury.

TITLE: Iraq's New Ambassador Officially Begins Duties
AUTHOR: By Natalia Yefimova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Iraq's new ambassador to Russia, who served for a time as Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's personal interpreter, officially took up his duties Thursday, saying that his 25-year relationship with the country of his first diplomatic posting has left him "nearly Russified."
 
Speaking in fluent Russian peppered with idioms, Abbas Khalaf told reporters that Baghdad considers Russia and Russian companies - which do a brisk business with Iraq under the UN sanctions regime but say they stand to gain billions of dollars more if the sanctions are lifted - a top priority, not a last resort in the face of international isolation.
 "Some press reports have said that Iraq wants to use Russia as a Trojan horse" to subvert the sanctions regime and then to abandon the relationship, but "this is not the case," said Khalaf, who holds a doctorate in philology and a journalism degree from Moscow State University.
 Russia's Foreign Ministry has said that in 2001 the two countries signed $2.3 billion worth of non-military deals, not including oil trade contracts. Since the start of the UN oil-for-food program, in which Russia is a major participant, Russian-Iraqi trade turnover has reached a reported $6 billion.
 Asked about Moscow's new pro-Western stance in the wake of Sept. 11, Khalaf said Russia's foreign policy is its own business.
 However, in a momentary lapse of composure, he accused the United States and Great Britain of using the sanctions as a tool to hit Russia where it hurts - its pocket.
 By keeping the sanctions in place, "the United States and England want to inflict the greatest damage on Russia," he said emotionally.
 Iraq owes Russia an estimated $8 billion in debt, which Khalaf said Baghdad is prepared to pay - but can't because of the sanctions.
 Khalaf also cited an official letter from Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov saying that Russia's losses as a result of the sanctions totaled $30 billion. 
 Russian oil companies that help Iraq export oil under the UN program now earn some $200 million to $400 million annually from the project, according to industry analysts.
 However, their access to some major oil fields - which they have rights to develop and which could be worth tens of billions of dollars in the long-term - have been frozen pending the lifting of sanctions.
 Khalaf indicated Iraq would honor the Russian companies' rights, saying oil was a strategic issue and "we insist it remain in the hands of our friends."
 Despite his unreserved criticism of the sanctions, Khalaf said he was optimistic about the latest round of talks between Baghdad and the United Nations, which kicked off in Vienna on Thursday.
 While the UN aim is to clinch a deal allowing arms inspectors back into Iraq after a 3 1/2 year shut-out, Baghdad has a much longer list of issues to discuss, including U.S. threats to oust Hussein and the future of the U.S. and British-imposed no-fly zones.

TITLE: Photos Haunting Ufa Teachers
AUTHOR: By Burt Herman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: UFA, Bashkortostan - One was a star student, her report card full of perfect grades. One was like a kid brother to all his classmates, loving to argue to prove his point.
 
Another was ill and trying to catch up, but nonetheless had started studying Spanish to prepare for a school trip to the Mediterrannean coast.
 That trip to Spain ended in a fiery death for them and 42 other schoolchildren from the republic of Bashkortostan, in a plane collision over Germany.
 Grieving teachers at the Gymnasium No. 3 school in the center of Bashkortostan's capital, Ufa, pored over school files, old class photos and pictures of holiday celebrations with girls in satin pink dresses dancing to mark World War II Victory Day.
 Seven of the dead students had attended the school, one of a few elite institutions in the region where all pupils study English and either German or French, along with choosing specialties in either humanities, math or science.
 One of the school's brightest was Karina Urazlina, 16, who would have entered her final year Sept. 1. Principal Leilya Sharafutdinova went through a file on her desk of Karina's numerous award certificates and her latest report card - filled with rows of fives, or top marks.
 Karina had specialized in chemistry and was the best student in the subject, teachers said.
 On a videotape of a fellow student's presentation, the dark-haired Karina sat in the front row and applauded enthusiastically.
 She had won an award in a school science competition for a report called "Ozone and its influence on the environment."
 "She wanted to solve the problem in her own way," said Sharafutdinova. Karina had also worked with UNESCO, the UN's cultural and educational arm that was also involved with the students' trip to Spain, and had won an international science competition on a previous trip to Bulgaria.
 Her younger brother, Ruslan Urazlin, 14, was also on the ill-fated plane. A year younger than the rest of the children in his grade, Ruslan was like the kid brother to everyone in his class with his boyish ways, said his math teacher Lilia Satayeva.
 In photographs, the skinnier and shorter Ruslan was always smiling. In one he modestly spoke into a microphone held by another student at a ceremony for the completion of ninth grade. Despite his smaller size, Satayeva said Ruslan always liked to start debates with his fellow students.
 "He just liked to prove something," she said. "It was of no importance how, he just liked to do things in his own way." 
 Less outgoing was Sofia Fedotova, 15, who had been forced by illness to miss many classes and was struggling to keep up, said her English teacher Lidiya Gafurova. Sofia had problems with her back, making her unable to sit for long periods in class, and hoped that the sun and sea in Spain would be good for her health, Gafurova said. 
 Despite always being behind, she had even started learning Spanish, in addition to already studying English and French, in eager anticipation of the trip. 
 "A lot of people dance or do sports, but for Sofia there wasn't time for that," said Gafurova. "All her attention was paid to studying." 
 At the parents' meeting, Alexander Safchuk sat motionless, having lost not only his two children, 12-year-old Vladislav and 13-year-old Veronika, but also his wife Irina, who had worked in the regional administration and was one of the escorts for the ill-fated trip. 
 His brother, Vladimir, sitting next to him for support, said Alexander would go to Germany with his remaining son, Viktor, 22, "to have some kind of memory" of his loss. 
 Another parent, Alfiya Kakhanova, broke into tears as she remembered her 12-year-old daughter Alina. 
 "I don't feel like a mother anymore," she said, lamenting that she had sent her child on the trip. "I feel like I've lost my heart."

TITLE: Visa Delay Meant Five Escaped Death
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina and Robin Munro
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Visa problems were all that stood between the air tragedy and the five people who failed to make the flight.
 
Dim Khuzhin, who was to oversee the group of students from Bashkortostan, was furious when the Spanish Embassy balked at issuing visas last week for his wife, Klara, who was also the group's doctor, their two children Diana and Rasul and an assistant.
 He only found out that he and his family had escaped death when they turned up at the Spanish Embassy on Tuesday morning to try to sort out the visas.
 The embassy said the visa application forms had been incomplete.
 "They were not refused visas. The issuing was delayed," Spanish Embassy spokesperson Grigorio Laso said. "They just hadn't supplied all the necessary documents."
 The family and the assistant, Yevgenia Sigalova, had thought they would miss a few precious days of the two-week vacation when the embassy handed out visas to the other 49 members of the group Friday.
 Laso said the embassy had gotten angry telephone calls about the delay of the five visas.
 The Bashkortostan group's Moscow travel agent, Tatyana Ostapenko, was to meet the Khuzhins at the embassy at 8 a.m. to help them resolve the visa problem and arrange a later flight to Spain.
 "But after I got up at 6 a.m. and watched the news, I went to the office instead," said Ostapenko, the general director of the Soglasiye youth travel agency. "This was the only place I could do anything if anything at all could be done."
 The Khuzhins, however, remained unaware of the crash. "They called me sometime early in the morning wondering where I was and why I wasn't at the embassy," Ostapenko said. "It turns out they didn't know anything.
 "What could I tell them? I told them that all the children had died. That the plane had crashed. What could a person say under such circumstances?" she said.
 As often happens when tragedy strikes, the Khuzhins had difficulty fathoming what had happened. "They just kept asking for strangely irrelevant details, as if that would change anything."
 Ostapenko said the Khuzhins and Sigalova were picked up by officials of the Bashkortostan representative office in Moscow and were due to take a train back home to Ufa in the evening. Nobody picked up the telephone at Bashkortostan's representative office.
 The Spanish Embassy said the angry phone calls were replaced Tuesday with calls of gratitude, thanking the embassy for staunchly sticking to its visa rules.

TITLE: Official Accuses Government Of Sabotage Over Policing
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - A senior official with the pro-Moscow Chechen government accused federal authorities on Thursday of sabotaging the transfer of policing duties to Chechen officers. 
 
"We are ready to assume full responsibility for the maintenance of public order, but there is hidden sabotage," Shaid Zhamaldayev of the Chechen administration was quoted by Interfax as saying. "Someone wants the Chechen police to remain a stepchild." 
 He said that local police units lack the necessary arms, computers, vehicles and communication equipment. 
 The Chechen police "is not allowed to work in full," Zhamaldayev said. 
 The government has long said that life is slowly returning to normal in Chechnya, and they have expressed a desire to boost the role played by Chechen police. But while Russia said earlier this week that is would shrink its military presence in Chechnya, there is still an 80,000-strong force of service personnel and special police operating there. 
 Additionally, the federal troops have an uneasy relationship with local police. Military units regularly accuse some Chechen police officers of acting on behalf of rebels and say that rebels frequently try to infiltrate the police. 
 Interfax reported Thursday that several rebels were detained after applying for service in a riot police unit of the Chechen interior department. 
 Meanwhile, Colonel Ilya Shabalkin told Itar-Tass that federal troops seized an audiocassette made by rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov in which he allegedly implores rebels to force Chechen businesspeople to pay a "presidential tax" to raise money for the separatist fight.

TITLE: Floods Dampen Recovery Plans
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - In the Chechen town of Itum-Kale, a battleground for federal troops and Chechen rebels two years ago, a newly built mineral-water bottling plant was seen as a symbol of the transition from war to peace.
 
But only days before the local administration was to hold a ceremony officially opening the plant last week, it was washed away by the flood waters that swept southern Russia. In addition to the factory, 109 houses in Itum-Kale were demolished when the Argun River overflowed its banks, leaving almost 400 of the town's 950 residents homeless.
 "The disaster has made a mess of all our plans. Everything we managed to rebuild after the war was washed away," Elbek Uzuyev, head of the district administration, said in a telephone interview from Itum-Kale this week.
 Itum-Kale in southern Chechnya is just one of 360 villages and towns ravaged by the floods that hit nine regions last month, killing almost 100 people and leaving thousands homeless. 
 The floods destroyed or damaged 1,717 kilometers of highway, 448 bridges, 6 kilometers of railway, 121 factories, 134 kilometers of gas pipelines and 1,189 kilometers of powerlines, the Emergency Situations Ministry says.
 Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov ordered the government to allocate 1.8 billion rubles ($57 million) to rebuild houses and buy apartments for those who lost their homes, and most of the money, 1.15 billion rubles, has already been released, Finance Ministry spokesman Pyotr Afanasyev said Thursday, adding that the remaining 650 million rubles are to be allocated within days.
 So far, the money has not been well spent, according to Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu. Speaking Thursday on RTR televsion, he criticized the State Construction Committee, or Gosstroi, for its slow work and poor organization in restoring the damaged houses. Shoigu said only 4 percent of the 62,000 damaged residential buildings have been restored.
 His ministry preliminarily estimated the damage caused by the flood at 13.5 billion rubles ($4.3 billion), but the federal government does not plan to foot the entire bill.
 Under a government resolution on measures to cope with the flood damage, powerlines are to be restored by Unified Energy Systems while restoration of gas pipelines is the responsibility of the state-controlled natural gas monopoly, Gazprom.
 The bulk of the work restoring water and electricity and repairing major roads was to have been completed by Friday, when Kasyanov is to hold a cabinet meeting to sum up the results of the work, Interfax reported.
 The country's economy as a whole also will not suffer significantly, said Yevgeny Gavrilenkov, chief economist at Troika Dialog.
 "Though the damage is considerable, we should not expect it to have a heavy impact on the country's economy or on the pace of the economy's growth," he said. 
 Agriculture Minister Alexei Gordeyev said earlier this week that the effect on this year's grain harvest will be minimal, with losses of 0.10 percent to 0.15 percent. Of the 2.4 million hectares of grain in the Southern Federal District, 130,000 hectares were lost to the floods, he said.
 The regions, however, will be hard pressed to cope. "The majority of the problems will be social rather than economic, and the main burden will be with the regions," Gavrilenkov said.
 In the affected regions, where local residents and emergency workers from elsewhere in Russia are busy restoring roads, bridges, power and water supplies, the main fear of many local administrations is that the funds from Moscow will be slow to arrive and the amount will not be sufficient to cover the damage.
 "We absolutely must house all those who have become homeless before the winter cold sets in, and we have nothing to count on but the federal aid," Zhanna Makhova, deputy head of the Armavir district administration in the Krasnodar region, said in a telephone interview from Armavir.
 She said the disaster left about 8,000 people homeless in her district, and they are being housed temporarily in tent camps and in buildings in areas not affected by the floods. A total of 1,904 houses were washed away in the town of Armavir, the village of Krasnaya Polyana and in Staraya Stanitsa, located across the Kuban River from Armavir.
 Uzuyev from Itum-Kale shared Makhova's serious concerns that the federal funding might take a long time to arrive.
 "We have had to rebuild houses, roads and bridges before and we know what it is like waiting for financing from the government," Uzuyev said.
 Not only is the amount of money allocated by the Finance Ministry not nearly enough to cover the damages, "there is a chance that part of the allocated funds will disappear," Gavrilenko said. Federal funds have had a habit of going missing, through corruption and mismanagement, especially in Chechnya.
 Makhova said the flood in the Armavir region washed away almost all of the old residential buildings, which were built in the 1960s and long needed to be rebuilt. But even if new buildings are put up, the Kuban River, which swells almost every year due to heavy rains, will remain a danger for the town of Armavir, which sits on its banks.
 "We need to fortify the bank of the river, but the expenses are too high for our budget," Makhova said.

TITLE: Lawmakers Pushing for Reform of Media Laws
AUTHOR: By Andrei Zolotov Jr.
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A group of influential lawmakers announced Thursday that they have drafted a new mass media law that aims to discourage the government from owning media outlets and introduce a European style concept of public media.
 
The bill, which should go for a first reading in the State Duma this fall, was written by Mikhail Fedotov, one of the authors of the much-praised yet outdated 1991 Law on Mass Media.
 "The fact that Fedotov is an author of the draft is already a certain credential," said Deputy Duma Speaker Irina Khakamada, who is also a leader of the Union of Right Forces, or SPS. "That means that the draft does not strive to limit media liberties."
 One of the bill's backers, Russia's Regions Deputy Boris Reznik, said that deputies from across the Duma's political spectrum had agreed to support the bill. They included Khakamada, Boris Nadezhdin of SPS, Mikhail Zadornov of Yabloko, Communists Alexander Kravets and Tatyana Astrakhankina and deputies from Fatherland-All Russia, People's Deputy and Russia's Regions.
 Fedotov, a lawyer and a secretary at the Union of Journalists of Russia, is one of the three men who wrote the first glasnost-era Soviet and then Russian law on mass media. The legislation freed the press from official censorship and has acquired an almost holy status among Russian liberals and free speech advocates, who tend to see any attempt to amend it as a government-sponsored assault on free speech. At the same time, since the high-profile media conflicts of the past years, advocates of the law have come to accept that a new law is needed to include realities such as private media owners and Internet publications that did not exist in the early 1990s.
 Fedotov said that his draft, which is posted on the Union of Journalists' web site (www.ruj.ru), would create a buffer between the state-owned media and its government owners. The state would not be able to partially own a media outlet as it currently does with ORT. Also, advertising would be limited in state-owned media.
 Internet sites would be able to register as mass media, but on a strictly voluntary basis.
 Lawmakers said the draft, which was written two years ago, was submitted to the State Duma on June 20, just two days after President Vladimir Putin met with a group of top media executives. He conceded that the Law on Mass Media contradicted newer laws and urged the executives to draft legislation to build up a "civilized media business."
 "Since [Putin] expressed the political will, we decided to submit this bill," Reznik said. 
 Khakamada said she thought enough support could be drummed up in the Duma to pass the legislation.
 She noted that the deputies had changed tactics by presenting Fedotov's bill before the Kremlin announced a draft of its own.
 "Otherwise they will switch on the [Duma] voting machine, and it will be hard to do anything," she said.
 It was not clear Thursday how the Press Ministry and other relevant government agencies would react to the deputies' move. 
 Deputy Press Minister Mikhail Seslavinsky, who is in charge of the ministry's relations with parliament, could not be reached for comment, and other officials refused to discuss the issue.
 Reznik said that the ministry had absorbed much of Fedotov's draft into its own version of a media bill and was displeased that the lawmakers had released their bill first.
 Khakamada warned that the bill faced a "big battle" in the Duma.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Good Friends?
 

MOSCOW (SPT) - Although Russia and the U.S. have reached agreement on a number of issues, almost two thirds of the Russian population believe that relations between the two countries are strained, according to a survey carried out by sociologists for monitoring.ru.
 Interfax reported Thursday that 1,400 St. Petersburgers were surveyed, and 65 percent categorized relations between Moscow and Washington as being negative, 27 percent reported that they were positive and 9 percent were undecided.
 
 
Sennaya Goes Back
 

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - According to reconstruction plans, Sennaya Ploshad is to be restored to its original appearance, Interfax reported.
 In order to make the restoration historically accurate, 58 trees are to be planted and benches and street lamps are to be installed. The square will also be decorated with a fountain, marking the area where horses were watered in the 19th century. Documents and plans have been studied in order to maximize the accuracy of the work, the agency reported.
 The square will also feature market pavilions; the sidewalk will be paved with artificial and granite slabs; and work will be carried out on partially rebuilding the underground engineering of the square.
 
 
Soldier Dies in Ditch
 

MOSCOW (AP) - A 20-year-old Russian soldier was killed when the walls of a ditch he was digging far from his military base, on orders of his battalion chief officer, collapsed, the Interfax-Military News Agency said Thursday.
 Military prosecutors have opened a criminal case against the officer, who directed eight soldiers to dig the ditch at a settlement of summer houses several kilometers from their base in the village of Funkovo in the Moscow region, the agency reported. The work had no connection with the soldiers' military duties.
 
 
Anti-Semitic Sign 
 

VLADIVOSTOK, Far East (AP) - Police sappers in the Pacific port of Vladivostok on Thursday gingerly removed an anti-Semitic sign from the side of a road and blew up suspicious-looking sacks that were wired to the poster.
 The hand-painted sign, saying "Death to Jews," appeared to be inspired by a similar placard, rigged with explosives, that was placed on a highway outside Moscow in May. When a passer-by tried to take down that sign, it blew up in her face, burning her and injuring her eyes.
 
 
Hostage Raid Verdict
 

ROSTOV-NA-DONU, Southern Russia (AP) - A court in the southern Russian city of Stavropol sentenced five men Wednesday to several years in prison for taking part in a 1995 hostage raid by Chechen rebels that ended with more than 100 people dead.
 The defendants were convicted in a trial in a maximum-security prison of charges including hostage-taking, illegal purchase and possession of weapons and banditry, said Vladimir Namyotkin, spokesman for the Stavropol regional police. 



TITLE: Ford Gears Up To Open Plant
AUTHOR: By Angelina Davydova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Ford plant plans to produce 2,369 cars in 2002, with the facility having a full capacity of 25,000 cars per year, the plant's General Director Murray Gilbert said, speaking at the plant on Tuesday. The first Russian-made Ford Focus will be made available in September. Ford stopped importing the Focus model in April, according to Gilbert, though domestic dealers still have another 300 imported cars left on their books. 
 The price of the basic model, a 1.6-liter, five-door Ford Focus produced at the Vsevolozhsk plant, was made public on Tuesday, following much debate and discussion of the subject in the local automobile press. At $10,900, the price compares well with that of the same imported model, which retails at $13,900. Ford Motor Co has invested $150 million in Russian production and employs approximately 800 people locally. The plant will produce a total of four different models of the Ford Focus. 
 In 2001, only 7 percent of the total number of cars sold in Russia were new foreign imports (62 percent were produced by Russian manufacturers, while 31 percent were second-hand foreign cars). Ford's market share for new imported cars is currently 5.5 percent, with the company occupying 9th place for sales among foreign automobile manufacturers.
 At present there are several foreign-car manufacturers with production plants in Russia, including BMW in Kaliningrad, Daewoo in Rostov-Na-Donu, and Citroen in Taganrog. Ford, however, maintains that the new Ford plant will be the first to provide a complete manufacturing facility. Gilbert said that the plant encompasses the full production cycle, with assembly, welding and painting all taking place on site.
 Ford Russia President Henrik Nenzen said that production based in Russia will allow high tariffs on new imported cars, reaching $1,870 per vehicle, to be avoided. Imported-car tariffs are expected to rise even further in the next few months. 
 Under an agreement reached with the federal authorities in 1999, Ford has also gained an exemption from import duties on components from Europe, on the condition that, by 2007, 50 percent of its components be locally produced. The company has already signed five contracts with Russian suppliers.
 Ford also plans to attract Russian customers by offering a special credit-facility program, together with the International Industrial Bank and the Russian Interregional Development Bank.
 In a telephone interview on Thursday, Valery Serdyukov, governor of the Leningrad Oblast, where the new Ford plant is located, said that, "The opening of the Ford plant shows that major investors are interested in cooperating with the Leningrad Oblast. We started work with such investors in 1998, and the first to appear was Philip Morris."
 Commenting on the success of the Ford plant, he said that, "Thanks to investors like Ford, we can see growth in industrial production, which has gone up 40.1 percent in the first five months of 2002. Apart from that, it partially solves the problem of unemployment - more than 80 percent of Ford's employees here are Leningrad-Oblast inhabitants".
 A St. Petersburg Renault dealer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that there is a good chance that the demand for Ford cars will increase as a result of the local production facilities, but it will not overcome the demand for second-hand foreign cars, which predominantly cost far below the $10,000 price level, and for new Russian-produced cars.
 Ford has a long history of work in Russia. One of Russia's leading car manufacturers, GAZ, was established in Nizhny Novgorod in 1929, as the result of an agreement between the Soviet government and Ford Co. The first Ford AA model was produced at the GAZ plant in 1932. A few years later, due to financial and political disagreements, Ford quit the project.

TITLE: Agreement on Importing Of U.S. Poultry 'Closer'
AUTHOR: By Alla Startseva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A top U.S. agriculture official said Wednesday that the prolonged spat over American poultry imports to Russia was nearing an end, and normal trade would resume shortly.
 
J.B. Penn, U.S. Department of Agriculture undersecretary for farm and foreign agricultural services, was speaking after two days of negotiations with the Agriculture Ministry. Both sides said the talks had resolved several key issues over the imports.
 "My judgment is that we are very close to completing the development of a new [import] certificate, and the discussions are continuing," Penn said. "And we are extremely hopeful that we can resolve the poultry issue."
 Russia, the No. 1 market for imports of American poultry, banned the meat in March, citing concerns about sanitary conditions at U.S. plants and cases of salmonella in imported chicken. The ban was lifted a month later, after Washington promised to tighten export controls, but Moscow insisted that the United States revise its poultry health certificate to correspond with Russian safety demands.
 Russia gave the United States two months to reach an agreement on the new certificate, but that goal has eluded negotiators. The Agriculture Ministry extended the deadline until Aug. 1 and threatened to reimpose the ban at that time if the United States failed to update the certificates.
 Deputy Agriculture Minister Sergei Dankvert said Wednesday that Penn had proposed pushing the deadline to Oct. 1, but no decision to that effect has been made.
 Dankvert warned that U.S. poultry exporters would already have to call off shipments at the start of the second week of July to prevent the meat from going to waste, should the new certificate not be ready by the Aug. 1 deadline.
 Penn, however, was upbeat about the dispute.
 "I am pleased to say that we have narrowed our differences substantially and reduced the number of outstanding issues to a very few," he said.
 Penn said the unresolved issues concerned testing procedures, practices at processing plants and the information that is included with the shipments.
 Dankvert said this week's talks resolved the issue of how much chlorine U.S. farmers could use in breeding. The Americans agreed to use less chlorine.
 Meanwhile, Penn said he was disappointed with a decision by the Economic Development and Trade Ministry on Monday to increase import duties on chicken. The ministry opened an investigation into whether U.S. poultry was being dumped on the market after the Russian Association of Poultry Producers complained that the growth of poultry imports was hurting Russian farms. The association said imports grew from 235,400 tons in 1999 to 687,000 tons in 2000 and 1.3 million tons in 2001.
 The ministry said it would raise tariffs while it looks into the complaint but has not yet determined by how much. The poultry import duty is currently 25 percent but not less than 0.2 euros ($0.20) per kilogram. A ministry source said the duty would be raised by 8.3 percent to 33.3 percent, Vedomosti reported.
 "We were disappointed to see the decision to impose additional duties," Penn said.

TITLE: No. 2 Russian Aluminum Producer Plans To Go Public
AUTHOR: By Torrey Clark
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - SUAL, the country's second-largest aluminum producer, aims to go public next year and is looking for financing for a $2-billion start-up, company President Viktor Vekselberg said Wednesday.
 
"The question of an IPO [initial pubic offering] is not about how ready we are," Vekselberg said at an American Chamber of Commerce conference. "It is purely economic. It must be done at the right time, in the right place, with the right partner."
 "I believe it would be optimal to do it next year, if there are no financial crises," he said. 
 He did not say whether the company would target the domestic or foreign markets or the amount it wanted to raise.
 SUAL has grand plans to improve its four existing aluminum smelters, moving over to the latest, cleaner, technology. The changeover at its Urals plant will come later this year, followed in 2003 by Kandalaksha, in the arctic Murmanskaya Oblast, SUAL officials said. The company plans to invest $80 million in mining, modernization and expansion in 2002.
 SUAL also intends to build a new $460-million smelter that will be able to turn out 200,000 tons of primary metal at its Irkutsk aluminum plant. The project should take about five years.
 Another strategic goal at SUAL is increasing manufactured products, Vekselberg said. Russia exports 13 percent of its manufactured products, while it imports 59 percent of the goods currently available on the domestic market, he said.
 In preparation for going public, SUAL moved its four main smelters to a single share in January 2001, as well as two of three silicon producers. The SUAL group includes 12 other cable, mining and aluminum-product manufacturers. 
 "We are working toward consolidating the company in a way that is understandable for foreigners," said SUAL spokesperson Alexei Goncharov.
 He said SUAL would offer a stake in the consolidated group, rather than in any one division.
 Depending on market conditions, SUAL may choose to place a stake with a strategic investor, Goncharov said.
 Vekselberg said that SUAL also intends to raise financing for a planned $2-billion Komi Aluminum company. Komi Aluminum would be a fully integrated bauxite mining, alumina and aluminum production site, 900 kilometers northeast of Moscow.
 SUAL has already invested $100 million and is ready to lay out another $250 million for the first half of the project, Vekselberg said in an interview.
 SUAL will sell up to 70 percent in the Komi project if compatible strategic investors are found, Vekselberg said. 
 A large part of the start-up bill will be financed with debt: Sberbank has agreed to provide loans and SUAL has approached other domestic and international banks, he said. The company is also looking at tapping the corporate bond market.
 "We'd like the investor in Komi Aluminum to regard the project as its main business: whether an aluminum company or an end user," Goncharov said. "If we get a portfolio investor, we could end up with share redistribution ... instead of investment. This could slow the project."
 Komi Aluminum will be built up as a separate company "with no history," that is, only the latest technology, Goncharov said. "Alcoa, for example, doesn't invest in Soderberg technology. ... The project needs to meet the blue chips' demands."
 The new company will have bauxite reserves of at least 250 million tons, or 50 years of mining. It would produce up to 1.5 million tons of alumina, the intermediate material, and 750,000 tons of aluminum, more than twice SUAL's output of 620,000 tons last year.
 SUAL posted revenues of $1.3 billion under Russian accounting standards in 2001. SUAL plans to have 2001 consolidated statements audited to international standards by the end of this year.
 No. 1 aluminum producer RusAl has also been considering an initial public offering. RusAl CEO Oleg Deripaska said in April that the company may float shares and issue bonds to finance new plants in two years. 
 Analysts cautioned that, in an uncertain global economy, facing increases in Chinese aluminum production and the resumption of mothballed production in the northwest United States, a new aluminum plant could push down market prices. 


TITLE: Slavneft Resumes Exporting of Oil
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Oil company Slavneft resumed exports of crude and refined products Wednesday after a five-day halt caused by a standoff over the company leadership.
 
Slavneft President Yury Sukhanov and other senior employees had been locked out of the company's head office since June 27, when police stormed the offices after business hours as part of a search for evidence in connection with an embezzlement investigation against him. He was allowed back in on Tuesday.
 The Slavneft management said that the company, which is majority owned by the Russian government, lost $7 million each day that it could not go ahead with exports.

TITLE: Understanding Terror
AUTHOR: By Fred Hiatt
PUBLISHER: The Washington Post
TEXT: U.S. President George W. Bush last week embraced President Vladimir Putin as a fellow foe of terrorism. "President Putin has been a stalwart in the fight against terror," Bush said as the two leaders stood shoulder to shoulder in Canada. "He understands the threat of terror, because he has lived through terror."
 
"He has lived through terror" - what could that mean? Bush presumably was talking about Chechnya, whose inhabitants, or at least some of whose inhabitants, have been waging a war of independence. Putin has frequently portrayed these Chechen fighters as terrorists, as some clearly are, and Bush was endorsing that official Moscow view.
 But if, terror is, by definition, the harming of innocent civilians in order to frighten a larger population, then the chief terrorists in Russia today work for Putin - they are his soldiers and police. Bush understood this once. The question is what he thinks is to be gained by pretending it is no longer true.
 A recent reminder of Russian terror came in a dispatch Saturday by The Washingon Post's Sharon LaFraniere, who described a <i>zachistka</i>, or cleansing operation, in Mesker Yurt, a Chechen village of about 2,000 only 11 kilometers from the supposedly pacified capital of Grozny.
 Based on interviews with relatives and survivors, LaFraniere described what has become standard operating practice for Russian troops: how they surrounded the village and rounded up the males; how they released some in exchange for bribes and took those who could not pay to a field outside the village; how some of these men were later returned with fingers chopped off, an eye gouged out, a back that had been sliced by jagged glass, then doused with alcohol and set afire.
 The relatives told about how, as always, some of the men did not come back. And about how, when the soldiers departed and the relatives went to the field, they found, in freshly dug furrows, parts of bodies that appeared to have been blown to pieces with explosives.
 &quot;He's seen terror firsthand, and he knows the threat of terrorism,&quot; Bush said last week.
 These Russian tactics are nothing new. Russian troops fought and lost one war in Chechnya from 1994 to 1996, and Putin launched another before Bush was elected president. Cities have been reduced to rubble and a population that once numbered 1 million is largely dead, displaced or cowering.
 &quot;It is troubling for me as a potential president to see use of force on innocent civilians,&quot; candidate Bush told Russia's foreign minister in April 2000. He and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, criticized Bill Clinton for continuing to send aid to Russia even as the Chechen war proceeded. &quot;When Bill Clinton compared Boris Yeltsin in Chechnya to Abraham Lincoln, what signal did that send to states around Russia's periphery?&quot; Rice asked.
 The war now gets less attention than before. That's in part because Putin has muzzled much of his domestic media, especially the broadcast media; in part because reporters in Chechnya have been attacked and kidnapped by both sides, and so few dare go; in part because European governments, though still terribly concerned for Palestinians, have pretty much given up on championing human rights in Chechnya. (Putin can export a lot more gas and oil than Ariel Sharon.)
 And in large part, it's because Bush has slipped effortlessly into the Clinton role he once criticized: excusing, enabling, pretending. &quot;He understands what I understand, that there won't be peace if terrorists are allowed to kill and take innocent life,&quot; Bush said. &quot;And therefore I view President Putin as an ally.&quot;
 This transformation is no mystery. Bush wants Putin's acquiescence in the stationing of U.S. troops in Central Asia, and his cooperation in securing Russia's nuclear and biological weapons. Chechnya just seems less important. And because there are Arab terrorists among the Chechen fighters, and Chechens who have attacked Russian civilians, it is easy to pretend that Putin's war and America's are parallel; just another useful inconsistency in the war on terror, like promoting democracy in Palestine but not Egypt, women's rights in Afghanistan but not Saudi Arabia.
 But no one is fooled, not even Russians, who can see the difference between a war of liberation in Afghanistan and of oppression in Chechnya. &quot;The West's support of your attempts to present the war as a counterterrorism operation is strictly temporary,&quot; Ivan Rybkin, a former State Duma speaker, wrote in an open letter to Putin last week. &quot;It is a tactic used by the United States to promote its own geopolitical objectives. In the long run, this solution - like the war itself - will not lead us anywhere.&quot;
 The Bush pretense comes at a cost, in other words, and not just a moral one.
 Over time, Americans will not support, nor will Russians respect, a war that recognizes evil only when convenient.
 
 <i>Fred Hiatt is a columnist for The Washington Post, where this comment first appeared. </i>

TITLE: Quick Blame Just Flying to A Conclusion
TEXT: A CHARTERED plane from Bashkortostan collides with a Boeing flown by DHL in airspace controlled by Switzerland. Bashkortostan - DHL - Switzerland. Which would you first suspect to be the weakest link?
 
So when Swiss air-traffic controllers called a news conference Tuesday morning in the first waking hours after the crash and said the Russian pilot had ignored the first two instructions to change course, it seemed more than likely that we were looking at yet another screw-up in Russian aviation.
 Maybe the pilot didn't speak English and didn't understand the instructions. Maybe he was unqualified.
 But as it turns out, the pilot, according to his airline, was highly experienced and spoke English, a claim backed up by Austrian air-traffic controllers who spoke to him earlier in the flight.
 It is the Swiss air-traffic controllers whose competence, and honesty, is looking downright shaky.
 First they said the Tu-154 pilot was given a two-minute warning that he was on a collision course, but they changed their story when challenged by German investigators and admitted the pilot had been alerted only 50 seconds before the crash. Fifty seconds!
 Then we learn that an automatic system designed to alert Swiss traffic-controllers when planes are on a collision course was off at the time - it was shut down for maintenance (how Soviet can you get?) - and the air-traffic controller in charge was working alone while his partner took a break.
 Officials at Skyguide, the Swiss air traffic control company, gave conflicting accounts Wednesday on whether the rules allow for having one person on duty when the automatic warning system is not working. But common sense says they should not.
 If the lone air-traffic controller contacted the Tupolev pilot with so little time to spare, did he even attempt to contact the Boeing pilot? There has been no word yet that he did.
 It was 25 seconds before the crash that the Russian plane responded to the warning and nose-dived. It was only after that that the Boeing descended, its pilot alerted by an on-board collision avoidance system, which tracks nearby planes and issues voice recommendations for how to avoid them.
 The two maneuvers merely put the planes back on a collision course.
 Patrick Herr, a spokesperson for Swiss air traffic control, told The Washington Post that there are two mysteries. &quot;Firstly, why the Tupolev pilot didn't react straight away. And secondly, why the automatic warning system of the Boeing also gave a descent order.&quot;
 The bigger mystery is why the air-traffic-control system failed to do its job.

TITLE: Yeltsin's Return Is a Bolshevik Comeback
AUTHOR: By Alexei Pankin
TEXT: RECENTLY, both television and the newspapers have started to talk about the &quot;second coming&quot; of Boris Yeltsin.
 
Having observed Yeltsin's goings-on, I think I have come up with the very national idea that Russia's best and brightest have been racking their brains over for some time. In a nutshell, it is the following: We need to create a society that would rule out the possibility of people such as Yeltsin finding their way into major-league politics.
 Allow me to explain. I once came up with a formula to explain the tragedy of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms: And Gorbachev said to the people, &quot;Do whatever you like, but just behave decently.&quot; It transpired, however, that all people really wanted to do was to behave badly. In other words, the moment we received the right to vote for the first time in our history, we elected Yeltsin as our president.
 Remember what Yeltsin said at the start of his &quot;democratic&quot; career as a result of which his fellow Russians fell in love with him: The communist exploiters are to blame for all our woes, and we must to strip the nomenklatura of all its privileges and distribute them equitably among the common people. Exactly the same thing was proposed by the Bolsheviks in 1917: The landowner-exploiters and capitalists are to blame for everything, &quot;let us expropriate the expropriators&quot; and hand everything over to the people. Some 70 years later, the citizens of Russia chose exactly the same kind of Bolshevik, only this time they did it in a free election.
 Bolshevism is not so much an ideology as it is a temperament and character trait: It is a belief in the idea that the truth has been revealed to you and that only you and a willingness to assert your version of the truth even on the bones of your fellow citizens, not stopping at anything, particularly when your power is in danger. The ideological wrapping can in fact be extremely &quot;democratic.&quot;
 It is worth recalling some of the things we went through under Yeltsin: the bombardment of a legally elected parliament in 1993; completely senseless carnage in Chechnya; economic reform that led to penury and loss of dignity for millions of people; &quot;freedom of speech&quot; that was on sale to the highest bidder; and, lastly, the endless squabbling that was supposed to pass for politics.
 In short, Lenin and Mao rolled into one, making some allowances for a general softening of mores toward the end of the 20th century.
 We have been living for less than three years without Yeltsin and the country has calmed down, the Communists have been tamed, we respect ourselves once again and are respected internationally.
 I did not vote for Yeltsin, but I am part of a country that has the bad habit of sometimes imposing Bolsheviks on themselves. And that is why I am proposing my own national idea: the elimination of Bolshevism in all its guises and manifestations.
 And the West can render invaluable assistance in this task. Let it shower Yeltsin with respect and esteem and organize for him a series of lecture tours that take up 365 days a year. And the further away from Russia the better.
 
 <i>Alexei Pankin is the editor of Sreda, a magazine for media professionals [www.internews.ru/sreda]. </i>

TITLE: dykhovichny's kopeck's worth
TEXT: <i>The latest film from director Ivan Dykhovichny, &quot;Kopeika,&quot; was a hit Saturday on the closing day of St. Petersburg's biggest film event, the Festival of Festivals. The film describes 30 years of Russian history through the history of a car, the VAZ-2101. The popular car, which was launched in 1970 and modeled on the Fiat 124, is nicknamed the &quot;kopeika,&quot; or &quot;one-kopeck coin.&quot; Dykhovichny spoke to staff writer </i><i><strong>Sergey Chernov</strong></i><i>.</i>
 

 
q: How did you come up with the idea of showing the history of the country through the history of a car?
 a: I think that the sorts of banal things that simply tell a story in a television series are good in the genre. However, [the story is] like &quot;Decameron&quot; [Giovanni Boccacio's novel of 100 stories told by characters trying to escape the Black Death in Florence in the fourteenth century], we can see that there is no point in showing just [historical] conflicts directly. Because we are living in something like the Roman Empire, our lives have been at times filled with great conflict.
 
[&quot;Kopeika&quot;] is not a documentary, so therefore it should have an image. An object that lives its own life is much more interesting to me than the story of a certain family that lived through these 30 years. For both [Vladimir] Sorokin [who wrote the script] and myself, it is better to stand at one remove, through an object that was a cult thing in its time.
 
 
q:Did you own such a car?
 a: Yes, I had one. Actually, one of the first produced by the factory. 
 

 
q: Some time ago, it was said that you were filming a documentary about LogoVAZ. What happened to it?
 a:I was filming a documentary for [LogoVAZ's] anniversary when I worked for RTR Television, but its bosses got themselves in a mess. They were persecuted, and the channel rejected the film for political reasons.
 
[&quot;Kopeika&quot;] is not really about a car, but [the documentary] was a real story. Also, I wanted to establish contact with the factory. I thought that they would help us with this picture, but they didn't help us with anything.
 
 
q:Why did you choose Sorokin to write the script?
 a:[Sorokin and I] have been writing other scripts for several years that unfortunately weren't realized, but I hope they will be. Then we found this story and it has actually happened. I've been working with him for a long time.
 

 
q:What do you like about Sorokin's writing?
 a: First, I am interested in Sorokin himself and, as a result, I'm interested in what he writes. I think he is one of [today's] best stylists, one of the best postmodernists - probably the only one in this country. There are other talented people, but I think that, with one exception, I do not know another person working at such a high literary level - not just a conceptual level. That is why it is a real pleasure for me that we found each other - by pure chance, as it seems. I think that's why something resulted from it.
 

 
q:What do you think about the recent allegations of pornography that the pro-[President Vladimir] Putin youth movement <i>Idushchiye Vmeste </i>[Marching Together] made against Sorokin? Are they dangerous?
 a:I am not inclined to attach importance to them but, since I have been living here for so long - I have simply been alive too long - I know that, sometimes, a trifling, stupid thing can turn into something horrible. Or not, as the case may be. If it doesn't, they will, as usual, say, &quot;Why were you shouting about it so much?&quot; Nevertheless, the only defense is to keep it all out in the open.
 
I definitely do not want to drink vodka or go to a party with Marching Together. Nobody wants to march together with them anywhere.
 
 
q:Could something similar threaten you because of your film?
 a:It is a pity that this campaign started a little while ago. It would have helped to promote the film, because there is no better publicity in this country. I think that [before the allegations were made] Sorokin's readership was about the tenth of the size it is now.
 
No literature can be of any harm. In a country where every second Web site is a fascist one, where nationalist gibberish is written practically on the Kremlin's wall, then making this fuss over Sorokin, a worthy man and writer, is outrageous. There's nothing left to explain.
 In a country where people are dying in war and of hunger, where there are several million homeless children, why is Marching Together not ashamed to be so keen on this instead of doing something for people? They are going to erect a urinal as a monument to Sorokin and contemporary literature. They asked [Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov] about it. I said, &quot;You'd better ask the Mayor to install more public toilets in the city.&quot;
 
 
q:[&quot;Kopeika&quot;] treats Russian icons of the 1960s and 1970s, like Vladimir Vysotsky, Alexander Galich and Bulat Okudzhava, with a degree of sarcasm.
 a: I don't like people being made into icons. People are alive, icons are icons, and the two should not be mixed up. I like Vysotsky as he used to be, in all his complexity, although I am not making an angel out of him. I think that [Futurist poet Vladimir] Mayakovsky, whom I admire a lot, was a difficult person, not to mention [19th-century poet Mikhail] Lermontov who, as they say, was simply an impossible man. My love for him is not love for an idealised, sterile imbecile. I have different feelings for people.
 

 
q:Have you received negative reactions because of that?
 a:Of course. In Russia, people mainly express themselves negatively. If something is good, they think, &quot;I liked it, so why talk about it?&quot; The people who don't complain, and who don't make allegations [are the ones who] don't appear on radio or television. But there are keepers of purity, who think they know Vysotsky. I knew Vysotsky [personally], but they &quot;protect&quot; him from me.
 
q:There are a lot of non-professional actors in your film. Do you think professionals lack something?
 a:They often lack cogency as people, they put on an act, mince, want to show themselves too much, whereas non-actors want to show themselves less, and don't want to act: [In other words], they are natural people. The other thing is that they sometimes find imitating difficult, and other kinds of problems appear, but it is more valuable for me.
 
The cinema is, in one sense, a magnifying glass, and it shows falsehood very clearly. But I have amazing professional actors as well - [Yury] Tsurilo, [Andrei] Krasko or [Roman] Modyanov all act amazingly. They are natural people: They have, as they say, charisma, and they fit well. There is not a seam to be found.
 
 
q:Sergei Mazayev, the frontman of Moscow band Moralny Kodeks, put on a great performance in the film. Where did you get the idea to use him?
 a:First of all, I like [Mazayev] a lot and know him. I thought he was a natural person, very worthy and one who has a life of his own. Also he has one Russian feature: a certain desperation, yet, at the same time, absolute calm. There is nothing hurried about him.
 
He sings in such a way - unlike all our pop stars, he doesn't intone, doesn't act his songs. He sings like an instrument, but the result is 10 times as strong as many people. I thought that he corresponds to the image of the Russian Levsha [the smith in one of Nikolai Leskov's satirical short stories] : A man who drinks heavily but, at the same time ... In reality, everything is hung on this man in this country, but people don't remember him. I think he is very deserving in this part.
 
 
q:Sergei Shnurov, of the band Leningrad, who wrote the film's title song, only gets a brief cameo. Why?
 a: It is a pity. First, we met late. I was almost finishing the film by then. I invited him along and he wrote a remarkable song, &quot;Kopeika.&quot; And when he wrote it and brought it to me, I said, &quot;I have a cameo and I want to film you in it,&quot; literally on that day. So I filmed him.
 
It was a pleasure to keep him in the film, because I like him a lot. Of course, I would give him a bigger part. Not because he is popular - he's simply very real. He's my type of person, so to say.
 
 
q:Did you chose Tsurilo because of his leading part in Alexei German's &quot;Khrustalyov, Mashinu!&quot; (&quot;Khrustalyov, My Car!&quot;)?
 a:Of course, because I liked him a lot in the film. Then we met and I thought he was a man who was very close to our story. Then German gave him his blessing - he is a jealous person, he doesn't like when his actors act in somebody else's films. And it was very pleasant for me that [German] said, &quot;It's OK to work for [Dykhovichny], [he] is a good man.&quot; 
 

 
q:The KGB officers are shown very convincingly in the film. Have you had dealings with them?
 a:[Laughs] Of course! I have been with them my whole life, and I don't think I am parting with them even now. They exist forever. I don't treat them [with hatred]. I understand that, when they wring your arms and carry you somewhere, you won't forgive them. But, on the whole, I have great pity for them. This is the only way they can be, or so it seems to them. But many [of them] could get on with some good work instead. But they think that the country needs it.
 

 
q:Though your film is clearly postmodernist, it's very different from the trendy, elitist Moscow films. Were you aiming to make a popular film for broader public?
 a:I can honestly say that no normal person sets such a goal for himself. I just like what I like. I think there's 100 times as much postmodernism in [the film] than in all the fake postmodernist films. It has the whole combination.
 
I know for sure that I have an absolute feeling of love toward the material that goes into this picture. But it is made in quite a tough way. I can't say that I feel moved and cry over it, or part with my past. That is, thinking seriously about stools in the kitchen, about Okudzhava ... I loved them a lot, and still love them, but in my own way, and I think that one should live for today.
 Remembering one's roots is one thing, but to force people to listen only to Okudzhava, or Vysotsky, or Galich, or to sit in the kitchen is today as stupid as to go around St. Petersburg in an open carriage. What's the point? This life of ours is remarkable, and we should love it. The most difficult thing is happiness.

TITLE: sculpting on the beach
AUTHOR: by Natella Kochetkova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: For the second time, the beach of the Peter and Paul Fortress has been made into an impromptu, open-air exhibition hall housing masterpieces made of sand. Starting on Tuesday, competitors in this year's International Festival of Sand Sculpture were given just four days to complete a project based on the theme &quot;Rush Hour.&quot; The results will be open to the public, beginning on Friday.
 
Sand-sculpture festivals have become a widespread tradition around the world, with well-known competititions taking place on the coasts of, among other countries, Canada, Denmark, The Netherlands, Japan, Italy, Spain and the United States. Largely due to their location - usually on a seaside beach, rather than a river, as is the case in St. Petersburg - such competitions attract broad interest from the public, as well as from the media. St. Petersburg's inaugural festival last year was no exception to the rule, with over 100,000 people visiting the exhibition. The competition, although only two years old, is already becoming a fixture in the city's calendar, and seems sure to be an annual event in the future.
 The twelve teams taking part in the competition each consist of two people and, this year, entries have come from the Czech Republic, Finland, Italy, Latvia, The Netherlands, Sweden and Ukraine, as well as Russia. Russia is represented by teams from St. Petersburg, Arkhangelsk, Kargopol, Petrozavodsk and Yakutia. Each team was given 15 cubic meters of sand with which to build its sculpture - adding water or other materials is against the rules - and 25 square meters of space to work in.
 In accordance with this year's theme, contestants in the festival have been required to create a sculpture that reflects the advantages and disadvantages of life in a big city like St. Petersburg.
 Although the weather this week has not been ideal for working with a medium such as sand, the sculptors have not been deterred. None of the participants would allow even a small preview of their creations before the adjudication, which will take place on Friday at 4 p.m., so the few impatient visitors watching them at work could do nothing but guess at the end results.
 One creation on the beach, however, has been on display this week, and is not part of the competition: The sculpture of a griffin, emblazoned with the symbol of national television station RTR on its pedestal, is a present from repeat festival participants, and last year's winners, Frantisek Balek, Josef Balek and Lubas Hasek, merely to show what is possible when working with sand.
 The jury for the competition includes cultural figures from St. Petersburg, members of the city administration, representatives from the competitors' consulates in the city, and the captains of the teams taking part. After Friday's judging, the exhibition will be opened to the public.
 

 <i>
The Second International Festival of Sand Sculpture runs through the end of July on the beach by the Peter and Paul Fortress. Open daily, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tickets cost 50 rubles. Call 380-4450 for more information. </i>

TITLE: chernov's choice
TEXT: The week's - probably the year's - biggest event will take place on Sunday - but not in St. Petersburg. <strong>Iggy Pop, </strong>the &quot;Godfather of Punk,&quot; will appear at the Tushino airfield in Moscow, and some St. Petersburgers are planning to go.
 
The musician, whose influence on the evolution of rock music cannot be overestimated, comes to Russia for a single show on Sunday as part of his current European tour, and it happens to be at a festival of Russian (sic) rock, called <strong>Krylya (Wings).</strong>
 Pop was writing and performing punk songs with his band, The Stooges, a decade before the Sex Pistols or The Clash emerged on the scene in the 1970s. 
 With its driving guitar riffs and a frontman - Pop - known for cutting his chest with broken glass and smearing his body with peanut butter during performances, The Stooges soon made a name for themselves on the Detroit rock scene for bringing something entirely new to contemporary music.
 &quot;I wanted music to reach out and strangle people,&quot; Pop once said about these early days. 
 Pop was born James Newell Osterberg in Muskegon, Michigan on April 21, 1947. Although his friends to this day call him Jimmy, Pop publicly became Iggy when he formed his first band, The Iguanas, while still in high school. Later, in 1967, he formed The Stooges after attending a Doors concert in Chicago. 
 After the band split, Pop vanished from the rock 'n' roll scene for several years, before resurfacing, with the help of Stooges fan David Bowie, who took Pop to Berlin, where he launched a solo career, remaking himself in the then-popular glam genre.
 Pop's solo debut, the Bowie-produced and co-written &quot;The Idiot&quot; (1977), contained such popular hits as &quot;Nightclubbing&quot; and &quot;China Girl&quot; (Bowie would cover the latter on his 1983 album &quot;Let's Dance&quot;). The Bowie-Pop partnership produced another album within the year, &quot;Lust for Life,&quot; which contained the now often-covered rock classic &quot;The Passenger.&quot;
 Pop's most recent album of new material - his 16th - is the guitar-driven &quot;Beat 'em Up,&quot; released last July. He released a record of live music, &quot;Power and Freedom,&quot; in April. 
 Pop's set is scheduled to begin at 8:40 p.m. and will last for 80 minutes.
 If you are not an Iggy fan, you can always relax to the lounge stylings of Japan's <strong>Plastic Fantastic Machine </strong>which plays at the StereoLeto festival in the Molodyozhny Theater and its gardens on Saturday. Reports say, though, that last weekend's event began three hours late, and some of the audience left before the headliners, Italy's Montefiori Cocktail, took the stage. 
 As club audiences started to leave the heated city for more relaxed places, some local venues have adjusted their schedules to the smaller crowds.
 <strong>Red Club </strong>is now closed on Monday and Tuesday, and it now opens at 6 p.m. rather than noon.
 <strong>Faculty's </strong>management has said the place would not hold regular gigs for a while. 
 &quot;If there are concerts, they will be big acts such as Tequilajazzz, or Sergei Shnurov,&quot; said Faculty's Stanislav Reinov.
 <strong>Front </strong>is planning repairs in the near future, but promises that it will be open for the next two weeks.
 For the rest of the pack - including Fish Fabrique, Moloko and Griboyedov - it is business as usual.
 <i>- by Sergey Chernov
 </i>

TITLE: a blizzard of intriguing ideas
AUTHOR: by Katherine Ters
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: I've never really thought of myself as the kind of person who would dine in an establishment where the service staff dress in rabbit costumes but, on this occasion, I'm glad I made the exception. 
 
While walking down Nab. Reki Fontanka recently, I came across a doorway, shielded by iron curtains and with a pair of long-eared rabbit statues sitting out in front. Intrigued, if a little apprehensive, I took a look inside, and found the engaging interior of a new bar-restaurant called Purga (Blizzard).
 Purga is the creation of the &quot;Art Vtroyom&quot; design trio, the same collective that is responsible for the interior at the club Hali Gali and the restaurant Sakvoyazh.
 The group's new project is full of interesting things to look at, sit on and play with - there is even a miniature puppet show - and its year-round Christmas tree conjures up a perpetual feeling of winter holidays.
 The servers - male and female - all wear rabbit costumes, but not of a Hugh Hefner style. Purga's largomorphs have a much more PC look: headscarves with rabbit ears, white biker pants, and white T-shirts with strips of fake fur attached. The overall effect is actually quite fetching.
 The rabbit theme is also in evidence on the ceiling, where there are about a dozen large beasts, with rather menacing facial expressions and fingers. (The observant might suggest that the critter's faces, like the ones protruding from the air-conditioning pipe, are not dissimilar to that of one of Purga's owners.)
 The aluminum foil also on the ceiling achieves an interesting effect, and the cables anchoring the chairs to the floor and the ceiling might help those diners who have overindulged to remain on their stools.
 Each of the ten or so tables has its own design concept. One appears to represent a skier, while another is raised up on a platform and accessed by stainless-steel, check-pattern steps.
 Freestanding doors separate the tables from a space that becomes a dancefloor later in the evening. Some patrons - myself included - found that knocking at and walking through these doors was an entertaining way of passing time between ordering and the arrival of the food.
 The food. It is something of a rarity to find a restaurant in St. Petersburg that serves fresh bread - even some seemingly stylish places serve disappointing, tough slices of <i>baton </i>- but Purga's assortment tasted as though it had just come out of the oven. One rye-based variety even contained sultanas, which made for a nice change.
 The herring salad (90 rubles, $2.86) tasted good, and the little rabbit-shaped - surprise! - creation on top was impressive. Purga's soups range in price from 50 rubles ($1.59) to 90 rubles, and I, for one, enjoyed the <i>ukha, </i>or fish soup.
 For mains, our server recommended both the &quot;Five to Midnight&quot; - the best fish dish on the menu - and the beef fillet in a pepper-and-white-wine sauce.
 Subsequently, however, she changed her mind, and said that both dishes would take too long to prepare and that we would be better off with the grilled pork steak in a cream-and-mushroom sauce.
 I appreciated such honesty, and thought that the pork dish (120 rubles, $3.81) was a decent alternative. It is flavored with honey, nuts and cream - a combination that tastes better than it might sound, and is also a theme in several of the main courses.
 The chicken version, at 90 rubles, was the best - although in much the same sauce as the pork, it somehow seemed to work better. Purga's main courses are not expensive, either, ranging from 90 to 250 rubles ($2.86 to $7.94)
 Our side dishes were excellent. The boiled potatoes in a typically Russian dressing - cream, dill and parsley - were a bargain at 20 rubles ($0.63), but the real highlight was the risotto: yellow rice with mushrooms, spices and sultanas. A far cry from the more typical, tasteless rice dish cooked in grease and flavored with more grease, it was a snip at 40 rubles ($1.27)
 We passed on dessert so, unfortunately, I can't recommend or warn against anything in that department. On the drinks side, beer starts at 40 rubles, there is a broad selection of wines, and a wide choice of absinthe for the really daring.
 If Purga has one potential shortcoming, it could turn out to be its size and amount of seating space. Four weeks after opening, it was already proving difficult to get a table, so booking ahead is probably a good idea.
 
 <i>
Purga, 11 Nab. Reki Fontanki. Tel.: 313-4123. Open daily, noon to 6 a.m. Dinner for two, with alcohol: 530 rubles ($16.83). Credit cards &quot;will be accepted soon.&quot; </i>

TITLE: where tradition meets modernity
AUTHOR: by Andrei Vorobei
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg's traditional - and traditionally poorly attended - museums will be getting a modern twist until the end of July.
 
The third &quot;Contemporary Art in a Traditional Museum,&quot; which kicks off on Saturday, is organized jointly by the Pro Arte Institute, the Open Society Institute, the Museum of the History of St. Petersburg and the city administration's Culture Committee.
 The ideas behind the festival vary, benefitting both the artists and the museums. The festival brings together traditional culture and modern art, and gives artists - both unknown and established - a chance to exhibit their current work in a higher-profile setting. It also provides a financial helping hand for modernizing the city's smaller, less popular museums, whose own, less well-known collections are seen by new visitors attending the festival.
 According to Nikita Tolstoi, the festival's director, the artists in the festival are chosen from a competition carried out by the Pro Arte Institute in the autumn. Final decisions are made in January, allowing the selected artists five months to prepare for the show.
 The festival's previous two runnings attracted wide attention, due to projects such as &quot;Approach,&quot; by St. Petersburg avant-garde director Yevgeny Yufit and artist Vladimir Kustov; Mikhail Karasik's &quot;Dembilsky Album: Between Subculture and an Artist's Book;&quot; Georgy Ostretsov's &quot;Ice Eden;&quot; and &quot;Eloise and Abelaire, or the Five Feats of a Submarine,&quot; by Natalya Pershina-Yakimanskaya and Olga Yegorova, all of which were highly successful in 2001.
 According to Tolstoi, the attention paid to the festival, by artists, museums and the public, is growing fast. This year's running has thirteen exhibitions, by Russian and non-Russian artists, at twelve different museums.
 The Nabokov Apartment Museum (11 on the map) is the only participating museum to host two projects. St. Petersburg artists Andrei Chezhin and Dmitry Mishenin have their tongues firmly in their cheeks with their exhibit, &quot;A Demonstration of the Nonsunburned Parts of the Human Body,&quot; calling it &quot;a memory of a psychedelic-socialist childhood.&quot;
 The exhibition transforms part of the museum into a beach, and promises bikini-clad young women to welcome visitors. It includes 10 photo-fragments of the human body, and ten audio snippets from a young woman monologising on the beach, touching upon, among other things, religion, hedonism, literature and passive protesting.
 The other exhibition is &quot;Never Odd or Even,&quot; by New York artist Barbara Blum, which deals with questions of consumerism, information and reality through installations and other media.
 Russia and the West also meet at the Arctic and Antarctic Museum (8), in a collaboration between Paris-based artist Olga Kiselyova and students from the Pro Arte Institute. &quot;Pro Pole&quot; is an interactive multimedia project that aims to make a &quot;virtual continuation of a material reality&quot; - the museum's permanent collection - by creating virtual versions of the Polar Lights, the Pole Star, a symbolic &quot;Axis of the World,&quot; and the &quot;digital body&quot; of the radio operator Ernst Krenkel, a member of Ivan Papanin's 1937 expedition manning the first drifting station at the North Pole, who will apparently communicate with visitors via a chatroom.
 St. Petersburg artists are also represented at three other museums. At the Professor Popov Memorial Museum (3), Yegor Ostrov's &quot;Professor Popov's Visions&quot; aims to demonstrate the surprising results of a synthesis of science and art. Meanwhile, at the Museum of the Political History of Russia (6), is Leonid Rusnak's &quot;Extrapolation,&quot; which he describes as a &quot;hallucination of the computer&quot; that is used for political forcasting. Finally, the &quot;Musorshiki&quot; art collective's &quot;New Archeology,&quot; a project based on taking a special attitude to dust, will be at the Alexandriinsky Theater Museum (7).
 Four Moscow artists are also taking part. At the Kunstkammer (1), German Vinogradov's &quot;Bicaponia of a Heavenly Forest&quot; will look at elements of mythology in modern, post-industrial culture. The Rumyantsev Mansion (12) hosts &quot;The Story of A.K.,&quot; a story of love, madness, life and death, by Alexander Rakstein and Vera Khlebnikova. Yelena Kovilina's &quot;'Red House' Committee,&quot; meanwhile, focuses on charity, and will be at the Museum of the Revolutionary-Democratic Movement (10).
 The color red also forms the theme of Kaliningrad artist Yury Vasiliev's &quot;Russian Red,&quot; at the Kuindzhi Apartment Museum (2). It looks at of the most pervasive of modern stereotypes: &quot;the totality of the color red in 20th-century Russian history.&quot;
 The Kirov Museum (4) hosts two Siberian artists, Novosibirsk's Vyacheslav Mizin and Yekaterinburg's Alexander Shaburov, whose project, &quot;A Museum Serial,&quot; takes the form of a television serial, with elements of a detective story.
 The Museum of the Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Medicine (5) will house the tongue-twistingly titled &quot;Technogenesis: Chromophase,&quot; by Yevgeny Strelkov, of Nizhny Novgorod. For the project, Strelkov took photos of the river ports of his home town and of Duisburg, Germany, and turned them into a collection of &quot;fantastic insects.&quot;
 Finally, Kaliningrad artist Dmitry Bulatov's &quot;Chaotization of Space: Museum of a Linguo-Acoustic Environment&quot; will take up residence in the Dostoevsky Museum (9). The exhibition takes the form of an audio-visual installation, and is aimed at acquainting visitors with the little-known phenomenon of international sound-poetry. 
 
 <i>
&quot;Contemporary Art in a Traditional Museum&quot; runs from July 6 to July 31. A free shuttle service between the museums will run this Saturday and Sunday. Links: www.proarte.ru </i>

TITLE: gatchina a great getaway
AUTHOR: by Vivien Schweitzer
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: With the summer solstice having passed over a week ago, the steady tide of tourists flocking to St. Petersburg is beginning to abate. Trains, planes and automobiles, which were full just a week ago, now have at least a little room to spare. Nevertheless, if you're still keen to get out of St. Petersburg and avoid the tourist hordes, the village of Gatchina, one of the city's lesser-known historical suburban estates, icould be ideal. 
 
Only 45 minutes from St. Petersburg, and devoid of the tour buses and groups of noisy schoolchildren that are everywhere in the more well-known tourist destinations like Peterhof and Tsarskoe Selo, Gatchina is equally impressive. The fact that Gatchina isn't as popular a stop on the St. Petersburg palace circuit means that you will be able to enjoy its 18th-century palace and delightful grounds - among the most rambling and least clipped of Russian palace parks - in peace. 
 In 1765, Catherine the Great presented the village to her lover, Prince Grigory Orlov, who commissioned the Italian architect Antonio Rinaldi to build a neo-Classical palace. Work began on the palace in 1766. Its walls were constructed with slabs of local limestone, which, under bright sunshine appear golden. Because Rinaldi studied in England and was an admirer of English architecture, the Gatchina palace has the feel of a medieval British castle, and its austere facade is spartan in contrast to the ornate exterior of the palace at Tsarskoe Selo. 
 The Gatchina palace was completed in 1781, and when Orlov died two years later, Catherine transferred the estate to her son and heir, Paul I, who asked his favorite architect, Vincenzo Brenna, to refashion the palace to accommodate his military tastes. Brenna's alterations included the construction of an additional floor and a moat with a drawbridge. 
 Tsars Nicholas I and Alexander II visited Gatchina - where they hunted and entertained guests - on occasion, but Alexander III was the next Romanov to spend any considerable time at the estate, making it his permanent family residence in the late 19th century. The imperial family led a secluded existence here, and, following the custom of Western European nobility of the period, preferred the intimacy of the smaller, less ostentatious living quarters to the grandeur of the state rooms. This preference often surprised noble visitors, including Prince Vladimir Meshchersky, who once commented after entering the tsar's study that &quot;it seemed to me I was in the room of a modest yet well-kept home of a man of an average position and means.&quot; 
 Gatchina provided Alexander III with a safe haven from the social unrest threatening the country's nearby capital. The estate was guarded by several varied regiments of soldiers, Cossacks and police officers, a fact that led the tsar's contemporaries to note that the scores of armed men lent the palace the air of a defended castle. 
 Gatchina also played an important role in the Russian revolution, when, in October 1917 after the Bolsheviks seized power, Alexander Kerensky, the flamboyant leader of the Provisional Government, fled to Gatchina, where he made a final attempt to rally his troops. Adding to the palace's fortress effect is its secret underground passage - Kerensky used it that year to escape Bolshevik troops, after deserting his own forces. Not long afterward, the palace at Gatchina was turned into a museum.
 After World War II, during which the palace and its furnishings were badly damaged, Gatchina was used as a military academy until 1985, at which time it was again opened to the public as a museum. Although many of the palace's rooms are still being restored, the Marble Dining Room, Paul I's bedroom at the top of one of the towers and the White Ballroom are all open to visitors. 
 In addition to the palace, Gatchina is also home to several beautiful parks on the former grounds of the estate. Unlike the well-manicured gardens of Peterhof or Tsarskoe Selo, however, these are untamed, dotted with wildflowers and the ruins of pavilions, gates and bridges. Because water had a vital position in 18th-century garden design, one of the distinguishing features of the parks is their abundance of lakes, ponds and canals, both real and manmade. 
 On the secluded Island of Love in the White Lake in the Silvia Park, is the Venus Pavilion, built circa 1796, which boasts marble fountains and carved ceiling of angels and cherubs. The lake is safe for swimming and boats are available for rental through August.
 Near the Temple of Venus is the Birch House (1790s). Though, at first glance, it appears to be nothing more than a pile of logs, its modest exterior actually conceals a suite of exquisite rooms, each painstakingly rebuilt after their destruction in World War II. On the shores of the nearby Black Lake is the Prioratsky Palace (1798), which Paul I used as a base while hunting. 
 
 <i><strong>
Where to stay. </strong></i><i>Lodging in Gatchina is limited. One option is the Hotel Gatchina (77 Ulitsa Chkalova. Tel.: 711-1458), where double rooms start at 240 rubles ($7.62) a night. Another option is the Akedemicheskaya Hotel (12 Ulitsa Krupskoi. Tel.: 713-5660/35700/35611), which proudly upholds an irritating Soviet-era dual-pricing system. Doubles for Russian and CIS citizens start at 126 rubles ($4.00) a night, while doubles for foreigners start at 228 rubles ($7.24). 
 </i><i><strong>Where to eat. </strong></i><i>Gatchina is not a gourmand's paradise, but the Gatchina Restaurant (next door to the hotel of the same name) serves basic, inexpensive Russian and European fare. There are also numerous small cafes all over town.
 </i><i><strong>How to get there</strong></i><i>. To get to Gatchina, take the commuter train from the Baltiisky Station to the Gatchina-Baltiiskaya stop, about a 45-minute ride. The Palace is a five-minute walk from the station. 
 </i><i><strong>What to explore</strong></i><i>. Gatchina's parks are open every day. The palace is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday to Sunday (with the exception of the first Tuesday of every month), but the ticket windows close at 5 p.m. </i>

TITLE: how to make a debut
AUTHOR: by Michiko Kakutani
PUBLISHER: New York Times Service
TEXT: The &quot;Russian debutante'' in Gary Shteyngart's very funny, very deft first novel is one Vladimir Girshkin, a feckless 25-year-old Russian-American who works as a junior clerk at an immigrant-assistance agency in Manhattan. He's what Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim would be, if he were a Russian emigre trying to cope with the confusions of life in America of the 1990s and the incessant demands of an ambitious and endlessly aggrieved mother.
 
Vladimir is an engaging enough fellow, but he's also a shameless opportunist and self-loathing nerd: envious of those more attractive and successful than he is, self-conscious about his imperfect command of Western manners and mores, and eager to buy himself a portion of the &quot;American Dream&quot; at any cost.
 In &quot;The Russian Debutante's Handbook,'' Shteyngart tells the uproarious and highly entertaining story of how Vladimir journeys from St. Petersburg, Russia, to Scarsdale, New York, and back to Eastern Europe, and how he becomes in the interim a kingpin in the Russian mafia. But at the same time, the author - who, like his hero, was born in what was then Leningrad and moved to the United States as a boy - also uses Vladimir's picaresque adventures to satirize Americans' and Russians' preconceptions about their former Cold War enemies and to send up their illusions about themselves.
 Like Salman Rushdie and Bharati Mukherjee, Shteyngart uses his appraising outsider's eye to examine the bizarre, weightless state of exile (its conferring of freedom, but also rootlessness and dislocation); and like Victor Pelevin, he proves himself a nimble cultural magpie, borrowing street argot from both the East and West to create a wonderfully idiomatic, jet-fueled prose. His voice, however, is thoroughly his own, by turns ironic and earnest, farcical and melancholy, as attuned to the exhilarating possibilities of the English language as Martin Amis, as deadpan funny as the young Evelyn Waugh.
 Vladimir, Shteyngart writes, was the &quot;enduring victim of every practical joke the late 20th century had to offer.'' This &quot;coddled single child'' of parents who had left Russia for the wilds of Westchester County, New York, and who had &quot;paid $25,000 a year to send him to a progressive Midwestern college'' will journey through the hip provinces of downtown Manhattan and, on the run from money problems and an amorous member of the Catalan cartel, will wind up in a small Eastern European country, in the employ of a gangster known as the Groundhog.
 Raised in Russia, schooled in America, Vladimir is a knowledgeable but itchy outsider wherever he goes. &quot;Vladimir was 50 percent functional American, and 50 percent cultured Eastern European in need of a haircut and a bath,'' Shteyngart writes. &quot;He was the best of both worlds. Historically, a little dangerous, but, for the most part, nicely tamed by Coca-Cola'' and &quot;blue-light specials.''
 In New York, college Marxists and politically correct liberals adopt Vladimir as their pet, and he soon becomes an avatar of &quot;Immigrant Chic,'' embraced by his girlfriend Francesca's parents and courted by her Slavophile friend Frank, who says things like, &quot;Don't forget that Vladimir has an expansive Russian soul,'' and &quot;Camaraderie and salvation, that's his game.'' In Eastern Europe, where he is regarded as an expert on America, Vladimir sets about giving the Groundhog's troops &quot;American lessons,'' goading his students to rid themselves of their kitschiest possessions: &quot;the nylon track suits, the Rod Stewart compilations, the worn Romanian sneakers, everything that had qualified the Groundhog's vast crew as Easterners, Soviets, Cold War losers.''
 To Vladimir, &quot;Americans were too keen to invent their own troubles,'' Shteyngart writes. &quot;To paraphrase an old Russian expression, they were wild with their own fat.'' As for Russians like the Groundhog, Vladimir sees them as history's casualties: &quot;Everything they grew up with is gone. So what are their options now? They can either shoot their way through the gray economy or make $25 a month driving a bus in Dnepropetrovsk.''
 Shteyngart's depiction of Vladimir's adventures is so manic that his poor hero sometimes seems like a billiard ball careering from one head-on collision to the next. His billowing money woes in New York; his encounter with the Groundhog's madman of a father, who has conversations with electric fans; his flight from America, pursued by a convoy of thugs driving peach-colored Cadillacs; his Ponzi scheme for making the Groundhog's organization even richer by selling horse tranquilizers and literary dreams to young, well-heeled Americans: all are delineated with the antic glee of a natural farceur.
 And the people Vladimir meets along the way are sketched with an equally wicked and comic hand: his two impossible New York girlfriends, the pudgy, grudging Challah, and the snooty, doctrinaire Francesca; the jovial but deadly Groundhog, and his nutty, irascible father; and Morgan, the beautiful, plain-spoken terrorist with whom Vladimir falls in love.
 Together, these people populate the black comedy world in which Vladimir pursues his dreams, and they help the very talented Shteyngart expose the absurdities that exist on either side of the former Iron Curtain.
 
 <i>
&quot;The Russian Debutante's Handbook.&quot; By Gary Shteyngart. Riverhead Books. 452 pages. $24.95. </i>

TITLE: looking for missing kisses
AUTHOR: by Kirill Galetski
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: &quot;27 Missing Kisses,&quot; the new film from Georgian filmmaker Nana Djordjadze, is a rare romantic treat, punctuated with upbeat humor. Filmed in Georgia and Greece, the film is set in a small, but lively, town in southeast Europe during one summer.
 
The film first premiered during the Director's Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival two years ago, before doing the rounds of smaller film festivals - including a recent premiere at St. Petersburg's Festival of Festivals - and is finally on regular release at Dom Kino.
 The story concerns the bittersweet coming-of-age of Sibylla (Nuza Kukhyanidze,) an attractive 14-year-old girl with wavy red hair and a yearning for the pastoral side of life. Along with a number of the other women in the town, Sibylla is smitten by the handsome, blond, 41-year-old astronomer Alexander, played by Yevgeny Sidikhin, the hunky TV and film action hero, who has steadily moved into more and more serious roles.
 Alexander ignores Sibylla, however, as he realizes that she is too young for him. He pursues women his own age, some of whom are married. Sibylla's rival for Alexander's affections is Veronika (Amalia Modvinova), another redhead. Meanwhile, Mickey (Shalva Iashvili), Alexander's son and Sibylla's playmate, is in turn enamored with Sibylla, and has exacted a promise from her to give him 100 kisses. He spends the major part of the film trying to make her make good on her promise.
 Sidikhin and Mordvinova show a broader range than the action heroes they are usually given to play on Russian television, in <i>&quot;Banditsky Peterburg&quot; </i>and <i>&quot;Okhota na Zolushku,&quot; </i>(&quot;Hunting for Cinderella&quot;), respectively. They seem generally enthused and give involving performances. The crux of the film lies with the young novices, Kukhyanidze and Iashvili, and it is their heartfelt, truthful turns that make the story work. Other elements of the plot, such as a screening of the first Emmanuelle film at the local Dom Kultury, add to the humor, as well as to the romantic-erotic ambience. The bright-green, sunny days and lush, amorous atmosphere serve as a counter to the calamitous climax of the film.
 The film is mostly in Russian, with small doses of Georgian, English and French. The French comes in the form of Pierre Richard, the most recognizable actor in the ensemble, in the most incongruous role in the film. He is the Captain, a Romantic - with a capital R - who appears to think he can still pilot a boat on a dried-up sea. The aging Richard is a perennial Russian favorite from his numerous French comedies, such as &quot;The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe.&quot; He also played the lead role in Djordjadze's previous feature, &quot;A Chef in Love,&quot; which made some small waves on the international arthouse-film circuit.
 With a moving score by Yugoslav composer Goran Bregovic and lush cinematography by Greek-German Phedon Papamichael, who has lately been working with Wim Wenders, the film's colorful attributes are a manifestation of synergistic international cooperation. Indeed, the film was made possible though the efforts of Egoli Tossel Film, a progressive, up-and-coming Berlin-based international team of producers that has backed quite a few projects connected with Russia, the latest of which is Alexander Sokurov's new film &quot;The Russian Ark,&quot; which premiered at Cannes this year.
 
 <i>
&quot;27 Missing Kisses&quot; plays through Sunday, July 14 at Dom Kino, 12 Karavannaya Ulitsa. M: Gostiny Dvor. For more information, call 314-8036. </i>

TITLE: mariinsky fest a traditional treat
AUTHOR: by Gyulyara Sadykh-zade
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Mariinsky Theater's &quot;Stars of the White Nights&quot; festival wrapped up on Sunday, having featured operas, ballets and concerts performed at venues both in St. Petersburg - the Mariinsky itself, the Shostakovich Philharmonic and Smolny Cathedral - and outside the city - a one-off performance of the theater's new production of Mussorgsky's &quot;Boris Godunov&quot; at Vyborg Castle on June 27.
 
The emphasis in this year's festival was placed not on premieres and new music, as last year's festival was, but on the quality of the performances, and doing the basic things well. The productions were meticulously honed and were given a wealth of rehearsal time, for which their original directors were brought back to St. Petersburg.
 The results were immediately obvious in the festival's operatic offerings. Dmitry Chernyakov's production of Rimsky-Korsakov's &quot;The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh;&quot; Tchaikovsky's &quot;The Queen of Spades,&quot; directed by Alexander Galibin; Borodin's &quot;Prince Igor,&quot; in a production that is now almost 50 years old; and Viktor Kramer's recent staging of &quot;Boris Godunov&quot; all reached exceptionally high levels of artistic achievement, and all came off without the slightest hitch. The standards in the vocal area were similarly high, with notable performances from Vladimir Glazulin, as German in &quot;The Queen of Spades,&quot; and Yevgeny Nikitin (singing the title role in &quot;Boris Godunov.&quot;)
 A standout, however, was the &quot;retro&quot; production of Mussorgsky's &quot;Khovanshchina.&quot; For this, Mariinsky Artistic Director Valery Gergiev had assembled a cast of the theater's finest voices, and was himself in top form. Mussorgsky's masterpiece was profoundly expressive in this new production, making it the artistic highpoint of the entire festival.
 The lead female role of Marfa was stunningly performed by the regal Olga Borodina, whose enchantingly deep, ideally even voice achieved a genuinely hypnotic effect. In her sculptured poses and laconic, capricious gestures there was nothing superfluous: No fussiness, merely slow turns of the head and simple glances, creating an astonishingly powerful image on the stage.
 The other members of the cast were also in form. Alexei Steblyanko, as Prince Vasily Golytsin, sang freely and easily, without sounding forced. Mikhail Kit's tireless Dosifei, Sergei Alexashkin's colorful Ivan Khovansky, and Viktor Chernomortsev as the boorish, yet handsome, Shaklovity, amply filled out a first-rate cast of characters.
 Despite the revised staging by Yury Alexandrov three years ago, &quot;Khovanshchina&quot; recalled the original style and atmosphere of a mid-20th-century production. Leonid Baratov's direction, and Fyodor Fyodorovsky's sets, which seem not to have aged in any way since the production premiered in 1960, were a triumph.
 The construction of the performance as a whole was so well-planned and comprehensively assembled - the classic format for a major production in the Soviet era - that it could easily hold its own against the pressure of most contemporary versions of the opera.
 On June 23, the now-traditional Baltika Awards were handed out, as part of the festival's sponsorship by the local brewery of the same name that has long been one of the theater's partners.
 The awards have been descibed as an internal affair of the theater and, therefore, the list of nominees and prize-winners is effectively decided by Gergiev. The jury, which includes critics, music historians and journalists, leads an almost entirely nominal existence, which is almost limited to rubber-stamping the artistic director's choices. Nevertheless, it must be said that Gergiev's choices are almost always fair and well-grounded.
 There are separate prizes for established and younger performers. The main prize - &quot;for many years of creative participation in the festival&quot; - went to the astonishing pianist Alexander Toradze, a longtime close friend of Gergiev's, with whom he regularly perform's Prokofiev's piano concertos. This year's prizes for high achievement in opera went to Gennady Bezzubenkov, one of the Mariinsky's most seasoned basses, who this season sang Don Alfonso in &quot;Cosi fan tutte&quot; and Pimen in &quot;Boris Godunov;&quot; and, in ballet, to Zhanna Ayupova. Mikhail Shemyakin took the award for best original work, for his staging of &quot;The Nutcracker.&quot;
 The awards for younger performers are called <i>&quot;Nadezhda&quot; </i>(&quot;Hope&quot;). This year, the ballet prize was awarded to Darya Pavlenko, who danced the title role in the new version of &quot;La Bayadere&quot; that opened the festival; while the opera prize was won by Mikhail Petrenko, a young and versatile bass who has already sung most of the important roles in the repertoire. During the festival, Petrenko was very convincing in the role of Andrei Degtyarenko in Prokofiev's &quot;The Tale of a Real Man,&quot; and - interestingly, given his age - he also sang the part of Konchak in &quot;Prince Igor,&quot; without struggling to produce the lower notes in the famous aria, a notorious stumbling block for many performers.
 The awards ceremony took place on the stage of the Mariinsky, breaking up the smooth flow of Gergiev's showcase concert, &quot;At Home With Maestro Gergiev.&quot; The first part of the concert was performed under the baton of the Mariinsky's principal guest conductor, Gianandrea Noseda. Gergiev himself performed in a somewhat unexpected capacity, playing the piano in a six-handed work - employing three pianos - with Toradze and Sara Wolfensohn. The trio performed Mozart's Concerto for Three Pianos in F , K242 and, although they clearly had to concentrate in order to follow their scores, they played with inspiration and refinement, focusing on the intricate textured patterns of the work and its abundance of charming light passages.
 Such a high level of musicianship is, of course, intended for connoisseurs, and would perhaps have been more suited to a more intimate, chamber-music venue, where the music's subtle intonations and nuances could be highlighted, allowing the audience to appreciate more the decisions of the soloists, orchestra and conductor. In the enormous space of the Mariinsky, however, much is simply lost, although the extraordinary achievement of playing such a work can be imagined. Even so, the performance of the Mozart was of great interest.
 In the same half, the baritone Vasily Gerello performed expansively, demonstrating the passions of his temperament, employing a unique pathos and humor in his renditions of one of the arias from Verdi's &quot;Macbeth&quot; and the <i>cavatina </i>from Mozart's &quot;The Marriage of Figaro.&quot;
 In the second half, Gergiev took the podium to conduct Wagner's overture to &quot;Tannhauser&quot; with his usual quest for perfectionism, providing a rousing, inspiring performance of the piece. The Wagner was followed by Mussorgsky's &quot;Songs and Dances of Death,&quot; with Borodina as the soloist, and Stravinsky's &quot;The Rite of Spring.&quot;
 The final highlight of the festival was the performance of &quot;Boris Godunov&quot; in the coutyard of Vyborg Castle, which suited the production entirely. Although the production was entirely conservative, it maintained a wholeness of expression and gave an irrefutable logic to the characters and their precise behavior on the stage, as well as an entirely appropriate energy.
 The performance was staged without a raised podium, instead taking place directly on the yard's cobblestones, just a few steps from the audience. As a result, the audience was drawn directly into the space of the performance, becoming participants in the action, and following the performer's movements in close detail, listening to every word of the text and seeing every detail of the textured boyar costumes. The piercing cries of swallows, the smoke from blazing torches, Gergiev lit by a spotlight, and wind rustling through the trees growing in the courtyard gave the performance a striking authenticity, further enhancing the realism of this &quot;folk drama.&quot; The music and accompaniment of natural sounds blended into a symphony of life. In that instant, an ancient past, embodied in the thickness of the fortress' walls, and the artistic present were as one.
 It is too early to say whether performances in Vyborg Castle will attain the same status of Savonlinna, the Finnish town that has hosted an opera festival for over 40 years and attracts opera lovers every year. For one thing, the castle there has a much higher audience capacity than its counterpart at Vyborg. Nevertheless, the idea of holding an opera festival in Vyborg seems very rational indeed.

TITLE: N. Korea Wants Dialogue With South
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea said on Thursday that it will seek dialogue with South Korea, vowing to honor past agreements for reconciliation after a deadly naval skirmish between the two sides over the weekend.
 
&quot;We will make all efforts to smoothly promote dialogue and cooperation,&quot; the North Korea's Committee for Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland said in a statement. The committee is a government agency in charge of North Korean relations with South Korea.
 It said that the North will stand by a July 4, 1972 joint communique, in which the two Koreas agreed to work toward peaceful reunification of their peninsula. The two Koreas recently signed a similar agreement on June 15, 2000 after their leaders held a historic summit.
 Thursday's statement was carried by North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency on the 30th anniversary of the July 4 agreement.
 In the past, the North has issued several calls for dialogue, but has seldom followed up with concrete steps. South Korea did not immediately respond to the statement.
 The statement did not mention the naval clash on Saturday, in which one South Korean patrol boat sank, killing four South Korean sailors and wounding 19 others. About 30 North Korean sailors were believed to have died, but the government has not released an official figure.
 On Thursday, about 3,000 South Korean veterans burned North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's effigy and marched in downtown Seoul. Veterans, including retired generals, gathered near the Defense Ministry, waving banners and calling for retaliation against the North following the naval clash.
 The North Korean announcement comes after the United States' withdrawal, on Tuesday, of an earlier proposal to resume security talks with North Korea next week, saying that the clash had created &quot;an unacceptable atmosphere'' for dialogue.

TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: Big Day Defense 
 

WASHINGTON (AP) - Americans ventured into searing heat Thursday to watch the first Fourth of July celebrations since Sept. 11, hoping to forget the terror that rattled American well-being. Others watched the watchers, hoping to make sure it wouldn't happen again.
 Jet fighters were assigned to patrol the skies over major cities, including New York and Washington. An FBI official in Washington said a group with terrorist ties had gained access to a Website that features pictures of stadiums worldwide, and that it had downloaded images of two unspecified U.S. stadiums.
 Nationwide, plainclothes FBI agents walked Fourth of July parade routes in response to vague U.S. intelligence reports of possible terrorist attacks, as the State Department reported heightened communications traffic between terrorist operatives overseas.
 The military temporarily reactivated the post-Sept. 11 combat air patrols that flew routinely over Washington, New York, and other major U.S. cities and possible targets after the attacks, but had been scaled back in April. 
 
 
Arafat Fires Officers
 

JERUSALEM (WP) - Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, under pressure from his own people and international leaders to reform Palestinian security agencies, has decided to dismiss three of his top law enforcement officials, Palestinian officials said on Thursday.
 The dismissals include that of Jibril Rajoub, head of the powerful Preventive Security force in the West Bank, the officials said. Rajoub had been touted by some as a leader in the next generation of Palestinian leaders, making the decision to remove him a potentially important shift.
 The Palestinian Authority also has announced plans for broad reforms of its financial system. 
 
 
Typhoon To Hit China
 

BEIJING (Reuters) - Typhoon Rammasun, or "God of Thunder'' in Thai, churned toward China's coast on Thursday, packing strong winds and heavy rain that were expected to drench Shanghai, officials and state media said.
 Emergency workers in the Zhejiang provincial city of Ningbo evacuated coastal residents to higher ground on Thursday morning, a local flood official said, but declined to give figures.
 More than 600 people have died in China's worst floods since 1998, officials have said. Many fear that the present typhoon season, which is set to last for several more months, could bring more misery and deaths to large areas of the country.
 
 
U.S. Army Drug Bust
 

CAMP LEJEUNE, North Carolina (AP) - One of the largest military drug investigations in recent years has led to the conviction of more than 80 enlisted marines and sailors at Camp Lejeune for using and selling Ecstasy, cocaine, LSD and methamphetamine.
 The service personnel, along with 99 civilians, were arrested in a two-year undercover investigation that also resulted in the seizure of more than $1.4 million in drugs.
 All of the convicted marines and sailors received dishonorable discharges and confinement ranging from three to 19 years, said Robin Knapp of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.
 Drug charges were filed against 84 active-duty service members, none of them officers. Sixty-one of them were accused of distributing drugs and 23 were accused of using drugs. All but two were convicted in military court, Knapp said. 



TITLE: Zenit Is Back With a Win
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The break for the World Cup does not seem to have disrupted Zenit's push for its first Russian Premier Division title.
 
Goals in either half from Yevgeny Tarasov and Alexander Kerzhakov saw off a stubborn Alaniya Vladikavkaz, 2-1 at the Petrovsky Stadium on Tuesday.
 Zenit seemed to be cruising at 1-0 when Alaniya's central defender Igor Tarlovsky was sent off just before halftime. However, Alaniya scored seconds into the second half. Mihkail Ashvetiya won a corner from a quick break. From the kick, Ashvetiya snuck in between two defenders to beat Zenit goalie Vyacheslav Malafeyev at his near post.
 Zenit had gone ahead on 35 minutes, when Tarasov, making his first full start of the season, got enough onto a teasing cross by Boris Gorovoi from just outside the box to divert the ball in at the far low corner.
 Alaniya was the better side for most of the second half, but Zenit grabbed the win when Kerzhakov lashed home off the underside of the bar from six meters after the Alaniya defense failed to clear.

TITLE: Thome Homers In 7th Straight
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK - Jim Thome keeps hitting home runs, without much to celebrate. He homered in his seventh-straight game, one shy of the major-league record, but the New York Yankees beat Cleveland, 11-8, Wednesday night. The Indians have lost four in a row and 11 of 15.
 
&quot;It's nice, but it's not fun when you don't win,&quot; Thome said. &quot;I haven't really given it much thought because of the way we've been playing.&quot;
 Alfonso Soriano hit a two-run homer and drove in three runs for the Yankees, who improved to 11-0 against AL Central teams.
 Thome hit a 3-2 pitch from David Wells (9-5) to left-center with two outs in the seventh inning. The solo shot gave Thome an AL-leading 26 homers.
 &quot;He's pretty hot right now,&quot; teammate Ellis Burks said. &quot;I just wish we could support him as well as he's been supporting us, because he's definitely been carrying us.&quot;
 The major-league record for consecutive games with a home run is eight, shared by Ken Griffey Jr. when he was with Seattle (1993), Don Mattingly of the Yankees (1987) and Dale Long of Pittsburgh (1956).
 
 <strong>Boston 5, Toronto 2. </strong>Tony Clark's tiebreaking single off Cliff Politte (1-2) keyed a three-run eighth inning as host Boston took advantage of four Toronto errors. The Red Sox, who beat Toronto for the ninth straight time, were looking to complete a five-game sweep of the Blue Jays on Thursday.
 Wayne Gomes (1-0), making his first appearance since being recalled from Triple-A Pawtucket on Tuesday, got the win, and Ugueth Urbina earned his 22nd save.
 
 <strong>Arizona 5, Los Angeles 3. </strong>Quinton McCracken lined a two-run triple into the right-field corner in the eighth inning, and the Diamondbacks rallied for a win Wednesday night.
 Mark Grace followed with a sacrifice fly as Eric Gagne blew his second save in 32 opportunities this season. The Diamondbacks had scored just two runs on sacrifice flies in the first 25 innings against the Dodgers before McCracken's hit.
 
 <strong>Atlanta 6, Montreal 5. </strong>Javy Lopez hit an infield single off third baseman Fernando Tatis' glove to score Vinny Castilla in the ninth inning and give Atlanta a victory over visiting Montreal.=
 Julio Franco tied the game in the eighth with a two-out double for the Braves, who stretched their lead over second-place Montreal to 9 1/2 games in the NL East.
 
 <strong>Colorado 14, San Francisco 4. </strong>In Denver, Larry Walker and Bobby Estallela homered and drove in four runs each as Colorado routed San Francisco.
 Walker was 4-for-5, including a three-run homer off Livan Hernandez (6-10) in Colorado's seven-run second inning, to tie his career high for hits for the second time in four games.
 
 <strong>Minnesota 2, Oakland 1. </strong>Johan Santana (4-1) allowed one run in 6 1/3 innings and visiting Minnesota snapped Mark Mulder's seven-start winning streak. Mulder (9-5) allowed two runs on six hits in his eighth career complete game. He struck out a career-high 12.
 Eddie Guardado, who gave up pinch-hitter Olmedo Saenz's game-ending homer inthe Twins' 4-3 loss Tuesday, pitched the ninth for his 26th save.
 In other games, it was: Seattle 3, Kansas City 0; Anaheim 1, Baltimore 0; Texas 6, Tampa Bay 5; Detroit 5, Chicago 4; Philadelphia 8, New York Mets 7; Houston 11, Cincinnati 4; St. Louis 4, San Diego 1; Chicago Cubs 6, Florida 2; and Pittsburgh 3, Milwaukee 1.